“Now that they’re extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure.” — Luke Skywalker
Spoiler warning: This post will cover the events of Star Wars, including the prequels, the sequels, and the animated spin-offs.
We do not know how the Jedi of Star Wars began, except for their own self-reported histories. Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that “the Jedi protected peace and justice in the galaxy for a thousand generations.” Decades earlier, Mace Windu declares that the Jedi are “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” while Yoda, at the time of their fall, muses that they “spent [a] millennium training to re-fight the last war” against the Sith — and still managed to lose. Whether any of these fragments factually represent the Jedi’s history is up for debate, because we are not shown how the Jedi began. We are, however, given a front-row seat to their end.
In the Star Wars prequels, the Jedi are trapped. They’re sworn to defend a system that claims they’re monks, yet peacekeepers; ascetics, yet arbiters of justice; while we, the audience, become increasingly aware that neither claim is true. The Jedi have, willingly or not, allowed themselves to be turned into an arm of the state, and cling to fantasies of their past to avoid confronting what they’ve become in their present. Although the fall of the Jedi is brought about because an evil guy is trying to take over the galaxy, he’s able to so do relatively easily (just one proxy war!) because the Jedi, as an organization, are riddled with systemic failures that they are made repeatedly aware of and yet refuse to address. By the end of the Clone Wars, the Jedi have been maneuvered into a state of guilty helplessness as they fail first themselves, then the galaxy.
If we take the story of the Jedi seriously as a reflection of the many institutions George Lucas had in mind when writing the prequels, then it is very easy to apply these failures to academia, particularly in how it fails its students, and in so doing, fails its own future.
The first Jedi temple on Ahch-To offers conflicting information about the Jedi’s origins. Image via Lucasfilm.
You may be wondering why so much of what I write involves critiquing academia through the lens of pop culture, often Star Wars, when Star Wars, for the most part, isn’t that deep. What’s the point of probing it for solutions that stretch far beyond both the text and authorial intent? The answer is simple — I’m a Star Wars fan, and so are many other people in my field, and that shared experience can provide a crucial framework for discussions we need to have. While not everyone is familiar with or ready to acknowledge academia’s shortcomings, a whole lot of us definitely remember that the Jedi had some serious problems, and we can probably articulate what those problems are. In reading (and misreading) Star Wars as a text, I’m hoping to reframe known issues in academia in ways that might enable us to build community and work towards common solutions. That’s a pretty big goal, though, so I’m willing to settle for just making the reader think.
This particular piece began because, upon graduating with my PhD, I looked back at grad school to find that it had not made me better, or shaped me into the ideal scientist I’d dreamed of. Instead, I had become Anakin Skywalker, full of pain and rage, howling “I hate you!” at the system that had, as promised, turned me into a person with a PhD — and nothing else.
It’s uncomfortable to identify with Anakin Skywalker, of all Star Wars characters. After all, he’s a war criminal who murdered untold numbers of people and could only find redemption in death, and I’m just someone that had a hard time getting a PhD. And yet, towards the end of my time as a grad student, I found myself overwhelmed with the force of my anger. I gazed upon my life, which I hated, shrunken down to fit into the corners that work left behind, and myself, a person I could hardly recognize, and thought of him: Anakin Skywalker, who wanted desperately to be a good Jedi, yet was utterly incapable of and often uninterested in following the Jedi Code. Or, at least, the interpretation of the Jedi Code that he was given. This is the contradiction of Anakin Skywalker: that he is petulant and entitled, yet utterly deprived of any means to grow beyond his flaws. The system fails him, and he fails it in turn; in the end, they both burn.
Who is responsible when students, Padawans and grad students alike, find themselves fundamentally incompatible with the systems designed to teach them? Is it the fault of the system, for breaking me, or does the blame lie with me, for allowing myself to be broken? While many grad students have asked themselves this question over the years, I now know that it’s not the most useful question to ask when it comes to confronting the scale of the problem. Instead, we must ask: why is the predominant system in academia one that is known for, and often lauded because of, its ability to break people down?
The Jedi Order fails itself in three major ways: 1) establishing a teaching and mentorship hierarchy that rests on one master (advisor) and one padawan (student) with few means of oversight, 2) becoming dependent on the political apparatus of the Galactic Republic for funding and status, and 3) failing to provide any avenues for critique, reconciliation, or broader change, forcing any wayward minds to walk away from the institution instead. It’s a bad system, but one that somehow cannot bring itself to change, even to keep itself alive. And hopefully by the time this piece is over, we’ll able to agree that academia is trapped in a similar spiral, and think together on we want to do about it.
Anakin, about to receive some advice from Yoda that he will interpret catastrophically poorly, as usual. Image via Lucasfilm.
The first and most obvious parallel is in how the Jedi’s advising system mirrors graduate advising. The Master-Padawan relationship is one of the foundational aspects of the Jedi Order. Young Jedi are paired with a more experienced mentor, who is then almost wholly responsible for their education, up to and including when they are permitted to gain their independence as a Jedi Knight. Becoming a Knight is predicated by tradition-honed trials where, similar to a PhD defense, the Padawan must demonstrate mastery to graduate. Though, unlike a PhD defense, some of their trials can be solved by swinging a laser sword, which is a vast improvement over deriving equations at the board.
How long it takes for a Padawan to graduate varies wildly depending on their subdiscipline and their Master, among other factors, from Anakin Skywalker’s early knighting at 19 to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s later knighting at 25. Disagreements over being ready for the trials, as when Qui-Gon Jinn rapidly changes his mind about Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace, in addition to other Jedi milestones, such as Anakin’s struggle to gain legitimate authority through the Council in Revenge of the Sith, often breed resentment, and reflect a much broader problem. The highly personalized nature of one master, one padawan means no standardized metric by which to gauge improvement, let alone success. The wider Star Wars canon (and former EU/Legends canon) is full of otherwise promising Padawans who become lost to the Order due to a mismatch with Masters who are unprepared, unwilling, or unable to teach them. While this trope pops up so often because it makes for good storytelling, the idea of a broken Master-Padawan pair causing conflict, sorrow, and even death is so potent because the flaws in the system are so obvious. Why is one person the sole control — and thus the sole failure point — when it comes to a student’s progress?
Master-Padawan relationships become more complex the deeper one digs into Star Wars lore. Who your Jedi Master is matters, but so does their Master, and so on. Anakin could, if he so wished, trace his Jedi lineage from Obi-Wan all the way back to Yoda, one of the most senior Jedi living. Each link in this succession chain is fraught with decades of interpersonal friction, because to teach a Padawan is not only to advance the next generation of the Jedi Order, but to advance a Master’s specific legacy as well. For both Master and Padawan, this results in the burden of having to measure up to those who came before. Obi-Wan worries about stepping into his deceased Master’s shoes in training Anakin, and Anakin is constantly anxious about not being as perfect a Jedi as he perceives Obi-Wan to be.
This same power imbalance is frequently found in academia, where a student’s potential is often measured using the orders of separation between them and someone great. To be a famous scientist’s PhD student is to get a bit of the shine of greatness on you as well, like the Moon reflecting the light of the Sun. I can track my own academic lineage with the best of them — well enough to know exactly how close and how far I am from the real knowledge-makers. Despite the vaunted academic talk about knowledge as the great equalizer, all of us are still deeply wrapped up in proximity to power. And how could we not be? In a highly rarefied system predicated on the advisor as the trusted force behind a student’s progress, the main question everyone wants to ask a new person is: who let you in here? Do we trust their judgement?
All this edges around the truest, deepest problem — that the Master-Padawan relationship assumes the Master can be everything the Padawan needs as a teacher, while the Padawan must learn in those conditions, or fail. As designed, the Jedi’s primary training apparatus does a deep disservice to all parties involved. Very little support seems to be given, either to provide the Padawan with additional support, or assist the Master with adapting their approach to better suit their student. The Master-Padawan dynamic seems almost designed to fail, except in scenarios where both parties are exceedingly similar, which has its own problems — namely, that when people with power tend to give power to those who are more like themselves, the result tends to be oppressive, discriminatory, and abusive to anyone else. When Anakin enters the Jedi temple, older than his peers and carrying trauma none of them can understand, there is no system in place to support him. When Qui-Gon dies, leaving Obi-Wan the responsibility of training Anakin (another unfortunately common situation in academia), he is expected to shoulder this burden and teach the “chosen one” alone.
Academia fails its students and advisors in much the same way. Students choose a single PhD advisor and are expected to complete their research under whatever guidance they receive; the advisor is given little in the way of training for mentorship, relying instead on their own experience as a baseline. The current PhD system often produces, at best, miscommunication, mismatched expectations, and students left adrift to build additional support structures on their own. At worst, it facilitates harassment and abuse, with little recourse for students given the power dynamics at play and the anemic regulations that purport to combat them. This is the trap of how to succeed in academia: gut it out in whatever your particular flavor of subpar conditions might be, and then, once you’re on the other side and still have a bit of light left in your eyes, try your best to make things just a tiny bit better for the next generation of students, often at tremendous cost.
Let us return to the original question: whose fault is it that Anakin Skywalker became the Jedi Order’s downfall? Many would argue it’s Obi-Wan’s, for struggling to train him into a true believer of the Jedi and leaving him open to Palpatine’s temptation. We could also lay the blame on the Order itself, which pushed a grieving, unprepared Padawan into a position of authority over an even more traumatized child. The true answer is, unfortunately, more complicated. All of them failed, because the system that they have accepted, operate in, and aim to perpetuate cannot provide the necessary support, not just for Anakin, but for any of the Padawans. The problem is structural, and to fix it would require changing the Jedi Order at its foundations.
Anakin is presented with the first of many disappointments from the Jedi Council. Image via Lucasfilm.
While the similarity between PhD advising and the Master-Padawan relationship is the most obvious parallel between academia and the Jedi, their similarities (and their problems) go far deeper than that. The second major failing of the Jedi Order is their inability to reconcile their philosophic aspirations for their role in the Galactic Republic with their true social and political position. The Jedi are often compared to a monastic order; however, much like real monasteries, this does not mean that they function as the independent, self-sustaining entity they’d like to claim. Monasteries endure by cultivating a relationship with the state for funding, power, and visibility, which allows them to accumulate the money and status necessary to carry out their activities. During the High Republic, and likely even earlier than that, the Jedi were subsidized to perform their roles as mediators and peacekeepers in the far-flung reaches of the Outer Rim, which in turn provided legitimacy to expansionist Republic policies. The Republic and the Jedi willingly used each other to boost their own influence, a codependency that would become first dangerous, then fatal.
At the time of the Star Wars prequels the relationship between the Jedi and the Republic has metastasized, creating a massive disconnect between the Jedi Order’s established values and the work they’re actually capable of doing within Republic constraints. The middle part of The Phantom Menace, while largely a technological showcase for George Lucas’s fascination with racing cars, also functions as an illustration of how limited the Jedi have become, and how they have accepted those limitations in exchange for their current political standing with the Senate. Upon realizing that this strange new visitor to Tatooine is a Jedi, Anakin asks Qui-Gon if he is here to free the slaves — something it seems like a Jedi would do, given their reputation as a force for justice in the galaxy. After all, why else would a Jedi be here?
When presented with Anakin’s question, Qui-Gon (and Obi-Wan) prioritize their mission from the Republic over immense, ongoing human suffering. There is no triumphant return to Tatooine to finish what they started in freeing Anakin, who’s been dreaming of becoming a Jedi so he can liberate his people. As we are frequently reminded, republic law and order cannot be enforced on Tatooine. Without the Republic to support their actions, the Jedi decide that the oppressed must be left to their fate.
This codependency also makes it very easy to trap the Jedi into fighting Palpatine’s proxy war. When handed an army and asked to fight on behalf of the Republic, they cannot say no, because they’ve spent countless years becoming a load-bearing part of how the Republic functions. The truth of the Jedi, which Mace Windu was fighting not to face is this: once the Jedi became keepers of the peace on behalf of the Republic, rather than acting on their own behalf, their missions effectively made them law enforcement. When war came for the Republic, it could and did make them soldiers.
Academia survives in much the same way. We are not, and cannot ever be, truly independent thinkers, not when most of us are primarily funded by the state to conduct our research. To survive means proposing research that is fundable, which generally means research that the funding agency (usually part of the state or federal government) thinks is important. Thus, all of us are, to one degree or another, guided by outside interests in ways that influence all aspects of academic research, from the documents historians can access to the kinds of cameras scientists can send to space. What we call the “pure collection of knowledge” will always have a point of view, because academia is a collection of biased humans who get to decide what “knowledge” is, and because all of us are being directed towards what knowledge is considered valuable. On the one hand, this keeps people from studying whether aliens live underneath the Rocky Mountains (probably a good thing!); on the other, this keeps a lot of academics, myself included, deeply embedded in the interests of the military-industrial complex (much less of a good thing).
Current funding structures, oversight by university higher-ups, and the ongoing political attacks on higher education in the US and elsewhere have put the limits of “academic freedom” into sharp relief. It’s very difficult to study things that the state does not value, first because they are unlikely to pay you to do it, and second because, if you do manage to get a job studying it, immense pushback from a wide range of actors will result in internal and external pressure on the university to make you stop. “Things the state does not value” is an ever-shifting, but very broad category, encompassing everything from the hidden activities of large corporations to gender and sexuality across time to ongoing human rights abuses, and for most academics, and most universities, it’s simply not worth the effort to challenge anything that falls into that category. The costs, both financial and social, are simply too high.
But acceding to this system carries a hidden sacrifice: much like the Jedi, academia’s continued survival means overlooking very real problems to maintain its own reputation. This matters, because when we are forced to ignore the big problems outside of academia, such as white supremacy and settler colonialism, they have a funny way of making their way inside. Radical scholars, and radical Jedi, who start their careers enamored with an institution that purports to expand freedom, justice, and knowledge often find themselves steadily more burnt out by the constant diversion of their efforts towards maintaining the appearance of the institution, rather than being able to challenge or improve it.
Members of the Jedi High Council report to the Chancellor, unknowingly feeding information to their enemy. Image via Lucasfilm.
This leads us to the last major failing of the Jedi, which is perhaps the most important: its inability to change. The Jedi are not a monolith, and many have critiqued the Order and its stagnation over the years. However, the Jedi Order steadily and aggressively resists any transformation that can come from within, self-selecting for those who can adapt to their system. Calls for change are usually rebuffed, though sometimes guiltily, and the dissenters are instead pushed to leave the Order and seek justice elsewhere. While this approach stabilizes the Order for a time, the Jedi’s inability to acknowledge and act on criticism keeps them welded to a system that enables their destruction.
The most famous Jedi dissenter is Count Dooku, who, after leaving the Order, famously becomes a Sith Lord and leader of the opposing side in Palpatine’s proxy war. However, prior to his fall to the Dark Side, Dooku was, as the Jedi recall in Attack of the Clones, a “political idealist,” who left due to vaguely described disagreements with the Order. It is left to the extended universe to flesh out what those concerns entailed, most recently through the animated Tales of the Jedi (2022). In Tales of the Jedi, Dooku is shown chafing against the Jedi’s limited role in the Republic as he undertakes missions in which he and his partners are repeatedly forced to choose the safety of corrupt political leaders over the freedom of their people.
As he is compelled to jail those whose liberatory politics he agrees with, and free those whose exploitative acts he despises, Dooku begins to question whether the Jedi are capable of enacting “any meaningful change” in the galaxy. However, when he voices these views, he is met with censure from the Jedi High Council, who keep him from a leadership role to prevent him from acquiring the necessary leverage to make change. This, of course, alienates him further. By the time he leaves, Dooku is convinced the “Jedi blindly serve a corrupt Senate that fails the Republic it represents,” a sentiment Palpatine uses to convince him that, since the Jedi refuse to consider any form of change from within, they must be destroyed. And what better way to destroy the Jedi than through the power of the Sith?
This is what we call an “own goal.” Dooku spends decades as a Jedi, dedicated to the vision of what the Jedi purport to be, only to be broken down by the endless disappointment of being forced, time and again, to compromise his own moral integrity in favor of political expediency. Meanwhile, the Jedi are so obsessed with maintaining their status quo that they are more willing to push away a lifelong advocate than consider the concerns he brings. Thus, Dooku leaves, bitter and disillusioned, and the Jedi limp on for another decade, confident in their poor choices, before Palpatine uses their personal and political failures to tear them apart from within.
The pattern repeats again with Anakin, as well as his Clone Wars Padawan, Ahsoka. Anakin develops an antagonistic relationship with his fellow Jedi, particularly the Council, because of his unorthodox problem-solving, his status as the Chosen One, and, of course, his consistent grooming by Palpatine. Ahsoka, meanwhile, is framed for treason and murder and nearly convicted, with no defense from the Jedi beyond her unorthodox Master’s hunt for answers. In each case the Council responds too late, allowing Anakin and Ahsoka to suffer to save face and preserve their standing in the Republic. While Ahsoka walks away from the Order after her name is cleared, rejecting those that rejected her, Anakin feels bound to the Order, unable to live up to its impossible standards but unable to imagine who he might be without the Jedi. Much like with Dooku, Palpatine easily uses Anakin’s unresolved problems with the Jedi to convince him to burn them to the ground.
None of the people who try to make the Order change, to make it a safer place for its Padawans (Ahsoka), more open to alternative interpretations of being a Jedi (Anakin), or even just do more to live up to its reputation as a force for peace and justice (Dooku), succeed. Instead, they are all pushed out, directly or indirectly. This is also the experience of the many hopeful activists and organizers, who have observed the faults in academia and tried to introduce reforms. I have spent years on the tiniest of fights, from adding gender-neutral bathrooms to old buildings to providing graduate students with moving stipends — simple things that make life bearable, and yet were repeatedly, incessantly challenged by the inertia of the system.
Academia incentivizes exploitation and punishes dissent by limiting the capacity of those who wish to change it, much as the Order isolated its own internal critics. Worse still, the problems are so pervasive that they become almost impossible to grasp, let alone reform. If we point to either the bad actors, who abuse their graduate students and postdocs for their own gain, or those surrounding them, who do nothing, we are ignoring the framework holding all of it together. We become so tied up in the unending fight to be treated with the smallest amount of dignity — a pronoun in an email signature, an accessible building entryway — that we cannot confront the pervasive elitism, sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and more that occupy the heart of academia.
And so, like the Jedi Order, academia continues on, rewarding those that adhere to its tenets and exhausting its critics until they leave in disgust. Many of us might be wondering: how long can we go on like this? How do we change something that resists us at every turn?
Dooku, on a mission with Mace Windu, about to be disappointed once again by what the Jedi will ask of him. Image via Lucasfilm
I can’t answer that question. If I knew the answer, I would probably be out doing that instead of writing about Star Wars. The future of academia, with its lofty goals and cracked foundation, is a question with a multitude of answers. It will be the work of a lifetime for those of us who want to build something new, and will require extensive communication, education, and experimentation. It will require building the thing academia thinks it has, but truly lacks: community.
I can, however, recommend what not to do, because Star Wars has advice for that too. Luke, at the end of Return of the Jedi, finds himself at a crossroads. Does he want to rebuild the Jedi Order, an organization he’s only heard about secondhand, or does he want to find a new way to help others train with the force? For would-be academic radicals, we must face a similar question: once we’ve recognized that the current system does not work, what is it about academia that is valuable to preserve? What should we jettison because it no longer serves us?
For me, the good part of academia is when it’s actually succeeding at providing ways to learn about our world, our history, and the universe, and to share that knowledge with others. That foundation might be something we keep in the new iteration we build! But when we’re dreaming of a new future, it’s important to not be too tied to what we know. Luke, shouldering the burden of being (one of) the last Jedi, panics when building his Jedi school; he leans too hard on what has come before. He tries to rebuild a past he isn’t even sure he understands, and the fears that plague him are readily exploited by the dark side of the force, leading to the downfall of his school, the deaths of his students, and the facilitation of fascism’s resurgence in the galaxy.
Luke’s story, and the story of Star Wars as a whole, teaches us that it is not enough to acknowledge the mistakes of the past. We must also reject the ideas that produced those mistakes, and do so thoroughly; otherwise, we risk accidentally reinventing a broken wheel. I believe that it is possible for force users in Star Wars to move past the Jedi and become an incredible force for good; I also believe that it is possible for scholars across disciplines to leave behind hurtful, elitist systems and build something new. As Yoda reminds Luke: “we are what they grow beyond.”
It is long past time we allowed ourselves to grow. It’s time that we create something new.
Luke Skywalker achieves inner peace at last. Image via Lucasfilm.