“Nobody ever heard of an ‘adjunct administrator'”: Higher Ed SNAFU

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has a sharp column up
at
USA Today. It’s about out-of-control administrators who
outnumber full-time faculty at most colleges and universities and
are largely responsible for the climate of close-mindedness and
repressive policies. Reynolds runs through several recent,
high-profile examples of Dean Wormer-level stupidity
before 

In his book, The Fall of the Faculty, Johns
Hopkins Professor Benjamin Ginsberg talks about the
profusion of “deanlets” that has overtaken higher education. But
it’s even worse when those deanlets not only eat up the substance
of institutions, but also command armed force. It’s extremely
doubtful that any outside law enforcement agency would have
responded to any of the “threats” listed above, but campus police,
called in by insecure deanlets, have little choice. This sort of
behavior, though, is unfair, bad for morale, and likely to spur
expensive and embarrassing litigation…. 

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty.
And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to
shrink faculty numbers while keeping
administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by
low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct
administrator.”… 

 With college
enrollment falling and budgets
under pressure, legislatures, donors and alumni will
be looking at ways to restructure schools in the future. The
profusion of self-important deanlets and the abuse of campus police
forces ought to be looked at as part of this process. It’s just
another symptom of the now-imploding higher education
bubble.

More here.

I support the move toward “adjunct administrators.” It
used to be widely understood that a college or university travels
on the quality of its faculty, not its climbing walls, dining
halls, or number of administrators. The University
of Arkansas’ Jay Greene found that between 1993 and 2007, the
number of administrators at research universities grew by 39
percent per 100 students while the number of employees directly
involved in research and teaching grew by just 18 percent. More
damning, spending on administration grew 50 percent faster than
spending on instruction. Administrators don’t just add to the
open-air prison climate on many campuses, they directly add to
rising costs.

Reason TV‘s Alexis Garcia interviewed Reynolds a
few weeks back about his important book The New School and
many other topics. Watch below or
go here for downloadable versions, full text, and
links.