Universities, Academic Platforms, and Repositories are Not Emperors: How Epistemic Violence Undermines Democracy

In this essay, I argue that epistemic violence—practices within universities, scholarly platforms, journals, and repositories that marginalise multilingual, interdisciplinary, independent scholars, and university applicants—constitutes a severe fiduciary breach. Drawing explicitly upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence, Miranda Fricker’s epistemic injustice, Michel Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge regimes, Elizabeth Anderson’s epistemic democracy, Joseph Raz’s epistemic irrationality, John Rawls’s justice as fairness, Tamar Frankel’s fiduciary theory, Ronald Barnett’s ecological vision of universities, and my original scholarship, I show how epistemic violence is embedded in academic governance, perpetuating colonial epistemic structures, institutional authoritarianism, and democratic harm. To address these fiduciary failures, I propose specific fiduciary-epistemic reforms: inclusive peer review and admissions practices; explicit institutional support for multilingual, multimodal, and interdisciplinary scholarship; robust fiduciary accountability frameworks; and fiduciary-epistemic ethical commitments such as an academic fiduciary oath. These reforms are grounded in my concept of ‘epistemic transposition’, reframing fiduciary ethical duties as epistemic responsibilities directly owed to knowledge itself. Ultimately, I call upon academic institutions to abandon epistemic sovereignty and adopt genuine fiduciary stewardship, restoring democratic legitimacy, epistemic plurality, and intellectual integrity.