People are often surprised at how adamant I am that cutting administrative costs is a huge part of making college less expensive. Surely, the administrative costs– which means, to a very large degree, the salaries of administrators and the number of administrators employed– can’t be that much higher than they once were, right?
They can be. And it’s a huge, huge problem.
Here’s one of the saddest stories I’ve read about in ages. The University of Georgia’s student run newspaper, The Red and Black, is a no-bullshit great student newspaper. Or was. Yesterday the entire student leadership walked out, thanks to a paternalistic and heavy-handed Board of Directors who are uncomfortable with actual journalism. In a heartbreaking open letter from the former Editor in Chief:
The newspaper has always been a student-run operation, but recently, we began feeling serious pressure from people who were not students. In less than a month, The Red & Black has hired more than 10 permanent staff with veto power over students’ decisions.
In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial director at The Red & Black,” a member of The Red & Black’s Board of Directors stated the newspaper needs a balance of good and bad. Under “Bad,” it says, “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism.’ If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.” I took great offense to that, but the board member just told me this is simply a draft. But one thing that would not change is that the former editorial adviser, now the editorial director, would see all content before it is published online and in print. For years, students have had final approval of the paper followed by a critique by the adviser only after articles were published. However, from now on, that will not be the case. Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take “grip and grin” photos and compromise the design of the paper.
It’s totally disgraceful for a great, student-run– and thus student-centered– program be forced to bow down to ten pencil pushers who almost certainly got their jobs because they know somebody with connections. And for it to happen in a way that threatens journalistic independence is shameful. (For context, my public high school’s student newspaper was also quite acclaimed, and we enjoyed more editorial independence than is described in the letter.) Why is this happening?
It’s hard for people outside of the university system to understand just how many layers of useless bureaucracy have been added in recent decades. There are more buildings filled with more people with vague and redundant titles at the average university now, it’s incredible. Completing minor tasks gets you shuffled through the byzantine architecture of a vast bureaucracy. Jobs that were once performed as part of the duties of the professoriate have now been shuffled off to administrators who have no educational experience and no educational credentials, resulting in a massive hiring binge; meanwhile, the ranks of tenure track faculty continue to shrink, to say nothing of stagnant wages among the actual educators.
The bureaucratic takeover is more pronounced in public universities because of the explicitly political nature of recent changes in their structure. Republican state lawmakers realized that public universities could be a tool to enforce their political ends, but first, they needed to stack the deck by filling them with cronies. And fill them they have, as typical estimates for the increase in the number of college administrators from the late 1990s to the late 2000s are typically between 30-40%. This court-packing has multiple benefits for conservative state apparatchiks: college administrative jobs are a nice bit of influence to peddle, and these administrators can act as loyalists when there is a conflict with faculty and students. I’m afraid that, if there’s a major change in a university in the last decade, it’s more likely to have come from a petty functionary than from someone in the actual faculty. You’d be amazed at how much control these administrators truly have.
This article from the Washington Monthly gives you a good overview; it’s an adapted excerpt by Benjamin Ginsberg from his book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. If you’re interested in these topics I highly recommend it.
Update: Here’s the actual, disgraceful memo. “I guess this is ‘journalism.'” “Things we will not tolerate: Liable.”
Update II: Twitter has suspended the account the editorial board started, @redanddead815. No word as to why.
Another Casualty of the Administrative Invasion of the UniversityPost + Comments (88)