It’s a job like any other, and doesn’t need protection, at cost to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a very small subset).
Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that already happens for admissions.
Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals?
Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do.
In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who run the town and implement the services, it becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and associated services? The sports complex and associated services? The transportation system?
And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a university, because a university is just a school, and it shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One, you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get rid of these services, often times the local town cannot replace them. So how are they to manage?
So if you're having trouble understanding why a university can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it could be because you don't have a clear understanding of their role and why they are crucial. Universities require bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size of the student population.
Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased 75% across universities.
Per https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-... over the last 20 years, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.
So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level of admin service or was the level of service just fine and they got bloated because they could, not because they needed to?
Or put another way:
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> 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.
I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it explains the vast majority of the bloat.
Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately they demand greater services.
Implicit here is that there is or should be some sort of linear or sublinear relationship to admin and the student body. If the number of admin grows faster than the student body, is that strange, and is it bad?
1) is that strange?
It's not clear this is strange. First, Universities are highly modular organizations, so there's a lot of duplicated effort. Let's say it takes 5 faculty, and 3 admin to run a department that services 10 students. We open a new department and double our students, so we have 10 faculty, 6 admin, and 20 students. But now with all those students, we need two Teaching Assistants. Turns out that hiring an admin to manage the teaching assistants frees 2 faculty to do more research, so we hire another admin to do that. Student population stays the same. The students need a health center now because the local health facilities are insufficient, so now we need to open a whole health center and that requires 3 new staff with 2 admins. So admin has grown again with no new students.
You see how this can go? For a place line Yale or Stanford, which offer full hospitals, law schools, giant sport facilities, manages dozens of buildings, hundreds of programs and degrees, food services, safety services, IT services, library services... all of these things require coordination and management, and that can easily balloon without adding a single new student.
2) is that bad?
Now, the argument is usually that the students don't need all these things. Well first of all, the standards are much higher than they were even when I was in school in the 2000s. Back then research at an undergraduate level was optional, these days it's required or you are not competitive as a candidate. What does that mean? It means more undergrads in research, so we need more faculty support for undergraduate research experiences. That means freeing up faculty time with services like graders, research offices, legal offices, tutoring support, student services, and all the administrators that go with that. But it frees up faculty time to work 1:1 with students, which, was the goal.
However if you look at that from the outside, you see "administrative bloat". Take all that away without understanding the why, and you end up with fewer administrators, but the faculty have to do more work now chasing grant money and grading. If you don't want them to be doing that, we need to figure out as a society how to dole out research grants, but until then, it is what it is.
Secondly though, universities aren't just for students. My argument is in fact they are towns, and they are there for everyone there. Students, faculty, staff, admins, the general public, the cafeteria workers, the IT people, the librarians, police, the children at the campus daycare, program director at the arts center, the sports facility managers... everyone. A university is a livable, walkable, self-contained town where everyone is focused and oriented on the pursuit of higher education. What a great thing to have in our society, which by and large is oriented around the pursuit of profit.
I think the more our society becomes focused on profit, the more universities will be forced to grow their scope. If we want them to dial back, let's invest in our local communities.
First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously define and measure those qualities.
This would be great, but I will present without comment the fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far the best way that we know how to do ability-based admissions.
You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission.
Is this for any institution of higher learning? Or just public institutions (ie, institutions that receive public/federal money)?
Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power.
It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions.
Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.
Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the expansion of the administration and increasing education costs.
The main point is, professors don’t need life-time protection in many fields where research is increasingly focused on obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven. The gap between the type of research in academia and industry is not that much in many areas.
Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of the industry. The duration could depend on the field.
A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be fired for low performance, or for economical reasons. You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.
But this is Texas, with US labor protection and a culture which openly hates education and dissent, so in this specific case it’s definitively bad.
Why is this desirable (to anyone other than elderly faculty)?
This is a completely untrue and biased stereotype. No one in Texas “openly hates education”.
As for the dissent aspect, I don’t even know where to begin with that one.
This in my opinion is really what tenure is about, getting out of the yearly firing that adjuncts and lecturers face.
Even one who took a month of unannounced vacation out of the country then retroactively declared it as work from home when it turned out they had not even accrued the time they took. They were also only approved for one day a week work from home.
My point being at least where I work it is next to impossible to fire a full time staffer who is not attached to soft money. An adjunct though is essentially disposable once a year. Part time professors, at the end of any semester.
Of course, this makes perfect sense, due to the role adjuncts fill in the campus community. They are and always have been temporary labor that are used to fill small or short-term roles. For example, they may serve as a project manager on a capstone, a lecturer for a section, or a leader for a recitation. They are not full time faculty and are not expected to fill the role of a full time faculty member. At best they will work for maybe 14 weeks, maybe 6-8 hours a week for one course.
Why shouldn't an adjunct be harder to fire than an administrator, who has a full-time, 40 hour per week, year-round role at the university?
The problem you are alluding to is when a university builds a faculty out of adjuncts, which is just bad practice, and indicative of a bad university.
Tenure is what affords academics the time to pursue research that pays off in 10 years instead of 2.
Grants, trends, citations, and status...but money really? I come from mathematics and the notion of getting rich in academia is laughable. Maybe that's why so many math and physics people go to finance.
It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a controversial twitter post.
So what's the thinking here? Seems like it could be...
* pure political theater, without really focusing on long-term affects
* the result of deciding to not even fight a battle for control of administration for public universities in the state (except in that case... if you think the administrators won't share your views, making it easier for them to fire professors seems foolish)
* similar to the above, but maybe a more outright battle on public education in general; possibly the first of many moves in the hope that right-wing private universities will emerge as replacements?)
There are many, many examples of supposed "free speech advocates" trying to silence dissenting voices or criticism.
Under that assumption, it makes perfect sense that Texas conservatives, believing colleges are liberal bastions that spread ideas they disagree with, would see anything that reduces the power of college faculty as a win.
* if they don't control the administration of the schools, this only serves to make it harder to hire anybody and easier to fire those who the administration doesn't agree with. Presumably conservatives. That's a net loss.
* if they do control the administration (or have a path to getting that control) then why not just hire people who think like they do and then enjoy the results of having those folks have tenure?
They control the purse strings.
You have vastly more power in society by being able to remove your political enemies, than by being able to appoint your friends.
There's a lot of ways in which the latter can screw up - your friends might turn out to be less pliable than you wanted, someone might have been appointed who turned out to be a trojan horse, someone might have been appointed who was palatable to your goals a decade ago, but is now causing trouble, someone might have been appointed under your opponent's watch, etc, etc.
When you instead hang a sword of Damocles over their collective necks, they have no choice but to toe the party line.
It's only new hires who will be affected.
So "hire your political friends" is still important, since they can do some damage before you have a chance to fire them, even given you having additional leverage (and you can imagine a certain kind of academic who could ride that publicity to a lucrative position).
I guess the difference between my thinking here and the Texas GOP's is that I'm saying "make sure your friend are around even when you're not in power anymore" and they're thinking "we will be in power forever."
It's easy to spot that backlash complaint - "I used to be able to say this in the 90s" - but from what I'm seeing, it's a mistake to think the motivation is "more speech for everyone" and not "this should still be allowed, but that needs to go back in the closet."
In a way it’s like tattoos. Trump rallies are chock full of them somehow. These folks aren’t clinging to their parents taboos, their reasons for being conservative are different.
(Of course that’s true of liberals too. A lot of the “follow the social norms and watch what you say” people migrated to the Democratic Party over the last couple of decades. This is especially apparent in affluent, highly educated suburbs where there has been major changes in voting patterns without necessarily significant changes in culture.)
> It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a controversial twitter post.
contains within it the idea that not being fired for a controversial twitter post or even free speech generally are either concepts that help Republicans or concepts that Republicans believe in, neither of which are true. Not for present day Republicans, historical Republicans, idealized conservatives or any shade of right wing thought except for a tiny insignificant rump of libertarians.
These two statements are written as if there's an implication; there isn't one.
>It’s a job like any other, and doesn’t need protection, at cost to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a very small subset).
Bold claim! Let's see if it's more than just, like, your opinion.
(Again, it isn't).
And I don't understand how others in this thread are saying academic freedom isn't necessary anymore/doesn't matter. The entire purpose of the republican party attacking tenure is so they can explicitly attack academic freedom.