Not so very long ago — say, the 1960s — colleges and universities ran pretty lean operations. Professors devoted most of their time to teaching, and the few administrators did things that needed doing. Then along came federal aid to higher education, leading to low teaching loads for many professors and a huge expansion of administrative personnel. Is this a good thing?
In today’s Martin Center article, Alejandro Ramos finds it anything but.
He writes:
The problem is administrative growth that becomes detached from mission. Administrative growth is not simply about too many people in suits walking across campus. It is about what happens when universities expand managerial structures without asking whether that expansion actually serves the academic mission.
That key question has been lost over the decades of gushing money for higher education. And as Ramos observes, once bureaucracies root in, they seem inevitably to grow and never stop finding new justifications for their existence.
Ramos continues, “Higher education has become skilled at justification. Every office has a rationale. Every initiative has a strategic purpose. Every new position can be tied to an institutional priority. But students often experience something different: confusion, distance, and fragmentation.”
One might conclude that student learning has become an afterthought.