Posted on 06/19/2019 5:31:56 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Philip Hamburger recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Congress should control administrative bloat by limiting student loan funds given to colleges with too many administrators. He is dead right about the vast increase in non-faculty bureaucracy in recent decades and the need to reduce it. But the sources of the problem are many and the solution not, perhaps, as simple as professor Hamburger suggests.
College bureaucracies have been growing at least since the 1980s. I was then editor of a mildly disputatious Duke University publication called the Faculty Newsletter. The one thing that seems to be remembered from those days is the “VP Count:” The number of people in the administration with “vice president” or “vice provost” in their title. On the first or second page of every issue of the Newsletter, in large letters, appeared the current number of VPs. Finally, I got data from the Duke Archives and published a graph in November 1991, plotting the number of vice presidents from 1959 to 1991. The graph rose with only one small dip, from three in 1959 to 19 in 1991. Now we might have to convert to a log scale.
Using crude data from old phone books, I also subdivided “staff” into central administrative staff vs. staff located in academic departments. Lo and behold! The ratio of faculty to staff had grown smaller and smaller over the years, and the growth in the denominator was all in staff outside academic departments.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Remembering a talk by “executive information system” guru Allen Pallar. This was probably the late 80s and it was a federal IT conference. Pallar advice was something like “before you implement an executive information, eliminate all management whose job it is to pass information from below to above or above to below.”
I suggest that today in any bureaucracy we can go with everything after the comma in Pallar’s statement. Today, I believe we can see enormous productivity and quality improvements by eliminating the diversity bureaucracy.
The commissars are living well on the taxpayer and college student dime.
Another shining example of those on the Left using the taxpayer to make a buck. If it weren’t for government/civil service jobs, most of them would not be able to make a living. There are only so many art gallery director positions in the country. And, while they get to looking at how bloated admin’s at colleges/universities, they might also want to turn their attention to the US Dept of State. How many Deputy Directors to the Assistant Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs in Southwest Africa do we need?
The old Ronald Reagan quote comes to mind here: “the first and last priority of the bureaucracy is to preserve and expand the bureaucracy.”
And they hated him with a purple passion for pointing that out that simple fact.
I read that piece by Phil Hamburger. He got right to the meat of the issue.
How many diversity offices does any college need? By the time you add up women, gender, all the ethnic groups, various international students offices, and LGBT, you can easily have 20-30 administrative departments, each with their own set of VP, director, asst. directors, on down the line. Everyone of them sucking up $$$$.
That the biggest problem with our health care system - but the number of layoffs involved would cause a huge hit to our short-term GDP (though likely a long-term boom) and no politician dares to touch it.
Dean of Diversity, Dean of Special Needs Students, Dean of Safe room Allocations, etc. All making 150K.
As are the overabundance of general/flag officers in the military, living off the taxpayer dime.
As a result, the Pentagon still has 37 four-star general and flag officers, or G/FOs, on its payroll, which is more four-stars than served during World War II – when the military had nearly 10 times as many enlisted personnel.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/07/24/the-pentagon-has-too-many-troops
LOL, I see what you did there. LOL.
The bloating of the college administrations, is part of why tuition and fees have skyrocketed, far above the rate of inflation, in recent decades. Everyone who goes to college is paying for this.
Yup. I work at Kansas State and the number of diversity positions has gone up exponentially since the debacle at Mizzou.
Yes and guess what? Our summer enrollment period is presently ongoing and student numbers are down. Just in my department (@ 1,200 undergrads) we are tracking @ 50 less students compared to previous years at this time.
I worked for a major corporation for 24 years. Over that time I saw the corp. management slowly change from being run by the founders, engineers all, to business management types. As the change happened, VPs multiplied rapidly.
We used to joke that there would soon be a VP in charge of the paper clip supply.
This is partially due to the “diversity” bloat. You need checkists / political officers to make sure every student group, department and class are in political compliance.
You need nannies to comfort the weak students who are offended by assigned ready by white guys and incredibly stressed out by tests. Train them to run to powerful diktats so they’ll think they’re too weak to do anything without permission of another government authority figure.
I hear that. I used to work at the University of Utah. They even had diversity departments for first generation college students and for DACA students, in addition to all the others. Talk about replication of services!!
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