Immanuel Kant once wrote that the Conflict of the Faculties is a constant struggle for primacy that causes strife and ultimately undermines scholarly solidarity. His argument is a complex one, as it relates to the very ability of how to judge proper authority, what constitutes scientific truth, and how to create respect amongst a community of people representing divergent opinions. Whilst such considerations are still relevant today, a hitherto under-researched phenomenon is how the bureaucracy of university staff influences intra-collegial conflicts regarding contestations of what constitutes scientific authority. In this theoretically oriented research, we employ Michael Lipsky’s idea of street-level bureaucrats to study the complex mission of the university in practice. Management and public policy scholars employ it to study the implementation of policy at the microsocial level. Here, we focus on three different, yet interconnected, domains: pedagogy, funding, and impact generation, to understand the intentional and unintentional influences of the administrative side of the university upon knowledge production. The key research insights for these three domains are as follows. 

Concerning pedagogy, the medieval university allowed for a master-apprentice style relationship between student and teacher, which, according to modern literature, is the ideal learning situation. Yet, the current, for-profit mass education mode, with its focus on student employability and students-as-customers satisfaction evaluations, inadvertently undermines this pedagogical setting. The unintended consequence of this is teachers refraining from taking on difficult and complex subjects for the sake of scoring well within current student evaluation regimes.

Concerning research funding, the performance of researchers is assessed through the success of their funding applications. The implicit assumption of this regime is that researchers already understand and master the complex rules and implicit social codes of funding applications, which often is not the case. University support teams are, nominally, there to help and guide. However, as those teams are usually chronically understaffed, any difficulties for them are solved with a reference to breaches of technicalities. One consequence of this is researchers feeling alienated and left without support. 

Concerning research impact generation, scholars aligning with the strategic direction of the university leadership’s visions receive disproportionate amounts of support. The rationale behind such unequal treatment is often framed as ‘strategic alignment’. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to let such unequal distribution create discord among the academic community, especially so, when the administrators deliberately omit or alter due processes in order to facilitate the desired outcome. Yet, absurdly, researchers who fall outside of these support frames are still judged to the same standards as the ‘successful’ ones. 

Our contribution to knowledge lies in the conceptualization of the human element in the university bureaucracy. University administration makes judgements with limited understanding of the larger consequences of their own actions. If not properly adjusted for, not only is the solidarity within the university at jeopardy, but it may also directly influence academic knowledge production. We argue that this dimension has the potential to become ‘death by a thousand cuts’ for solidarity amongst university stakeholders.