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In the contemporary discourse on higher education, we speak of student anxiety, of faculty burnout, of administrative bloat. We diagnose these as separate problems to be solved with wellness programs, workload models, and strategic plans. But this is a fundamental misdiagnosis. What we are witnessing is not a collection of isolated issues, but the systemic traumatization of an entire ecosystem. The university, in its modern, highly institutionalized form, has become an engine of microtrauma, and it is the role of academic leadership—the Vice-Chancellor, the Dean—to cease being managers and become what I call ‘organic leaders’ or ‘fatherly advisors,’ who can metabolize this trauma and restore a sense of authentic sociality.
We must understand that trauma is not only the dramatic, catastrophic event. It is, as I have argued elsewhere, a universal and necessary part of socialization. The microtraumas of a rejected paper, a failed grant application, a harsh student evaluation, a missed promotion—these are the daily stuff of academic life. They are the denials of satisfactions that, in a healthy, organic community, direct us and shape our character. But in the inorganic, anxiety-ridden structure of the modern university, these microtraumas do not serve maturation. They inhibit it.
The reason lies in the nature of what I term ‘organic’ versus ‘inorganic’ communities. In an organic community, even punishment or failure is personal. It comes from a face we know, within a relationship we share. The trauma is inflicted, but it is also reintegrated by the same human hand. I recall a policeman in my hometown who, upon seeing my place of birth in my documents, dissolved his institutional role in an instant with the words, “but now you’ve come home.” The institution was a thin veil for the human connection.
The contemporary university is the opposite. It is a paradigm of inorganicity. The traumas are inflicted by faceless systems: the algorithms of citation indexes, the opaque committees for promotion, the bureaucratic demands of quality assurance. The student is traumatized by a grade from a teaching assistant they never met; the professor, by a workload model designed by a distant administrator. There is no human face to appeal to, no organic relationship through which the trauma can be metabolized and given meaning. The trauma thus does not propel us forward; it generates a prolonged state of anxiety, what Heidegger would call a dispersion into the diversions of everydayness, where we lose contact with our deepest values.
This is where the epistemic role of leadership becomes critical. The Vice-Chancellor or the Dean must undergo a modal shift in their own perception of their role. They must cease to be the chief executor of the institutional ‘master discourse’—the distant expert who administers the system. They must become the ‘fatherly advisor,’ the one who introduces what I have called a ‘modal proof’ into the collapsed world of their academic community.
A ‘modal proof’ is not a new policy. It is a lived, tangible experience that contradicts the system’s foundational lie—the lie that things cannot change, that human connection is secondary to bureaucratic procedure. It is the Dean who, upon hearing of a junior researcher’s despair over a rejected article, does not refer them to a wellness portal but invites them for a walk, listens to their intellectual struggle, and shares a story of their own early-career failures. In that moment, the leader is not managing a human resource; they are engaging in a ‘hip-to-hip’ quest, to use Lahav’s term, through the ‘scary forest’ of academic life. They are building an organic community, however small, within the inorganic institution.
This role is deeply therapeutic, but it is not therapy in the clinical sense. It is philosophical practice. It is about facilitating what death and true trauma force upon us: a reprioritization, a tearing of Schopenhauer’s ‘veil of Maya,’ to reveal what genuinely matters. The leader-as-advisor uses their position not to give answers, but to ask the modal questions: “What makes you feel this is impossible here?” and, more importantly, “What would make it possible?” They help the academic—whether a first-year student or a full professor—to see that the microworld they inhabit, with its oppressive rules, is not the only possible world. Sometimes, the Nietzschean solution is the right one: if something is falling, you should help it fall, and abandon that world for a new one. Other times, the Confucian path of repair and reintegration within the existing structure is the way. The leader’s wisdom lies in helping the individual discover which path is true to their character.
This is a demanding, almost paternal role. It requires the leader to show their own vulnerability, to have what Agamben calls ‘effectivity’—to be seen to live the values of the organic community they wish to build. They must be a person who has themselves been shaped by academic trauma, who has faced their own professional ‘deaths,’ and who has emerged with a clearer vision. They are, in a sense, a walking ‘modal proof’ that it is possible to survive the system with one’s humanity and intellectual passion intact.
The ultimate goal is not to eliminate trauma from university life—that is both impossible and undesirable, for trauma is the raw material of character. The goal is to transform the university from an inorganic system that amplifies trauma into an anxiety-ridden pathology, into an organic community that metabolizes trauma into resilience, wisdom, and a deeper, more authentic sociality. It is to create a world where the inevitable pains of academic life become, not alibis for failure, but the very instruments of our collective and individual growth. The leader’s task is to be the architect of that world, and the fatherly guide who helps everyone within it find their way.
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