Now that's management bloat.
Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members.
Now that's management bloat.
Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members.
This video overview of the project is dangerously close to parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKY0QdSElgc
Featuring the:
* Managing Director, Development * Vice President of Public Affairs * Vice President Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer * University Architect and Executive Director, Campus Planning & Design * Director, Architecture * Assistant Vice President for Business Affairs Finance and Facilities * Associate Vice President of Sponsored Research
This isn't even the entire Stanford administration. There's also the academic administration (deans and such), the Stanford Management Company (the investment operation, established 1991), and Athletic Administration. Those remain on the main campus.
It was in the 1990s that the administrators really took over. As an alum, this is embarrassing. But Stanford no longer has a real alumni association which could pressure the administration. The alumni association was acquired by Stanford's development department in 1998 so they could focus on their core mission of extracting money from alumni.
Those aren't telephone sanitizers. Their job is to keep thinking up spectacular things to propose, the better to lure insanely wealthy people into investing in Stanford. Stanford's run (or was) by a guy who as a matter of principle cannot think of ANY reason why any endowment or gift should ever go to any other school or thing that isn't Stanford, no matter how much money Stanford has or how little money anyone else has. He's committed to the proposition that the world's advanced through the consolidation of infinite resources (for Stanford).
As such, 'Office of Development' is a big deal for them, as is Land, Buildings and Real Estate: it's pretty much all about maximizing resources in order to be awarded more gifts to turn into more resources forever. They could not have ANY students or faculty and still function just as they are, if the hyper-wealthy people awarding them money were convinced their mission would be better without students. They could not have ANY students or faculty and still go on for years or decades just on the wealth they've currently got.
This university isn't 'broke'. They're part of the reason everybody else is broke. The idea is that they should have it all, ???, profit!
I'm not sure what metric 'profit' is expressed in. If it's 'money', this is working for Stanford.
They can easily use any potential savings by adjusting the way their scholarships taper off versus income.
That said, some of the boat may have to do with government oversight for their research grants.
After said activity there is more administration and less of everything else.
"This workout routine is a waste of time and effort. See, look at Usain Bolt doing it."
The cost of a university education has far outpaced inflation. Harvard cost $2,600 in 1970.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college-costs-are-so-hig...
Second, since you brought it up, can you explain how they determine the cost of tuition? If it’s unimportant maybe they can simply eliminate it for everyone. Are other universities the same?
Sticker price is an important value signal, which draws elites who, as alumnae, support the institution, so what elite universities do is have high sticker prices and then internal need-based financial aid packages that cover much of the costs for non-wealthy students. This also, incidentally, maximizes tuition revenue, as those who can pay from their own pocket or outside scholarships do pay. But maximizes revenue is incidental, because tuition is not the main source of revenue.
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/how-ivy-league-financial-a...
It may be hopelessly optimistic, but I think that eventually, tuition will and should be eliminated for everyone.. As it stands now, where students from wealthier families pay more, it is a good consolation prize.
Sort of 'progress through increasing the highest possible score'. In this light, spending excessively on administrators and absurd things is a form of virtue signalling meant to elicit further gifts through demonstrating they are already wealthy beyond all imagining.
That's not a joke: that's actually how it works, and there are many parallels, for instance in the stock market.
(Not getting down to brass tacks is the great weakness in the article too, I think. The author seems to have an idea that these expendable positions can simply be identified by filtering out anyone who can't explain what they do in non-jargon terms, or asking the surplus employees to simply name themselves so they can be cut. Nothing in business is quite _that_ easy.)
Heresy !
If that is true then the whole idea behind management is flawed. (management, MBA, business administration and the like depend on the idea that managing one company is pretty much the same activity as managing another. If what you say is true, that you cannot just generically cut then such people should never be put in charge of companies or even departments, yet that is exactly what is happening in every large company).
(Just a frustrated ex-cisco employee whose manager had an MBA)
1) I know many people who think like that (in some cases because they have such a position. Manager without knowing what their reports actually do)
2) The hiring decisions made -regularly- prove that this is in fact the overriding opinion in our management.
BTW, Stanford has professional schools and a hospital, and is a research university, all of which are activities that don't behave like educating undergraduates.
I'm not really here to defend Stanford, I'm just pointing out that the criticisms in this sub-thread are all hand-wavy.
You wouldn't tell a software engineer that their only job is to crank out code. That's actually a recipe for either 1) an absolute savant, or 2) a severely career-limited engineer. Engineers need to plan, estimate, document, test, troubleshoot, help recruit, and be technical leaders for all sorts of random things that come their way. We often deride that stuff as "admin work" that keeps us from our true calling – but let's be honest, that actually is part of the job description.
Similarly, it would be foolish to tell a professor that their only job is to sit in front of the classroom and teach. They should be expected to spend time improving their pedagogy, attracting students to their program, being a champion and mentor for students, spending some time in public outreach, and otherwise helping to drive their department's curriculum and agenda so it will flourish. At a research university like Stanford, they will be expected to spend time attracting research and research funding as well. Professors may bristle at having to do all that, and they can't do all of that alone – but again, it's part of the job description, and there's good reason why they're being tapped to do it! You really can't expect an admin to drive the research agenda of your department, for example.
So, where does your statement come from? How do you define "admin work"? Are you a teacher that feels like you're tapped to do stuff you shouldn't be doing? Are you really sure that's work that should be delegated?
Reflexively assuming that all "administrators" are unnecessary bloat isn't much different than the mindset of a corporate raider who wants massive layoffs for increased profitability. It can be a myopic and short-sighted vision of creating actual value.
Also, the School of Medicine, which is arguably the best research medical school in the world and a leader in genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, neuroscience and neurobiology is at ground zero for the genomics revolution and should be more focused on growth, not being pennywise and pound foolish.
Hilariously, the LOCKSS project is also at the RWC location.
Libraries at universities have always offered more than just buildings full of books. My point is that there is a lot more to managing a serious library than just cataloging books. Trained librarians especially do a lot to directly contribute to research by connecting researchers with the right sources of information.
One of the biggest problems facing the biological sciences (and scientific research in general) is an exponential rise in the amount of data being generated, but an inability to catalogue and store the information, much less understand it. Modern librarians are inter-disciplinary problem solvers, often embedded in with faculty and researchers, responsible for indexing and archiving a rapidly increasing amount of information.
Plus, books books have thus far proven to be a more durable storage medium than all digital options in current usage. Without them, a solar flare or nuclear war could cause the modern equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria
What now!?