“The Academy’s “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment: | by Stonekeeper | Oct, 2025

“The Academy’s “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment:

How Higher Education Mistook Prestige for Permanence — and Lost the Public’s Trust” by Stonekeeper

Marie Antoinette never uttered the words, “Let them eat cake.” Yet the phrase endures because it captures the arrogance of a ruling class too insulated to see the hunger at its gates. Today, higher education faces its own cake moment — an institution mistaking prestige for permanence while the public grows restless at the door.

For years, the academy imagined itself untouchable, wrapped in the illusion that prestige alone could shield it from accountability. Professors spoke in jargon, published for one another, and mistook their insulation for permanence. They forgot that public universities depend on taxpayers, and private elites depend on donors. They forgot that every crown rests on the patience of the people.

The illusion was reinforced by ritual. Rankings became scripture, tenure a coronation. To question the system was to risk exile. What looked like authority was often just performance, a crown propped up by ritual rather than substance.

But prestige is not permanence. The machinery that sustains the academy — rankings, tenure, jargon — was always more fragile than it appeared. When the public began to ask what exactly it was paying for, the answers were evasive. When students demanded relevance, the response was more theory, more insulation, more cake.

Now the reckoning has arrived. Students, parents, and the public are asking questions the academy can no longer ignore:

Why does higher education cost so much?

• Why do professors speak in tongues no one outside their circle can understand?

• Why defend institutions that refuse to defend the public in return?

The consequences are already visible. Enrollments are shrinking, and campuses are closing. Legislators slash budgets with little resistance, confident that voters will not punish them for starving institutions that no longer feel like public goods. The academy’s refusal to speak plainly, to share knowledge as bread rather than cake, has left it vulnerable to the very forces it once dismissed.

History reminds us that authority can be reclaimed, even when gatekeepers refuse to yield. In the 1970s, Black heroines of blaxploitation cinema — dismissed by critics as pulp — seized the screen with authority, rewriting who could wield power and how. They were not invited into the canon; they forced their way in, reframing absence as presence and spectacle as sovereignty. The academy could learn from them. Authority is not conferred by gatekeepers alone. It is claimed, embodied, and made legible to the people who need it.

A crown remains possible — not one of exclusion and prestige, but of knowledge spoken plainly, shared widely, and offered as sustenance. Freed from its gilded cage, knowledge is not diminished. It becomes what it was always meant to be: bread for the many, not cake