Empirical Application of SignalRupture: A System-Level Analysis of Universities

Empirical Application of SignalRupture: A System‑Level Analysis of Universities — Field Paper II applies the SR diagnostic architecture to universities as epistemic institutions operating under rising complexity. Unlike service or governance systems, universities occupy a reflexive position: they produce knowledge about systemic strain while simultaneously exhibiting the same structural signatures internally. This paper maps SR’s observable indicators—drift, buffer compression, policy churn, automation under strain, downward regulation, and fragmentation—onto higher‑education systems from 2010 to 2026. The analysis reveals deep misalignment between epistemic mission and operational incentives, persistent administrative expansion, compression of academic labor, and increasing reliance on compensatory infrastructure such as analytics platforms and AI‑mediated workflows. With an SRI score of 17, universities emerge as one of the most SR‑aligned institutional environments studied to date. The findings demonstrate that universities are not external arbiters of systemic coherence but embedded participants in the same structural dynamics they attempt to evaluate.