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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

When I read articles like this, what i don't understand is why the brilliant minds in the various different departments that are actually experts in their domains don't get together and come up with a scheme to oust the administrators. How can you educate students to go out and change the world if you can't even fix your own institution? What exactly is stopping faculty from going on strike or figuring out a way to subvert the power structures which everyone can see to be damaging tot he university's mission?

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The administrators are often former or current faculty. In articles and discussions similar to this there is often this conflict portrayed between faculty and administration but the reality is that they are often the same people. If not from the same institution, then from another institution.

Universities sometimes require or encourage support staff to have higher ed. degrees. Computer tech support positions may require a bachelors degree. Career counseling or academic advising may require a masters. Faculty encourage students to get graduate degrees at the universities they(the faculty member) got their graduate degree from. Politicians and alumni get favors for their families. Universities are practically influence and nepotism laundering machines. Faculty are simply part of the power structure, each trying to improve their position within. Grad school practically selects for individuals who are invested in the institution and will not rock the boat.

>The administrators are often former or current faculty.

That used to be true but not anymore. A lot of the administrative stuff these days are career administrators.

What if the adjunct professors are making something rather closer to the market rate than the high-paying jobs they're eyeing? There's an oversupply in a lot of these fields. The universities pay these terrible wages precisely because they can. Yeah, it's mind-blowingly hypocritical of the Universities to pay market rates when it suits them (but don't you dare do it; the University administrators have only the most educated rationalization skills unlike the rest of you hoi polloi), but it still suggests that the market rate probably is that low. If that's the case, starting your own learning program, even ignoring the question of how to get people to use it, may not actually provide a living wage without a lot more clever work. You're probably not going to be able to do it just by setting up competing classrooms, you're probably looking at something that looks a lot more like an edutech startup than a university. Which is great if you can pull it off, but an adjunct professor of the humanities is statistically missing almost every skill necessary to do that.

An astute analysis - depressing but hard to disagree with.

The university's stated mission may have something to do with learning or teaching or research, but most universities are run by bureaucrats with the actual mission of continued existence and expansion, like every other expansive government-funded institution. Professors, lecturers, and researchers are expendable tools for the administration, so they have no real power to 'rise up'.

> most universities are run by bureaucrats with the actual mission of continued existence and expansion

Existence is a prerequisite for all learning/teaching/research, and expansion is implied in these goals too. Unless their stated goal is to further knowledge, but not too much!

I'm skeptical that shady administrators actually don't care about the goals of their organization and have ulterior motives. What seems more likely is that universities are like any other large organization. Most people involved want to do a good job, but only a few are truly passionate about success. Fewer still know exactly what needs to happen for success and are able to rally others to fulfill their vision.

Various points:

1. Don't assume these are "brilliant" minds. It takes a certain type of mindset to become a college professor. Do not equate this with brilliance.

2. You're not listing a solution. Ousting the administrators won't solve anything in and of itself. They will be replaced by some other administrators (perhaps of your liking). But what actually is the solution? The realities they have to deal with won't change: Money has to come from somewhere.

3. Some of the author's complaints don't strike me as being a fundamental problem. As an example, it's not obvious why the publishing companies behave the way he would like them to. He's acting as if they have a responsibility towards people like him. Why?

4. Agree with the problem of too many administrators and too many adjuncts and teaching getting the shaft. But don't trust numbers too blindly. As an example, a local university showed their numbers. Since 1980, funding per student from outside (state/federal, etc) dropped a huge amount. Almost all of the tuition increases accounted for it. Overall funding for instruction per student did not drop at all - just the manner in which they obtained it. All the sports stuff was "extra".

5. The latest generation of faculty members - especially in disciplines like engineering - do not share this mindset. It's not at all unusual for me to hear a young engineering faculty member talk about the waste that are the humanities. I suppose primarily it's because the pressure for funding is huge on engineering faculty members, so they are predisposed to viewing everything as a fixed pie, and the less that goes to humanities, the more for them.

6. As several have pointed out, teaching is not something most faculty members today are hired for (especially in STEM). This is a problem from within - not something imposed by administrators.

7. As someone who spent time in academia, faculty members are focused on being individualistic and trying to stand apart from their peers. You cannot expect them to "get together" to oppose these changes. They have trouble getting together for pretty much anything. Don't let multi-author collaborations fools you.

Thanks for this very comprehensive reply.

1. I'm trying to be positive :)

2. I should have gone into more detail on that, but the solution I had in mind was not so much a specific policy as a putting-forth of basic principles which they wanted to see administration recentered around.

3. True enough.

4. I know it's more complex than it looks at first glance. Administration increasingly requires compliance with many state and federal regulations which costs money, and likewise sports teams bring in cash from nostalgic alumni, and indirectly subsidize other things.

5. This goes to the heart of what I'm talking about. I find myself wanting to arrange blind dates between members of the engineering, humanities, and economics faculties to figure out ways they could be supporting rather than competing with each other.

6. for sure, and I hope that changes.

7. Clearly I'm leaning too much on a vision of the university as a calling and not enough on its reality as a cut-throat research marketplace.

Thanks again for this in-depth exploration of the issues. I'll keep it in mind on my future reading.

You may as well ask why doesn't a genius out there topple the Trump administration or why did no one topple Stalin? It's unclear that power structures are so vulnerable to even the best-laid plans.

You're allowed to set up a new University or place of learning/teaching. You aren't allowed (to a first approximation) to set up a different fully-sovereign government.

You're also allowed to own 100 Lamborghinis, but that doesn't make it feasible for most people.

You can get together with a few people and some investors and start a new place of learning that may someday become a university. You can't get together with a few friends and start a new government without a lot more hassle than that.

The metaphor is unsalvagable.

Only in your mind. The only difference is one is more difficult than another. It doesn't matter what you're "allowed" to do or not, the point is about any power structure exerting its will strip you of any ability to meaningfully oppose it.

"the point is about any power structure exerting its will strip you of any ability to meaningfully oppose it."

Yes, but you can leave non-governmental power structures; the power of the Foot Veto is huge. By your logic, no new companies ever form because existing companies will strip you of your power to form them. Your logic predicts a society a great deal less flexible than the one we actually live in.

The metaphor is unsalvageable.

I suggest to you that it may be worth your time to meditate on this a bit more for your own health, which I mean fully literally. Your worldview quite easily leads to an excessively fatalistic feeling of a lack of control, which is a major factor in depression. Escaping non-governmental power structures may not be easy, but what worth doing in life is? It is well within the domain of possible.

I get the type of person you are. I'll just say it for you: you're right and I'm wrong. You even repeat yourself with your tangential point with no relevance to anything that you're replying to. Then proceed to shred the remainder of your credibility suggesting I go get help, in the fashion of a real clown. Good luck arguing with people online bud.

The largest barrier to entry to starting a new University is prestige. Accreditation is a challenge, but is doable. Gathering enough capital is a challenge, but is also doable. New institutions of higher education are started all the time. But when was the last time you saw a Harvard started?

Imagine the following thought experiment: the entire faulty of Harvard goes off and starts a new University (call it Garvard). Now, obviously, the quality of education at this new school is going to be just as good as Harvard. But which school are parents going to want their children to go to: old Harvard, with a newly hired crop of top professors, or Garvard, with the original professors? I suspect that Garvard would get less applicants, and would likely have to charge less.

This market force is why the cost of education is going up quickly while educator salaries are not rising as fast. In higher education right now, branding is more important than product.

Probably the late 19th-century, when Stanford, MIT and Caltech were founded. They are all now competitors to Harvard.

"Good" universities benefit from outsized tax-sheltered endowments, which can be spent on anything from rock climbing walls, employee perks and bonuses, restaurants, accommodation to land acquisition. Let's do another experiment, what if Harvard's $36 billion endowment was swapped with that of a less prestigious university in a major city, say Seattle University (SU). With now an almost $2 billion in annual expenditure, SU could hire some great faculty, and invest heavily in R&D. Meanwhile, Harvard would need to rely on huge tuition increases (via student loans), equaling $160k a year per student, as each student currently indirectly receives an additional $100k per year in endowment spending, and minimal financial aid. Maybe some wealthy alumni could try and prop it up, but I think it would take less than a generation for Harvard's prestige to sag, and SU's to soar.

The universities are effectively run by the tenured faculty members. As long as they produce more labor than they need, they can hire scabs if teachers go on strike.

The real question is why so many bright minds want to go into this to begin with.

No, universities are run by boards of directors like every corporation and a president/CEO. Tenured faculty has some vote (but NEVER a controlling or even large vote, they often have to fight to be included at all in serious decisions). It's top-down business decisions by investors and the CEO, who tell the deans/provosts/chairs/faculty/adjuncts, all the way down the totem pole to the grad students,

"oh we'd like to pay you decently and hire enough workers, we really would, but the market simply can't bear it, we don't have the funds, I'm so sorry. We're on the same side here, really, it's just the practicalities of the situation. You wouldn't understand, it's business, and you're an expert in Art/English/Engineering/Chemistry which I totally respect, but you just wouldn't get it so just trust me. I'm one of you. Oh, and by the way your faculty parking lot is being redistricted into stadium parking, and since you aren't an administrator you'll have to purchase a special faculty pass (half off!) that isn't valid on game day. You can take the bus on game day, you like that kind of stuff, you're a liberal, right?"

I think nearly unconditional tenure is kind of untenable. There is so much dead weight in any academic department and it's so easy to see. Ask any grad student which professors don't do research or take students and teach like absolute trash. There are always plenty. Usually old, taking up the few slots available for bright young PhDs.

But we could also make more slots. There's nothing wrong with being a teaching professor, lots of people love it and they love it so much it doesn't need to pay well, just decently, and how about tenure-ish-track teaching only instead of shunting teachers off into second class citizens who can be fired if some students drop their class the day before? There's plenty of room to expand if that was the goal. But it isn't. Cuts are made where they can be made. It isn't really a market, quality of education isn't really the measured output of paying tuition so the market will NEVER select for what we think of as 'good', but the institutions are being run as if they are operating in a market instead of a public service, which is THE central neoliberal fallacy whose implementation has been as disastrous in education as it has been in any public service which is not a real market (eg healthcare)

Oxford University (and, I think, Cambridge, but not the rest of the UK) really do have the senior faculty holding the formal power. There was a debate in Congregation (the University's 'parliament') last year on the question of whether to force the University administration to demolish some new (and expensive) accommodation blocks on the grounds that they spoiled the view from part of an ancient common. It was taken very seriously precisely because they did have the power to do it.

What's interesting is that this ultimate power is used exceedingly seldom, and very rarely indeed for non-symbolic purposes. There's an active Congregation process involving the compulsory retirement age, but for more-or-less everything else Congregation simply defers to the administration.

So I'm not sure that we can point to the power structures as the reason top-down management is such a thing. It happens because we're happy to let it.

The tenured faculty has no incentive to go on a strike/subvert the power structure. They are very much beneficiaries of the system.

Sounds a little like "shit's easy syndrome":

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

The actual professors have already got theirs, so screw everyone else. And the adjuncts don't have any power and are easily replaced.

Also everybody knows that if the university administrators actually got replaced by sensible rational people then the English department might not exist any more anyway so they're all living on borrowed time.

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