The Ever-Increasing Administration

Here is an excellent piece in the Washington Monthly on the growing share of university budgets being eaten up by administration, condensed from Benjamin Ginsberg's book.  Here is a key quote from early in the article:

Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

The article also notes how administrative spending has grew over the period from 1947-1995:

During this same time period, stated in constant dollars, overall university spending increased 148 percent. Instructional spending increased only 128 percent, 20 points less than the overall rate of spending increase. Administrative spending, though, increased by a whopping 235 percent.

There is also a nice discussion on the odious but ubiquitous "strategic plans" that are periodically promulgated by administrations as part of their make-work program, and the complete lack of oversight by boards of trustees of the lavish spending and compensation for presidents and other upper administrators.

Most infuriating were the apparently common behaviour of offering bonuses and salary increases to top administrators at universities facing budget freezes and layoffs, something we here can relate to:

In a similar vein, in February 2009, the president of the University of Vermont defended the bonuses paid to the school’s twenty-one top administrators against the backdrop of layoffs, job freezes, and program cuts at the university. The university president, Daniel Fogel, asserted that administrative bonuses were based on the principles of “extra pay for extra duties” and “pay for performance.” The president rejected a faculty member’s assertion that paying bonuses to administrators when the school faced an enormous budget deficit seemed similar to the sort of greed recently manifested by the corporate executives who paid themselves bonuses with government bailout money. Fogel said he shared the outrage of those upset at corporate greed, but maintained there was a “world of difference” between the UVM administrative bonuses and bonuses paid to corporate executives. He did not specify what that world might be.

The piece ends with a few suggestions for how to get this problem under control.  I highly recommend reading it.

(h/t Freddie deBoer)