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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I hope some enterprising journalist works out some way to wiggle in there and try to figure out exactly what all these administrators are doing, because to me, it's not a merely a rhetorical question. What are all these administrators doing? I'm 100% serious. Really, what on Earth are they doing?

A great deal of the truly hard work of running a University, like scheduling several thousand students into several thousand classes, is done either entirely by or with great assistance from computers. In the absence of prior knowledge of the situation, had you asked me whether a university would need more or fewer administrators today per student or professor than in 1960, I would have immediately answered "fewer".

Moreover, to be clear, I'm not trying to make an implicit argument here that they must be doing worthless things. That argument, if I were to make it, could only come after this question is answered. Further, I'm not asking for people to conjecture what they may or may not be doing from the outside; I can do that as well as the next guy. But if you have direct experience, I'm all ears. I'm especially interested in hearing about the experiences of people who are deep down in the system, removed from direct student or professor interaction, not a lab assistant or counsellor whose contribution is obvious.

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> A great deal of the truly hard work of running a University, like scheduling several thousand students into several thousand classes, is done either entirely by or with great assistance from computers.

The work you are describing used to be done by secretaries and office assistants -- you are quite right, and those jobs for the most part no longer exist.

When you ask what a dean does, it rather depends on the position. If we're talking about the dean of a particular college (say, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at a state university), then the answer is: _everything_. Every department with a problem comes to you, expecting it to be solved right now. Everyone always needs more money, and you have to figure out some way that no one's budget explodes (you will be talking to the Provost or Vice-Provost quite frequently). Oh, and you also have to fight all the other colleges over funding as well. And find out how to attract new faculty to your departments. And make sure that no departments are self-destructing, as they do every once in a while. Or perhaps the History Department has decided to phase out an antiquated method of teaching that has got some old fart alumni all riled up about a loss of traditions. Guess who's getting called? You.

The idea that an organization of 1,000 faculty and two or three times that in staff [1] would have no greater administrative worry than class scheduling is, frankly, laughable. Would you expect a corporation of that size to get by with no managers?

The positions that the original article bemoans (which are also deanships) appear to be higher up the food chain, and are almost certainly the result of severe bureaucratic bloat. And don't get me wrong -- it is in the nature of a state university to be incredibly bureaucratic, and they could always use a bit more slimming. I just wish HN wouldn't always take the bait of "OMG HIGHER ED IS SO BLOATED TEAR IT DOWN TEAR IT DOWN", which scans rather well but, as with any oversimplification, ignores all the interesting parts of the argument.

[1] e.g. a decently-sized college at a state university

But the tone of the OP (and the article as well) isn't to get rid of all managers or tear down higher ed entirely (not to say that opinion isn't alive and kicking on HN, just I don't see it in the article or OP's comments). It's asking whether there's justification for the current ratio of upper management vs. faculty.

Yes, there are important things that need to be done and handled, and I'm glad there are people with the talent to handle those (I know I'd be incapable of defusing faculty politics at a University scale), but is it really necessary for staff at the top tier grow at 10x the rate as staff at a lower tier? I always imagined the makeup of a business to be generally a pyramid, so you add multiples more elements in the lower ranks than elements at the upper ranks to sustain the pyramid shape.

Maybe the issue could use restating. I feel that we're really at a loss as to how to justify these positions. If you take janitors, you can justify their count by num-buildings vs. reasonable-amount-for-one-janitor. If your janitors outnumber the trashcans they need to empty, you know there's a problem with the formula. With teaching faculty, it's num-students-or-classes vs. desirable class size. With research faculty, it's grants-obtained-and-publications-and-grad-students vs. salary-plus-lab-costs. Perhaps upper management can't be explained in such simple terms, but is it really that much harder to justify? So hard that most student/faculty that have been in your vicinity for 4 years are still unable to understand what your value is?

I have exactly the same question. In attempt to answer it, I did a cursory search for job listings for "university dean" on monster.[1] While there are better places to search, this seemed like a good place to start.

The first result for a "Dean of the University College and Library" in Ft. Lauderdale.[2] You can read it, but it seems to boil down to:

1. Ability to communicate.

2. Previous management experience.

3. Knowledge of finance (for budgeting).

4. Knowledge of libraries, and technology.

But actually I find this exercise too depressing, so I will stop here.

1 http://jobsearch.monster.com/search/university-dean_5

2 http://jobview.monster.com/DEAN-UNIVERSITY-COLLEGE-LIBRARY-J...

Edit: this one looks good, too: http://jobview.monster.com/Associate-Dean-Academic-Affairs-J...

I'm doubt that many of these positions actually post job ads or do any headhunting, rather they're awarded as gifts for political favors.

The few that do, probably just do it as a formality or because it's required by policy.

They're honestly not doing much at all. These are quite cushy positions. Work usually gets sloshed around and offloaded onto staff who make much less but work much more.

For example, at my public law school (1,000 students), there was the dean (who many suspected had an alcohol problem and appeared drunk at commencement) who makes $330,000 per year. His job is to just go around the country/world selling the school to "recruit" (we don't actually need more faculty) in order to boost our "prestige" so we can climb up in the almighty US News rankings. He doesn't engage with faculty or students at all.

Then below him is another Dean, who is a prick. He makes something like $280,000 and also doesn't do much at all. He is also a "recruiter." At least he answers emails when you have a question.

Then there are other Deans, like Dean of "Student Affairs." She makes $130,000. Mind you this is just for a law school of 1,000 students situated on a larger university campus that will have its own Dean of Student Affairs as well. I have no idea what she does. She does get dressed up every day in fashionable clothes and walk around the building chatting up people. That's all I ever saw her do.

Below that is the "Director of Student Services" or something like that. This guy works his ass off, has a mediocre basement office, but literally runs the school. What does he earn? $80,000. Anytime anyone had a question, they had to go to him. After exams, he gets a pile of USB keys, one for each exam. Takes each grade for each class and logs it, curves the grades, reports them, etc.

It's all a big scam. A big one. Tuition at this school has risen every year -- they want to build a new building (Why does a law school need a fancy building? All you need is a room and a professor). They think it will boost their "ranking." Nevermind that "ranking" doesn't do anything for the local job market, which is still stagnant, and every year new graduates enter it looking for work to pay their $150,000 in loans (at 8% interest, non-dischargeable).

This school isn't even that bad compared to the other law schools out there, namely the private ones. Even a top school like Columbia states on its own site that students will spend $250,000 for their law degree (this includes a conservative housing budget).

The only thing more mind blowing than the scam itself is that we all sit around and don't seem to care as these people eat our young alive. In fact, they worship these institutions. It's their "alma mater," after all, it's like family, isn't it? Some even DONATE to them! The federal government enables the scam by flooding the industry with easily obtained credit, with no restrictions on tuition charged, and even letting for-profit "schools" get the money if they want.

This is a racket that is in big need of disruption. Where does it start? Perception. Once we stop perceiving these degrees as meaning anything, once we stop valuing prestigious names as absolutely required, and look more at individuals themselves when hiring, the racket will die.

It is in need of disruption, and it's a wicked problem. There's no simple solution and no easy starting point. Perception is definitely something that needs to change, but unfortunately behavior is much harder to change.

Another aspect of the problem is tenure. It is (extremely) difficult to fire a tenured professor (or admin for that matter). When things get tough universities have a hard time downsizing if necessary.

A resulting, and somewhat funny, problem is what universities tend to do with tenured professors who just aren't good at what they do anymore. What do you do when a professor with tenure isn't good at teaching or research? You promote them.

My college considered dropping its PE requirement back in the 70s. From what I heard, a major reason for not doing so was because all the PE teachers were tenured and couldn't be laid off.

That's unfortunate. For some reason that reminded me of high school. The AP English teacher was notorious for being considered almost crazy. Her son was a classmate of mine too and one time he decided to flip a compressed air can upside down during class and spray his own arm.

It was well-known that your performance on class work meant very little, and your only opportunity to get a good grade was to bet on the extra credit "opportunities" that arose towards the end of the year. Basically, it all depended on how much she liked you. One girl gave her a ride to the airport and her grade miraculously jumped to a 4.0 after nearly failing every assignment.

She also happened to be the chair of the AP committee, and tenured. It wasn't until well after I graduated that the school was finally able to do something about her, which amounted to having her teach non-AP courses and removing her from the committee.

PE requirement in University? It's... unusual... no?

MIT has it and a swimming test to graduate. No idea how wide spread it is

Caltech has a PE requirement.

Ga. Tech had one in the olden days when I went there. Survival swimming, which involved things such as swimming the length of the pool underwater with a brick and staying afloat for an hour. I think we had to do another PE course in addition, but that may have just been my choice.

i'm sorry but i don't see tenure as a root cause problem here (unless someone can find figures saying tenured positions are growing at a rate comparable to admin).

tl;dr summary of academia: high failure rate, low salary (per unit brain power) and the only carrot on offer is that somewhere decades down the line you might get a salary that doesn't hinge on kissing up to this year's newest admin quality surge? seriously, tenure (done right, i'm not defending idiots) is the only safeguard that allows universities to fulfill their legal obligation of 'Conscience of Society'. I wish more professors had tenure and the courage to speak up against waffle and balderdash. NB Conscience of Society may be a NZ only part of the Education Act but I suspect it was borrowed from the UK system wholesale back in the day NB 2 This is playing out in NZ realtime as a scientist is being wailed on for having the temerity to point out some rather unpleasant facts about NZ's environment

Not necessarily a root cause problem, but it is still a problem that affects the quality of education and research.

Tenure was intended to allow for the things you're stating (i.e. academic freedom) without fear of backlash from donors. Unfortunately, as with all things there are downsides and one is having people who strive for tenure in order to ensure a stable job.

One thing that is a fundamental problem is how universities operate. There is inherent waste in everything that is typically done. Classes aren't designed so that the work you do amounts to anything beyond a grade for the class.

In a way, it relates to your point about perception. The perception of universities has changed because originally the university was for academics. College wasn't necessary to get a job. Now it's almost a necessity to find a decent job, but the way colleges operate aren't in a way that optimizes for that.

The problem with getting rid of tenure is that we have an up-or-out system in academia: you either rise to tenure, or you're fired. Permadoc positions would be nice, but if you eliminated tenure then academics would just become more abused, overworked corporate employees. Not because academic freedom would die, but because "if you don't publish X papers and bring in $Nx100 thousand research dollars this year, we'll get someone who will."

Private universities exist.

If public universities were mismanaged and inefficient, we would see private ones providing a better product at a lower cost.

I would agree with this statement, but the prestige situation is a self ensured stagnation. You do see big private competitors such as Phoenix, but in order to compete they lose out in the prestige competition.

I think the only real disruptive players in the business timelines that Universities operate in are the technical school, but they have been around long enough to play the prestige game also.

Phoenix for example will need to operate for 100 years to even begin to sit at the table with the nostalgia crew.

Good luck if you believe that Univ of Phoenix is a disruptor in the space and simply lacks "prestige".

That's quite an excuse. The newer University of California campuses have only been around for a few decades.

Phoenix is probably does more harm than good to the for-profit or at least disruptive private college community. Their targeting of federal subsidies that often account for ~90% of their income and the stories of them doing things that basically trick low income people into spending more money than they will get from the degree give everyone a bad impression. Even if these stories are all exaggerated (which I have no reason to believe they are), they aren't entirely false and it makes people (reasonably) dubious of other for-profit schools. Someone should have made an elite for-profit school first that then expanded to what Phoenix could be.

It's like google and other companies with driver-less cars. Sure, their cars might be safer than drivers statistically, but if you get a few high profile accidents that a driver could have stopped, they will probably get swamped in bad PR and get delayed many years. Luckily, this hasn't happened.

random example from google: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/vet...

Education is not a market where perfect competition obtains (as for fungible commodities like oil or cotton or iron). Rather, it follows laws of monopolistic competition, so price doesn't automatically converge on a sensible equilibrium.

Private universities have found that there are other metrics they can compete in other than cost: ease of admissions, prestige, specialization, etc.

Public universities are hugely subsidized by the state.

In many places states are just another donor to their public universities, budget-wise.

" According to the Delta Cost Project, most of the nation’s public research universities had more than half their costs paid by tuition in 2008, and other four-year public institutions were hovering near the 50 percent mark. With three more years of tuition increases, they, too, have probably passed it, said Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the project, leaving only community colleges as mostly state-financed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/education/24tuition.html?p...

≈50% is a fairly large amount of subsidy.

But it's not 50% subsidy, it's just 50% things other than tuition. There's also various donations and grants.

You wish. It used to be that way, and it used to make up for the comparatively small endowment, but it isn't the case any longer.

AFAIK, it's actually significantly easier to fire administrators. My parents are both bio professors, so I've been around academia my whole life. Multiple of their friends at different schools discussed the downside of being "promoted" to a dean is that they lose their tenure. These were all private schools though.

This reminds me of when I went to a legal symposium at a newly opened law school (UC Irvine). There were about 80 attendees sitting in a room with Aeron chairs. A lecture room with Aeron chairs, FFS. Many attendees were congratulating the Dean on the opening of the school, with more than one reference to 'that new law school smell.' This is why I can't afford to attend a real school :-(

You think that's bad? Check out NYU's Bobst library, where there are entire floors with Aeron chairs.

Aeron chairs in a place where you'd spend many, many hours studying are useful. Not for an hour-long lecture.

well you completely miss the point

the dean is a dean, because in the past he was more succesful in raising money(+ you need a ph.d), but more important is how much money you raise.

i can show you a bunch of guys whos resume consists exclusively of how much money they raised

Nonprofit institutions are not supposed to operate so exclusively on capitalist principles.

Those deanships sound like sinecures.

"Why does a law school need a fancy building? All you need is a room and a professor"

Or in my subject, a room, a few whiteboards, some textbooks, plenty of scrap paper, and the attention of my students, which is getting harder to get.

Something has gone wrong in the UK as well, we have a culture of checking, inspecting, compliance, data driven quality &c and all it does is increase costs.

You know, with just a room and a whiteboard you won't be able to convince parents that paying tuition is worth it. Universities need tuition, because the share of state and federal funds has dropped in the last decade.

At my university they are renovating the teaching labs, and it took them half a year to replace the tiles that had rotted off the floor of my office.

Sounds like marketing, not education ;-)

The problem is that nobody has been disrupting academia at all. Instead, everyone has chosen to disrupt job-training with for-profit job-training scams and to disrupt teaching with massive online video courses (which have rampant cheating and plagiarism problems).

I'd really love if someone could come up with a way to create a new form of nonprofit teaching and research institution not prone to the feudal staleness and scamming of real universities.

Mind, in a lot of places, they just call that a "publicly-funded university", and it often has no scamming problems at all. Still involves a stale institution and a stagnant job market, though.

> I hope some enterprising journalist works out some way to wiggle in there and try to figure out exactly what all these administrators are doing

The piece isn't really "journalism"-- it's basically an op ed. You are told the opinion up front and then given some supporting facts. In this case vague and with not much detail.

Dripping nourishing soap water on the thinning surface of the higher education bubble.

Beautifully put.

I am reading in horror the various fees involved - I have a doctorate in statistics and a couple of years postdoctoral experience and I have been living independently since 18, and have never taken a loan in my life.

Something crazy is afoot in the US.

Some major responsibilities you have not included: recruiting new faculty, stealing other universities' faculty, restructuring underperforming departments, handling promotions. And above all: raising money!

As you've mentioned, admin doesn't deal with scheduling really since it's mostly automated and what they do aren't worthless things, necessarily. What does happen, however, is mostly repetitive and overlapping work.

“This is a $2.2 billion operation—you’ve got to have some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it,” he says. “We’re about as lean as we can afford to be.”

As Acting President Timothy Sands stated, they need people to manage things for the entire university. The university itself, however, is comprised of many different schools. Each of these have their own admin to function.

Some schools, however, overlap in what they teach and do. Other schools don't have the same demand as they used to. Others have difficulty in being self-sufficient (i.e. difficulty fundraising) and rely entirely on state funding. The same goes for departments within schools, which also tend to have their own admin. For all of these cases, it makes much more sense to consolidate in order to reduce reptition and overlapping work as well as costs. So why hasn't this been done? It does happen, but, as you can probably guess, bureaucracy tends to get in the way. Each school/department formed for a reason, and they don't want to be "acquired" in a sense, especially the admin because their jobs will be at risk.

I remember being told about a discussion between several deans and an alumni of the university who went on to become a billionaire. They were discussing several things with one of the topics being the budget and the university's future. The alumni suggested a plan to form a new school by consolidating a few of the schools and departments since what they did was overlapping or complimentary. No one agreed to it.

I worked for the office of the "Special Assistant to the Vice Provost for International Relations" (though that title has been changed many times since then) at my public University. Her job consisted of answering emails here and there between bickering faculty members or administrators in order to run interference before these emails reached the President or one of the Provosts (of which there were I think 13) and wasted their supposedly valuable time. She would also coordinate administrator/faculty "delegations" to other Universities abroad -- basically the president of our university and rich alumni going various countries pretending they were foreign dignitaries and signing various "memorandums of understanding" with similar individuals at other universities. This mainly involved getting her unpaid interns (or, members of her "Leadership Program", as she liked to call it) to create huge binders of useless information (basically printing out Wikipedia articles). From what I heard, the new President of our university has asked for these binders to be discontinued because they seemed like a waste of time and paper. Other than the binders (which she neither created nor read), she would have her assistants, who were making a few bucks above minimum wage, call and speak with the travel agents and party planners who would actually do the work of planning these engagements. She would also, of course, accompany the delegations at the university's expense to make sure everything was "running smoothly." Thus, the job of entertaining rich Alumni was delegated by the President to the Vice Provost for International Affairs, who then delegated it to her, who then delegated it to her poorly-paid assistants and unpaid interns. For this, the "Assistant to the Vice Provost for International Affairs" made 125,000 dollars a year, while the Vice Provost for International Affairs made $165,000 -- fully documented by the state for anyone who cares to see.

I'm curious what would happen if you cut out all administration of technical solutions entirely at universities with top notch computer science departments. Right now so many of the technical solutions are antiquated crap. If people had no choice but to solve this problem on their own, but had access to some good developers at their school, would some interesting open-source projects eventually rise from the initial confusion?

Take course scheduling for example. Are there any well known open-source course scheduling solutions out used by many universities? If not, why not? Every time we see an industry with a dearth of open source tools, we should be worried and be asking why.

What you have is an obscure procurement process intractable to open competition , dominated by niche vertical players with fat rolodexes with a quasi monopoly on academic institutions. The result of which are incestuous business relationships not at all concerned with the interests of students or taxpayers case in point : textbooks.

This industry is beyond ripe for disruption. it's an institutional racket.

There is at least one open-source administrative systems effort going on: http://kuali.org/

The software is crap, and hated by most who actually have to use it.

Because 'scheduling' in the real world (as opposed to 'scheduling as an operations research problem') is not as simple as you make it out to be. Every department has their own requirements, about being able to schedule labs, equipment, people, timetables at which specific security personnel is available, rush hour avoidance requirements, and dozens of other factors. It is not impossible to abstract all those away into an algorithm that can come up with a solution, but at that point, you basically need a programmer to make the schedule. Which is why consultants come in to customize the software to the specific situation, leading to a number of solution providers, which is the situation we're in now.

(grump mode on) I wish everybody who wants to hit submit on 'how hard can this be? I can do it over a weekend!' type of posts on HN would come off their high horse and apply Occam's Razor. If a problem exists, and probably thousands of people have already devoted substantial parts of their lives to it, how likely is it that some amateur on HN would come up with a better solution in 15 seconds after reading a cursory overview of it? Answer: negligibly likely. So what's the more likely explanation? That the reality is not as simple as the abstract overview makes one think. Which is exactly what is going on here.

There are few if any workable OS scheduling packages because it's boring and situation-specific. 'Scheduling' as an abstract problem is solved, all that is left are implementations, which are all site-specific. Exactly the type of situation in which OS has little chances of being a realistic solution.

I don't disagree that the problems are generally harder than one thinks at first blush. However, often many of the odd intricacies and rules people have around existing processes aren't necessary, and are there because they've always been there. The act of rebuilding a modern system can help root out some inefficiencies and streamline things.

Secondly, most places with computer programs should have enough competent people to choose from to collaborate on internal projects like this to avoid the need for everything to be an outside consultant or purchase. If a small team of graduate students can't handle some of these problems, I would consider that an indication that the programs aren't doing a good enough job. I understand not every "computer science" person is a naturally good programmer - there's a distinction, etc. But there still seems to be a waste of available talent on-campus that could be tapped for some problems.

And my particular favourite: scheduling one off exam slots in medium sized rooms at unusual times of year (UK, further education, modular basic qualifications, externally marked exams). Last time, they put an exam in the room next to a music practice room...

Ah yes, spatial relationships between resources, the bane of every class scheduler across the world. The complexity of relationships between resources can explode so quickly to a degree that it becomes impossible to foresee every situation. So the software has two options: build in a Turing complete language to list this sort of dependencies (too hard to use for users), or allow large amounts of manual 'exclusion lists' for special situations. After a few years, those lists get so large that they start to contain internal conflicts. Then there are a few years of screwed up exam plannings, people get yelled at, new system gets implemented, and the whole circle starts again.

Bitter, who, me?

Yup, 'ask Fred' gets easier when you are dealing with one off events.

what on Earth are they doing

Raising money. Grant money and donations and similar sources of income don't show up by themselves, someone has to hustle their asses off to get those. And by all accounts it's getting harder and harder to pull in each dollar.

I haven't looked much into universities, but I'd check the similarities between deans and the managerial class (as well as other corporate bureaucracies, like marketing departments). Maybe books like Bousquet's _How the University Works_. (http://www.amazon.com/How-University-Works-Education-Low-Wag...)

Tech could be used to remove layers of management and empower the actual workers (as you mentioned you'd expect in 1960), or deskill workers and strengthen managerial control over production. David Noble wrote about these things.

> what on Earth are they doing?

Going to meetings about the need to write mission statements and assessment reports, to file for the accreditation team to read when they arrive in four years. They can't move up the dean ladder without good reports from the accreditation team.

my adviser happens to be the dean and it seems his job focuses on budgets, plans for improvements (direction of the department), and overall being the 'face' of the department for events between businesses and alumni.

Dean? Are you sure you don't mean department chair?

It's not clear from your profile whether you're in grad school or undergrad, but if you're a PhD student and the guy's really a dean seriously consider changing advisors even if he's a "big name"---it would be exceptional for a dean to be on the cutting edge of research, or to be spending as much time on research as you'll need. If you're an undergrad or master's student, no worries.

Much of what they do has been mandated by governments at various levels, particularly the diversicrats. The Dept. of Education can force universities to cope with a whole new layer of bureaucracy without any change in the law by making student aid contingent on compliance.

And some of it is just featherbedding. When the University of California hired Denice Denton as the chancellor for its Santa Cruz campus, one of her conditions for taking the job was a tenured appointment (with a $192k salary) for her partner. I personally know two other people who got their spouses university jobs this way, so I think it's pretty common.

Unfortunately, it is pretty common. One school at the university I attended wanted to really hire someone, but his condition was that they hire his wife. They didn't think she "fit" their school so they asked around at other schools. Another school agreed to hire her since on the surface she seemed like she'd be a good addition. To this day, the dean looks back on that and regrets that decision.

Fundraising, or managing the primadonna tenured professors.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=responsibilities+dean

How is that supposed to help? Official responsibilities for Deans (which are hardly the only administrators who have been ballooning anyhow) probably haven't changed in the last 16 years, but somehow the work field has. Therefore, such a search is highly unlikely to produce any answers to my questions.

Less snark, more thought please.

The snark is shorthand for the observation that you don't seem to have bothered to look into your own question, and judging by your reply, it sounds like you still haven't. If you had, you'd likely find that academic administration is actually much more complicated than keeping enrollment records (in the days of yore, this would have been done by clerical staff). Sorry if that hurts your feelings.

I have. I asked a question. It's considered a valid move in many places.

I know enough about the Internet to know I'm not going to find my answer on it. Google searches will be full of puff pieces, job descriptions, all sorts of other things. It's hardly going to have an "insider's apology for college administrators" with the detailed breakdown of Bob the Administrator explaining exactly why and how he does nothing all day. (That search, by the way, leads back to the article in question, as the sixth link, after the first five are essentially garbage. Google being what it is, YMMV.)

This may shock you, but Google's ability to amplify certain types of signal above the noise are inexorably bounded by the cruel mathematics of the web

Besides, I'm going to guess based on your tone that you would have found reason to complain if I had spent three hours on Google, then dared to pontificate an answer based on indirect experience on the unreliable web.

Just go to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The cruel mathematics of the web are not that restrictive.

So you don't have any experience in the area, and you don't want to do any cursory research to figure out what a university administrator does, but you do want the juicy details of an "insider's apology" that confirms your suspicions (yes I know it's just an innocent question, the kind that college kids ask about CEOs) that they do nothing all day.

Look, you're being a jerk. Not every question need be a rhetorical attempt to prove a point.

The OP clearly had an honest question, was open about his bias, and invited rebuttal of his bias. I'd actually say it's one of the best, most open comments I've ever seen on HN, and yet somehow you are intent on reading into it an ulterior motive.

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