Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia
16th June 2026
In Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) of The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek argued that centralized political authority tends to elevate the worst people in society. Goons and demagogues do not rise to the top in totalitarian systems by accident. The logic of totalitarianism selects for thuggish leaders.
A less dramatic, but equally perverse, logic governs American academia.
The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.
An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.
Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.