Thread by @BretDevereaux

So the last chat-about-universities tweet went far, but it also raised a bunch of questions which I want to talk about.

One of the big questions was admin vs. staff, the structure of university governance and where the 'bloat' was.

So let's talk about it. 1/lots?

Any discussion of higher education these days runs into the phrase 'administrative bloat.' it is *everywhere* but a lot of the folks who use it won't define what it means, which leads to a lot of confusion - there are a lot of people in the university who could be 'admin.' 2/xx

Let's start with who I do *not* mean, when I talk about administrators.

First off, you have 'departmental staff' (some of whom may work in curricula or centers or other sub-department organizational units, but doing the same thing). 3/xx

Dept. Staff are your student services, accountant, HR staff who work inside the department; large departments often have a department manager who oversees the rest. A large department might well have 2 student services (undergrad and grad), an accountant...4/xx

...a general admin assist. who also does front-desk and aids faculty (scans, copies, mail, etc), along with a dept. manager who often handles HR as well.

Smaller units will combine these roles, often down to just 1 or 2 people. 5/xx

Dept. staff work in the department (physically-offices near faculty); report to the dept. chair (who is a faculty member; position typically rotates among senior faculty).

While they do 'admin' and sometimes have 'admin' in their job titles, they are not what I mean. 6/xx

Dept. staff are not the source of administrative bloat; their numbers don't seem to have meaningfully grown compared to faculty (jamesgmartin.center/2019/06/admini…). Also, depts would collapse without them, and I do not say this because I am married to a dept. manager (but I am). 7/xx

The other chunk of staff I want to pull out are staff in traditional university admin. units - registrar, bursar, academic advising, library.

I don't have good data on them (they're harder to pick out than dept. staff) but my impression is they haven't grown much either. 8/xx

So when we talk about administrative 'bloat,' we should be clear we do not mean these folks. Those basic functions have existed for a long time, they're generally not super-well compensated, and they are necessary. I tend to call them 'staff' rather than admin to be clear 9/xx

So where is the admin. and bloat?

Let's start with university governance. At the top of most universities, you have a chief executive (names vary: president/chancellor/rector - gonna say chancellor henceforth), who typically as a no. 2 administrator, the provost. 10/xx

Beneath the provost are 'deans,' each of whom oversees a school/college, which in turn is made up of a bunch of academic departments, where the faculty are (headed by a chair, selected from/by dept. faculty).

Deans are typically senior faculty pulled up from the depts. 11/xx

So profs are in depts., depts. report to a college (run by a dean), which reports to the provost and chancellor. And often you had a few subordinates who might report to the provost and run all-university-services like the registrar, or the bursar. 12/xx

I want to note, titles for all of these things vary a TON. Like, UNC has a cashier's office headed by a Cashier, where UMASS has a Bursar's office headed by a bursar and FSU has a 'student business services' office headed by a 'Director' and THESE ALL DO THE SAME THING. 13/xx

But we've got our ideal organization: chancellor, provost, deans/colleges, depts./chairs, a handful of registrars/bursars, etc.

Seems simple, direct, fairly rational.

So now let's make a mess of it. With vice-provosts and deanlets. 14/xx

Like the other titles here, these positions go by a *lot* of names, but they both seem to me to be pretty clearly tied to the business model of education; note for instance onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/he… or jstor.org/stable/2649146… . 15/xx

To oversimplify a bit, when you bring in business-world managers to the provost or chancellor positions, promising to 'shake up' the university, they are going to want to do stuff, which means creating new units to do those things. 16/xx

Those new units need someone to run them and these tend to be professional adminstrators, rather than elevated faculty (like the old deans and provosts). They have any number of titles - vice provost, vice president, asst. dean. Each university is different. 17/xx

Often they are collectively called 'deanlets' though obviously no one has that as a title. insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/1…

The key is that they tend to be new positions outside of the traditional structure, held by prof. administrators, not faculty/former-faculty. 18/xx

Those new administrators (who are paid typically quite a bit more than traditional university staff, like dept. managers, registrars, bursars, etc) need staff, so they hire staff to run the new centers/initiatives etc.

All of which costs money, of course. 19/xx

These initiatives tend to stack up over time, so you get a layer-cake of new initiatives on top of old centers, all of which keep running and soaking up funds. Sometimes you have multiple initiatives designed to solve the same problem, all running in parallel. 20/xx

The other big structural change with the business model - it's a fairly common initiative - is an effort to create centralized administration by pulling functions out of the departments or colleges and putting them together in big new university bureaucracies. 21/xx

Often this is a 'service center' or 'business center' - you can often tell it's new because it exists in a big off campus building (because it's new building for new unit).

The *promise* of these things is that they'll be cheaper and more efficient than dept staff. 22/xx

Which you can understand: these business-model guys were brought in to fix cost-growth, remember?

The *problem* is that they don't work. Moving functions away from depts. (or registar/advising/etc) makes it harder for faculty/students to use them. 23/xx

So depts./colleges refuse to give up their staff in these roles - they want someone down the hall, not halfway across campus (or sometimes off of it!).

So the promised cutbacks on dept. staff never materialize; instead both fill out the same paperwork in parallel. 24/xx

And of course the deanlet or vice-provosts of each unit fight to stick around and get more staff and resources.

And so all of these centers and initiatives - often designed to save money - end up costing more money. 25/xx

THREAD CONTINUES...

Layered on top of this is the problem of compliance. Basically, the level of regulation and the layering of laws over higher ed. have radically increased the legal compliance burdens on universities (issues.org/smith-5/)... 26/50

...and in turn that compliance burden both means you need more staff at all levels, and at the same time creates demand for initiatives and centers and more centralized administration to handle new compliance paperwork.

To be clear, that's being imposed from outside...27/50

...sometimes by state legislatures that have gone to war with the universities (and like imposing lots of compliance rules on teaching), sometimes by the federal government.

All of it costs money and it gets tied up with universities trying to be lawsuit proof. 28/50

Because, of course, you show that you are trying to be in compliance with <regulation> by creating a new administrative unit with a dedicated vice/assistant/deputy dean/provost/chancellor to oversee it.

It doesn't matter if they do anything - they just need to exist. 29/50

Which gets us to the sticky problem with expanding administrations and why everyone likes to hide behind the phrase 'administrative bloat' without actually talking about who they mean...30/50

...because often these initiatives and centers are - in theory - addressing problems the students and faculty want addressed: thecollegepost.com/breaking-down-…

Moving beyond the empty phrase 'bloat' means complaining about specific units and initiatives... 31/50

...which were often created in response to faculty and student demand.

The issue is that these new initiatives often don't address those concerns - they're not supposed to. They're supposed to diffuse liability, just like many private HR depts: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… 32/50

To be clear, I'm papering over a lot of variance. I am sure many of these initiatives do good work - what works and what doesn't is often hyper-localized.

But a lot of them impose new paperwork burdens in place of making any kind of actual changes...33/50

...a situation perhaps most obvious with the proliferation of centers and initiatives devoted to diversity at schools where the diversity of the students or faculty has either been unchanged or in some cases gotten worse at the same time. chronicle.com/article/why-di… 34/50

Often pulling those functions into a specific office actually makes it less effective (insidehighered.com/views/2020/08/…) because that new office gets money, but no power to make changes. Had the job remained with the provost, the provost could *do* something. 35/50

But it is often open secret at some universities that these programs exist to give the university cover so that it can be *less* diverse or equitable in its admissions and hiring (typically so it can chase after more affluent students who make more lucrative donors). 36/50

Again - not all such programs are like this! But some are.

Worse yet, the effect these new administrative elements (all of them, not just diversity) is to drive up costs, making the university less affordable for the very folks some of these offices are trying to help. 37/50

(To be **very** clear, this is not saying "administrative bloat is diversity offices" - a line you will hear put forward, typically in bad faith. There are a lot of these top-down initiatives, only small number are about diversity and some efforts at diversity are real). 38/50

I should note I am also leaving out another form of university bloat: athletics bloat centered on the 'revenue' sports, only a tiny, TINY few of which actually bring in money (if you think your alma mater makes money off its sports teams, you are *almost*certainly*wrong*) 39/50

I don't feel qualified to speak to athletics except to say "it's a problem with broad negative impacts." Others have done a lot more than me. If you want a good starting point, read J. Smith, "Cheated" (2015). amazon.com/Cheated-Scanda… 40/50

So now you might ask "who the hell is responsible for all of this?" which brings us to university governance.

So the president/chancellor/rector/whatever in theory runs the university. In a big state school, it is likely that s/he answers to a 'board of trustees.' 41/50

Sometimes that's a board of governors, or regents, or trustees. Again, each university system is different, often with different names. Most state public schools have their board of trustees selected by the governor. 42/50

By and large it is the board of trustees who make decisions about who the chancellor is and the overall direction the university is going to make.

Consequently, if you want reform within the university administration - if you are looking to ditch the business model...43/50

...and its oversaturated administrations, you have to start with the trustees. Typically that means getting the governor to appoint trustees who share that vision - that's why the business model of education started with state desires to engage in cost-cutting. 44/50

Finally I should note that most universities have a 'faculty senate.' In theory that makes the faculty self-governing; in practice the faculty senate can't do anything without approval from the chancellor/president/whatever,who in turn wants to keep the trustees happy. 45/50

Thus even tenured professors mostly (adjuncts don't get represented by most faculty senates; also staff are even less represented, which is not great) have little control over the university's direction.

Often their best option is to raise a stink in the local papers... 46/50

...or, I suppose on twitter, like I am doing now.

So how do we fix this stuff? There are a lot of little answers.

I think the first step is putting leadership back in the hands of faculty, as I stressed before. The business model has to go. 47/50

States and the federal government need to reassess the compliance and regulatory burden they are putting on schools, which just grows and grows (yes, under this admin. too - try processing a student visa or foreign faculty hire). 48/50

Finally, states and university leaders need to then ask real questions about if these centers, initiatives and offices just *sound good* (or chase the most recent passing academic fad) or if they *do good.*

In many cases, rather than creating new offices...49/50

...it would be better to make and keep decision-makers responsible for achieving outcomes - with due appreciation that a universities also cannot solve broader social problems on their own. 50/50

ADDENDA:
First, I want to note that my solutions on this thread are probably a lot less complete here. I am not a university staff member and while I try to talk to staff folks and understand what they do (more than most faculty, perhaps), a lot of them know more....

...so perhaps the ultimate solution here is 'talk to staff more.'

Second: I want to stress again, every university and university system is different. Internal organizations and effectiveness vary wildly. Some are better run. Some are more focused on education....

...if you are reading this and thinking, "but hey, our XYZ center actually works and <does what it's supposed to do/saves money/etc>" - you are probably right. You'd know better than me. Every university is different and I am only speaking in generalities!

Third: I would not have come across some of the information here about university organization if it wasn't brought to my attention by a study my better half was involved with on a tangential topic (improving staff-faculty interactions); hr.unc.edu/files/2020/04/…

Also, by the by, if your initiative/center/office does work and produces measurable cost-savings or significant improvements in your metrics, I am **sure** the Chronicle of Higher Education would **love** to hear about it from you. Go tell them (and by extension, us).

...so I wanted to be sure that I called some attention to that.

Especially since one of its points is the point I make above: talking to university staff - esp. mid/low level - is the best way for faculty or the general public to get a handle on what works/doesn't.