A “proliferation of administrators”: faculty reflect on rapid expansion | Hacker News Reader

A “proliferation of administrators”: faculty reflect on rapid expansion

yaledailynews.com

I watched this play out in a large university system. Seems to be largely the creeping expectations of faculty, doubly at the most prestigious institutions.

First of all faculty get about zero credit for teaching, it's really an afterthought and does not impact recruitment, career path, grants, or merits (increasing salary). So naturally many faculty push off as much of the teaching, preparing materials, grading, handling of office hours, labs, handling student questions, etc on others.

Grad students are increasingly resistant to being overworked and distracted from their studied and research. So there's been in increase in walkouts, unionizing, and related activities.

So where does an increasing fraction of the faculty support come from? Staff. Staff to help with technical writing, applying for grants, handling recruitments, serving on committees, and myriad of other demands. Not to mention indirect requirements like increasing IT demands, cybersecurity, remote learning, compliance officers, HR, security incident handling, inventory, metrics and reporting, etc. I've seen months of work generated by a single management request like "because of budget increase foo, we want to track the success of the last decade of graduates ..."

The most successful research universities can have research budgets on the order of $1B a year, pretty much independent of the number of undergrads they teach. Teaching is really a secondary concern. Thus undergrads/staff varies widely.

> So naturally many faculty push off as much of the teaching, preparing materials, grading, handling of office hours, labs, handling student questions, etc on others.

I would count adjuncts and lecturers as non-tenured faculty rather than administrative staff.

This. Almost no teaching is absorbed by someone who would be counted as administrative staff.

As a faculty member, the problem here is very similar to people suggesting there be "less regulations" but never really pointing out which ones to get rid of and why.

Most of these positions were created for a reason, and have a purpose. Everyone seems to agree that there are too many Deans and VPs, but no one wants to get of the ones they need.

Surely out of the mentioned 3500 staff the vast majority of them are not Deans or VPs.

No, but this is where a lot of the expense is, when you create a Dean or VP they usually need staff, and very rarely is the problem "The university has too many people working IT support!"

Could you expand on this? At your university, are there annual reviews on the efficacy of these administrators?

There are, but a lot of things are hard to peg (either deliberately or just by nature) to measurable indicators. For example, various "Corporate Engagement" types who are building partnerships and strengthening reputations - should they probably be be evaluated based on actually research support brought in? Probably.

Or the canonical example of the Athletics departments in a lot of places, which cost-justify themselves based on alumni goodwill.

The problem is, even then, you know a administrator is bad, not whether or not the position is needed.

Burying the lede: Yale now has more administrators than undergrads.

First I laughed loudly at a funny quip. Then I thought, “I better check to see if that’s a joke or not.”

It’s not a joke. From the article: “the number of Yale’s administrators today exceeds the number of faculty — 5,066 compared to 4,937”

From https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts, undergrad enrollment is 4,664. Wow.

So administrators > faculty > undergrads. Double wow.

A lot of research institutions will have a greater number of graduate students than undergraduate students, as grad students are (supposedly) the focus of the organization - they're the ones who are training to be members of the academy after all!

A quick google shows that Yale has 7,357 graduate students enrolled for the 2020-2021 academic year. While the number of administrative faculty ballooning like this is absurd (one is reminded of the University of California system building a new billion dollar[0] campus _solely for administrators_), it makes more sense in the context of ~12,000 students, and ~5,000 faculty.

[0] - I don't recall the exact number off of the top of my head, all I can remember was that it seemed extravagant and absurd.

Given the existence of a Law School, a Business School, a School of Public Health and a Medical School, this isn't at all surprising to me.

Those generate tremendous needs for administrative support, and won't necessarily see a single undergraduate.

This might not be too bad assuming each of the ~5000 faculty members has a personal administrative assistant.

Assuming each student has a personal butler and cook, adding 1500 staff for 600 students would actually be fewer than expected.

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