David Garraway
Senior
Rice University
[Reprinted with permission from Campus, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1993. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Bryn Mawr, PA.]
American universities were in bad shape: professors were being denied tenure because proposed salaries would burden overstretched budgets, tuition had tripled at some colleges within the last decade, endowments were in danger of being raided to cover short term costs, and students were forced to plunge ever further into debt. The year was 1991, and the recession had brought the economy to a low point. Yet despite budget constraints, shrinking departments, and an unstable economic future, several universities began nationwide searches to fill a newly created administrative position.
This new position took on many names, ranging from "Residence Life Coordinator" or "Multicultural Advisor" to "Dean of Student Life."
The job description for such a residence administrator--facilitating discussion among students, acting as an in-house counselor, promoting multicultural events--is only partly relevant. The salient factor is that many schools, although financially strapped, were willing to add another costly layer of bureaucracy.
These days, many administrators and instructors view the university as a vehicle for a brave, new, "sensitive" tomorrow. With this notion has come the advent of "politically correct" speech codes, dormitory counseling sessions, and sensitivity workshops designed to create and enforce negativity-free environments. The movement has also unleashed a barrage of politically-charged "awareness weeks" and ethnic student unions, which sometimes include separate facilities for minority students. Many institutions have curtailed speech on their campuses--for instance, Vassar College in New York where "inflammatory language" and "political harassment" are forbidden.
More than 120 schools, including Stanford University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of California system have "speech codes" in place.
Over the past decade, universities have devolved into places of sensitivity instruction.
In the mid-sixties, campuses across the country were rife with protest. Students were fed up with administrations acting in loco parentis--that is, restricting their behavior by assuming the parental role. Unrest continued until protests--and even riots--caused many deans and presidents to reconsider their policy of acting in loco parentis.
Consequently, in the seventies, universities backed down and assumed a more or less laissez-faire attitude toward student life. For a short while, students enjoyed independence from administrative meddling. By the mid-eighties, the honeymoon had ended. Today, the student radicals from the sixties have, in many cases, become college administrators with a subtler radicalism and notions of "rapid social progress."
Needless to say, such "progress" comes with a hefty price tag. As schools have begun to hire counselors, specially trained resident advisers, minority directors, and health (read: "sex") advisers, the costs have mounted accordingly. Each of these positions usually entails several student support workers. Extra secretaries, extra computers, and copy machines are needed to process all of the new red tape. On the higher end of the hierarchy, administrators are needed to manage and direct all of these new positions. Add to this the cost of supplies, employee benefits, travel to seminars, as well as the cost of new administrative facilities, and the dollars start piling up.
Of course, hiring new faculty of any kind places a burden on a college budget. But compare the beneficial effect a professor has on the lives of his students to the role a sexual health adviser plays, and then consider the costs. At some colleges, student life deans earn more than professors, and their new staff are granted large budgets over and above their salaries. Furthermore, administrations grow; they rarely shrink. With such expansion in bureaucracy, the average college tuition rose 10.6 percent annually during the eighties, while other goods and services rose only 4.6 percent.
The burgeoning bureaucracy of sensitivity is not immune to the difficulties that plague most other types of bureaucratic organization. An incident at Houston's Rice University illustrates the "stickiness" of these situations. In the spring of 1991, the school created an Office of Residence Life and hired a Residence Life Coordinator. Because Rice has a residential college system that allows the students to run their own affairs, the new position was perceived by some students as a threat to their autonomy, while others viewed it as a nuisance. This existing system made it difficult for the coordinator to carry out the duties of her position, and she began to look for other tasks. Eventually, the job changed from "counselor" to "apartment finder." The coordinator left within a year. Despite a general consensus that the position is unnecessary, the university has begun a national search to fill the "void" left behind.
Overlapping duties and vague job responsibilities are yet another symptom of bloated bureaucracy. Vassar College has both a Director of Multicultural Affairs and an Adviser to Minority Students. When reached by phone, the assistant at the Office of REACH (Research Education for Assault, Conflict, and Harassment) and Multicultural Affairs was unable to describe the difference between the two positions,
At Vassar, a Dean of Student Life was instituted in 1989 in response to a recommendation from the Middle States Accrediting Organization, which claimed that such a position was the new trend in higher education. When the Vice President for Administrative Service quit in 1991, most of her duties were simply transferred to the purview of the Dean of Student Life, who, incidentally, also quit that year. Now Vassar is back to its original number of administrators, and a behind-the-scenes man nominally called the "Acting Dean of Student Life" is carrying out almost the identical functions of the former Vice President for Administrative Services, while student life has not been enhanced one iota.
Increasingly, students are not only being forced to bear the obvious "aboveboard" costs of bureaucracy, but the costs incurred through corruption and bureaucratic abuse as well. Earlier this year, the University of California's Board of Regents instituted a salary freeze, then a short while later gave themselves generous pay hikes. Schools from Stanford University to Roxbury Community College have conducted investigations in the past year on improper use of funds for administrative travel expenses. While these abuses are not occurring at every college, the growth of this educational bureaucracy certainly warrants concern.
Abuse, it seems, is an inevitable circumstance of overgrown administration. Generally speaking, one cannot deny the benefits of counseling, cultural sensitivity, and mutual acceptance, but today's schools are facing downscaling, stagnant faculty wages, shrinking departments and, in some cases, bankruptcy. With so much recessionary pressure on the system, it is imperative to reconsider the purpose and ultimate end of a liberal arts education. Is it scholarship and research, or is it sensitivity, psychological wellness, and social engineering? Additionally, with more and more students going into debt to support top-heavy academic superstructures, college administrators need to carefully consider the morality of adding trendy new departments and administrative positions that serve only to quiet noisy interest groups.
However, there have also been instances where universities have reversed or rejected measures that would restrict free speech. Michigan State University recently declared a "Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance" to be unconstitutional, while the president of Tufts University rescinded a speech code not long after it was adopted, saying he would "rather err on the side of free speech."