{"id":1920,"date":"2026-09-09T09:43:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T09:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1920"},"modified":"2026-09-09T09:43:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T09:43:56","slug":"medieval-autocratic-and-exploitative-the-university-roots-of-americas-democratic-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1920","title":{"rendered":"Medieval, Autocratic, and Exploitative: The University Roots of America\u2019s Democratic Socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In 2011, I went to New York to cover Occupy Wall Street. Among the protesters I met was a young man in his thirties who told me, with considerable frustration, that he had earned two master\u2019s degrees and yet ended up serving coffee at Starbucks.<\/p>\n

Read more Morning Greatness: GOP Midterm Convention Kicks Off in Dallas<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat did you study?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cSociology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, sociology was also my Ph.D.<\/p>\n

That encounter has stayed with me because it captured a contradiction at the heart of America\u2019s new democratic socialism. Its advocates frequently speak in the name of the working class. Yet many of its activists did not emerge from factories, farms, construction sites, or working-class neighborhoods. They came through universities, moving from undergraduate programs to graduate schools, accumulating credentials and sometimes entering temporary academic employment. Their most immediate experience of hierarchy and economic insecurity was not necessarily American capitalism at large. It was the American campus.<\/p>\n

And the American campus is a peculiar place from which to learn about capitalism.<\/p>\n

The modern university speaks the language of equality, inclusion, social justice, and workers\u2019 rights. Yet internally, many universities operate through a remarkably stratified system. At the top is a comparatively secure class of tenured professors and senior administrators, enjoying stable salaries, benefits, institutional prestige, and considerable influence over hiring and promotion. Beneath them is a much larger population of lecturers, adjuncts, and other contingent faculty members with far less security or institutional power.<\/p>\n

The numbers are striking. According to the American Association of University Professors, 68.2 percent of faculty members held contingent appointments in fall 2023, while only 31.8 percent held full-time tenured or tenure-track positions. In 1987, 53.1 percent were tenured or tenure-track. Nearly half of faculty members were working part-time by 2023.<\/p>\n

In other words, the university increasingly resembles a medieval guild: a protected inner circle surrounded by a much larger population hoping for admission. Entry requires years of apprenticeship. Advancement depends heavily on approval from established members. The successful few acquire extraordinary job protection, while many who fail to enter the inner circle continue performing much of the institution\u2019s basic labor.<\/p>\n

Students pay dearly to enter this hierarchy. Universities sell credentials as tickets to professional success while graduate programs continue producing aspiring academics for a market unable to provide all of them with permanent careers. The contradiction is particularly visible in the humanities and social sciences. A student earns a bachelor\u2019s degree, then a master\u2019s, perhaps a doctorate, followed by fellowships, visiting positions, and adjunct teaching. Years pass. The promised professional life remains just beyond reach.<\/p>\n

At the same time, universities have created and expanded programs centered on race, gender, sexuality, and identity, many influenced by theories of class, power, and social hierarchy. Such programs do not necessarily provide obvious pathways into the broader private-sector economy.<\/p>\n

The reason? Ronald Reagan put his criticism of liberal intellectual culture memorably in his famous 1964 speech: \u201cWell, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they\u2019re ignorant; it\u2019s just that they know so much that isn\u2019t so.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result is a distinctive social type: highly educated, culturally sophisticated, credentialed\u2014and economically insecure.<\/p>\n

That condition matters politically.<\/p>\n

Someone who spends his formative adult years inside this system may understandably come to see society through its categories. The university becomes a miniature model of capitalism. Tenured professors look like owners. Adjuncts resemble the proletariat. Administrators become the managerial class. Hiring committees control access to scarce opportunities. Those who succeed appear protected; those who fail are encouraged to acquire still more credentials.<\/p>\n

Read more The Enemy Invasion of Our Schools<\/a><\/p>\n

Eventually, a crisis produced partly by the university can be interpreted as proof of a crisis in American capitalism itself.<\/p>\n

The grievances are not imaginary. Contingent academic labor is real. So are credential inflation, uncertain career prospects, and the gap between the expectations universities cultivate and the opportunities some degrees can deliver. The analytical mistake comes when the structure of one institution is projected onto an entire country.<\/p>\n

The private economy is messy, decentralized, and frequently unforgiving, but it contains mechanisms largely absent from academic life. People start businesses without asking a faculty committee for permission. Workers change industries. Companies disappear, and new ones emerge. Skills can matter more than credentials. Someone whose academic career stalls may find opportunities in business, technology, the trades, media, entrepreneurship, or countless occupations universities neither control nor fully understand.<\/p>\n

Yet universities can encourage students to imagine that the credential hierarchy is the world.<\/p>\n

This helps explain the cultural distance between the new democratic socialism and the traditional labor movement. Earlier American labor movements grew out of mines, factories, railroads, docks, and construction sites. Their demands were tangible: higher wages, shorter hours, safer workplaces, pensions, and collective bargaining.<\/p>\n

The contemporary campus left often speaks a different language\u2014the language of theory, identity, institutional power, and systemic transformation. Its activists may invoke \u201cthe working class,\u201d but their political vocabulary was often formed in seminar rooms, nonprofit organizations, university offices, and graduate programs.<\/p>\n

What emerges is less a resurrection of the old industrial labor movement than a revolt within the educated professional class: people with impressive credentials but uncertain economic prospects, considerable cultural capital but limited economic power, and expectations their institutions cannot always fulfill.<\/p>\n

Universities bear responsibility for this contradiction. They condemn inequality while maintaining profound inequalities among their own employees. They celebrate workers while relying heavily on contingent instructors. They criticize markets while continually raising the price of admission to their credential system. They teach students to interrogate power structures while rarely asking them to examine the power structure immediately surrounding them.<\/p>\n

That may be the great irony of campus socialism.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to my young Occupy Wall Street protester.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can\u2019t find a good job with your two degrees, why don\u2019t you go a few blocks to the campus and protest the school for not teaching you employable skills?\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Assembly: The Forgotten Freedom<\/a><\/p>\n

He looked a little stunned. Apparently, the thought had never crossed his mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are right,\u201d he finally said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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