Any bureaucracy seems to tend towards making the system of bureaucracy more efficient for those managing it, not those working under it.
Schools, K through university, all suffer from this.
Schools, K through university, all suffer from this.
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Organization A that is 80% devoted to serve it's bureaucracy will be outcompeted by Organization B which is only at 40%, presumably because it's younger.
That only works if they compete on productive end results, and I'm not sure how true that is for US universities.
A school’s academics are, in a way, secondary to the school’s brand/influence (with built in networking effects in the alumni base)
Imagine some crazy world where education-level is a protected class for employment and degree/school can’t be considered or explicitly asked about in job applications. The credential monopoly would be no more. Yet you would likely still see top colleges thrive for the same reason top fashion houses do: status signaling, brand loyalty, and a sense of belonging with patrons who subscribe to the same values
College could be another case where competition drives up costs.
Another option is to eliminate reasons to compete. Just standardize the offerings and the administrative structure required for a university. Students can choose the school that's closest to home, and go there with confidence.
Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own. There a serious lack of examples of successful large orgs where bureacracy is in fact minimal.
Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism made a good note of this, how the capitalist world of the west recreated the bureacratic culture in a host of in what are its institutions (which are obstensibly businesses) that existed in soviet russia, and in many ways surpassed those systems.
Yes, that was even heavily implied in my post you're critiquing!
This cycle of very bureaucratic orgs being outcompeted by lightly bureaucratic orgs, which then grow very bureaucratic, and are in turn outcompeted, results in a medium bureaucracy level on average in the long run.
It's more likely that the entire western system is outcompeted than it is that the current set of elite schools are outcompeted within our system, imo.
Given enough time unions tend towards bureaucracies dedicated to serving the Union, not its members.
Frankly I think saying the Iron Law is inevitable is a little too pessimistic for me, but it’s definitely something that needs to be consciously monitored/managed.
Look no further than Martin Scorsese's The Irishman for an exegesis of other ways union leaders can increase their pay and solidify their power at little to negative benefit for union members. What happened with Jimmy Hoffa doesn't categorically indict all unions themselves, but it illuminates the continuum of soft "influence" and hard corruption. Where that doesn't exist, the pressure is there by interested parties to create it. The odds are in the favor of amassing power and wealth and strengthening a bureaucracy to further serve itself toward those ends. The iron law is upheld.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Unions aren't the big scary bureaucracy Corporations would have you believe. That's the corporations right now, and they're so terrified of unions, that they're projecting their own image onto unions.
The older employees also happen to be the union leaders.
The union movements and 8 hour workday have strong roots here, and the members of the Labor Party have historically been union members/supporters, although that changed to more management types in the mid 2000s[0].
Although they still have strong ties to Logging/Trade Unions which have become such institutions themselves, particularly the state ALP factions. This mostly puts them in a position to protect each other, rather then their "members".
There are other captured unions such as the SDA as well, which supposedly protects retail workers, but apparently is largely directed by the supermarket duopoly (Coles+Safeway).
I think the comment above on Pournelle's Iron Law really shows the current social state of omnipresent regulatory/bureaucratic capture.
The ancient Greek concept of Kyklos seems like the only kind of sociopolitical system that creates regular catalysts to shed such systems, Westminster[2] worked for a while but the aristocratic layers born from it are now clinging to the teet of its corpse.
[0]: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/45... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system
in the government this is solved when elections change power. (sort of)
in universities... i think they might just be better off having the administrators elected by the... alumni.
I miss Byte magazine
That said, I think the entire US university system needs a rethink, so I'm not upset that these bureaucrats are accelerating the process of burning it to the ground.
> The founders of the democratic tradition understood that institutions are prone to corruption. This does not mean that they cease to operate. It means, to the contrary, that they continue to function, but in ways that no longer serve their original purpose.
It's not clear to me that universities will burn to the ground. They can probably stumble along for decades down the same path if nothing changes. No, their incentives need to be corrected.