Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/11/administrators-have-seized-the-ivory-tower/

by jseliger • 4 years ago

466 308 4 years ago

UIUC_06• 4 years 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_...

greesil3• 4 years ago

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

pokstad• 4 years 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.

greesil3• 4 years ago

Military industrial complex == arsenal of democracy

This decade, at least.

lofatdairy• 4 years 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 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936

magigift• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

defrost2• 4 years 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.

robertlagrant2• 4 years 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?

kortilla• 4 years ago

Do you not know what it means?

greesil3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

cycomanic4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

cycomanic4• 4 years 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).

etempleton3• 4 years 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.

another_story• 4 years ago

Any bureaucracy seems to tend towards making the system of bureaucracy more efficient for those managing it, not those working under it.

Schools, K through university, all suffer from this.

pclmulqdq6• 4 years ago

One of the worst parts of this is that the bureaucrats in school systems are so smug about it. They go yelling "academic freedom" when you threaten to cut their job, while clamping down on the "acceptable" fields of study for faculty. These administrators are the real threats to academic freedom.

That said, I think the entire US university system needs a rethink, so I'm not upset that these bureaucrats are accelerating the process of burning it to the ground.

trentnix• 4 years ago

Precisely as Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy predicts:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

lamontcg• 4 years ago

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

killjoywashere• 4 years ago

People, especially well educated people in affluent areas, are living longer and the cost of their healthcare is skyrocketing. Unless you are next in line to the throne of a specifically designated tenured spot, you’re fucked. You could cure cancer and it doesn’t matter, actually that would literally make the problem worse.

Also, read the Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

doliveira• 4 years ago

Given the salary increase for CEOs and executives, I'd say that's a general trend throughout society.

flanked-evergl3• 4 years ago

It is, but in traditional shareholder owned companies have mechanisms to deal with this, and is less detrimental to society. If the owners are fine with shitty profits, they can let things stand. If they are not, they demand change and can get it because they have control over the company. In publicly traded companies even minority shareholders can have an impact.

Universities are a bit like corporate squatters though, or even monopolies, they sit on some intellectual real estate that is incredibly overvalued and does not easily scale, and refuse to provide what society expects of them at reasonable quality and price.

The solution is actually quite simple, we should reduce the value we place on university educations, especially from these captured institutions which are the most prestigious.

etrautmann• 4 years ago

Yes - concur for expenses is exactly this. Administration loved that users now need to do all of the work.

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

I don't think this has anything to do with academia or administration, you're describing every large organisation, from companies to charities to states...

hooverd• 4 years ago

There's more than just faculty and administrators. Staff aren't fatcats. They're doing all the boring work that keeps the university running.

beckingz• 4 years ago

The issue is that they create more boring work. Some of the newly created work is valuable for the goals of the administration, in most cases the boring work provides marginal benefit to anyone.

matthewdgreen3• 4 years ago

As a faculty member I find it more and more difficult to use my own grant funding (some of which is from organizations like NSF and some of which is "unrestricted gift" funding, which is supposed to be used at my sole discretion.) Mostly this is due to new rules and reporting requirements that rule out certain expenses, and some of it is new procedures that make reimbursement harder.

For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.

I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.

i_am_proteus5• 4 years ago

We've been seeing "administrators" start asking for detailed reports on unrestricted funding, plans for expenditure, etc. I am starting to wonder when they'll start to ask for "gifts" from faculty discretionary accounts to support general scholarship funds or anything else that basically just pushes it back into the top line.

Unrelated tangent because I recognize your name: thanks for making your course materials openly available!

pannSun• 4 years ago

Funny. One would naively assume that administrators are there to make the faculty's job easier. To take care of administrative work so that you can focus on teaching and research.

Instead they think their role is to create administrative work.

malshe3• 4 years ago

By any chance are you required to use Concur for flight booking?

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

I've made this kind of post many times, so apologies if you've seen it before.

My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field.

Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less.

Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need.

You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.

csa• 4 years ago

we couldn't buy pizza for research lab meetings

It’s probably not worth the time, but there are usually ways to use the rules to get your way with the business office.

“Team building”, or whatever category that falls under, might be a way to get pizza.

(Note that they seem to be treating the pizza as a reimbursed meal for travel or something like that — probably an incorrect categorization).

I have a friend who knows this kind of stuff inside and out. I will ask her and post back here. It might take a day or two.

scrubs• 4 years ago

@matthewdgreen theoretically profs chafe at the admin substate in academia ... So with the situation as stated in the article how should we weight the explanatory reasons:

* Profs lost institutional control imposed on them, and can't get it back

* Profs lost institutional control they initiated which grew bigger than them

* Profs are surrounded (by paperwork) and don't see a way out; they've become cynical as it's become a way of life

* Increased tuition to pay for increasingly expensive admin means the uni's customer is more themselves then it should be

At the macro scale the complaint here is analogous to the frustration American doctors have about patients (to much paperwork too little time with people) or Brexit. The question is why can't incentives be aligned; why aren't the purported customers (students, patients, voters resp) able to have more power? For this level of institutional failure if we see it as that, the profs, doctors, reps (resp) have got to be part of the problem sad to day.

noipv4• 4 years ago

Just as every other aspect of American life has played out while being taken over by the corporate management model and financialization. Quality plummets, costs soar, Executives proliferate and grant themselves enormous pay raises, the ranks of Administrators and Executive Assistants balloon as these feudal lords require retainers and staff to maintain the style to which they feel entitled

genghisjahn• 4 years ago

Which university?

jonstewart3• 4 years 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_A... 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_proteus5• 4 years ago

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.

jonstewart3• 4 years 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.

topaz06• 4 years ago

The most common form of ad hominem is "A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong".

Note here that B did not claim that argument x was wrong. You're fallacy hunting and you missed.

Siddarth1977• 4 years ago

This isn't "context" this is literally the definition of an ad hominem attack. "Attacking a person's character or motivations rather than a position or argument"

If universities have a massive, bloated and overly expensive legion of administrators, does it matter if the person pointing that out is doing so because they want to reduce the burden on students who are forced to take out massive loans or to reduce the burden on the taxpayers who ultimately pay those loans when the government "forgives" them?

rektide2• 4 years ago

Ad hominem is a problem when you are arguing with people who argue in good faith & who can demonstrate unbiased willingness to engage in open discussion, who can hold & respect a broad set of interests when they argue.

But when the person you are arguing with has a permanent bent that will distort & warp every argument, it's just a defense of open society to call the person out on that bias, on their forever grinding that axe.

This mention was an excellent & valuable warning to me. That it happens to resemble an attack to some people, is, in my view, far secondary to the broad public good this post served.

igorkraw• 4 years ago

Yes. Because they aren't attacking bloated bureaucracies that have been sufficiently captured and privatised, and the offered solutions might be subtly biased. It's only an ad hominem if after using the heuristic and critically checking any hidden bullshit the personal bias of the interlocuteur you stick to your hostility even if you don't find anything. Otherwise it's just context that helps you think

vegetablepotpie3• 4 years ago

As a former student and Pell grant recipient, I never felt like conservatives had my back. I remember a Republican state legislator saying, while I was in school, that all students should be required to spend some minimum amount of money per year, regardless of aid, because “we needed skin in the game,” as if many of us we’re not perilously close to dropping out due to expenses.

This is important because many of these conservative groups focus on making education cheaper for students, and their families, who are already wealthy. This should be acknowledged when looking at their solutions because they don’t count many Americans as their stakeholders.

pasquinelli• 4 years ago

logical fallacies are interesting. in logic, it doesn't matter what the objects are, just give them letters for names. a logically valid argument always holds no matter what you substitute the variables for; logically invalid arguments don't always hold no matter what you substitute the variables for; a logical fallacy is when you think an invalid argument is a valid one.

there's a tendency to fall into a fallacy of thinking an argument must be wrong because it's invalid. in real life, everyone does actually care what the objects being discussed are, and restricting yourself to logical validity would constrain your thinking to the point of uselessness. by dismissing a logically invalid argument out of hand because it's logically invalid, you're falling into your own fallacy, because to assume what's being claimed is false just because what's being claimed doesn't hold for everything itself doesn't hold for everything. for instance, if i tell you not to believe someone's claim because they cheat on their spouse, you can't assume they are lying about that claim, but you also can't assume they aren't lying about it.

so if someone tells you a person is motivated by greed to make an argument, yes, it isn't necessarily true that their argument has to be wrong--here's a cookie--but that also doesn't mean they aren't decieving you. what do you know about the subject other than what this potentially interested party just told you?

anyway, pay attention to when you fall for the fallacy fallacy, it's a window into your own ideology.

mikebenfield• 4 years ago

I don't have infinite time available. I can't read every article posted on HackerNews and carefully consider all its points. Knowing this author's affiliation is a big clue to me that this might not be a key source I want to rely on for this topic. Obviously this doesn't actually refute the author's points, but I don't care. This is enough information for me to decide to spend my time elsewhere.

topaz06• 4 years ago

Conflicts of interest are definitely important context for me. You can jam that into the definition of ad hominem, I guess, but this isn't really a debate, so I don't see how it's relevant. Maybe if they'd said "this article is wrong because they're funded by so and so". But they didn't.

jtolmar• 4 years ago

A source speaking contrary to its own biases is very likely to be notable, and a source speaking along with its biases is essentially information-free. This implies that understanding a source's biases is crucial context to evaluating what they have to say.

incone123• 4 years ago

Administrations are entirely responsible for making themselves a juicy target. If nobody from the centre ground is going to do anything about that then it falls to the political extremes (and I've seen much the same criticism coming from the left too)

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

But the article’s written by rich people who want to lower state taxes.

Yes? Are you saying that's bad? Because it would have made sense if you'd argued that they just want to cut costs in a way that won't work or that will have outsized problems associated with it, but it kind of sounds like you're complaining about a good thing.

8note• 4 years ago

I read their conclusion "unc is unsuitable for a market based education, and that the bad incentives come from having to compete for money from students" as the opposite?

They're saying the more government funding is needed to avoid needing all the administrators

slibhb• 4 years ago

Sometimes conservatives and even -- gasp -- rich people are right

barry-cotter2• 4 years ago

Hey look. It’s an attack on the source of the argument that is irrelevant to the argument itself! This can be used as evidence jonstewart is a person of bad faith until the sun goes cold.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

Thanks for the context. Other folks might be constructing, I dunno, formal logic proofs about how universities ought to operate (or so I gather, they seem to be really interested in discussing logical fallacies). But since I’m not, I haven’t constructed a framework where I can objectively evaluate every single argument about this. So, at least for this little mortal, it is necessary to consider the bias of the parties presenting the arguments.

TreeRingCounter• 4 years ago

I'm not rich and I also want to reduce the amount of taxes I pay to university PMCs.

rdtwo5• 4 years ago

Aren’t you part of the PMC. That definition extends to most knowledge workers including professors.

mistrial9• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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!"

shrubble2• 4 years 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...

vegetablepotpie3• 4 years 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

shrubble2• 4 years ago

Yes it does match, thank you for that!

i_am_proteus5• 4 years 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.

randomsearch4• 4 years ago

Yep. Wage of postdoc U.K. (real scenario) £40K. Uni charges govt over £100K. £60K “overheads”.

TylerE3• 4 years 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.

adastra223• 4 years ago

What do you mean by complicit? I was on a team in a federal agency which did large research grants to universities. We knew the overhead rates of the universities we contracted with and factored that into our grant allocations. If the team needed $1m to do the research but the university takes half, we allocated them $2m. It was just the cost of doing business.

lmm6• 4 years ago

We knew the overhead rates of the universities we contracted with and factored that into our grant allocations.

I read this and thought you meant you preferentially allocated grants to universities with lower overhead rates, and was hopeful for a moment, but then:

If the team needed $1m to do the research but the university takes half, we allocated them $2m. It was just the cost of doing business.

Right, that's exactly what being complicit is! You're the problem!

i_am_proteus5• 4 years ago

Exactly your agency's behavior. If federal grant-writing agencies put a ceiling on overhead (at a high level, such as the level of the entire agency), I have no doubt that universities would start submitting proposals that included less overhead.

(I do not intend to indict you personally; as you have said, individuals at your level were executing the mandate of the agency as directed and did not have power to effect change.)

clarkmoody• 4 years ago

the federal agencies that write grants are somewhat complicit in this process.

Academia provides a vital service to the government, namely producing research that helps further political and regulatory aims. Indeed, this phenomenon is widely known as The Alliance of Throne and Altar.

enasterosophes• 4 years ago

Similar to Halffman & Radder's 2015 Academic Manifesto: 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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...

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_William_Pope_Foun...

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Art_Pope

physPop• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

US universities are no better. It's not a public / private issue. It's classic rent seeking behavior.

cycomanic4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

rahimnathwani3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

naveen99• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Ah, the classic horsemen of the apocalypse. War. Pestilence (of body and/or mind). Conquest. Wonder what Death would be. Private equity firms?

throwaway748292• 4 years 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?

flanked-evergl3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

etempleton3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

notacop31337• 4 years 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.

maegul4• 4 years ago

All of this yes. Additionally I’ve been wondering what blame falls on the academics themselves. They’re the “credentialed” ones in this and allegedly hold and are committed to high values, and are, in the end, the final guardians of the virtues of the University and academic system.

Where is their guardianship? Their collective action at a global scale to uphold and ensure what really matters here? That the publication system evolved into what it did was probably a big red flag that modern academics were not capable or even willing. My own experience is that academics, especially collectively are sadly pretty spineless when it comes to big issues like this. So preoccupied are they with their own prestige, papers and grants they seem like broken-in domestic animals.

But as a class of professional how well do they serve society at large? I’ve brought this up with Academics before and they don’t like the topic. I feel like lawyers and doctors and even accountants do better.

willis936• 4 years ago

Professors are stewards of nothing except their feud. Academics are nothing but serfs to their lord. Professors cannot be thought leaders because their position is always on trial. They go along to get along so they can do what they devoted their life to: some research, living a cushy life, and an inflated ego.

Administrators hold real power in academia.

antiatheist3• 4 years ago

The guardianship should be built into the the societal systems, universities and technical colleges.

i.e. in the old days professors/students would leave the decaying institutions and start their own, seek some funding elsewhere.

The Institutionalization of Accreditation into the fact of modern capital requirements and regulatory capture at all social levels make this seem not so feasible though.

However there could soon be more of such social changes, perhaps someone could create some digital technology to facilitate analog socioeconomic action, instead of billion$ in silly valley vapourware like zuckverse or alphabets adworld.

bnralt• 4 years ago

I agree. We should go further, and think about what we, as a society, are actually trying to accomplish with higher education and how good universities are at achieving those goals. Not just some vague "it teaches you how to think"/"it teaches you how to be a good citizen" goals with no attempt made to actually see if we're achieving it. Real, concrete goals, with actual effort put into determining of the system is actually furthering those goals.

From what I've seen, the current university system is a very inefficient way of achieving what we're trying to accomplish.

melagonster• 4 years ago

like doctor focus to save people in front of him, scientists focus on resolve their problems. in another way, works on journal system is existing. many region had required open access journal and add preprint to internet.

lmm6• 4 years ago

Academics have very little power because the supply vastly outstrips the demand. So they're all caught in a race to the bottom, and there's a ready supply of scabs to undermine any collective action. Doctors have prevented this by setting strict limits on how many new doctors can be qualified at the national level; academics should probably have done the same, but it's a bit late for that now.

scythe• 4 years ago

Historically, universities weren't organized by the faculty. They were organized by the students:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna#History

The university arose around mutual aid societies (known as universitates scholarium) of foreign students called "nations" (as they were grouped by nationality) for protection against city laws which imposed collective punishment on foreigners for the crimes and debts of their countrymen. These students then hired scholars from the city's pre-existing lay and ecclesiastical schools to teach them subjects such as liberal arts, notarial law, theology, and ars dictaminis (scrivenery). The lectures were given in informal schools called scholae. In time the various universitates scholarium decided to form a larger association, or Studium—thus, the university. The Studium grew to have a strong position of collective bargaining with the city, since by then it derived significant revenue through visiting foreign students, who would depart if they were not well treated. The foreign students in Bologna received greater rights, and collective punishment was ended. There was also collective bargaining with the scholars who served as professors at the university. By the initiation or threat of a student strike, the students could enforce their demands as to the content of courses and the pay professors would receive. University professors were hired, fired, and had their pay determined by an elected council of two representatives from every student "nation" which governed the institution, with the most important decisions requiring a majority vote from all the students to ratify. The professors could also be fined if they failed to finish classes on time, or complete course material by the end of the semester. A student committee, the "Denouncers of Professors", kept tabs on them and reported any misbehavior. Professors themselves were not powerless, however, forming collegia doctorum (professors’ committees) in each faculty, and securing the rights to set examination fees and degree requirements. Eventually, the city ended this arrangement, paying professors from tax revenues and making it a chartered public university.

taylorius3• 4 years ago

"So preoccupied are they with their own prestige, papers and grants they seem like broken-in domestic animals."

Absolutely this. It's their predisposition to be preoccupied with unworldly things, that's why they became academics. They want to be left alone to do their research, and hopefully they make some new discoveries now and again. That doesn't really fly these days though - because being left alone is incompatible with being measured and recorded every waking second, which is the fetish of our age. But if you want to be left alone, you probably don't like confrontation, and sooner or later you will be doing the bidding of those that do.

skissane• 4 years ago

I have no doubt that there are some completely out-of-touch administrators. On the other hand, I have also seen the opposite – administrators having to deal with out-of-touch academic staff.

20 years ago, I was enrolled in my computer science degree, and working part-time as a programmer on a project to improve the university's "course handbook" website, and the automation of the publication of the printed edition. As part of that project, the administration ran focus groups with students and staff, to find out what their experience was with the current handbook, and how it could be improved.

In the student focus groups, the students all complained about how complex and confusing the rules around prerequisites/etc were. My own experience as a student supported that; it became even more clear to me when I tried to build a data model to capture that complexity. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything the administrative staff could actually do about it–the prerequisite rules were under the control of committees of academics, all of whom were quite convinced that this complexity was absolutely necessary.

The academic staff focus groups reported a very different concern. You see, the university handbook was actually printed in two volumes – the volume containing the degree/unit listing, which many students bought; but there was another volume, which few students ever bothered with, containing such fascinating information as a full copy of the Act of Parliament which established the university, and all the rules and regulations made under said Act. It also contained a list of all the university staff (both academics and non-academics), their job titles and qualifications.

Now, it turned out, that the publication deadline for this list each year happened before the annual academic promotions were announced. So, suppose you were an associate professor, and you just got promoted to full professor – you'd have to wait a whole year before your new title was printed in the university handbook – a situation about which a number of recently promoted academics were rather upset. The fact that just about nobody ever bought that volume, or read that section, didn't seem to register with them. The administrators involved couldn't do anything about that either – the university printer said the publication deadline couldn't possibly be moved, and no way was the university going to change the timeline of the academic staff promotion process. But I remember one administrator opining "if only some of these academics would spend as much time talking and thinking about the experience of students, as they do about their own job titles". I don't think she was wrong.

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

I used to be an associate at an international law firm. One of the partners told me that the firm was structured to maximize the percent of time that lawyers spent on billable matters. There was substantial support staff to take care of scheduling, handling mail, reimbursements, and other non-billable matters.

I've been shocked to see how this mentality is not duplicated in university environments. I know tenured professors at Stanford who spend countless hours arranging travel with visiting scholars, dealing with reimbursements, and other office minutiae. It boggles my mind that these people — who are supposed to be focusing on teaching and research — spend to much time on menial tasks.

It isn't that these tasks are 'below them'. Rather, it's that there are a limited number of hours in the day, and every hour they spend handling reimbursement paperwork is an hour they're not spending doing award-winning research or writing an award-winning book.

MontyCarloHall• 4 years ago

I've been shocked to see how this mentality is not duplicated in university environments

Why? Maximizing billable hours maximizes the amount of money the law firm as a whole makes, and thus the amount of money law firm leadership makes. Maximizing research output does not maximize revenue for the leadership of the university as much as further bloating the administration does.

alisonatwork• 4 years ago

Annoyingly, this exact same thing happens in tech companies too.

In my current company, one of the employee perks is a lunch allowance. But to get the lunch allowance, you need to get a tax receipt from the place you bought lunch, and then scan it, submit the scan to a woefully slow and painful expense system, then also physically glue it to another claim sheet, and annotate it with some more details, etc etc. From my perspective it's essentially rewarding employees who waste the company time not doing the work they were hired to do. To me it's utterly absurd that any software developer spend their day doing expense claims when a professional administrator could do the job much faster and (probably) more cost-effectively.

And this isn't the first place I've worked like this either. I miss my job 20+ years ago when we had a secretary who not only took care of these things but also did stuff like take meeting minutes too. The loss of administrative staff has made the workplace far less efficient, in my opinion.

lkrubner• 4 years ago

Since the 1990s there's been a massive effort to get rid of all the secretaries, and this was coupled by the idea that the secretaries were not doing crucial organizational work. The end result is that secretarial responsibilities have been given to other people in the organization, and therefore many organizations are worse run, compared to 30 years ago. This has also been the rare case where labor specialization went in reverse, with secretarial work being given to doctors, professors, computer programmers, police, etc. If you know what Adam Smith said about specialization, you should understand how much worse things have gotten as specialization went into reverse.

shandor• 4 years ago

I've been wondering this exact same thing, with added bewilderment from the fact that after all this non-core work pushed onto the academic staff the administration is still the one function growing, and growing fast.

We used to joke at my alma mater that the administrators were just trying to fill up their building to get a new one. The joke turned more than a little sour when it actually happened. And no, the university hadn't seen anything resembling necessary growth for such an explosion in administrative staff. If anything the faculties had been under cost-cutting for some years when it happened.

I think the phrase "you can't make this shit up" was coined for these situations...

dontbenebby• 4 years ago

There was substantial support staff to take care of scheduling, handling mail, reimbursements, and other non-billable matters.

I know many a phd student or professor who use freemium apps to handle that, at the expense your travel itinerary is now marketing data.

Not a great thing, especially when agents of foreign power will do things like show up in your hostel to pump you for “business intelligence”.

Americans don’t get much vacation, if you bother us in the hostel common room it makes us want to do a”social experiment” where since the EU has no death penalty we drown you in a Dutch canal and see if they give us a 1 bedroom with a PlayStation like they did Anders Brevik, not tell you the inner working of our NGO.

(For context, it’s my understanding since there’s no death penalty for espionage anymore, paired with no EU wide intel agency, many EU folks sell secrets back to the “motherland” - usually France or Israel - for money… to the point it’s basically decriminalized.)

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

The difference is that scholars don't generate revenue for the university. Also, hiring PhDs in academia is surprisingly cheap.

jojobas2• 4 years ago

It is indeed a Ponzi scheme backed by government education loans. Pretty much the only way for an Egyptologist to make money is to teach more Egyptologists. Guess what, one day even the option to learn interesting stuff on the "future me"'s dime will not be attractive enough.

jmopp• 4 years ago

There was a post a few days ago about Roman Egypt that mentioned how there are so many papyri that are just sitting there and not enough trained Egyptologists to read, translate, and contextualise them. There is clear value in training Egyptologists, since by learning more about Egypt's place in the Roman empire, we can learn more about Western society (as we are in some sense descendents of the Roman Empire) as well as Middle-Eastern society (as Egypt was one of the first huge conquests from the Romans by the Rashidun Caliphate, and thus an early example of how the Middle East became Islamic)

pjerem• 4 years ago

I understand the concept of maximizing the output of every employee. It’s something logical as a company.

But otoh, as a human, when I hear people complaining about what is basically cleaning after themselves, I cannot feel any empathy.

I really cannot acknowledge that there exist one person in the world who is so productive every minute of the day that they don’t have the single minute required to clean after themselves.

It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo. It’s just not true.

I’m not advocating against paying someone to do all those tasks : it’s practical. But any decent human being should see this as a perk rather than some sort of human right they deserve because they are worth more than garbage mens.

mjburgess• 4 years ago

Right.. but the example is a cleaner, who is already hired to clean, emptying a bin.

And the point of the example is the malicious joy of the admin staff at humiliating the academics by adding "cleaner" to their CV for wholey pointless reasons.

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

But otoh, as a human, when I hear people complaining about what is basically cleaning after themselves, I cannot feel any empathy.

Cleaning up after yourself is taking the stuff off the top of your desk and putting it in the trash can. Also taking some things like cans and bottles down the hall to the recycling bin.

I could also of course take the bag out of the bin, walk down the hall, walk down two flights of stairs, go out to the garbage area and garbage things myself. There's a difference between the two things.

If everyone is going to the garbage down stairs to throw things out yes it starts to be somewhat inefficient.

It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo

sure, but if Tim Cook needs to take the bag out of the garbage in his office, walk out the office, take elevator downstairs to basement and throw it into the big bins there it might be that his time at that point is worth more to the company. It's really a question as what fragment of time is monetizable, a minute saved here or there is probably unmonetizable waste-time but saving greater than 5 minute increments together starts to be significant.

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

Although admins have gotten out of hand, I think the classism "only the untouchables should handle bins" to be absolutely abhorrent. In my culture, we don't take kindly to that old world caste mentality.

ggm3• 4 years 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)

rahimnathwani3• 4 years 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.

ggm3• 4 years ago

This is the inverse. They've DECREASED the value of future pensions based on a mis-informed view of their current debt obligations to defined-benefit recipients. The younger cohort have to pay more, and will receive less when they retire so that an illusory funding gap in the future can be covered.

It's about 1/3 less future benefit, for the same money received and invested from the staffers themselves. All because of a 2-3 year investment shortfall which has apparently been shown to be both shorter than expected and smaller than expected. (or so I am told)

You're talking about what I think is sensible: spend debt money now, in the future it will turn out the net present value was worth it. Is it "stealing from the future" ? yes, and it can be bad. But its not axiomatically bad.

there are two kinds of theft however. "my" kind was re-writing what you promise people they will get in the future, from the money you force them to deposit.

jmugan• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_jeeves12• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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!

gnicholas5• 4 years 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!).

jackcosgrove2• 4 years 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-evergl3• 4 years 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-tel...

psychomugs2• 4 years 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.

wolverine8762• 4 years 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.)

Shinmon2• 4 years 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.

periheli0n2• 4 years 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.

Shinmon2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

DubiousPusher• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

periheli0n2• 4 years ago

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

flowersjeff• 4 years 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_jeeves12• 4 years 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.

Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower

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