Peter Thiel calls it like he sees it (and he ain’t wrong):

“The analogy that I’ve used is that perhaps the universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago,” Thiel said. “If you think about the eve of the Reformation when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church doors, there were all these priests that did not do very much work in much the same way that college professors and administrators are today. You had to pay these indulgences the way that you have to pay runaway tuition today.”

One of the first long-term questions I had about my choice (or rather, “choice,” long story don’t ask) of employment in the higher ed sphere was the debt bubble. What I didn’t know then, but know full well now, is that it’s not just a debt bubble. It’s also an awareness bubble, and/or an effectiveness bubble.

This is even belied by the fact that many faculty and administrator refer to their life choices as “academe” completely unironically.

What is interesting about the church structure in academia, however, is how multi-layered it is. Each university is its own cathedral (so to speak), but within the university are multiple competing interests. Faculty and administration are constantly at each others’ throats. There’s a huge rift between the sciences and the humanities. And professors in each disciplines are often more loyal to their field than they are their institution. One college president likens these to “guilds.”

So you have reverence for the specific university, usually headed up by the alumni of that university with the support of the administration. Sometimes the faculty join in, but not always. These people often see the university as never doing wrong.

Faculty, meanwhile, have loyalties somewhere completely different and are more often concerned with raising their national research profile than anything for their specific university. If anything, they choose the university that they wish to work at based on their own fame and caliber of research.

But even within disciplines, you have schisms. Maybe some faculty are funded by certain types of grants, and maybe a subset of those are the referees for those grants. Or editors of a journal, or whatever.

Academia–especially the research colleges, teaching colleges are more straightforward–is this shifting miasma of priorities.

One of the reasons universities are in trouble is because faculty are often incentivized to care for themselves and their career–looking to the discipline for guidance–over being part of a team at a given university.