Comment by elgar1212 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elgar1212 | Hacker News Reader

> Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?

Why aren't people angry about this? Why hasn't this been regulated away by now?

Anyone who's been through the university system knows about all the trash emails that these people sit around writing. It's like that's all they do (visibly): they either sit on their asses writing emails or they stand on the stage for graduation day.

What are these people for? Just writing emails? Why don't we just automate their jobs away and slice the cost of tuition?

Here's what we need: legislation to cap the percentage of administrative staff and cap their salaries to be no higher than the average salary of a professor at that university

As a former administrative staff member at Harvard (web developer in the IT department) for several years, I can't think of a single coworker who spent their days "just writing emails". This is complete and utter nonsense.

The administration is responsible for the entire operation of the university, outside of teaching. And it's a relatively large university with a lot of different divisions/schools. There's a LOT more to "administration" than writing emails and standing on stage at graduation!

> What are these people for?

I consider it unsurprising that a bureaucracy gets taken over by bureaucrats. The rest of the faculty is too busy doing research and teaching classes to bother with office politics, climbing the ladder, and increasing staff counts at levels of the ladder beneath themselves. The professors consider the importance of their research and teaching efforts to be self-evident, so there's no need to waste time justifying them, trying to convince people that they're important or that their department budget should be increased.

You see a similar effect in tech companies, where engineers building the company's product get relegated to the sidelines after the technology is proven or the market is captured, and MBAs, management, and sales become the dominant forces within the organization...engineering is still focused on the product, with their careers an issue that they assume will resolve itself, while the MBAs are entirely focused on their careers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com