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Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower

466 points by jseliger 4y ago

UIUC_06 4y ago
As a 501(c)(3) Harvard (and most universities) have to file a Form 990 with the IRS, which anyone can read. Here's theirs from 2021: [1] it's 373 pages and not (easily) searchable. Go crazy. [1] https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_2022071120199295.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...
greesil 4y ago
This article is probably full of nuanced observations but lost me at "deep state". Ugggh.
- pokstad 4y ago
  The term "deep state" has become sullied in recent years. What are your thoughts on Eisenhower's speech about the Military Industrial Complex? Whether by conspiracy or out in the open, there are a number of actors inside large institutions that actively try to derail the original mission of said institution in the pursuit of their own survival.
  - greesil 4y ago
    Military industrial complex == arsenal of democracy This decade, at least.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  You might prefer some of the discussions on HN from similar articles[^1]. I will say, this is nice in the sense that it's focusing on public universities, rather than elite privates. [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496246 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936
- magigift 4y ago
  Even though it has become a political term the “deep state” does exist and is a useful concept to think about when evaluating bureaucracies. These are people long tenured in their jobs who know how to fast track or slow walk policy. Depending largely on their politics and mission they can steer departments the way they want almost regardless of the new boss or outside influence. Makes a lot of sense to me that they would also exist in universities.
  - Ztynovovk 4y ago
    Not a single linked citation in the entire article aside from a book reference. If you are going to talk about the “deep state” and not cite anything at all you deserve a good eye roll. Any institution that has “renewal” in their name is ideologically driven.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Yes, but the problem is that this is just... ordinary human social dynamics plus a priority queue. The only reason why this seems surprising is that we're used to bureaucratic indifference in every power structure we normally inhabit.
- defrost 4y ago
  Yep. There is a valid point to made about administrative bloat eventually bogging down any organisation | domain unless actively worked against ... but the point missed here is that hair clogs the drains of any regime regardless of whether it is obscured by "Progressive" or "Capitalist" dogma. They article raises many good points, and then pivots into an unneccesary coupling of "bad" with "liberal" and "progressive" ideals and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill. This, of course, is just silly.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill Where are you seeing this? Can you quote it?
    - defrost 4y ago
      I read these closely located quotes: > As Catherine Liu argues in a recent book, the PMC is comprised of educated professionals who embrace a moralizing progressive ideology while believing that it can be realized only in a top-down, hierarchical manner. ... > Consistent with Liu’s description of the PMC, university administrators “labor in a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production.” at first as describing the opinion that US university admins are disguising their busy work behind a cloud of "liberal progressive" smoke and that presumeably other locales and times would see other topical issues being used (ie. it's not intrinsically linked to a political ideal) However they were followed by: > While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. > More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia. which had me wondering; I'm not in the US and I'm always struck by the apparent ever present need to shoehorn "Left" V. "Right" and at best gently curse with backhanded references ( "despite being politically liberal, many of the common staff still lack blinkers" etc). The conclusion is that all this needs to be flushed away: > Whether they have any commitment to preserving the complex ecology required by institutions of learning in a market-driven society is another question entirely. and that conclusion follows what I saw as weak and weasly implication that (US) progressive liberal values were tied somehow to administrative self perpetuating at the expense of that they were supposed to serve. I'll admit it's a weak bias, but it comes across as white anting all the same (to my non US eye).
- kortilla 4y ago
  Do you not know what it means?
  - greesil 4y ago
    Yes, but in recent years deep state had taken on a political smell. Like, you can just call the university administrators a tyrannical bureaucracy and you'd be sufficiently accurate. Deep state implies some sort of secretive network that's entrenched. They're literally the bosses, no secrets needed.
- christkv 4y ago
  I suggest watching the satirical comedy show Yes Prime Minister that showcases what is meant by the deep state better than anything I’ve seen.
cycomanic 4y ago
The disconnect between uni administrators and the academics on the ground is growing at a staggering pace. One example is that I know of several universities were salary increases for academics have been capped to 1-2% due to the "hard economic times", while the vice chancellors/presidents ... received salary increases above 8% (and above 20% in at least one case). At the same time most academics will attest that the requirements that they have to fulfill are consistently going up, for example when computer systems are being modernized e.g. purchasing systems, it's very obvious that the requirements are made to minimize the work of the administration, which typically increases the workload of academics.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  I think a distinction should be made between administrations on the ground (we had an incredible secretary of graduate studies who made everyone's life much easier) and those who work for the executive office and act to lower the "cost" of running a University while not actually making any processes more efficient.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Completely agree, the closer an admin is to actually working with the people on the ground, the more they care and the more engaged they are. The administrators in our department that we interact with on a weekly basis are all extremely dedicated and will go out of their way to help you. If you ask someone in central admin for anything you will likely be told it is not their job and look somewhere else (and the next person you contact will do the same... until you give up).
  - etempleton 4y ago
    Yes administration is a very broad term in higher education. When people complain about administration they are almost always talking about the presidents cabinet and academic leadership, not, say, the folks in financial aid or admissions.
    - rdtwo 4y ago
jonstewart 4y ago
Context: The James G Martin Center is a small conservative think tank funded by the Pope Foundation. They routinely call for budget cuts to the UNC system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_Academic_Renewal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_A... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation University administration is a juicy target and I’m certainly not defending them wholesale. But the article’s written by rich people who want to lower state taxes.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem (Latin for 'argument to the person'), refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonstewart 4y ago
    HNers need get a grip on what’s ad hominem and what isn’t. I didn’t say their mothers were hamsters. There are oodles of think tanks and institutes, many have a particular policy agenda, and it’s useful to consider that before deciding whether to spend precious attention on an article from one.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Then show the flaw in the argument. For all we know, your reasoning might be as motivated as theirs. Ad hominems, even when not fallacious, don't tend to contribute to the discourse. If you don't have a good rebuttal to the argument, saying that the person who wrote it did so because they have an agenda is inane. Of course they had an agenda: they wrote an essay!
mistrial9 4y ago
sweeping social evaluations like this one have left me cold these days -- too many particulars in this messy world today. Instead of finding a perpetrator social class with some catchy acronym, why not try factual data? The top administrator payroll at a decent-sized school has been described recently as more like a mafia system -- outsiders are plentiful and there are things for them to do with some vague promise that they might prosper for it. Insiders are worked hard and at the lowest levels, get worse treatment than most outsiders. Once the promotional levels get into the picture, ruthless and relentless infighting not visible to other insiders or outsiders, culls the herd that wants to rise to the top; most fail or tire of the fight. Then, apex roles like top administrator, or Head Coach for a profitable sports team, make old-world style agreements with many multiples of income of their nearest rival, signalling dominance, and serving as a goalpost for achievement supposedly available to "anyone." There are thousands of situations like this across wealthy nations, hidden behind the middle class success they breed on. It is even extolled as a virtue among the predatory capitalists as "competition". This state of affairs is a social default - not some political development of our times. This is ancient as societies go.. it is sometimes startling to see it starkly. I suspect that more than half of higher education by numbers are failing financially right now, while some small number of institutions echo the money-printing economy numbers of the last fifteen years.
tylermenezes 4y ago
I'm not sure why they attributed this in part to pressure for job-related skills. Everyone I've talked to who's concerned about that has been a professor at a community college (or other affordable school).
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > Everyone I've talked to who's concerned about that has been a professor at a community college (or other affordable school). At public institutions, "non-PhD-granting" is typically a better heuristic than "community college". At private institutions, tuition-dependence and acceptance rate is a good heuristic -- "do I need the tuition dollars to survive and am I already scraping the barrel on my customer base? If so, I better focus on the customer!"
shrubble 4y ago
The second image of the blog post (not mine) sums up a lot of my views about the bureaucratic lifecycle we are seeing: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12-10.html https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12...
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  Seems like another expression of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. It’s funny how everyone keeps seeing the same phenomena. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  - shrubble 4y ago
    Yes it does match, thank you for that!
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Academia is an incredible industry to be in if you are a rent seeker. Universities' top lines (revenue) consist of a few major areas: beyond tuition and any state aid (for state schools), research grants are a huge source of funding. Most of that comes from the federal government. Most research grants have an itemized budget and, alongside the itemized budget, "indirect costs" that are often between 30-60% of the direct budget. Schools do, of course, have indirect costs associated with conducting research, such as facilities and actual administration (secretarial work, accountants, etc.). But these costs are not itemized and included in research grant budgets! It's just a percentage of the research budget. Naturally, this both incentivizes institutions to maximize the size of the research budget and creates a large pool of nebulously-allocated money for rent seekers to try to socially capture. At this point, I can't help but think that the federal agencies that write grants are somewhat complicit in this process.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  Yep. Wage of postdoc U.K. (real scenario) £40K. Uni charges govt over £100K. £60K “overheads”.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    That’s not that out of line from what typical in the private sector in the US, once you factor in everything from HR, to building expenses, to health insurance premiums.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Academics who see this as an academia-only thing don't understand that the same growth of bureaucracy that happened to them has happened in every large company too. It's kind of the natural order of things once the dedicated bureaucrats get a foothold.
      - bumby 4y ago
        Someone else has already alluded to this, but do you think it's possible for any organization of appreciable size to not develop "dedicated bureaucrats"?
enasterosophes 4y ago
Similar to Halffman & Radder's 2015 Academic Manifesto: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468800/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468800/ "The university has been occupied – not by students demanding a say (as in the 1960s), but this time by the many-headed Wolf of management. The Wolf has colonised academia with a mercenary army of professional administrators, armed with spreadsheets, output indicators and audit procedures, loudly accompanied by the Efficiency and Excellence March."
softwaredoug 4y ago
In my university town, there’s significant construction happening. to ensure every faculty member has office space. Meanwhile, many pure research faculty work remotely. Faculty and staff have been hired from all over the state and the country. And the cost of housing astronomical. The city needs whole neighborhoods to keep up with demand. Eventually reality will catch up. But I don’t see a lot of forward thinking right now.
cxf12 4y ago
A trite example, but your HOA dues are likely going up not because the cost of maintaining common areas has increased that much, but your HOA management and legal salaries have been adjusted for "cost of living."
etc-hosts 4y ago
James G Martin Center = John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy the amount of stuff Art Pope funds is amazing https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_G._Martin_Center_for_Academic_Renewal https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_G._Martin_Center... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_William_Pope_Foundation https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_William_Pope_Foun... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Art_Pope https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Art_Pope
physPop 4y ago
In USA where private universities can choose to spend their dollars on admin, sure, go ahead. But this is a much bigger issue in publicly funded systems. Here in Canada, the trend described in this article has been going on for decades. Not mentioned is how each vice president, provost, chancillor, department head, co-head, chair-of-such and such all have their own office support staff, admin assistants etc. There is also no incentive to reduce such administrative overhead -- indeed, (federal) granting agencies ask for more and more paperwork for due dilliagence, grant management, etc. necessitating ever more support staff.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  US universities are no better. It's not a public / private issue. It's classic rent seeking behavior.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  One should acknowledge that part of the reason for the increasing amount of paperwork is that many organisations campaign the government for "outcome based tax spending" which requires that for every tax dollar spend another dollar has to be spend on the "monitoring that it has been spend appropriately".
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    I think another issue is a broader philosophical shift in how people view higher education. It's no longer a higher level of education really; it's positioned as a skills certifier, accreditor, and early career trainer. The role of education in the classical liberal sense as humanistic enlightenment is no longer the focus of higher-ed. Research is secondary to pushing students through degree calendars as fast as possible. They're more like private hotels of late-teens to twenty year olds before they enter the workforce. Most students are not viewed as adults, but as pseudo adolescents under the institutions care, so everything but the core education services inflate to service and meets those demands.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  "In USA where private universities can choose to spend their dollars on admin, sure, go ahead." Private universities in the US; - receive billions of dollars in direct federal funding - benefit from government interference in the student loan market (which allows universities to charge more than they would without this interference) - don't contribute the same federal taxes as other businesses with similar size and margins Given how much we (the rest of society) contribute to their functioning, why shouldn't we care if they waste a lot of what we give them?
Ladioss 4y ago
Not only the Ivory tower. Every facets of society has been captured by the managerial class.
- naveen99 4y ago
  What’s to stop the university board of trustees from running off with the hedge fund without the administrators to keep them honest (to protect their own jobs if anything) ?
nonrandomstring 4y ago
To rank five things causing massive loss to Western society, I'd say they were; - War (the ultimate sacrificial alter of value) - Sickness (premature death snatching away human capital) - Child and domestic abuse (trauma inhibits) - Corruption (financial loss and crisis) - Professional management (a deep sickness of motive) What is the real cost of employing millions of people to bullshit each other? Benjamin Ginsberg first rang alarm bells on "The Fall of the Faculty" over a decade ago. Since then, the damage done to education, research and academic life by the infection of bureaucracy is immeasurable. To think of all the good professors leaving the vocation, the students who drop out disillusioned, and the piss-poor educations they receive, the debt, and mediocrity of vision, it's heartbreaking. Our universities have been eviscerated. The result for industry and society is a colossal bonfire of wealth.
- Asooka 4y ago
  Ah, the classic horsemen of the apocalypse. War. Pestilence (of body and/or mind). Conquest. Wonder what Death would be. Private equity firms?
  - throwaway74829 4y ago
    A spiritual one -- its causes numerous. Though it would be invigorating to have a word for the whole thing. Maybe the Germans have something for us?
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  Are any of the first 4 particular problems in the west? I think the west mostly do better than non-western countries when it comes to war, sickness, child and domestic abuse, and corruption.
elgar1212 4y ago
This article comes off as a little too polemical. Is there administrative excess in academia? Yes. But the author seems to have an underlying motive > George Leef, the director of research at the Center for Higher Education Policy, has described the funding of higher education as “a boondoggle” that robs taxpayers, and Shaw has demanded that the legislature “starve the beast.”[0] (George Leef is director of editorial content for the site linked) In this case, it seems like the underlying motive is to undermine trust in higher education in order to increase support for broader budget cuts. As much as I dislike university presidents, provosts, etc, the author of that article simply brings up a bunch of grievances and offers no clear indication of a solution [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale
etempleton 4y ago
Everything the author is saying is true, but the reason for this direction is that the business / enrollment pressures on colleges and universities are mounting and the shared governance model wasn’t getting it done. Decisions made by committee take too long and often no decisions are ever reached. This works fine, and is even preferred when there are limited financial pressures, but that isn’t the reality in higher education today. All of the titles the person mentions are academic titles. Almost always held by former faculty. In practice they often do very little because they don’t know how to do the job because, well, they have never done anything like it before. After a few years they usually are fired or resign in defeat and go back to being full time faculty. Other things the author says are on point. There are too many “institutes of this,” “centers of that.” Often these centers are demanded by students or a reaction to student complaints. Other times they are partially funded by wealthy donors who have some interest in the area. I think professional management of colleges and universities is needed, but I also think faculty freedom and compensation needs to be protected and increased. Colleges need to be less concerned about graduation rates and other metrics that create perverse incentives. They are good goals, but when you optimize for them you encourage grade inflation.
barelysapient 4y ago
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
notacop31337 4y ago
I experienced this in the form of a conversation with a member of University PMC not too long ago, they bragged about how they'd recently eliminated the function of bin emptying from the cleaning staff, and were now forcing all faculty to empty their own bins, they bragged about the cost savings whilst all I could think of was the absolute joke that is asking a highly credentialed person to spend their, quite expensive time, emptying bins. Even funnier when you consider that this just take even more time off the very likely zero hour contracted cleaner that was previously doing the bins. They even told me some faculty members in pretty well respected positions got mad (the fucking audacity) about the changes and how they so quickly put them in their place. "Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors—sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one’s discipline, even reading books." In amongst all of this, I have a neighbour who is a member of teaching staff at a local University, and the stories I'm told about digitisation, low salaries, bullshit job requirements and unpaid overtime, have all contributed to me deciding that University in my country is all in all, a massive ponzi scheme, and when it all goes to shit, the Universities themselves will be the only ones to blame.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > Apparently teaching, even at the college level, is now considered work. You must've just woken up from a really long nap. Teaching as paid labor has existing for at least 1500 years.
    - throwaway74829 4y ago
      How low tutelage has fallen. Once the noblest of duties; now...
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    I don’t understand the hard-left into fitness watches. I track my running because it’s more difficult to train effectively (especially with regard to avoiding injury) without data. Most people don’t push quite that hard when they’re chopping wood. I track my hikes so I have a background image (the map) for collages of pictures I took. Most people don’t have a similar tracking need for their raking.
ggm 4y ago
Ignoring the source bias, there is a real problem here, and its not confined to the USA. The strikes in the UK at the moment which cross the barrier from academic to general staff reflect the huge amount of "suck it up" logic coming out of the public sector university administration in the UK, and have added to it what can best be described as "theft from the future" in some proposed adjustments to the pension fund the staff contribute to, on bogus economic grounds. In Australia, the same problems exist: process costs to provide tertiary education are extreme and focus on revenue raising (Australia sells tertiary education worldwide but especially in the Asia-Pacific footprint) at a detriment in the core mission. The commonality in both the UK and Australia is underlying venality inherent in the system: Universities are now seen as an industrial component of the knowledge industry sector. We used to fund overseas study under what was called "the columbo plan" which led to a cohort of PhD in the region with significant affection and goodwill to Australia politically, strategically, and we provided tertiary education to Australians for a grant. Now, we sell degrees to anyone and levy a future tax on the loan we give Australians to do it, and we don't care about the strategic goals of engagement in region as much as the revenue. Not surprisingly, degree courses are suffering, and research is suffering, and building a career in Tertiary education in the UK, in Australia and in the US now demands outcomes which go to KPI more than a passion for knowledge. The problem is the farms of KPI paperwork pushers. And the administration which decided to go to a semi-industrial KPI model of education delivery. (I left tertiary education 20+ years ago. I was last employed in a general staff role, I worked in the UK and Australia in more benign times in grant funded research and systems management. What I understand above is from what family and friends who work in the sector tell me, happy to be corrected if people currently inside the space think I have this wrong)
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  "theft from the future" This is common on in the US as well. Many (most?) government bodies don't have to account for unfunded pension liabilities, so it's easy for leaders to increase the value of future pensions, than to increase current salaries. It's sort of like a Ponzi scheme, except that it can always raise more money from taxes.
  - 4y ago
jmugan 4y ago
I keep hearing about how in the US enrollment is going to drop in a few years when the kids (not) born during the great recession of 2008-2010 hit college age. Interesting to see how that will play out with this administrative bloat.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Ah yes, modern academics... where most activities are unrelated to science, prove regulatory capture is real, and corporate indentured training cost-externalization on transient skilled labor (functionally became trade schools). One is certainly learning a lesson, but not the one people intended to acquire. As a graduate student, most people figure out American universities are similar to the Soylent Green business model (the film). The real scientists are jammed into dilapidated buildings, underfunded labs due to unpopular faculties/subjects, and beset by thousands of selfish ambitious children who generally only feign interest in a subject for 4 months. The reality becomes clear after years of hard credible work, and one can't make tenure for political reasons. Its funny listening to people defend these places like it was a church. In retrospect, plumbing is likely a better career choice. =)
glitchc 4y ago
More like academics have ceded control of the ivory tower to adminstrators. It's been happening for decades: Senior academics should be mentoring junior academics and managing the university functions on their behalf, so that junior academics, the bright sparks they are, can change the world. But instead we have senior academics who continue to pursue their own research interests all the way into retirement, while shunning all administrative tasks as "beneath them." This leaves a leadership vacuum at the top, which of course is filled by professional "leaders." The academics only have themselves to blame.
- baazaa 4y ago
  Agreed. Sure many academics today lack the job security to stand up for themselves, but that's only because a whole generation of ultra-powerful tenure-track faculty before them allowed this to happen. Also you'd have to be an idiot not to realise that universities were intentionally over-producing post-docs to create an easily exploitable labour pool. The lack of job security is not some act of god, but the product of a corrupt system in which academics once had absolute power. The whole institution should be considered a damning indictment of the sort of people who aspire(d) to become academics. As in there is something seriously wrong with them at the characterological level. Usually institutions decline due to various external pressures which creates internal faults. Whereas in this case an omnipotent clerisy simply spent a lot of time not working, exploited underlings and took credit for their work while fornicating with the more of attractive of them (and no, not in a 'and then they married and lived happily ever-after way', as in every year profs would sleep with multiple very young women, that was a perk of the job for boomers).
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  You are spot on. A few minutes before I saw your comment I put something along similar lines. In fact a similar observation can be made of life in general. Tyrants often to the top because people have ceded control to them, slowly. It's the boiling frog phenomena. Things are not noticed until it's too late.
ashton314 4y ago
While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia. As a PhD student who wants to eventually teach at a university, this terrifies me. I love plurality and intellectual freedom—if the ostensible bastions of academic freedom succumb to dogmatic forces, our democracy is doomed as its citizens will not have the intellectual tools to sustain a government that can tolerate and allow differing opinions to flourish.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Once upon a time "liberal" meant adhering to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. But apparently no longer? One view, one course, one future, glory to the unstoppable wave of social progress!
gnicholas 4y ago
Part of this administrative bloat is caused by the fact that universities are simply churning out way more PhDs than can be employed as professors, or in other jobs that require a PhD in their chosen field. Universities don't want to have a bunch of unemployed graduates, so they create positions that these individuals are somewhat-qualified for (they know how universities work, having spent a decade+ at them!).
jackcosgrove 4y ago
The professional managerial class is an affliction throughout many walks of life. What's most notable with academia is that the PMC was able to capture such an unorthodox organization. The playbook for capturing a public corporation is well worn, but a university? That requires some imagination. The existence of the PMC I believe is evidence of elite overproduction and is a nasty side effect of an increasingly winner-take-all society. When the number of pie slices gets smaller, each slice gets bigger, and the jockeying for each slice becomes ever more bitter. I can't help but think academia is in its sorry state because so many people are seeking a refuge from a hostile corporate and industrial economy. Unrelated point: universities are now the gatekeepers for economic success. There's a whole lot of money on the line. To riff on Uncle Ben, "with great power comes great corruption."
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > The existence of the PMC I believe is evidence of elite overproduction and is a nasty side effect of an increasingly winner-take-all society. If you have met these people, they are not winners. They are conniving scum. And they have explicitly instituted mechanisms to disconnect their own fortunes from actual results. FTX had a higher ESG score than ExxonMobil [1] and for the most part things like ESG are being used to disconnect indirect investor capital (like pension funds and insurance) from actually high performing and profitable companies. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-esg-truth-teller-ftx-cryptocurrency-crash-11668723808 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-esg-truth-tel...
psychomugs 4y ago
I went to one of the schools mentioned in TFA (the one with a real engineering program) and thankfully didn’t deal with any of the bloated positions mentioned; I just did my classes, project teams, and professional orgs and got out in three years. In hindsight, I seem to have lucked out in just being able to put my head down and do the actual academic things I was in college for. In my recent time in grad school at a private university, I was at least aware of most of the positions mentioned. Some were invaluable, specifically those mediating the lopsided power dynamic between professors and students (which is a whole other problem); others seemed like they picked Twitter buzzwords out of a hat and threw them together into a job posting. My inner cynical accelerationist almost wishes for a brain drain from academia so the Ivory Towers can be torn down and built anew.
wolverine876 4y ago
Management fad is contempt for labor, and applause for disruptive displays of aggression and narcissism (we can think of an especially prominent CEO who follows this herd - oddly trying to look like an outside-the-box leader). That's the issue; not each individual case. Let's stop looking at each case individually, which is false, and deal with the systemic problem. It's a cultural issue in the business world and society. Where do we start? I think in large part it is people mimicking - even people who claim to despise him - Donald Trump. I think the timing and behavior match well. Though Trump was hardly the first to embrace that mode, which existed as a businsess subculture, it was not respected or celebrated. Now lots of people I know, even political progressives, behave like him in many aspects of their lives. (Note that is not a partisan observation. Trump supporters might be happy about his influence, for example.)
Shinmon 4y ago
This is definitely a problem in Germany as well. The water head of universities become bigger and bigger while research and teaching staff is being kept on fixed-term contracts. This is a disgrace and hurts the research in the short term and the economy in the longer term. I realize that individual researchers are not a priority for people at the top but having strong research and skilled people should be important to them.
- periheli0n 4y ago
  The only reliable path to a permanent contract at a German university is to join the administration. Everything else is fixed-term, with the exception of the professorships, which are a lottery with an incredibly high ticket price.
  - Shinmon 4y ago
    Yep. Some states still have a permanent contract for a senior assistant. Depending on how well the professor negotiates their terms they might be lucky if they get a second one. However, this is rarely the case unless you are a well-sought after professor.
evanb 4y ago
I've never met at adjunct administrator, and that tells me all I need to know.
DubiousPusher 4y ago
> The American university thrived historically on the marrying of teaching and research You had me up to here. If there's anything I detested about the 2 years I spent at public university it's that I was taught constantly by inexperienced graduate students and barely got a second with any professor due to their heavy publishing schedule. I was much happier at a school which had the audacious concept of paying the teachers first and foremost to teach students.
winReInstall 4y ago
It would have been funny, were it not that society is utterly dependent on the outcomes of the hard sciences. Chemistry, Physics, Math, they all made life possible. WorldWars have been fought for nought, cause the reason ceased to be once science unlocked new "rocks" to food pathways. Machines and Automation freed us from physical labour. Let universities be whatever they want, but its vital to keep the economic core of our society protected from this shenanigans at all cost. You cant eat crypto, you cant avoid civil wars and conflict with performative dance and ritualised social performances. You cant make fertilizer without power plants. This part of the ivory tower is absolutly and riduclously important. You can burn wallstreet to the ground and another one would rise in its place, but you cant recover from destroying the economic sun of a modern society.
chaostheory 4y ago
What we are slowly starting to realize is that entropy affects everything including organizations regardless of ideology. The only real question is how fast will it decay? Asimov’s Hari Seldon and the Adams brothers of Dwarf Fortress fame were right.
anonymousDan 4y ago
The problem is that in many universities, the managers are no longer accountable to the wider faculty and are instead only accountable to some corporate-style board. However, unlike the true private sector there are no real shareholders with skin in the game to keep the board accountable. It has become a bit like FIFA/IOC and other sporting organisations where once you get into a position of power it becomes almost impossible to dislodge you. Universities where the board and administration are hired and accountable to some kind of academic senate of faculty members tend to suffer much less from this problem in my experience.
- periheli0n 4y ago
  Where are these universities where an academic senate holds admin accountable? I want to apply!
flowersjeff 4y ago
Can confirm, at least at my college. I don't see how this is helping anyone / society at large - and worry how it will play out long term.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
Collectively (not individually), IMHO the professors are to blame. Just like many other 'nerd' professions (engineers, programmers, doctors), taking positions of power is uninteresting, even when offered, because the scientific/technical/mathematical problem at hand is significantly more interesting then wielding power. This is where the alpha male professional manager come in and offers himself to manage the show , and the nerds are only too happy to delegate that responsibility. Over a period of years/decades the transition of power is complete and the professors end up being the underdogs.

466 points by jseliger 4y ago

As a 501(c)(3) Harvard (and most universities) have to file a Form 990 with the IRS, which anyone can read. Here's theirs from 2021: [1] it's 373 pages and not (easily) searchable. Go crazy. [1] https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_2022071120199295.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...

greesil 4y ago

This article is probably full of nuanced observations but lost me at "deep state". Ugggh.

pokstad 4y ago
The term "deep state" has become sullied in recent years. What are your thoughts on Eisenhower's speech about the Military Industrial Complex? Whether by conspiracy or out in the open, there are a number of actors inside large institutions that actively try to derail the original mission of said institution in the pursuit of their own survival.
- greesil 4y ago
  Military industrial complex == arsenal of democracy This decade, at least.
lofatdairy 4y ago
You might prefer some of the discussions on HN from similar articles[^1]. I will say, this is nice in the sense that it's focusing on public universities, rather than elite privates. [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496246 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936
magigift 4y ago
Even though it has become a political term the “deep state” does exist and is a useful concept to think about when evaluating bureaucracies. These are people long tenured in their jobs who know how to fast track or slow walk policy. Depending largely on their politics and mission they can steer departments the way they want almost regardless of the new boss or outside influence. Makes a lot of sense to me that they would also exist in universities.
- Ztynovovk 4y ago
  Not a single linked citation in the entire article aside from a book reference. If you are going to talk about the “deep state” and not cite anything at all you deserve a good eye roll. Any institution that has “renewal” in their name is ideologically driven.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Yes, but the problem is that this is just... ordinary human social dynamics plus a priority queue. The only reason why this seems surprising is that we're used to bureaucratic indifference in every power structure we normally inhabit.
defrost 4y ago
Yep. There is a valid point to made about administrative bloat eventually bogging down any organisation | domain unless actively worked against ... but the point missed here is that hair clogs the drains of any regime regardless of whether it is obscured by "Progressive" or "Capitalist" dogma. They article raises many good points, and then pivots into an unneccesary coupling of "bad" with "liberal" and "progressive" ideals and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill. This, of course, is just silly.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill Where are you seeing this? Can you quote it?
  - defrost 4y ago
    I read these closely located quotes: > As Catherine Liu argues in a recent book, the PMC is comprised of educated professionals who embrace a moralizing progressive ideology while believing that it can be realized only in a top-down, hierarchical manner. ... > Consistent with Liu’s description of the PMC, university administrators “labor in a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production.” at first as describing the opinion that US university admins are disguising their busy work behind a cloud of "liberal progressive" smoke and that presumeably other locales and times would see other topical issues being used (ie. it's not intrinsically linked to a political ideal) However they were followed by: > While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. > More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia. which had me wondering; I'm not in the US and I'm always struck by the apparent ever present need to shoehorn "Left" V. "Right" and at best gently curse with backhanded references ( "despite being politically liberal, many of the common staff still lack blinkers" etc). The conclusion is that all this needs to be flushed away: > Whether they have any commitment to preserving the complex ecology required by institutions of learning in a market-driven society is another question entirely. and that conclusion follows what I saw as weak and weasly implication that (US) progressive liberal values were tied somehow to administrative self perpetuating at the expense of that they were supposed to serve. I'll admit it's a weak bias, but it comes across as white anting all the same (to my non US eye).
kortilla 4y ago
Do you not know what it means?
- greesil 4y ago
  Yes, but in recent years deep state had taken on a political smell. Like, you can just call the university administrators a tyrannical bureaucracy and you'd be sufficiently accurate. Deep state implies some sort of secretive network that's entrenched. They're literally the bosses, no secrets needed.
christkv 4y ago
I suggest watching the satirical comedy show Yes Prime Minister that showcases what is meant by the deep state better than anything I’ve seen.

cycomanic 4y ago

The disconnect between uni administrators and the academics on the ground is growing at a staggering pace. One example is that I know of several universities were salary increases for academics have been capped to 1-2% due to the "hard economic times", while the vice chancellors/presidents ... received salary increases above 8% (and above 20% in at least one case). At the same time most academics will attest that the requirements that they have to fulfill are consistently going up, for example when computer systems are being modernized e.g. purchasing systems, it's very obvious that the requirements are made to minimize the work of the administration, which typically increases the workload of academics.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
I think a distinction should be made between administrations on the ground (we had an incredible secretary of graduate studies who made everyone's life much easier) and those who work for the executive office and act to lower the "cost" of running a University while not actually making any processes more efficient.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Completely agree, the closer an admin is to actually working with the people on the ground, the more they care and the more engaged they are. The administrators in our department that we interact with on a weekly basis are all extremely dedicated and will go out of their way to help you. If you ask someone in central admin for anything you will likely be told it is not their job and look somewhere else (and the next person you contact will do the same... until you give up).
- etempleton 4y ago
  Yes administration is a very broad term in higher education. When people complain about administration they are almost always talking about the presidents cabinet and academic leadership, not, say, the folks in financial aid or admissions.
  - rdtwo 4y ago

jonstewart 4y ago

Context: The James G Martin Center is a small conservative think tank funded by the Pope Foundation. They routinely call for budget cuts to the UNC system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_Academic_Renewal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_A... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation University administration is a juicy target and I’m certainly not defending them wholesale. But the article’s written by rich people who want to lower state taxes.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem (Latin for 'argument to the person'), refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jonstewart 4y ago
  HNers need get a grip on what’s ad hominem and what isn’t. I didn’t say their mothers were hamsters. There are oodles of think tanks and institutes, many have a particular policy agenda, and it’s useful to consider that before deciding whether to spend precious attention on an article from one.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Then show the flaw in the argument. For all we know, your reasoning might be as motivated as theirs. Ad hominems, even when not fallacious, don't tend to contribute to the discourse. If you don't have a good rebuttal to the argument, saying that the person who wrote it did so because they have an agenda is inane. Of course they had an agenda: they wrote an essay!

mistrial9 4y ago

sweeping social evaluations like this one have left me cold these days -- too many particulars in this messy world today. Instead of finding a perpetrator social class with some catchy acronym, why not try factual data? The top administrator payroll at a decent-sized school has been described recently as more like a mafia system -- outsiders are plentiful and there are things for them to do with some vague promise that they might prosper for it. Insiders are worked hard and at the lowest levels, get worse treatment than most outsiders. Once the promotional levels get into the picture, ruthless and relentless infighting not visible to other insiders or outsiders, culls the herd that wants to rise to the top; most fail or tire of the fight. Then, apex roles like top administrator, or Head Coach for a profitable sports team, make old-world style agreements with many multiples of income of their nearest rival, signalling dominance, and serving as a goalpost for achievement supposedly available to "anyone." There are thousands of situations like this across wealthy nations, hidden behind the middle class success they breed on. It is even extolled as a virtue among the predatory capitalists as "competition". This state of affairs is a social default - not some political development of our times. This is ancient as societies go.. it is sometimes startling to see it starkly. I suspect that more than half of higher education by numbers are failing financially right now, while some small number of institutions echo the money-printing economy numbers of the last fifteen years.

tylermenezes 4y ago

I'm not sure why they attributed this in part to pressure for job-related skills. Everyone I've talked to who's concerned about that has been a professor at a community college (or other affordable school).

thwayunion 4y ago
> Everyone I've talked to who's concerned about that has been a professor at a community college (or other affordable school). At public institutions, "non-PhD-granting" is typically a better heuristic than "community college". At private institutions, tuition-dependence and acceptance rate is a good heuristic -- "do I need the tuition dollars to survive and am I already scraping the barrel on my customer base? If so, I better focus on the customer!"

shrubble 4y ago

The second image of the blog post (not mine) sums up a lot of my views about the bureaucratic lifecycle we are seeing: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12-10.html https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12...

vegetablepotpie 4y ago
Seems like another expression of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. It’s funny how everyone keeps seeing the same phenomena. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
- shrubble 4y ago
  Yes it does match, thank you for that!

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Academia is an incredible industry to be in if you are a rent seeker. Universities' top lines (revenue) consist of a few major areas: beyond tuition and any state aid (for state schools), research grants are a huge source of funding. Most of that comes from the federal government. Most research grants have an itemized budget and, alongside the itemized budget, "indirect costs" that are often between 30-60% of the direct budget. Schools do, of course, have indirect costs associated with conducting research, such as facilities and actual administration (secretarial work, accountants, etc.). But these costs are not itemized and included in research grant budgets! It's just a percentage of the research budget. Naturally, this both incentivizes institutions to maximize the size of the research budget and creates a large pool of nebulously-allocated money for rent seekers to try to socially capture. At this point, I can't help but think that the federal agencies that write grants are somewhat complicit in this process.

randomsearch 4y ago
Yep. Wage of postdoc U.K. (real scenario) £40K. Uni charges govt over £100K. £60K “overheads”.
- TylerE 4y ago
  That’s not that out of line from what typical in the private sector in the US, once you factor in everything from HR, to building expenses, to health insurance premiums.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Academics who see this as an academia-only thing don't understand that the same growth of bureaucracy that happened to them has happened in every large company too. It's kind of the natural order of things once the dedicated bureaucrats get a foothold.
    - bumby 4y ago
      Someone else has already alluded to this, but do you think it's possible for any organization of appreciable size to not develop "dedicated bureaucrats"?

enasterosophes 4y ago

Similar to Halffman & Radder's 2015 Academic Manifesto: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468800/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468800/ "The university has been occupied – not by students demanding a say (as in the 1960s), but this time by the many-headed Wolf of management. The Wolf has colonised academia with a mercenary army of professional administrators, armed with spreadsheets, output indicators and audit procedures, loudly accompanied by the Efficiency and Excellence March."

softwaredoug 4y ago

In my university town, there’s significant construction happening. to ensure every faculty member has office space. Meanwhile, many pure research faculty work remotely. Faculty and staff have been hired from all over the state and the country. And the cost of housing astronomical. The city needs whole neighborhoods to keep up with demand. Eventually reality will catch up. But I don’t see a lot of forward thinking right now.

cxf12 4y ago

A trite example, but your HOA dues are likely going up not because the cost of maintaining common areas has increased that much, but your HOA management and legal salaries have been adjusted for "cost of living."

etc-hosts 4y ago

James G Martin Center = John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy the amount of stuff Art Pope funds is amazing https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_G._Martin_Center_for_Academic_Renewal https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_G._Martin_Center... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_William_Pope_Foundation https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_William_Pope_Foun... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Art_Pope https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Art_Pope

physPop 4y ago

In USA where private universities can choose to spend their dollars on admin, sure, go ahead. But this is a much bigger issue in publicly funded systems. Here in Canada, the trend described in this article has been going on for decades. Not mentioned is how each vice president, provost, chancillor, department head, co-head, chair-of-such and such all have their own office support staff, admin assistants etc. There is also no incentive to reduce such administrative overhead -- indeed, (federal) granting agencies ask for more and more paperwork for due dilliagence, grant management, etc. necessitating ever more support staff.

wittycardio 4y ago
US universities are no better. It's not a public / private issue. It's classic rent seeking behavior.
cycomanic 4y ago
One should acknowledge that part of the reason for the increasing amount of paperwork is that many organisations campaign the government for "outcome based tax spending" which requires that for every tax dollar spend another dollar has to be spend on the "monitoring that it has been spend appropriately".
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  I think another issue is a broader philosophical shift in how people view higher education. It's no longer a higher level of education really; it's positioned as a skills certifier, accreditor, and early career trainer. The role of education in the classical liberal sense as humanistic enlightenment is no longer the focus of higher-ed. Research is secondary to pushing students through degree calendars as fast as possible. They're more like private hotels of late-teens to twenty year olds before they enter the workforce. Most students are not viewed as adults, but as pseudo adolescents under the institutions care, so everything but the core education services inflate to service and meets those demands.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
"In USA where private universities can choose to spend their dollars on admin, sure, go ahead." Private universities in the US; - receive billions of dollars in direct federal funding - benefit from government interference in the student loan market (which allows universities to charge more than they would without this interference) - don't contribute the same federal taxes as other businesses with similar size and margins Given how much we (the rest of society) contribute to their functioning, why shouldn't we care if they waste a lot of what we give them?

Ladioss 4y ago

Not only the Ivory tower. Every facets of society has been captured by the managerial class.

naveen99 4y ago
What’s to stop the university board of trustees from running off with the hedge fund without the administrators to keep them honest (to protect their own jobs if anything) ?

nonrandomstring 4y ago

To rank five things causing massive loss to Western society, I'd say they were; - War (the ultimate sacrificial alter of value) - Sickness (premature death snatching away human capital) - Child and domestic abuse (trauma inhibits) - Corruption (financial loss and crisis) - Professional management (a deep sickness of motive) What is the real cost of employing millions of people to bullshit each other? Benjamin Ginsberg first rang alarm bells on "The Fall of the Faculty" over a decade ago. Since then, the damage done to education, research and academic life by the infection of bureaucracy is immeasurable. To think of all the good professors leaving the vocation, the students who drop out disillusioned, and the piss-poor educations they receive, the debt, and mediocrity of vision, it's heartbreaking. Our universities have been eviscerated. The result for industry and society is a colossal bonfire of wealth.

Asooka 4y ago
Ah, the classic horsemen of the apocalypse. War. Pestilence (of body and/or mind). Conquest. Wonder what Death would be. Private equity firms?
- throwaway74829 4y ago
  A spiritual one -- its causes numerous. Though it would be invigorating to have a word for the whole thing. Maybe the Germans have something for us?
TreeRingCounter 4y ago
flanked-evergl 4y ago
Are any of the first 4 particular problems in the west? I think the west mostly do better than non-western countries when it comes to war, sickness, child and domestic abuse, and corruption.

elgar1212 4y ago

This article comes off as a little too polemical. Is there administrative excess in academia? Yes. But the author seems to have an underlying motive > George Leef, the director of research at the Center for Higher Education Policy, has described the funding of higher education as “a boondoggle” that robs taxpayers, and Shaw has demanded that the legislature “starve the beast.”[0] (George Leef is director of editorial content for the site linked) In this case, it seems like the underlying motive is to undermine trust in higher education in order to increase support for broader budget cuts. As much as I dislike university presidents, provosts, etc, the author of that article simply brings up a bunch of grievances and offers no clear indication of a solution [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale

etempleton 4y ago

Everything the author is saying is true, but the reason for this direction is that the business / enrollment pressures on colleges and universities are mounting and the shared governance model wasn’t getting it done. Decisions made by committee take too long and often no decisions are ever reached. This works fine, and is even preferred when there are limited financial pressures, but that isn’t the reality in higher education today. All of the titles the person mentions are academic titles. Almost always held by former faculty. In practice they often do very little because they don’t know how to do the job because, well, they have never done anything like it before. After a few years they usually are fired or resign in defeat and go back to being full time faculty. Other things the author says are on point. There are too many “institutes of this,” “centers of that.” Often these centers are demanded by students or a reaction to student complaints. Other times they are partially funded by wealthy donors who have some interest in the area. I think professional management of colleges and universities is needed, but I also think faculty freedom and compensation needs to be protected and increased. Colleges need to be less concerned about graduation rates and other metrics that create perverse incentives. They are good goals, but when you optimize for them you encourage grade inflation.

barelysapient 4y ago

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

notacop31337 4y ago

I experienced this in the form of a conversation with a member of University PMC not too long ago, they bragged about how they'd recently eliminated the function of bin emptying from the cleaning staff, and were now forcing all faculty to empty their own bins, they bragged about the cost savings whilst all I could think of was the absolute joke that is asking a highly credentialed person to spend their, quite expensive time, emptying bins. Even funnier when you consider that this just take even more time off the very likely zero hour contracted cleaner that was previously doing the bins. They even told me some faculty members in pretty well respected positions got mad (the fucking audacity) about the changes and how they so quickly put them in their place. "Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors—sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one’s discipline, even reading books." In amongst all of this, I have a neighbour who is a member of teaching staff at a local University, and the stories I'm told about digitisation, low salaries, bullshit job requirements and unpaid overtime, have all contributed to me deciding that University in my country is all in all, a massive ponzi scheme, and when it all goes to shit, the Universities themselves will be the only ones to blame.

wrycoder 4y ago
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > Apparently teaching, even at the college level, is now considered work. You must've just woken up from a really long nap. Teaching as paid labor has existing for at least 1500 years.
  - throwaway74829 4y ago
    How low tutelage has fallen. Once the noblest of duties; now...
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  I don’t understand the hard-left into fitness watches. I track my running because it’s more difficult to train effectively (especially with regard to avoiding injury) without data. Most people don’t push quite that hard when they’re chopping wood. I track my hikes so I have a background image (the map) for collages of pictures I took. Most people don’t have a similar tracking need for their raking.

ggm 4y ago

Ignoring the source bias, there is a real problem here, and its not confined to the USA. The strikes in the UK at the moment which cross the barrier from academic to general staff reflect the huge amount of "suck it up" logic coming out of the public sector university administration in the UK, and have added to it what can best be described as "theft from the future" in some proposed adjustments to the pension fund the staff contribute to, on bogus economic grounds. In Australia, the same problems exist: process costs to provide tertiary education are extreme and focus on revenue raising (Australia sells tertiary education worldwide but especially in the Asia-Pacific footprint) at a detriment in the core mission. The commonality in both the UK and Australia is underlying venality inherent in the system: Universities are now seen as an industrial component of the knowledge industry sector. We used to fund overseas study under what was called "the columbo plan" which led to a cohort of PhD in the region with significant affection and goodwill to Australia politically, strategically, and we provided tertiary education to Australians for a grant. Now, we sell degrees to anyone and levy a future tax on the loan we give Australians to do it, and we don't care about the strategic goals of engagement in region as much as the revenue. Not surprisingly, degree courses are suffering, and research is suffering, and building a career in Tertiary education in the UK, in Australia and in the US now demands outcomes which go to KPI more than a passion for knowledge. The problem is the farms of KPI paperwork pushers. And the administration which decided to go to a semi-industrial KPI model of education delivery. (I left tertiary education 20+ years ago. I was last employed in a general staff role, I worked in the UK and Australia in more benign times in grant funded research and systems management. What I understand above is from what family and friends who work in the sector tell me, happy to be corrected if people currently inside the space think I have this wrong)

rahimnathwani 4y ago
"theft from the future" This is common on in the US as well. Many (most?) government bodies don't have to account for unfunded pension liabilities, so it's easy for leaders to increase the value of future pensions, than to increase current salaries. It's sort of like a Ponzi scheme, except that it can always raise more money from taxes.
- 4y ago

jmugan 4y ago

I keep hearing about how in the US enrollment is going to drop in a few years when the kids (not) born during the great recession of 2008-2010 hit college age. Interesting to see how that will play out with this administrative bloat.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Ah yes, modern academics... where most activities are unrelated to science, prove regulatory capture is real, and corporate indentured training cost-externalization on transient skilled labor (functionally became trade schools). One is certainly learning a lesson, but not the one people intended to acquire. As a graduate student, most people figure out American universities are similar to the Soylent Green business model (the film). The real scientists are jammed into dilapidated buildings, underfunded labs due to unpopular faculties/subjects, and beset by thousands of selfish ambitious children who generally only feign interest in a subject for 4 months. The reality becomes clear after years of hard credible work, and one can't make tenure for political reasons. Its funny listening to people defend these places like it was a church. In retrospect, plumbing is likely a better career choice. =)

glitchc 4y ago

More like academics have ceded control of the ivory tower to adminstrators. It's been happening for decades: Senior academics should be mentoring junior academics and managing the university functions on their behalf, so that junior academics, the bright sparks they are, can change the world. But instead we have senior academics who continue to pursue their own research interests all the way into retirement, while shunning all administrative tasks as "beneath them." This leaves a leadership vacuum at the top, which of course is filled by professional "leaders." The academics only have themselves to blame.

baazaa 4y ago
Agreed. Sure many academics today lack the job security to stand up for themselves, but that's only because a whole generation of ultra-powerful tenure-track faculty before them allowed this to happen. Also you'd have to be an idiot not to realise that universities were intentionally over-producing post-docs to create an easily exploitable labour pool. The lack of job security is not some act of god, but the product of a corrupt system in which academics once had absolute power. The whole institution should be considered a damning indictment of the sort of people who aspire(d) to become academics. As in there is something seriously wrong with them at the characterological level. Usually institutions decline due to various external pressures which creates internal faults. Whereas in this case an omnipotent clerisy simply spent a lot of time not working, exploited underlings and took credit for their work while fornicating with the more of attractive of them (and no, not in a 'and then they married and lived happily ever-after way', as in every year profs would sleep with multiple very young women, that was a perk of the job for boomers).
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
You are spot on. A few minutes before I saw your comment I put something along similar lines. In fact a similar observation can be made of life in general. Tyrants often to the top because people have ceded control to them, slowly. It's the boiling frog phenomena. Things are not noticed until it's too late.

ashton314 4y ago

While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia. As a PhD student who wants to eventually teach at a university, this terrifies me. I love plurality and intellectual freedom—if the ostensible bastions of academic freedom succumb to dogmatic forces, our democracy is doomed as its citizens will not have the intellectual tools to sustain a government that can tolerate and allow differing opinions to flourish.

Joker_vD 4y ago
Once upon a time "liberal" meant adhering to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues. But apparently no longer? One view, one course, one future, glory to the unstoppable wave of social progress!

gnicholas 4y ago

Part of this administrative bloat is caused by the fact that universities are simply churning out way more PhDs than can be employed as professors, or in other jobs that require a PhD in their chosen field. Universities don't want to have a bunch of unemployed graduates, so they create positions that these individuals are somewhat-qualified for (they know how universities work, having spent a decade+ at them!).

jackcosgrove 4y ago

The professional managerial class is an affliction throughout many walks of life. What's most notable with academia is that the PMC was able to capture such an unorthodox organization. The playbook for capturing a public corporation is well worn, but a university? That requires some imagination. The existence of the PMC I believe is evidence of elite overproduction and is a nasty side effect of an increasingly winner-take-all society. When the number of pie slices gets smaller, each slice gets bigger, and the jockeying for each slice becomes ever more bitter. I can't help but think academia is in its sorry state because so many people are seeking a refuge from a hostile corporate and industrial economy. Unrelated point: universities are now the gatekeepers for economic success. There's a whole lot of money on the line. To riff on Uncle Ben, "with great power comes great corruption."

flanked-evergl 4y ago
> The existence of the PMC I believe is evidence of elite overproduction and is a nasty side effect of an increasingly winner-take-all society. If you have met these people, they are not winners. They are conniving scum. And they have explicitly instituted mechanisms to disconnect their own fortunes from actual results. FTX had a higher ESG score than ExxonMobil [1] and for the most part things like ESG are being used to disconnect indirect investor capital (like pension funds and insurance) from actually high performing and profitable companies. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-esg-truth-teller-ftx-cryptocurrency-crash-11668723808 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-esg-truth-tel...

psychomugs 4y ago

I went to one of the schools mentioned in TFA (the one with a real engineering program) and thankfully didn’t deal with any of the bloated positions mentioned; I just did my classes, project teams, and professional orgs and got out in three years. In hindsight, I seem to have lucked out in just being able to put my head down and do the actual academic things I was in college for. In my recent time in grad school at a private university, I was at least aware of most of the positions mentioned. Some were invaluable, specifically those mediating the lopsided power dynamic between professors and students (which is a whole other problem); others seemed like they picked Twitter buzzwords out of a hat and threw them together into a job posting. My inner cynical accelerationist almost wishes for a brain drain from academia so the Ivory Towers can be torn down and built anew.

wolverine876 4y ago

Management fad is contempt for labor, and applause for disruptive displays of aggression and narcissism (we can think of an especially prominent CEO who follows this herd - oddly trying to look like an outside-the-box leader). That's the issue; not each individual case. Let's stop looking at each case individually, which is false, and deal with the systemic problem. It's a cultural issue in the business world and society. Where do we start? I think in large part it is people mimicking - even people who claim to despise him - Donald Trump. I think the timing and behavior match well. Though Trump was hardly the first to embrace that mode, which existed as a businsess subculture, it was not respected or celebrated. Now lots of people I know, even political progressives, behave like him in many aspects of their lives. (Note that is not a partisan observation. Trump supporters might be happy about his influence, for example.)

Shinmon 4y ago

This is definitely a problem in Germany as well. The water head of universities become bigger and bigger while research and teaching staff is being kept on fixed-term contracts. This is a disgrace and hurts the research in the short term and the economy in the longer term. I realize that individual researchers are not a priority for people at the top but having strong research and skilled people should be important to them.

periheli0n 4y ago
The only reliable path to a permanent contract at a German university is to join the administration. Everything else is fixed-term, with the exception of the professorships, which are a lottery with an incredibly high ticket price.
- Shinmon 4y ago
  Yep. Some states still have a permanent contract for a senior assistant. Depending on how well the professor negotiates their terms they might be lucky if they get a second one. However, this is rarely the case unless you are a well-sought after professor.

evanb 4y ago

I've never met at adjunct administrator, and that tells me all I need to know.

DubiousPusher 4y ago

> The American university thrived historically on the marrying of teaching and research You had me up to here. If there's anything I detested about the 2 years I spent at public university it's that I was taught constantly by inexperienced graduate students and barely got a second with any professor due to their heavy publishing schedule. I was much happier at a school which had the audacious concept of paying the teachers first and foremost to teach students.

winReInstall 4y ago

It would have been funny, were it not that society is utterly dependent on the outcomes of the hard sciences. Chemistry, Physics, Math, they all made life possible. WorldWars have been fought for nought, cause the reason ceased to be once science unlocked new "rocks" to food pathways. Machines and Automation freed us from physical labour. Let universities be whatever they want, but its vital to keep the economic core of our society protected from this shenanigans at all cost. You cant eat crypto, you cant avoid civil wars and conflict with performative dance and ritualised social performances. You cant make fertilizer without power plants. This part of the ivory tower is absolutly and riduclously important. You can burn wallstreet to the ground and another one would rise in its place, but you cant recover from destroying the economic sun of a modern society.

chaostheory 4y ago

What we are slowly starting to realize is that entropy affects everything including organizations regardless of ideology. The only real question is how fast will it decay? Asimov’s Hari Seldon and the Adams brothers of Dwarf Fortress fame were right.

anonymousDan 4y ago

The problem is that in many universities, the managers are no longer accountable to the wider faculty and are instead only accountable to some corporate-style board. However, unlike the true private sector there are no real shareholders with skin in the game to keep the board accountable. It has become a bit like FIFA/IOC and other sporting organisations where once you get into a position of power it becomes almost impossible to dislodge you. Universities where the board and administration are hired and accountable to some kind of academic senate of faculty members tend to suffer much less from this problem in my experience.

periheli0n 4y ago
Where are these universities where an academic senate holds admin accountable? I want to apply!

flowersjeff 4y ago

Can confirm, at least at my college. I don't see how this is helping anyone / society at large - and worry how it will play out long term.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

Collectively (not individually), IMHO the professors are to blame. Just like many other 'nerd' professions (engineers, programmers, doctors), taking positions of power is uninteresting, even when offered, because the scientific/technical/mathematical problem at hand is significantly more interesting then wielding power. This is where the alpha male professional manager come in and offers himself to manage the show , and the nerds are only too happy to delegate that responsibility. Over a period of years/decades the transition of power is complete and the professors end up being the underdogs.