The Fall of University Faculties and the Rise of Their Administrations. (August 22, 2011)

  Johns Hopkins University's David Bernstein professor of political science, Benjamin Ginsberg, in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, (Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780199782444) writes a scathing attack on what he catalogues as the cancerous bloat of US university administrations beginning about 1975.

Data that Professor Ginsberg has amassed show that between 1975-2005 the growth in administrators (81%) and associated professional staff (240%) dwarfs faculty (51%).

Dan Berrett of Inside Higher Ed recently interviewed Professor Ginsberg. This is part of what he had to say; you can be the judge of how much is pertinent to the Australian scene and its cadre of pro vice-chancellors, deans, assistant deans... and the micromanagement of government:

I’ve been in the university for 40 years – 20 years at Hopkins and 20 years at Cornell – and I’ve observed the university changing quite dramatically. As a political scientist I was very sensitive to issues of politics and struggle. And I’ve increasingly seen the same tactics at work in universities that we see here in Washington.

I wanted to emphasise a major shift that’s been under way for several decades. Deans have an academic background. Years ago, they were part-time and always part of the faculty. This is extremely important because, like the faculty, they saw the university as an instrument of teaching and scholarship. Today, we have a cadre of professional administrators... They either have no faculty background or they decided early in their careers that their talents lay elsewhere. To them, what used to be the means is now the end. Instead of an institution serving teaching and scholarship, teaching and scholarship serve the institution.

Years ago, administrators tended to be a bit older. The typical administrator was someone who had been an academic for a number of years and saw administration as an honourable way to close out a career... [Today] they’re bureaucrats. That’s not all of them; some of them are quite good. Even those who are good are often reshaped by the system.

[To explain the shift] you have to look for motive, means and opportunity to solve the crime. The motive is that you have some ambitious university presidents and provosts who sought ways of enhancing their own power. We see that all the time in every bureaucracy. The opportunity was given to them by two factors: one is that faculty would prefer to work in labs and classrooms, so they’re easily circumvented; two is the rise of professional fundraising. To my mind, professional fundraising is the worst thing that ever happened to the university. If the university is dependent on revenues from federal grants and tuition – revenues from doing things – then it has to rely on faculty. The revenue base is under the control of the faculty. But professional fundraisers allow them to circumvent that.

I look at [administrations'] strategic planning that takes enormous energy for no reason. Many of these could just be copied; the end result would be the same. The process of putting these plans together is designed rather like elections in the Soviet Union: to give people the impression that people care what they think. I also looked at the minutes and agendas of administrative meetings. When administrators and staff get together, they mostly talk about prior meetings and plans for future meetings.

I hope [my book will] wake up the faculty. We’re like the residents of a Japanese city living next to the ocean and thinking the tsunami won’t affect us. I also hope to alert university boards. When they read the administration’s propaganda organs, I want them to understand that the institution they love needs their help. They didn’t come to Hopkins or Georgetown or Princeton to work with our [administration]. They came to work with our faculty.