(A new governance model for higher education grounded in fiduciary ethics and epistemic plurality, challenging managerialism and advancing democratic knowledge institutions)
by Peter Kahl, 2025-06-19; v2: 2025-09-15
This paper advances the concept of epistemocracy as a normative model of higher education governance, grounded in fiduciary transparency, epistemic plurality, and distributed credibility. Building on fiduciary theory (Frankel, Smith, Miller), virtue epistemology (Fricker, Zagzebski, Medina), and critical pedagogy (Freire, Darder), I diagnose the epistemic crisis of contemporary universities through three new critical terms—optocratic drift, fiducial hollowing, and epistemic inversion. These neologisms identify how institutions privilege optics over substance, hollow fiduciary duties into public relations, and collapse plurality into singular figureheads. Against this backdrop, I propose epistemocracy as a structural reform: a governance framework embedding epistemic audit boards, fiduciary oversight mechanisms, decentralised credit infrastructures, and visual plurality protocols. The model resists epistemic injustice, strengthens fiduciary obligations, and restores universities’ democratic and epistemic integrity. Beyond academia, I argue epistemocracy provides a transferable governance framework for corporations, NGOs, and democratic institutions, modelling fiduciary–epistemic accountability in wider society.
epistemocracy, fiduciary duties, epistemic justice, epistemic plurality, higher education governance, optocratic drift, fiducial hollowing, epistemic inversion, virtue epistemology, fiduciary transparency, epistemic audit, democratic governance, social justice
This is a provisional draft circulated for discussion; readers are welcome to cite it, noting that revisions may follow in later versions.
Kahl, P. (2025). Epistemocracy in higher education: A proposal for fiduciary and epistemic accountability in the university (v2). Lex et Ratio Ltd. GitHub: https://github.com/Peter-Kahl/Epistemocracy-in-Higher-Education DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17293583
First published in London by Peter Kahl, 2025-06-19.
v2 published in London by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-09-15.
© 2025 Lex et Ratio Ltd. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
You may share this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution and without modification. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/