The Tragedy of Prestige
Is there a comedy in the university?
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
My weekly series on the past, present, and future of the institution we call “the university” takes a turn this week toward the immaterial. Universities have both benefited from and done their best through history to perpetuate the idea that they offer storehouses of “prestige.” Scare quotes indicate the curious character of “prestige.” What is it, and why does it matter - or not?
“Prestige” indicates difference, and difference of a specific sort: difference based on performance, or history, or authority, or character. Academic “prestige” is both acquired and performed via demonstrations of expertise. Expertise accumulates through history; it gets ratified by certifications of authority, both internal (professional associations that manage disciplinary membership) and external (accrediting organizations).
In the university setting, prestige has material indicia: the Latin that often graces diplomas; the gowns, hoods, and caps that faculty (“fellows,” to use an older term) wear at commencement, alongside new graduates, recalling medieval traditions; the podium, dais, or stage that teachers occupy at the front of a lecture hall; insignia that grace banners and buildings - and football uniforms.
But materiality is evidence of prestige rather than prestige in itself; the things are manifestations or reflections of a social construct, which is what we label “prestige.” “Prestige” is an intangible, conceptual “thing” that is manufactured and recognized collectively, if not always consistently, out of the fact that audiences and rivals sometimes accept the claims of difference and sometimes contest them. Harvard isn’t “Harvard” unless there is Yale or Stanford to say “well, you’re not so important, and after all, what about *us*?” (Even Harvard and Stanford conduct peer assessments of their academic programs, where the peers are … Harvard and Stanford. Sometimes Yale. Sometimes Oxford. Sometimes MIT.) Using that elite university example makes “prestige” seem necessarily bad, but it isn’t; the drive toward excellent performance that often accompanies a drive to “prestige” can be good in itself, and can produce excellent outcomes, and can have positive spillover effects.
“Prestige” is abundant, yet its impacts are complex. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing. Prestige is, in other words, what some economists call a “social good,” or more commonly, a shared “public good”: a resource that non-excludable and non-depletable (sometimes stated as non-exhaustible or non-rival). That is, some”thing” whose value does not diminish with use. And under some circumstances, additional demand for it might actually increase its value.
Which means that prestige, like other public goods, is subject to governance - both internal and external, to generalize my point above about certifications of authority. All of that distills into simple form a neat argument about “the economy of prestige” captured by James English in a book of the same name, published about 15 years ago. To build on one of English’s examples: trivializing the Academy Awards as merely an exercise in Hollywood vanity does nothing to undermine the status of the Oscars; instead, trivializing the awards makes them salient - and awesome. Maybe moviemakers make great movies because they are pursuing Oscars; maybe Oscars are meaningless to filmmakers but offer important spillover benefits for investors and fans; maybe the Oscar “race” is a MacGuffin, allowing the plot to mature while the the spotlight is elsewhere.
It’s neither a stretch nor novel to note, as one must, that an enormous amount of what matters and what is problematic about modern universities is captured by that simple phrase “the economy of prestige.” As a public good, “prestige” cannot be owned, but universities are nevertheless largely in the business of trying to do exactly that - trying to convert “their” “prestige” from some sort of shared good into sort (different) sort of private good. Licensed college and university merchandise, a billion dollar business, is but one obvious example; universities themselves do their level best to stigmatize (at best) and sue (at worst) companies that would free ride off of the “goodwill” embodied in mascots, logos, and color schemes. One way to understand the current frenzy of angst over NIL (“Name, Image, Likeness”) rights in college athletics is to see that colleges and universities are being compelled to share some of the private “prestige” value of their athletics programs with athletes themselves. Universities can use NIL programs to attract athletes … who then turn around and do what universities had long been accustomed to doing: exploit the opportunity, in every meaning of that word. The economy of prestige doesn’t come with natural limits.
At the same time, when it suits them, universities are happy to lean into the shared attributes of “prestige.” Cue Yogi Berra: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” That’s certainly true at places like Harvard and Stanford; the explosion of the number of applications to elite colleges in recent years hasn’t diminished their elite status in the least; if anything, the dwindling acceptance rate at those schools has enhanced their prestige. Nor has their “prestige” been affected at all by the soaring nominal cost of attendance. Cue Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” That’s the economy of prestige at work.
It is, moreover, no less at work (though differently) at universities and colleges of many sorts. Difference comes in many different flavors, from institutions to schools, departments, centers, and faculty members. Even alumni (perhaps especially alumni, at least in the US). USNews rankings didn’t invent academic prestige, let alone institutional difference; USNews rankings simply documented the payoffs of the prestige economy in a way that makes the workings of that economy explicit. Some readers will be familiar with the California Master Plan for Higher Education - and with the pressures from below that eventually pulled it apart. The dynamics of the economy of prestige are not entirely to blame, but it is unquestionably true that citizens of the California State University system envied the money and status afforded the citizens of the University of California system, and the California legislature was receptive to their arguments. It is no longer true that the UC universities are the only public institutions in California that are permitted to award doctoral degrees.
The economy of academic prestige is simultaneously inescapable and deeply, deeply flawed - so much so that I once wrote an entire law review article criticizing law professors’ obsession with prestige, yet couldn’t get through the piece without laughing on the page about the silliness of it all. Cue any number of speakers for the quotation: university politics are so bitter because the stakes are so small.
Reconfiguring “the university” as an institution requires harnessing thoughtful governance to the economy of prestige rather than carrying on the current (mostly unregulated) university environment. Is that even possible? I’m not going to argue that it is. But I am going to stick to my belief that it might be. There is more to come.
Meanwhile, a confession: I’ve been thinking about the economy of prestige for a long time but was motivated to compose this post by this recent piece in The Guardian, about this season’s changes to the structure of the “Champions League” in European football (a/k/a soccer). It seems that the overlords of European soccer decided to increase the number of games between “champions” of European soccer leagues, reasoning, apparently, that if a small number of those “special” games were a good thing, commercially, then lots of “special” games would be even better. “Excess demand” for those games having been met by an increase in supply … the prestige associated with the competition is at risk of diminishing, and perhaps disappearing. A university education for all seems like a great thing, until the fact of a university education turns out to be quite unimportant.