When You Are Cursed with Knowledge...And Reporting to Those Who Never Sought It

There was a time when the professor stood at the center of society’s intellectual life. In medieval Europe, scholars were revered figures — part sage, part priest, part scientist. Universities themselves were built around them. The scholar was not merely an employee; they were the reason the institution existed.

Fast forward to the Enlightenment: academics were public intellectuals, shaping revolutions in politics, science, and philosophy. Their respect came not from administrative titles but from the force of their ideas. Even into the 20th century, professors commanded social authority. A scholar’s voice on radio or television could tilt public debate; their presence in civic life was valued.

Today, that figure has been quietly dethroned. Professors are now expected to operate less like autonomous intellectuals and more like mid-level employees in a corporate firm. And in a surreal inversion, they often report to administrators and managers — people who, while skilled at compliance and logistics, are not academics themselves.

From Reverence to Reporting

This shift is not accidental. As universities globalized and grew, bureaucracies mushroomed. Compliance officers, HR managers, data analysts, and “student experience” coordinators multiplied. Each new administrative layer brought its own rules, audits, and metrics. Soon, the scholar who once stood at the institution’s core was surrounded, and eventually overshadowed, by administrators who claimed authority not through knowledge, but through structure.

The professor became a box-ticker, a form-filler, a KPI generator. Imagine Galileo being instructed to update his weekly performance dashboard. Or Freud being told his teaching load would be adjusted to “align with student satisfaction surveys.” Absurd? Yes. Except this is precisely what many academics now face.

The Psychological Undercurrent

For academics of calibre, this arrangement is more than frustrating — it is psychologically wounding. Decades of immersion in rigorous thought are reduced to compliance with systems designed by those who have never known intellectual rigor.

Cognitive psychology calls this role incongruence: when identity and imposed function diverge so radically that the self feels diminished. Jung would describe this as an archetypal clash between the Self and the Persona. The academic represents the Self: deep, integrative, meaning-oriented. The administrator embodies the Persona: outward-facing, efficient, managerial. When the Persona dominates unchecked, the institution collapses into its shadow — becoming hollow, neurotic, and obsessed with appearances over substance.

Satire in Real Time: The Administrator’s Fantasy

There is a tragicomedy in watching someone who has never written, let alone published, an academic paper advise scholars on “improving their impact factor.” Or in hearing a procurement officer question whether research really needs so many years of “exploration.” It is equivalent to a flight attendant critiquing the pilot’s aerodynamics. Everyone in the room knows who actually understands the plane, but the structure demands polite compliance.

Respect Lost

The respect once afforded to academics rested on two things: rarity and recognition. Rare, because only a small fraction of society could dedicate their lives to deep study. Recognized, because society saw knowledge as both noble and necessary. Today, both have eroded. Knowledge has been commodified — turned into “content” and “deliverables.” Recognition has been replaced with suspicion: why fund “abstract” research when it doesn’t immediately translate into profit?

In this landscape, the scholar is no longer seen as a sage but as a service provider. Respect is not automatic but conditional, mediated by rankings, surveys, and budget justifications.

Why It Matters for Society

This is not merely an internal academic complaint. When universities treat scholars as subordinates to non-academics, the very purpose of higher education is distorted. Research that requires decades of patience is forced into quarterly reports. Teaching that fosters critical thinking is judged by customer-satisfaction-style surveys. Universities become efficient at everything but knowledge creation.

And society pays the price. Without respected academics, public discourse grows shallow. Expertise is sidelined in favor of opinion. The very institutions designed to safeguard truth begin to replicate the short-term, transactional mindset of corporations.

The Real Curse of Knowledge

The real curse of knowledge is not simply possessing it — it is having to report to those who never sought it, never valued it, and yet wield authority over it. The academic knows this inversion is not just absurd but dangerous. Because when institutions forget that their soul lies in scholarship, not in management, everyone loses.

In the end, history remembers the scholars — Galileo, Curie, Freud, Jung. The administrators, with their spreadsheets and compliance forms, fade into footnotes at best. The tragedy is that today’s professors, cursed with knowledge, must endure the indignity of being managed by those destined for oblivion.