Institutions Are Overeating

Earlier today, I published Joshua T. Katz’s essay, “Food for Thought Goes Hungry at Princeton.” His piece zeroes in on the university’s decision to cut meal privileges for non-advising fellows in the residential colleges, framing it as a small but telling loss in the broader culture of academic life.

Princeton’s endowment is so vast that it has been described as a “perpetual motion machine.” Yet, when belt-tightening becomes politically convenient, it is faculty meal privileges—not administrative bloat—that get cut. And Princeton is not alone. Harvard, too, has announced cuts, citing political headwinds and financial uncertainty, despite an endowment of more than $50 billion and no actual need for public funding to operate.

I’ve written before about this in the context of the University of Chicago. (Matthew Andersson wrote a response to my essay.) There, too, financial decisions weren’t dictated by necessity but by preference—choices that bolstered the institution’s bureaucracy while doing little to improve the lives of students or faculty, let alone its educational duties. In case after case, universities cling to a logic of scarcity that doesn’t exist, all while empowering a bureaucracy that adds cost but little value.

What we see at Princeton, however, is emblematic of a broader shift in institutions that has, over time, fractured the relationship between institutions and their employees.

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Speaking from experience, at a former job in Washington, D.C., employees—including myself—were paid well below wages that were compatible with the city’s cost of living, despite being required to live there. Instead, superficial perks—such as pizza parties, Top Golf outings, and other gestures—were offered, which did little to help pay rent. During high-revenue periods, lower-level staff received little or nothing, and in downturns, they were often let go under the pretext of “reigning in the parade,” while the C-suite class continued to receive massive bonuses, regardless of whether it was a downturn or an upturn. The result was widespread disillusionment, deep mistrust, and extraordinarily high turnover—conditions that undermined the institution’s mission. The only beneficiaries were the executives, who enjoyed their financial perks; for everyone else, and for the organization as a whole, the work simply didn’t get done, and the institution failed to fulfill its purpose.

In a certain sense, my experience reflects just one instance of a broader shift—one in which employees are no longer treated with dignity, a pattern that truly extends everywhere.

Take, for instance, my father, an ER physician, who has told me that his ER no longer provides a coffee machine for doctors. If he wants coffee during a twelve-hour shift, he has to bring his own Keurig. Yet the ER he works for is raking in more money than ever—quite literally off the backs of people like my father, the very ones whose labor and expertise generate the revenue. And he can’t even get a cup of coffee?

As my father laments, it wasn’t always like this. 

In Jim Collins’s book Good to Great, he points out that the companies that became great didn’t just do so through strategy or innovation, but also through the investment and good treatment of their employees. These firms recruited thoughtfully, provided fair wages, offered performance-based bonuses, and maintained a reasonable gap between CEO compensation and that of other employees. Loyalty and long-term service were rewarded with meaningful perks—one company even gave employees a Rolex after ten years of service. At their core, the companies he wrote about succeeded because they built strong, respectful relationships with the people doing the work, fostering commitment, morale, and a shared sense of purpose.

It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when institutions gave up on fostering that, but I think 2008 provides a helpful reference point. 

That year exposed how deeply the “employees as cogs” mentality had taken hold in America, particularly in the financial sector. Despite precipitating an economic crisis, bankers and executives at major firms still walked away with massive bonuses—even when their companies incurred losses—while thousands of rank-and-file employees were laid off. The episode revealed a lot of things, and one of the clearest was a structural incentive that rewarded leadership regardless of outcomes while treating ordinary workers as expendable. This same mindset persists today, evident in companies that lay off American employees only to hire H-1B visa holders at lower wages, prioritizing cost over loyalty, skill, dignity, and even citizenship.

To that, sadly, many Americans seem largely indifferent to this decay—especially conservatives, who treat ever-growing shareholder value as the highest virtue. But people should care. The country cannot continue down this path without consequence: this breakdown between institutions and workers fosters cultural division, drives protest, and undermines social cohesion. Moreover, this attitude toward workers is slowly killing the spirit of work itself. Do we really expect the best and brightest to dedicate themselves to a life in medicine if they can’t even get a damn coffee? Or to devote themselves to institutions like Princeton when political scapegoating is used to justify the continual erosion of benefits and perks? Who wants to work for a place with a $34 billion endowment that can’t even provide basic cafeteria perks? It’s literally a joke.

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And it’s not a funny one because we have seen what this logic has done to our institutions. For universities, it has turned them into credential mills that have abandoned forms of education that do not immediately yield financial returns—namely, the liberal arts and humanities. These disciplines require both intellectual and financial investment to thrive, yet under the current model, universities don’t see it as rewarding to cultivate thoughtful, capable citizens—those who might sustain the cultural and intellectual foundations of the West. We shouldn’t be at all surprised that Americans can’t even name, or describe, how their government should work, let alone how it actually does. 

I could ramble on, but the bottom line is that across institutions, the dignity of the worker has been diminished. What’s most upsetting, at least to me, is that it wasn’t always like this. Institutions once recognized that the people doing the work were essential not just to output, but to the character and mission of the organization itself. Princeton once welcomed non-advising fellows into meal plans. Hospitals once provided physicians with basic amenities, such as coffee machines. Companies described in Good to Great rewarded loyalty, hard work, and long-term service, treating employees as partners in a shared enterprise rather than expendable cogs.

Katz’s essay captures this tension in microcosm. On the surface, it is about meal privileges. At a deeper level, it tells the story of a broader transformation across American institutions—a shift from respect and mutual investment toward a transactional, mechanistic model that treats people as costs to be minimized and managed rather than contributors to be valued. Recognizing this change is crucial because it reminds us that the dignity of the worker, connection, and respect were once integral to how organizations functioned—even how they became great—and that reclaiming these values is essential not only for workplaces but also for the health of our institutions and our society. I am happy that Katz submitted his essay. 

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