@kfitz And we wind up replicating those deformed relations. As a friend of mine said to me, in a culture structured by bullying, it's all but inevitable that you wind up wanting to be the bully.
@kfitz I am quite serious when I say that my discomfort with that system is one of the reasons I took my current job. In the Honors Program we all have the same courseload, and we all teach the first-years (no contracting those courses out to adjuncts). It feels countercultural in some good ways.