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That's from the Harvard Business School. Perhaps they can start by reducing Harvard's count of 7,024 full time administrators.

[1] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2022/12/02/harvard-employs-...

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It is funny when the dog catches its tail, but having worked for Harvard as an individual contributor for quite some time until recently, I think this is more an artifact of how many things Harvard does rather than some vast bureaucratic inefficiency. It's forestry program, pharmaceutical research, real estate development, giant dining organization, handful of public theaters, 72 (seriously) libraries, most being domain specific, police department that has the third largest jurisdiction in the state (on paper but they really only deal with university stuff,) their hospitals, and the zillions of other things they do can only take so much centralization. It's a bloated bureaucracy, for sure, but it doesn't hold a candle to The Fed, and IBM beats them both by a mile.

But then ask why does Harvard need to do all of those things? European universities don't have dining organizations. They don't have police forces. They don't need much real estate development because they don't have this type of mission creep. And that's just out of the things you mentioned. There's a lot more fat to cut.

University police forces are common in the United States, and are an explicit legacy of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests, and the Kent State Massacre in particular. The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9069841/university-of-cincinna...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/colleg...

The marketing may be that interests align but the reality is that police that answer to the university will jump to answer calls that local police forces would get to when they get to, like petty theft of university property, public drunkenness, etc.

Transit police, university police, capitol police, boutique police forces like that exist for one reason and one reason only: to prioritize things that the police who would otherwise have jurisdiction would laugh at.

Universities are also generally exempt from all the taxes that pay for municipal police, so they provide their own.

It (sometimes) has a dual educational purpose where they run a law enforcement or criminal justice curriculum and the campus police service provides practical experience for students.

We had a great Atlanta PD major do a Q&A on the GT campus after a string of thefts/muggings.

She straight up said something to the effect of "I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. Your zone also includes Midtown, with bars and commercial. If crime goes up there, owners with more political connections and tax revenue than the university gripe. So that's where most of my resources are."

Gotta respect honesty.

If you follow that to its logical conclusion the police would never show up in certain areas of the city. Personally I don't want my country to turn into Sao Paulo or Mexico City. Hell why not a subscription plan for the police? 911 please enter your customer credentials.

To some degree this already happens though it's less of a direct subscription or denial of services and more of a function of the taxes and connections in an area. Police officers often have entirely different response times, presence, escalation/deescalation strategies and enforcement policies for wealthy and poor parts of a city.

Good thing that crime rates are one of the few things that get people to vote in council elections.

>Hell why not a subscription plan for the police?

Because the people who currently have a lot of influence over current policing would be up in arms when that "certain neighborhood" police never show up in roll their own minimum viable solution that a) is not up to their standards b) they cannot exert political influence over.

Beyond that, you can't exactly cancel a subscription on the public servants you pay. It's not like cops are independent contractors.

>The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.

Kids not being beaten up or killed by the police in general wasn't an option?

Ideally, yes. But in the absence of wholesale reform, this does look like a pretty reasonable solution that could be implemented quickly.

So, a kludge

Somebody somewhere would be doing these things. Does it matter that that somebody is called “Harvard”? It’s not like it’s all run top-down; it’s just a bunch of affiliated organizations that have contractual relationships. I.e. an economy.

The people who run those theatres et al aren’t directly benefitting from the donations of Harvard alumni; they’re rather benefitting from the (presumably) Harvard College(s) of Performing Arts paying them for use of the space—same business model as any commercial theatre. Those affiliated businesses aren’t “Harvard” (the University) per se, any more than the people working for businesses in a food court in an airport work for the airport.

> Somebody somewhere would be doing these things

Yes, but Harvard duplicates existing services. e.g. when Harvard runs a dining org, that service is already provided by local restaurants and grocery stores. The only things Harvard needs to provide are things that you can't already get in Boston. Classrooms, libraries, labs, etc. It's just like engineering. Anything that can easily be offloaded to a third party tool should be.

Do those existing local businesses have the capacity to fulfil the customers that Harvard currently is, if Harvard were to suddenly tomorrow withdraw that service entirely?

Unless Harvard was to sell its facilities for someone else to operate, local businesses never could... Not without serious change in local governance. Not close to enough commercial space. You'd have to demolish a bunch of buildings to make larger facilities to handle the load.

Generic restaurants can't exclude non-Harvard students.

Presumptuous.

Also, opinion.

You seem to be missing that harvard attracts exceptional (and well connected) people. Expanding the business to suit their skills is a natural evolution.

>...dining...

Uh, Harvard throws a huge number of fund raising events that have to be catered and no one cares about the name of the catering company if the food is trash. It's in the best interest of Harvard to set their own standards for their events

They have a cafeteria, dining halls, and other eateries. Do you know how long it would take a student to walk off campus to a find a grocery store or restaurant? Sometimes quite a walk depending on your location

But you could say that about anything. If there's one restaurant in town and somebody opens up a second, you could say, "There was already a restaurant and you're just duplicating existing services." Yeah that's true, but so what? Same with Harvard. If they want to build services that compete with other local services, why is that worse than anyone else doing the same?

It is also pretty common for large companies in the US to have some sort of dining services, for what it’s worth. (I’m surprised this isn’t a thing in Europe, off the cuff “cafeteria” doesn’t look like an Americanism to me, but maybe it is).

Dining services for students make sense to me. Students are generally young folks with a lot going on. They might be on their own for the first time. It is helpful to have a place where they can just go grab some food without too much thought. Dining services might be priced into the student’s tuition, so parents can be confident that their kids will get meals, rather than spending their budget on partying, haha.

Plus, actually this is probably a more practical reason and I should have lead with it: dorms usually have limited cooking facilities. And imagine the messes which would be created in the shared kitchen, if everyone was using it. Eating out is nice, but most people don’t do it every day. Dining services handle the unexciting daily meals well — so really, this isn’t a redundant service to local restaurants.

I totally agree with you that providing healthy and affordable meals for the students is a very good idea. So let me tell you how that was and is organized in my alma mater, the Helsinki University.

Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.

Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.

Interesting. Actually I think there are shops and cafeterias that are student run at some US universities. It just doesn’t seem as widespread as what you describe. Health insurance seems like a high stakes thing to be student-run! Is it run entirely by current students or do alums help out?

In any case, I’m certainly not going to pretend that US students aren’t coddled a bit. School here has a been a little bit infected with the customer-service mentality… like pretty much everything else. It is what it is I guess.

Economies of scale diminish with size. Merge 1000 small companies? Huge benefit. Merge 10 big companies? Minor benefit, and sometimes the loss in specialization can actually be negative

Why are you suggesting it should be in this case? I reckon you are begging the question here.

Why would Harvard want to emulate European schools

Many tech businesses don't need to contribute to open source either, yet a significant amount of salary is lost to those employees who do.

Most companies contributing to open source do it either because they (1) consume projects directly or (2) want access to the community. For (1) it is no longer considered a waste of money as the corporation directly benefits from such changes. (2) is slightly harder to directly quantify however by opensourcing tools like tensorflow or react companies directly have access to talent pools which otherwise would not exist and they can cut costs on train ing. Its also free marketing for companies. In the end there really is no salary lost.

I suspect similar intangibles exist for Harvard.

That's another question That's much more complicated. The gp said they should cut their administrators not "Harvard should reduce services so they can then cut administrators"

A) United States universities offer a broader, more general education than the more compact, specialized education conferred by most European universities. B) Harvard's enrollment is more than 22k, many of whom live in campus dorms. That requires a lot of infrastructure. Plus it's a giant research organization with an endowment of 53 billion dollars. Centralizing makes complete sense in many areas. As any large organization does, they outsource things, like security patrols, when it works out better. C) They don't just do those things for the heck of it. The research alone contributes a huge amount to society, as do it's graduates. Those 72 libraries hold some of the world's most precious documents and objects. D) Saying that European universities simply don't have dining services that run their cafeterias and events shows you don't understand what the term dining services means. Lots of Harvard gatherings get food from local restaurants but sending thousands of residential freshmen into Harvard Square for breakfast every morning would be ludicrously inefficient. E) Tieing up Cambridge PD's officers responding to loud parties, petty theft, etc. would be dumb. Not having a centralized organization to handle or monitor crime that takes place in the many municipal jurisdictions that Harvard has facilities would also be dumb.

Harvard does have a large bureaucracy that could trim some fat, but your sweeping assumptions about what they don't need without even considering why they have them are pretty uninformed.

It's not "from" HBS. HBR is a publication. While both authors likely have HBS affiliation in their past, I think neither was at HBS at the time of this particular article.

They seem instead to have created some other management consulting thing called "Humanocracy".

I'm not defending any of it, but HBR articles are not necessarily from HBS.

If the Harvard Business School could lay off people it didn't employ, that would be a good cost-saving strategy they might consider. Another requirement would be that they'd have to conflate administrators with managers. But a good strategy otherwise. Put it in the 'maybe' pile.

Steve Bannon, the old Trump goon, I forget his actual position, had talked about the growth of the "administrative state" when referring to government.

I don't agree with his politics over all, but on this front I do and see similar trends in other institutions, the education system being one of the most obvious.

We see the growth of the "administrator class/caste" in education at the cost of rising tuition while seeing no improvement in student/teacher ratios, etc. At the same time teachers who rightly spend their time doing their job, which is teaching, are often in a place where they then have to fight the shit rolling downhill from the expanded administrative caste. They could fight the administrator class, but the administrators do this all day every day as their actual job, it's fun to them. The teacher's actual job is teaching, the time and energy needed to fight these battles mean the administrator class wins.

I think this dynamic plays out at our tech companies with the expansion of various non-product roles like HR that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking. Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities. Or the new DEI orgs, agree or disagree, they didn't exist a decade or two ago but are now prevalent in all spaces and DEI consultants are one of the most widely growing positions inside Fortune 500.

I think these things will continue to compound.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_...

If I'm not mistaken, the US has one of the, if not the, highest per capita spend per student in the world...but most of it goes into administrative costs and students never see it. It's a big problem. It's unfortunate that many of the people saying this also have questionable politics on other serious topics that drown this point out. Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.

> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.

I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators.

That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant.

I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.

Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties.

And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power).

I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...

> They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story.

Given that the alternative to disempowering those orgs is throwing good money after bad, there's nothing wrong with a bit of benign disruption to the existing power structure. Fixing things is not rocket science; educational systems outside the U.S. don't have these dysfunctions to anywhere near the same extent.

"Fixing things is not rocket science"

Assuming by rocket science you mean difficult but not impossible why are you assuming it's not difficult to fix any problem?

It's okay to criticize Democrats, mmkay?

The Democrat platform has a 3,200 word section covering education[0]. It covers dozens of topics, but doesn't appear to contain a single word about administrative bloat or poor use of resources on the part of the public schools system.

It's safe to say that this issue isn't something that Democrats want to talk about, and I think the parent comment is spot-on as to the reason why.

[0] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin...

Management doesn't belong to unions.

"but most of it goes into administrative cost"

Source?

Bureocracy is easy to create and almost impossible to destroy. I think its one of the main reasons start ups beat out established competitors who on paper can bring much more resources to bear.

I dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.

This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy?

Or to put it another way, bureaucracy increases as a result of systems. E.g. 'We want to do a new thing, let's set up a new team to do it'

But there rarely seems to be continuous, automatic counter-system in place. I.e. a generic, regularly re-run reaping process that exists solely to decrease the number of teams/orgs/rules

You have periodic, CFO-org-led centralization / re-orgs, but those are default: status quo. Someone explicitly has to decide to decommission a thing, and that turns into a political struggle.

Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?

> Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?

Isn't that called an audit? They're rare because you can't force bureaucrats to always be making the argument for their usefulness without impacting their actual work. Impact assessment for policy is also gaining some ground, at least wrt. government. So that when a policy fails to achieve its goals, that failure is a matter of shared knowledge.

That's why, in my experience, it usually comes out of the CFO org. At the end of the day, they have the actual opex/capex numbers.

And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance).

Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years.

It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.

>This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy?

Because bureaucracy is people (management, employees) reaching for more power.

Why would they ever reach for less power?

And if some management unit implemented such "stack ranking" and discarded other units, they'd make enemies quickly, and be undermined, as other (not yet discard people and units) would be fearing for their position.

Not to mention that management being about personal power, their "stack ranking" would basically be based on "does this unit/product/team/etc furthers my power"?

I like how to tried to come off as unbiased by agreeing with Bannon on this one issue but calling him a "goon" and saying you don't agree with his other politics. However you then make this obvious right wing statement.

"of various non-product roles like H.R that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities."

Who are you to say that certain groups of people don't deserve to have their own resources when they may face similar issues of racism or sexism. Maybe they feel more comfortable talking amongst people like them about sensitive issues. How many more HR people do you think it takes to set these groups up when they are mostly just employees.

You also talk about training impying that it's only for "box checking", which is a obvious right wing red flag. Basically, you assume that no one really cares, everything is for show, simply because you don't care.

You just have no empathy and therefore any resources allocated at companies that wouldn't help you are useless.

Sorry, could you elaborate? Are you saying that it’s impossible for someone right wing to dislike Steve Bannon, or that no one should express right wing opinions on HN, or something else?

Where do I say that?

I don't like manipulative arguments. This person tried to set themselves up as being unbiased or "above the situation". This is done so that others, who normally tune out certain types of people or have a bias (which to be fair is wrong but natural), will take their arguement more seriously.

It's like when the wise old man in a movie finally speaks on a contentious issue Everyone listens more closely and places a higher initial value on their opinion.

This is entire conversation was about excess administratiors/managers, whether that's the case at all or some companies has almost nothing to do with employee groups, like a group of Black employees. These groups are self managed by employees with the backing of HR.

This person is so right wing that they couldn't help make a point about how overly sensitive we are and that these groups are unneeded due to that. This is Glenn Beck at a chalkboard connecting everything negative (bloated management) to a view of opposing political force. It's so transparent that I blew my head gasket.

Alone that would be annoying but combined with the "I normally hate X and disagree with X but this view has some merit" BS guided my response

You don't say that. If you had said it I wouldn't need to ask for clarification. I'm just trying to understand what you did mean. [EDIT: you subsequently added an explanation, thanks]

While I don't agree with your politics I do understand the desire to raise issues you feel passionate about even if they're only indirectly or tangentially connected to the topic at hand. However, if you had focused exclusively on managerial and administrative overhead without trying to connect it with your political grievances, real or imagined, the discussion would be vastly improved by being less divisive and more constructive.

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