Against Academic Hierarchy

The Intellectual Poverty of the University’s Prestige Hierarchies

Not long ago, I met with a student applying to several top-ranked law schools. She is bright, disciplined, and articulate. Her writing is sharp. Her analytical instincts are strong. She asks probing questions in class and backs her claims with evidence. She will, I suspect, do very well.

She is majoring in public relations and marketing.

When she told me that, I felt something I am not proud of: doubt.

Not doubt about her intelligence. Not doubt about her work ethic. Not doubt about her character. Doubt about her choice of majors.

Would admissions committees at elite law schools take her seriously? Would they see “public relations” and downgrade her? Would her transcript carry less symbolic weight than one in philosophy, political science, or history?

The uncomfortable truth is that my doubt did not arise from evidence about her performance. It arose from an academic hierarchy I had internalized—a hierarchy that Pierre Bourdieu would recognize as the educational system’s core function: the production and reproduction of cultural capital that legitimates social stratification while pretending to assess merit.

And that hierarchy needs to be confronted.

The Architecture of Exclusion

Institutions like Harvard do not offer undergraduate majors in public relations, marketing, nursing, architecture, kinesiology, criminal justice, or business administration. That fact alone sends a message.

They offer economics, government, philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. They offer engineering, but often abstracted from direct professional pathways—theoretical computer science rather than software engineering, applied mathematics rather than actuarial science. They offer public policy at the graduate level, not undergraduate professional preparation.

This absence is not accidental. It reflects an institutional self-conception rooted in nineteenth-century German university ideals: intellectual seriousness resides in Wissenschaft—systematic theoretical knowledge pursued for its own sake—not in applied professional formation.

The sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in The Higher Learning in America (1918), diagnosed this as “conspicuous waste”—the prestige of institutions derives partly from their apparent freedom from economic necessity, their studied distance from merely practical concerns.

When elite institutions decline to house certain majors, they create a prestige gradient. The message is subtle but powerful: some knowledge is higher. Theory is more intellectually respectable than practice. Abstraction is more rigorous than application.

Disciplines that trace their genealogies to medieval universities (philosophy, mathematics, theology’s secular descendants) carry more symbolic capital than fields born from twentieth-century social needs.

And over time, faculty—even those far removed from Harvard, even those employed at regional public universities explicitly chartered to serve their states’ workforce needs—absorb that signal. They internalize the hierarchy. They reproduce it in their advising, their course evaluations, their casual dismissals.

I did.

What the Hierarchy Obscures: The Intellectual Substance of “Applied” Fields

What I had failed to see—or had not bothered to examine closely—is what these supposedly lesser fields actually entail when taught seriously.

Public Relations and Strategic Communication: The Management of Attention

Public relations and marketing are not simply about branding or selling products. Serious programs in strategic communication require students to master audience analysis through demographic and psychographic segmentation, behavioral economics and choice architecture, data analytics and A/B testing, persuasion theory drawing from social psychology and rhetorical studies, media ecosystems and algorithmic amplification, narrative construction and framing effects, crisis communication under conditions of information abundance and institutional distrust, and the ethics of influence in democratic societies.

Students must understand how messages travel through networked publics, how public opinion forms and shifts, how reputational risk is managed, how institutions communicate under scrutiny, how counterpublics emerge and challenge dominant narratives.

In an age of misinformation, digital amplification, political polarization, and institutional fragility, this is not trivial work. It is central to democratic functioning.

The student sitting across from me was not studying fluff. She was studying power—specifically, the power to shape attention, frame issues, construct publics, and manage meaning in contested informational environments.

This is applied rhetoric combined with empirical social science. Aristotle would recognize it. So would Walter Lippmann, whose Public Opinion (1922) identified the “manufacture of consent” as the central problem of modern democracy. So would Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of the public sphere addresses precisely the conditions under which rational-critical debate becomes possible or impossible.

The hierarchy that places political theory above strategic communication cannot account for the fact that both address the same fundamental questions: How do publics form? How is consent manufactured or negotiated? What are the conditions for democratic deliberation?

The difference is that one field theorizes these questions while the other teaches students to intervene in them—and the intervention requires no less analytical sophistication.

Architecture: Social Philosophy in Steel and Concrete

Architecture, too, is routinely dismissed as aesthetic or vocational—as if designing attractive buildings were the discipline’s primary concern. Yet a serious undergraduate architecture curriculum integrates materials science and structural engineering, load distribution and seismic resilience, environmental systems and thermodynamics, sustainability modeling and life-cycle analysis, energy efficiency and carbon accounting, urban sociology and spatial justice, zoning law and regulatory frameworks, the history of the built environment and theories of place-making.

Students must reconcile physics with form, climate with aesthetics, budget with structural integrity, individual client desires with collective urban fabrics. They design under constraint—which is to say, they engage in what Herbert Simon called “satisficing,” the search for adequate solutions within bounded rationality, which is the condition of all real-world problem-solving.

Architecture is social philosophy embodied in steel and concrete. It shapes how communities interact, how energy is consumed, how inequality is spatially encoded, how public and private are distinguished, how memory is materialized, how power is monumentalized or democratized.

Jane Jacobs understood this in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. So did Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, analyzing how built environments produce and regulate subjects. So did Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, arguing that space is not a neutral container but actively produced through social relations and in turn produces social relations.

To dismiss architecture as mere professional training is to misunderstand what serious architectural education entails: it is applied ontology—the study of how worlds are made.

Kinesiology and Recreation Studies: The Science of Embodied Flourishing

Kinesiology integrates biomechanics and motor control, exercise physiology and metabolic function, neurobiology of movement and proprioception, injury prevention and rehabilitation science, aging and mobility across the lifespan, chronic disease management through physical activity.

In societies confronting epidemics of chronic disease—diabetes, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome—and rapidly aging populations, understanding movement is not secondary. It is urgent. The question of how bodies move, age, break down, and recover is a question about the material conditions of human flourishing.

Leisure studies and recreation science examine public space design and accessibility, recreation policy and environmental justice, tourism economics and cultural heritage, social cohesion and community formation, well-being and quality of life, time use and the politics of rest.

How societies structure time, rest, communal space, and play is a philosophical and political question. Leisure is not frivolous; it is how a society organizes the reproduction of life beyond wage labor.

Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture argued that leisure—understood not as empty time but as contemplative freedom—is the foundation of cultural life. The Frankfurt School analyzed how the “culture industry” colonized leisure time, transforming it from a realm of freedom into an extension of capitalist rationality.

Recreation studies asks: Who has access to parks? How are public goods distributed? What are the health equity implications of green space access? How do communities create shared worlds? These are questions about justice, democracy, embodiment, and the good life.

To place these concerns below, say, abstract political philosophy is to make a category error. Both address human flourishing. One does so through embodied, spatial, temporal analysis. The other through conceptual argument. Neither monopolizes rigor.

Computer Science: The New Grammar of Power

Even computer science—which now enjoys high prestige in the market but is often still treated warily by traditional humanists—is frequently misunderstood.

Many humanities faculty concede its technical rigor but view applied domains like cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, or information science as mere technical training, distinct from “real” computer science (theory of computation, algorithm design, formal methods).

This misses what computer science actually is: algorithm design involves formal reasoning, optimization theory, and complexity analysis; cryptography draws from number theory, abstract algebra, and probabilistic methods; distributed systems require modeling concurrent processes under uncertainty; machine learning integrates statistics, linear algebra, and information theory; cybersecurity intersects with game theory, law, international relations, and ethics.

Digital infrastructure now shapes democratic discourse (through algorithmic curation of information), state surveillance and civil liberties, financial systems and economic stability, critical infrastructure and national security, labor markets and the future of work.

Computer science is not a trade. It is the logic of contemporary power. Code is law, as Lawrence Lessig argued—it structures what is possible and impossible in digital environments more rigidly than legal regulation. Algorithms allocate attention, credit, risk, and opportunity. Understanding computational systems is understanding how power operates in the twenty-first century.

The humanist who dismisses computer science as technical while valorizing close reading of Foucault on power has failed to notice where power actually resides and how it functions.

The Inconvenient Fact About Rigor and Standards

As I reconsidered my internalized hierarchy, another uncomfortable realization surfaced—one that few humanists want to acknowledge publicly.

Many liberal arts disciplines, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, experience the highest levels of grade inflation. According to studies by Stuart Rojstaczer and others, humanities and social science courses consistently award higher grades than STEM fields, professional programs, and applied disciplines. At elite institutions, A-range grades have become modal in many humanities departments.

Why? Not because faculty are unserious. Not because the content is easy. But because mastery in these fields is harder to define and assess.

In engineering, the bridge stands or it collapses. The calculation is correct or it is not. The tolerances are met or they are not. In accounting, the ledger balances or it doesn’t. In nursing, clinical competencies must be demonstrated through supervised practice and standardized evaluation. In computer science, code compiles and produces correct output, or it fails.

These fields have threshold benchmarks. External accreditation bodies—ABET for engineering, ACEN for nursing, AACSB for business—enforce standards that transcend individual institutions. Performance criteria are transparent and often binary: you can intubate a patient or you cannot; the stress analysis is adequate or it is not.

In literary interpretation or cultural theory, evaluation is more holistic and developmental. Arguments are stronger or weaker, interpretations more or less persuasive, readings more or less generative—but rarely “incorrect” in the same binary way. Mastery is comparative and judgment-based. This does not make humanistic inquiry inferior. But it does make assessment more subjective and grade calibration more difficult.

The sociologist Michèle Lamont, in How Professors Think, documented how peer review and evaluation work across disciplines. She found that humanistic evaluation relies heavily on tacit knowledge, disciplinary socialization, and aesthetic judgment—which makes standards real but difficult to articulate explicitly and reproduce consistently.

Ironically, the fields that claim higher intellectual prestige sometimes operate with less clearly articulated and less rigorously enforced benchmarks for excellence. Meanwhile, many applied fields enforce stricter, externally validated performance thresholds.

That asymmetry complicates the hierarchy. It suggests that prestige may track not rigor but autonomy—the freedom to define one’s own standards without external accountability. Which looks less like intellectual superiority and more like guild privilege.

The Civic Misallocation of Talent

Academic hierarchy does more than distort perception. It shapes talent flows in ways that damage the republic.

Prestige cultures at elite institutions subtly steer high-achieving students toward a narrow band of outcomes: management consulting (especially McKinsey, Bain, BCG), investment banking (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley), elite corporate law (white-shoe firms, federal clerkships), and academic research in high-prestige disciplines.

This is not coincidence. These are the destinations that the institution’s social networks facilitate, that alumni cultures valorize, that on-campus recruiting makes frictionless. The message is clear: these are where smart people go.

Meanwhile, fields of enormous civic importance struggle to attract top-tier intellectual talent: K–12 teaching, especially in high-need schools and subjects; public health infrastructure and epidemiology; municipal planning and urban governance; nursing, particularly advanced practice and nursing education; criminal justice reform and public defense; social work and clinical mental health; civil engineering and public infrastructure; public-interest journalism; government service, especially at state and local levels.

These fields are not less complex than consulting. Municipal finance is not intellectually simpler than corporate M&A. Teaching high school mathematics in under-resourced schools requires extraordinary skill. Public health modeling during a pandemic is as analytically demanding as any hedge fund quantitative strategy.

But they lack prestige. And in an economy of symbolic capital, prestige determines talent allocation.

The result is a spectacular misallocation of talent: we deploy our most analytically gifted graduates to help corporations minimize tax obligations, while our public schools struggle to find qualified physics teachers. We send our best young minds to optimize ad placement algorithms while our public health infrastructure crumbles. We channel intellectual energy into financial engineering while our bridges literally collapse.

This is not just individually regrettable. It is a societal and cultural failure.

As the political theorist Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit, meritocracy becomes self-defeating when it allocates talent according to market returns rather than social contribution—and when educational prestige hierarchies legitimate that allocation as reflecting genuine worth rather than merely market power.

The Class Subtext

There is also a class dimension that makes the hierarchy’s operation more insidious.

Students from affluent backgrounds can afford to major in abstract fields without immediate labor-market payoff.

The classics major whose family wealth provides a safety net experiences education differently from the first-generation college student calculating debt-to-income ratios. Philosophy, art history, comparative literature—these become signals of class security, markers that one need not worry about employment.

Students from working-class or first-generation backgrounds often choose majors with clearer economic trajectories: accounting, business administration, nursing, computer science, engineering. These choices reflect not diminished intellectual ambition but material constraint and economic rationality.

When faculty dismiss those choices as lesser, when they express subtle disappointment that a bright student is “only” pursuing nursing rather than biology, they may be mistaking insulation from economic necessity for intellectual virtue.

This is what Bourdieu called méconnaissance—misrecognition. Class privilege appears as intellectual refinement. Economic security masquerades as pure love of learning. The ability to defer economic concerns gets coded as higher consciousness.

Hierarchy is not only disciplinary. It is social. And it functions to legitimate inequality by naturalizing it as intellectual difference.

What the University Actually Needs: The Case for Integration

But there is a deeper problem than misallocation of talent or reproduction of class privilege. The disciplinary hierarchy prevents the university from doing what it most needs to do: produce knowledge adequate to the complexity of the problems we face.

The challenges defining our century—climate change, technological disruption, democratic erosion, pandemic disease, mass displacement, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, inequality—are not disciplinary problems. They are systems problems that cut across traditional boundaries.

Climate change requires atmospheric chemistry and energy economics, political science and international law, engineering and urban planning, ethics and risk analysis, communication and behavior change, history and sociology. No single discipline contains the knowledge needed to address it.

Democratic erosion requires political theory and comparative politics, media studies and communication, psychology and behavioral economics, history and area studies, law and technology, sociology and anthropology. You cannot understand it from within political science alone.

Pandemic response requires epidemiology and virology, public health and clinical medicine, data science and modeling, supply chain management and logistics, risk communication and behavioral science, law and ethics, political economy and governance.

COVID-19 revealed brutally what happens when these domains fail to integrate: scientists who couldn’t communicate uncertainty, public health officials who didn’t understand political constraints, politicians who couldn’t grasp exponential growth, media that sensationalized rather than clarified, publics that received contradictory guidance.

Yet our universities are still organized around disciplinary departments that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address the knowledge problems of that era.

Economics split from political science. Sociology separated from anthropology. Psychology broke from philosophy. Engineering splintered into civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical subspecialties. These divisions made sense when knowledge domains were expanding rapidly and required specialization.

But the division has become a barrier. Departments become silos. Disciplines develop their own languages, methods, journals, conferences, standards for advancement. Interdisciplinary work is praised in principle but penalized in practice—it’s harder to publish, harder to get tenure, harder to explain to disciplinary gatekeepers.

The applied and professional fields that the hierarchy devalues are often ahead of traditional disciplines precisely because they must integrate.

Architecture students cannot design buildings using only aesthetic theory—they must integrate engineering, environmental science, sociology, economics, and law.

Public health students cannot address health disparities using only epidemiology—they must integrate medicine, sociology, policy analysis, ethics, and communication.

Urban planners cannot design cities using only economics—they must integrate geography, environmental science, political science, community engagement, and law.

These fields are structurally interdisciplinary. They have to be. The problems they address don’t respect disciplinary boundaries.

What the university needs is not the elimination of disciplines—deep specialized knowledge remains essential—but the creation of robust spaces where disciplines can productively collide, where theoretical sophistication meets empirical constraint, where abstract analysis confronts implementation challenges, where scholars trained in different modes of inquiry work on common problems.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity: The Comparative and Transnational Imperative

But even interdisciplinarity is not sufficient if it remains parochial—if it integrates disciplines but does so within a single national context, using frameworks developed in the West and assumed to be universal.

Most American universities, even when they attempt interdisciplinary work, remain stubbornly domestic in their framing. Climate policy means U.S. climate policy. Healthcare means the American healthcare system. Democracy means liberal democracy as practiced in the North Atlantic. Development means economic development on the model of Western industrialization.

This parochialism produces knowledge that is simultaneously sophisticated and provincial—analytically rigorous but blind to how differently problems manifest and how different solutions emerge in other contexts.

Take urban planning. American planning schools typically teach modernist planning paradigms developed for twentieth-century American cities: zoning, automobile infrastructure, suburban development patterns.

But the majority of urban growth in the twenty-first century is happening in the Global South—in cities of the Majority World like Lagos, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mexico City—where these paradigms don’t apply. Zoning is weakly enforced or nonexistent. Most people cannot afford automobiles. Housing emerges through informal settlement rather than formal development. Infrastructure is improvised rather than planned.

To understand how cities actually work requires comparative urbanism—learning from how São Paulo manages bus rapid transit, how Singapore integrates housing and infrastructure, how Medellín has used cable cars and library parks to connect informal settlements, how Seoul has transformed its relationship to rivers and public space, how Curitiba pioneered participatory budgeting.

American planners who only study American cities are intellectually impoverished—they understand one variant of urbanism and mistake it for the nature of cities as such.

Or take public health. American public health education tends to focus on the American healthcare system’s pathologies and the clinical-epidemiological model developed in the United States and Europe. But the most important public health innovations of recent decades have often emerged elsewhere: community health workers in Bangladesh, conditional cash transfers in Brazil and Mexico, SMS-based health information systems in Kenya, participatory budgeting for health in Porto Alegre, HIV treatment protocols developed in South Africa under resource constraints.

The anthropologist Paul Farmer demonstrated in Pathologies of Power how health inequities are structured by political economy, colonial legacies, and global capitalism—realities visible only through transnational analysis. You cannot understand health without understanding how the IMF’s structural adjustment programs devastated public health systems across Africa and Latin America, how pharmaceutical patent regimes create global inequalities in access, how labor migration patterns spread disease.

Or consider democracy and governance. American political science tends to treat liberal democracy as the natural endpoint of political development and analyze deviations as failures or backsliding. But this teleology obscures how democracy is actually practiced and contested globally: participatory budgeting in Brazilian municipalities, indigenous governance structures in Bolivia, deliberative polling in China, panchayati raj in India, traditional councils in African contexts.

The political theorist James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, showed how high-modernist schemes to improve the human condition fail when they ignore local knowledge and practice. Development economics is slowly learning what anthropologists have long known: solutions that work must be contextually embedded, not imported as universal templates.

What we need are not just interdisciplinary programs but programs that are structurally comparative and transnational—where students studying public policy examine cases from multiple continents, where students studying education compare pedagogical approaches across cultural contexts, where students studying healthcare analyze systems ranging from single-payer to social insurance to community-based models.

This requires more than adding a few international case studies to syllabi. It requires epistemological humility—the recognition that knowledge produced in American universities using Western frameworks is particular not universal, that other societies have generated sophisticated knowledge from different starting points, that learning requires genuine engagement with non-Western scholarship not just application of Western theories to non-Western cases.

It requires linguistic capacity. You cannot seriously engage Brazilian urban planning without Portuguese. You cannot understand Chinese governance without Mandarin. You cannot analyze Middle Eastern politics without Arabic. Yet American universities have systematically defunded language instruction even as they celebrate “global engagement.”

It requires decentering. American students should spend time studying in universities in the Global South, not just European exchange programs. They should read scholarship produced in other contexts, not just translated into English but engaged in its original intellectual traditions. They should understand that theories of democracy or development or justice or education developed in Europe and North America are provincial, not universal.

The sociologist Raewyn Connell has called for “Southern theory”—recognizing that the Global South produces theory, not just data for Northern theorists to analyze. Postcolonial scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty have demanded “provincializing Europe”—recognizing European thought as regional not universal. Latin American scholars developed dependency theory, subaltern studies emerged from South Asian scholarship, African philosophy has generated sophisticated critiques of Western universalism.

But most American universities treat this scholarship as marginal—interesting for specialists in area studies but not central to the disciplines. This is intellectual impoverishment masquerading as rigor.

The Real Divide: Seriousness Versus Superficiality

The real divide in higher education is not liberal arts versus vocational, not theoretical versus applied, not disciplines versus professions.

It is between serious and superficial education—wherever it occurs.

A history curriculum composed largely of narrow “sub-survey” courses—each skimming a slice of time or theme without cumulative depth—mistakes coverage for rigor.

A thin philosophy curriculum that teaches students to rehearse canonical arguments rather than construct and defend their own under analytical pressure is no more defensible than a thin marketing program that trains students only to produce advertisements.

A political science program that reduces the discipline to memorized typologies without confronting empirical complexity is no better than a business program confined to spreadsheet mechanics.

In each case, familiarity replaces mastery; abstraction replaces judgment; technique replaces integration. Rigor is not a property of subject matter. It is a function of standards, expectations, and intellectual demand.

The question is not whether a field is applied. The question is whether it demands conceptual clarity, cultivates judgment, confronts ethical complexity, requires writing and analysis, integrates knowledge across domains, and produces graduates capable of both specialized expertise and synthetic thinking.

Wherever those standards are present, intellectual seriousness resides. Wherever they are absent, superficiality reigns—regardless of the field’s prestige.

A serious public relations program teaches students rhetorical theory, media sociology, research methods, ethical frameworks for persuasion, and the political economy of attention—producing graduates who understand power and communication at a sophisticated level.

A superficial political science program has students memorize democratic transition theories without examining actual cases, producing graduates who can recite Lipset but cannot analyze an election.

The hierarchy inverts rigor and prestige. It assumes that fields with longer pedigrees and greater distance from markets are inherently more serious. But seriousness is not inherited. It is constructed through curriculum, standards, faculty commitment, and institutional expectations.

Against Hierarchy: Toward a University Worthy of Its Problems

My student applying to law school does not deserve doubt because she studies public relations and marketing. She deserves to be evaluated on the rigor of her work, the acuity of her thought, and her capacity to integrate knowledge across domains.

Against academic hierarchy is not an argument for abandoning standards or pretending all fields are identical. Different fields have different epistemic cultures, different ways of warranting claims, different relationships to practice. That diversity is valuable.

But it is an argument for several propositions:

First, recognize rigor wherever it lives. Applied fields that enforce external standards, require demonstrated competence, and integrate multiple knowledge domains are often more rigorous than prestigious disciplines that rely on subjective evaluation and insular peer judgment.

Second, value integration over isolation. The problems that matter cut across disciplines. Fields that must integrate—architecture, public health, urban planning, strategic communication—are structurally positioned to produce knowledge adequate to complexity.

Third, attend to civic need, not just market prestige. Talent allocation should reflect social importance, not just symbolic capital. We need brilliant teachers, nurses, planners, public health experts, infrastructure engineers as much as we need brilliant consultants or academics.

Fourth, acknowledge the class politics of prestige. Hierarchies that elevate abstract over applied knowledge legitimate privilege by coding economic security as intellectual virtue.

Fifth, demand comparative and transnational perspectives. Knowledge produced in one context and assumed to be universal is provincial, not rigorous. Serious education requires engaging multiple contexts, traditions, and knowledge systems.

Sixth, create structural supports for serious interdisciplinary and transnational work. This means joint appointments, team teaching, collaborative research, language requirements, international partnerships, funding for comparative research, and tenure criteria that reward rather than punish boundary-crossing work.

The future of the university depends not on preserving inherited hierarchies but on cultivating seriousness across every field in which serious work is being done—and on creating the conditions where serious work can address the problems that actually matter, in their full complexity and global scope.

Prestige is not proof of depth. Application is not the enemy of thought. And the university will serve the world only when it stops serving its own hierarchies.