Reform in American higher education depends on recognizing freshman courses as the foundation of higher-order thinking and learning. These courses must be recognized for their intellectual significance and their inherent possibilities for multi-disciplinary scholarship. The Maimon Hierarchical Fallacy is a phrase coined by Elaine Maimon to refer to the idea that those who teach graduate students are smarter than those who teach undergraduate students, those who teach seniors are smarter than those who teach freshmen, and so on. Maimon argues the challenges of twenty-first century education require recognizing and reordering these hierarchies. She points out that reexamining and reassigning prestige in higher education can lead to culture change, disrupting hierarchies and assigning new respect to those who teach and do research on the first-year experience. Drastic rethinking of PhD preparation in the humanities, particularly in English, is necessary to match twenty-first century epistemology. Well-structured and efficient PhD programs have existed in the past and can be developed for the future, educating future professors to see themselves as members of an academic community rather than as independent contractors. [This article is adapted from "Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation," to be published by Stylus Publishing in January 2018.]