The Man Behind the Push to Abolish Academia’s ‘Caste System’
The term “academic caste system” has gained traction as a powerful metaphor for describing entrenched hierarchies within higher education. While the phrase has been used in different contexts from India’s caste-based discrimination in universities to the global divide between tenured and contingent faculty it represents a growing movement to challenge structural inequality in academia.The concept was formally introduced in sociological literature by researcher Val Burris in 2004, who used social network analysis to study faculty exchange networks. Burris described how the interdepartmental exchange of PhD graduates creates a highly stratified structure where prestige accumulates at elite institutions and reproduces itself over generations .
The American Context: Tenure vs. Contingent Faculty
In the United States, the “academic caste system” manifests most visibly in the growing divide between tenured faculty and the army of adjunct instructors who now constitute the majority of college teachers. Leemon McHenry and Paul W. Sharkey, writing for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), argue that this system is “capricious, discriminatory, and unjust”. According to their analysis, the corporatization of universities has created a permanent underclass of part-time lecturers dismissively labeled “the great unwashed” who teach the majority of courses while lacking job security, benefits, or a voice in institutional governance.These contingent faculty members, often holding PhDs from world-class institutions, become “freeway flyers” teaching at multiple colleges just to survive. They face unreasonable teaching loads, no research support, and are treated as temporary regardless of decades of service. Upon retirement, many simply disappear without recognition or benefits .
The Indian Context: Caste as Literal Reality
In India, the “academic caste system” is not merely metaphorical it reflects the literal operation of caste hierarchies within educational institutions. Academic Ravneet Param’s research at Jawaharlal Nehru University examines how elite
institutions claim to champion social justice while obscuring upper-caste dominance in curriculum and campus culture. Param argues that scholarly insistence on looking at caste only as a form of marginality conceals how caste privilege is reproduced through curriculum and college culture. Her work centers the “absence of caste in curricula” and how dominant epistemology sidelines caste-critical knowledge.Similarly, Apeksha Yadav and Dr. Sudhir Keshav Maske from Delhi University describes Indian universities as operating like “Academic Agraharas” spaces deliberately reinforcing Brahmin-Savarna (upper caste) dominance . Their research documents how Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi (DBA) students and faculty endure systemic alienation, institutional violence, and relentless casteist hostility. “For them, campuses become battlegrounds of survival,” they write, “where navigating casteist hostilities and asserting dignity is an isolating, relentless struggle” .
The Rohith Vemula Tragedy: A Catalyst for Change
The push to abolish this system gained massive momentum following the 2016 suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad. Vemula was 25 when he died by suicide after being expelled from his hostel following a confrontation with ABVP leaders . His death letter “My birth is my fatal accident” became a rallying cry against caste-based discrimination in higher education. What made Vemula’s death particularly significant was what it exposed about institutional failure. As scholar Akhilesh Kumar notes in a reflective piece marking ten years since the tragedy, “Rohith Vemula’s experience at the University of Hyderabad made visible how institutional failure operates in caste terms. He questioned authority, challenged Brahmanical dominance, and insisted that equality was a right, not a favor. The response was swift and disciplinary: suspension, social boycott, withdrawal of material support, and administrative indifference” .Kumar argues that “institutional murder” is not an isolated act of individual cruelty but “the terminal effect of a prolonged regime of humiliation embedded within institutional life” . This regime operates through the normalization of Brahmanical embodiment where Savarna (upper caste) aesthetics, taste, and comportment are treated as neutral standards of merit.
