[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

An Absolute Embarrassment: Administrative Bloat in Montana Higher Education

John Snider, PhD
Professor of English
Montana State University Northern

In 2009 Erskine Bowles, the President of the University of North Carolina system, got it right when he referred to the unchecked growth of administrators in his system as "an absolute embarrassment" (Selingo). In 387 B.C. Plato began teaching at his Academy which continued its existence until the year 529, almost one thousand years later. Unlike our modern universities the Academy had no administrators. There were simply teachers and students engaged in the pursuit and celebration of the truth. Imagine for a minute if Aristotle or Plato would have tolerated an endless meeting to discuss outcomes assessment, or if they would have listened to the presentation of a strategic plan, or if they would have abided some huckster from, say, Thrace, who was hawking "best practices." Imagine any of the important intellectuals of the last two thousand years who would have endorsed a Director of Student Success or the foolish notion that students are the most important persons in a university. The administrative caste that now controls American Universities has betrayed the ideals of truth and beauty that are the foundations of genuine learning and instead has created a vast bureaucracy concerned only with its own perpetuation.

Emerson in "The American Scholar" reminds us that "[o]ur American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year" (61)—millions of dollars for stadiums and computer gadgets and fancy buildings while the value of faculty is diminished every day. As I write this, I read that our campus in Bozeman is poised to spend 12 million dollars on a parking garage. Now, the high ideals of the university are not contained in buildings. The true intellectual values of a genuine university are transcendent—they have intrinsic value. Too often we think that if we can find enough parking spaces our job is done. The last chancellor up here in Havre spent thousands of dollars on banners—now tattered by the hi-line wind; we advertise our name but do not know its real worth. And as the events surrounding the Law School in Missoula have taught us, our names, no longer sacred, are always for sale.

The sheer size of this collection of administrative workers is staggering. Although the data is a bit stale, in 2005 there were 675,000 college or university faculty in the United States, but there were "756,405 executive, administrative, and managerial...[and] other professional employees" (Ginsberg 24). Virtually none of these workers teach any students at all. The growth of administrators and professional staff relative to faculty has been well-documented. Benjamin Ginsberg in his excellent book The Fall of The Faculty reports that between 1975 and 2005 faculty grew 51% while administrators grew 85% and other professionals by 240% (25). Farhad Mirzadch concludes, "From 1987 to 2012, universities and colleges hired 87 administrative and professional workers a day, or 517,636 total" (Mirzadch). Nationwide, roughly only one-third of all employees in all colleges and universities actually teach (Ginsberg). All of this excessive administration drives up the cost of college for students and their families. Writing in the 4 April 2015 New York Times Paul Campos observes, "A major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions" (Campos).

According to The New England Center for Investigative Reporting, in the public universities of Montana the number of professional staff grew from 675 in 1987 to 1736 in 2011, or a growth of 257% while the enrollment grew only 60% (Marcus). If the Montana University System could somehow maintain the same ratio of professional staff to students that it had in 1987, the system could save from 40 to 50 million dollars a year—that is one thousand dollars for every student in the system. Moreover, the number of employees in The Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education in Montana was only seven in 1974 (Aristad). Today the Commissioner's office lists some 88 employees. According to the Montana Board of Regents' 2015 budget, in the public colleges and universities of Montana only 29% of all full time equivalent employees teach students. This means that in our state fully 71% of all full time employees in our universities do no teaching at all. Here at Montana State University Northern, where I have taught for the past 26 years, we have no professors of music, physics, psychology, foreign language, or philosophy; at the same time, the university lists some 78 administrative and contract professional employees for a student enrollment of just a little over 1,000 students.

Now imagine that you own a farm or ranch in Montana. Imagine further that the numerous buildings on your property are in need of painting before the winter sets in. You call a painting company, and they assure you that they will send 100 workers to get the job done, or as the former Mayor of Havre was fond of saying, "Get 'er done!" Now, of course, you are thrilled. One hundred painters working away will surely get the job done quickly. One day you come home from town to see how the job is progressing. And what do you discover? 29 people are painting while 71 folks are sitting around your lawn at tables writing reports, holding meetings, discussing outcomes assessment, and anticipating the next strategic plan. Over two-thirds of the people you have hired haven't even touched a paint brush. As in this scenario, perhaps the chief reason for the proliferation of "support" personnel is the fact that the very administrators whose ranks are swelling beyond any sense are the ones with the sole authority to hire workers for the university. Prestige follows those administrators with the biggest staff.

Perhaps the most damning bit of data comes to us from the Montana University System where the 2015 Operating Budget shows that less than 50% of all funds in the system are spent on instruction (http://mus.edu/board/meetings/2014/Sept2014/AdminBudget/OpBudgetMetrics/MUS-Total.htm). Think about this for a minute. Less than half of all the money spent in our state in public higher education is spent on instruction. But isn't instruction the heart of any university? Imagine that you are asked to contribute to a charity to help poor children with food or medicine. Then you find out that less than 50 cents of every dollar actually goes to food or medicine for these unfortunate children.

In addition to being bloated, the administrative staff in any university is organized along hierarchical lines—a system that compromises effectiveness and initiative. The least important director or dean is beholden to the one above; hence an authoritative and fawning relationship exists up and down the food chain. Those on top are often dictatorial to those below while those below are obsequious to those above. More than once I have been present in meetings with deans or presidents where their bosses were present. I was always struck by the shameful kowtowing of these administrators, who themselves—on their own campus—were often "little Hitlers" when dealing with faculty, students, or their dean underlings. Of course, psychologists have long noted that aggressive and passive behavior is usually two sides of the same coin. Moreover, administrators and professional staffers do not have tenure and can be sacked without explanation, hence they are timid and even afraid. They are always waiting to see what those on top want, and they become so worried about various outside agencies or political entities that they lose all track of the real demands of the higher intellectual task at hand. They are (to adapt a familiar cliché) inside the box.

Administrative bloat has now developed a new meta-level: There exists a doctorate degree in higher education administration to train these functionaries. Even here in Montana, the Board of Regents has jumped on the bandwagon. In their proposal, the various deans and provosts and presidents no longer apologize for the fact that educational leaders will be wholly unconnected with the genuine intellectual work of the university. Here we read the proposal from Bozeman presented at the Montana Board of Regents meeting held in March of 2015: "The shift in who is being hired for higher education administration positions has occurred as the roles and duties of higher education administrators and executives have become more corporate, managerial, and based on outreach and fund raising" (http://mus.edu/board/meetings/2014/Nov2014/ARSA/Level-II-Memorandum.pdf). This same proposal is replete with the obligatory buzz-words: stake-holders, data-driven, cutting edge, labor market professionalization. As a long time college writing teacher, I might add that any essay for freshman composition that used so many worn phrases would surely fail.

When a new college president is introduced as a CEO without any embarrassment on the part of the speaker, then we know we have finally gone down the rabbit hole. When we look for leaders of our universities, we need to look for poets and scientists and artists and musicians who are scholars first and who know that the center of all university intellectual life are these higher ideals of learning. Emerson put the question concisely (57), "Is not the true scholar the only true master?" In Montana the leader of our educational enterprise is a businessman. Now I do not discount business just as I do not discount the flossing of teeth or the counting of beans—enterprises of differing value but all of no relevance to the enterprise of higher education. I do not want to read in the paper that our university president has put on a tie and schmoozed with the timber lobby, or attended a football game, or yucked it up with the Chamber of Commerce, or peddled soft-drinks. I want to read that he or she has reread the works of Immanuel Kant, or learned Italian in order to read Dante in the original, or gone into the public square to demand simple honesty and kindness from our civic leaders, or gone into the banks to kick the moneylenders out into the street. But instead the leaders of our universities are more likely to fit the description of the ruling caste given by C. Wright Mills nearly 50 years ago in his book The Power Elite:

The characteristic member of the higher circles today is an intellectual mediocrity, sometimes a conscientious one, but still a mediocrity… [H]is public utterances [are] pious and sentimental, grim and brave, cheerful and empty in their universal generality. He is open only to abbreviated and vulgarized, predigested and slanted ideas. He is a commander of the age of the phone call, the memo, and the briefing. (353-54)

And we might add the e-mail, the twitter, and the webinar.

Ultimately, the administrative juggernaut becomes its own justification—an end in itself. No longer is this proliferation of meetings and reports set out to serve the higher end of learning and research and the celebration of the ideals of beauty and truth. No longer is the measure of its success whether or not it has made the world a better or fairer or safer place. The administrative edifice has becomes its own raison d'etre. Perhaps the best diagnosis of this disease comes from Emerson: "Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat… The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the décorous and the complaisant" (68). Low objects indeed. A large part of the growth in professional staff is accounted for by growth in so-called student services. Let us be clear: The primary purpose of a university is not to serve students; they are not the most important part of any university. The proper purpose and mission of a genuine university is to discover and proclaim the truth, to celebrate beauty and the ideals of learning—all of which will make us more fully human. This task is more often than not likely to threaten students because it forces them to get outside themselves and to encounter a larger universe. And certainly this purpose will anger the corporate donors who want passive and compliant workers.

One of the things that anyone who has worked in higher education has observed is that the vast majority of tasks performed by administrators could be done by a competent clerk. There are, of course, defenders of the army of administrators. None other than Stanley Fish has argued that being a Dean demands delicate skill and great intellectual acumen. Not the easy tasks set for Adam and Eve before the Fall but tasks that Fish claims "require calculations of incredible delicacy" (Fish). Really? And what are these delicate tasks? Assigning Space! Yes indeed, the momentous task which is the culmination of 3,000 years of intellectual work and is done in the shadow of Plato, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton is deciding who gets what office. How are the delicate deans going to proceed? Do they consult Bacon or St. Anselm or perhaps Nostradamus? Next the good dean informs us of the difficulty of resolving differences among various workers in the university. Now I will confess that these problems do require some skill, but they hardly require a dean making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with dozens of assistants to do the job. Scheduling, advising, the endless series of reports for the Office of Public Instruction or the myriad accrediting agencies all require a few simple skills that any fairly bright high school graduate has learned. Folks in higher education know that they key person on campus is the administrative assistant or executive secretary who has been at the university forever and knows what to do better than anyone else. I say pay this person what she is worth—usually it is a woman in this position—and can the various deans and provosts. The savings would be significant!

Let our universities return to the educational purpose that is their only legitimate function. First, universities must establish real governance by the faculty. The faculty is the university. Period. Faculty and student learning and teaching together are the university. All other workers, though important, are not the center of the university. They are secondary. The administrators who do no teaching hold all the power. Second, require that at least half of all employees actually teach students. Eliminate the army of underpaid adjuncts and hire only full time tenure track faculty. If the universities in the land hired adjunct administrators at the same rate as they hired adjunct faculty they could save billions of dollars. Here in Montana the university system saves 22 million dollars a year by hiring part-time and adjunct faculty instead of full time faculty. Of the 2500 contract faculty in the MUS, 20% of the credits taught are paid for at 25% of the cost for a full time instructor. For example, here at Northern we have 64 full time faculty who teach full time, but 84 contract faculty. The 20 additional contract faculty are comprised of adjunct faculty and overload and summer school all of which are paid for at a considerably lower rate than full time faculty. These credits include adjunct faculty, summer school, and overload credits. If the MUS could somehow hire administrators and professional staff at the same adjunct rate, they could save 19 million dollars a year. Now I do not think any worker should be nickeled and dimed and forced to scramble for a living by having to work part time. However, our universities should put first things first and hire faculty—recognizing that faculty are the center of the university. By returning to the ratio of administrators and professional staff that existed 30 years ago, universities could bring themselves back into balance. We need to recognize that many administrative tasks are simply not worth completing. Outcomes assessment is nothing more than white collar featherbedding. It has no intellectual value and should be discontinued. The value of administrative retreats, junkets, training sessions, and strategic plans is dubious at best. The money saved by eliminating these needless exercises should go to reducing student tuition and hiring permanent faculty. Any university that does not spend the lion's share of its resources on faculty and instruction should have to face closure. We need real universities, not jobs programs for bureaucrats.

Works Cited

[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]