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Comment by zarkov99 | Hacker News Reader

Oh, it is easy, the US is trying it right now. Inflate the administration body, filling the University with a majority of career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research, teaching or learning. Then inflate tuitions to unaffordable levels so you can pay for the bureaucrats. Next, drop merit requirements for both students and professors and replace them with identity based selection criteria. Finally, protects students, all of them and at all costs, from any idea that any of them might find unsettling.

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It sounds like you have not been in an R1 university (ever?) and are pulling your critiques out of a hat after listening to right-of-center podcasts like the Rubin report. I would love to hear about a _single_ R1 university that is hiring based on identity criteria, where the majority of the staff are "career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research". The way you get grant money is by doing research that gets published at top-tier conferences, and at least in CS it is pretty hard to bullshit your way into those. Try not to make authoritative sounding posts like this without any knowledge of what you are talking about.

Respectfully, I think you're basing this assessment on what it was like when you or I went to college and haven't kept up with recent trends. If you apply to most R1 faculties today, you'll be required to write what's known as a "diversity statement", a detailed explanation of what you've done for underrepresented identity groups and how you intend to help them in the future. And the UC headcount stats (https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/uc-employe...) show 11,559 tenure-track faculty vs. about 16,500 "managers and senior professionals" - I don't quite agree with the tone of the original claim, but I think it's fair to say that means there's more bureaucrats than researchers.

I recently applied to the faculty job market and wrote a diversity statement. I have also served on the hiring end (last year), and have heard enough to understand that the content in this statement will neither make nor break your case, but is an additional datapoint that the committee takes into consideration.

I hope the OP understands I was being mostly sarcastic, but really they wrote a (imo) uninformed post about the university life which is far from the reality at the research-oriented institutions I've passed through in the past 10 years.

Thanks for the additional datapoint. Speaking seriously, I am on the same page about bloat and there is a very real danger of it especially in the UC and other state school systems. Maybe private institutions are more robust to bloat since there is less protection for non-tenured employment. Generally the trend to hiring XM$/yr administrators as university heads is worrying, but I am not sure what the fix for it is in the endless competition for endowment and donor money.

Last edit: check out "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber if you haven't already. You may not agree with his politics or his prescriptions, but the book is a funny and highly alarming wakeup call to the proliferation of useless jobs (part of the book discusses bloat in university administrations).

Oh yeah, I've heard about that book before! I keep putting it off, maybe this time I'll actually read it over the holidays.

I have a graduate degree from an R1 University. Perhaps you should back off a little on the personal attacks and substantiate your rebuttal with more than insults. My point was on the overall US University system, not R1 Universities , not that it matters all that much.

For R1, on administrative bloat:

https://oir.harvard.edu/fact-book/faculty_and_staff

https://web.mit.edu/facts/faculty.html

In both you can see that there are more people in the Administrative staff than in the faculty. As to discrimination based admission, Harvard and Yale were sued for that, I am sure you know about it. As for discrimination in hiring, here is a Cornell study :

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-...

Thanks for the datapoints and level-headed reply, and apologies for the snark.

I didn't know about the Cornell study, although I am not at all surprised to hear that. How do you suggest representation imbalance in CS faculty gets somewhat closer to 50/50 without having some kind of bias towards hiring women, though? As someone of Asian descent, I totally understand where the lawsuits against Harvard/Yale were coming from, but at the same time I see no way to fix representation in undergrad/grad-school/faculty outside of some kind of "discriminative" hiring procedures (outside of fixing much broader and challenging systemic issues).

I think the problem is this belief that there is something to fix at all. It goes without saying that there should be no barriers to anyone doing anything they want, but we have that already. Why is 50/50 in CS a goal at all? Who cares? Do we also want 50/50 in nursing? on oil rigs? or in prison? Why? Seriously, WTF? Are we so stupid that we discount millions of years of evolution and chalk any difference in outcome to cultural norms? It is all so, so stupid, and we all know it.

I agree that in principle anyone can do what they want, and I hope that in our long term our society can actually realize this ideal, but in practice an individual's decisions are informed by the mores and attitudes of the culture they find themselves in. So the conflating factor is our society's history of discouraging women from pursuing technical paths, the (older) insistence that they be homemakers and take on more traditionally feminine roles (like K-12 teachers). Yes, we no longer overtly say such things, but the effects of these attitudes persist across large subpopulations and ethnic groups. It seems very likely to me that traditional gender roles and attitudes about what jobs a women is capable of doing has caused fewer women to pursue math/physics (e.g., see the statistics here: https://math.mit.edu/wim/2019/03/10/national-mathematics-sur...).

Also consider the very recent history of breakthrough results coming from female mathematicians like Lisa Piccirillo and Urmila Mahadev. How much human potential are we leaving on the table, untapped?

I see no "easy fix" for improving representation in higher education other than affirmative action. It's one of the few knobs that we have to turn without much more significant changes to society like implementing UBI or making the average work week much shorter. While it may hurt people like me who happen to be well represented, and prevent me from joining the institution "I deserve" to be in, well maybe that's better for society in the long run.

These complaints don't really address the point of this article. Career bureaucrats? An integral part of the supercommunity, dealing with the paperwork that their class set up themselves and getting doled out a cut of all the money rolling in for "education" and "research". Unconnected and politically unsavvy undergrads dealing with tuition inflation are losers in this situation, true, but those who are willing to work the system can still get rewarded. And besides, when I think about the cost of my state school, there's no way I could have that much fun at my age for so little money.

The library still contains plenty of unsettling ideas, and you're missing the system's neatest trick: they still have so much money and prestige that they can simply co-opt any serious competitors. I'd bet money that the author of this post would take a professorship and a budget at a prestigious university any day if it were offered, as long as they get weakly promised some kind of independence, the same kind of independence a tobacco-sponsored scientist gets.

I know. I only skimmed the article, but the title was too good to pass on.

Strikes me as overblown, because that's a criticism universities and bureaucracies have always faced. They're insular, they select based on their own criteria, they're too slow, and yet they outlast almost anything else. During their hundreds of years of existence many bureaucracies have up and downs, yet they're resilient.

If you ask me if Oxford will be around longer than any currently listed company on the S&P 500 I'm actually pretty confident to say, yep it will. You might as well also have described the Catholic Church in your post, but the Vatican is still kicking.

> You might as well also have described the Catholic Church in your post, but the Vatican is still kicking.

The church used to play a vastly more important role in society than it does today… something for universities to ponder now that repositories of knowledge and communities that formed around such are no longer bound behind their walls and the churches walls before that…

You forgot: have grad students do most of the teaching/grading and pay them pennies on the dollar.

Ah yes, this is particularly effective in CS where students are giving up extraordinarily high salaries for the privilege of teaching undergrads.

Aren’t a lot of these grad students internationals? It’s immigration laws and culture that drive them into grad school, not the privilege of teaching undergrads.

Loads and loads of parents of international students push their kids into grad school because they want them to climb the ladder to the upper echelon. They don’t know how to accomplish this in the corporate world because that ladder is more like a maze of culture fit dead ends. Then it’s the immigration laws which make this path extremely risky (getting fired and losing your visa, then having to go home).

So the focus is on school, which they already know how to do well at. As long as you stay in academia, you can safely maintain a student visa. It’s your foot in the door. And then when you graduate with an advanced degree you’re much better positioned to get a long term visa leading to a green card.

I was one of those international students. It was 50/50 Americans/Internationals when I went to grad school 20 years ago, I am not sure if that has changed. Perhaps for some of the internationals you reasoning applied, though it did not to me, but for the Americans I think only an extreme love of research would keep you in grad school, when you can make 10x more money elsewhere, working fewer hours, under less pressure.

Which industries have not been overwhelmed by skyrocketing administrative overhead?

That's an impressive list of tired clichés. You did, however, forget to complain about the humanities ("Oh, the humanities!").

You did mention "identity based criteria", which is, indeed, a terrible scourge of the modern universities, as compared to the days of yore (i. e. until the 70s or 80s, or, as they are sometimes called, "the first 560 years of the modern university"), where everyone, including women, non-white people, and everyone not born to the richest 5% were famously admitted on exactly the same criteria as real people. But it doesn't count unless you also crack a joke about Judith Butler or Hannah Arendt.

>Inflate the administration body, filling the University with a majority of career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research, teaching or learning. Then inflate tuitions to unaffordable levels so you can pay for the bureaucrats. Next, drop merit requirements for (-both-) students

All of this is correct.

If you're refuting this, you either don't pay attention to anything, are some old fudder who went to uni 35+ years ago, or are living in a gigantically blown bubble.

> If you're refuting this, you either don't pay attention to anything, are some old fudder who went to uni 35+ years ago, or are living in a gigantically blown bubble.

I haven't paid attention to the latest fads, but when I went to Uni 35+ years ago, "gigantically blown" bubbles were regarded to be superior to small bubbles, as far as intellectual universes are concerned.

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