Institutional Hierarchy Quotes

The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

I'm interested in institutions, particularly in the way institutions close ranks. They have hierarchies and their own ethics.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave toward him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability.

Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Most college students are not as smart as most college presidents.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that way.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.