The "All-Administrative" University: A Faculty Invention?

I recently read Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University. The rising number of administrative employees in higher education and increasing costs attributed to administration are hot topics. Many observers bemoan bloated mid-managerial ranks and obscene compensation for executives. They link excessive spending on administration to cuts in instructional expenditures, as evidenced by the now routine reliance upon contingent instructors. I've been knee-deep in these issues as part of two initially unrelated research projects on part-time faculty and administrative costs at public comprehensive institutions.

Ginsberg's claim is that in the 1960s and 70s, colleges and universities were directed by the work and concerns of faculty. Teaching and research were ends and institutions of higher learning existed to achieve these ends. By contrast, today's colleges and universities are dictated by a growing number of full-time professional administrators, who view management and institutional advancement as ends. Their primary objective is increasing the reaches of their authority and increasing the number of people they supervise. Shared governance is eroded as power concentrates in the hands of people who are far removed from classrooms, laboratories, and libraries.

The data that Ginsberg cites certainly raises questions:

• Over the past four decades, the number of full-time professors has increased about 50 percent, keeping pace with growth in student enrollments. During the same period, the number of administrators and administrative staffers increased by 85 percent and 240 percent.
• Between 1947 and 1995 total university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, however, grew by 235 percent.

These figures are perhaps not surprising to anyone familiar with higher education. It is less clear why the number of administrative employees and why administrative costs are rising. Several explanations have been proffered, but few of them have been systematically researched. These include:

• Spending money to make money: in the wake of state budget cuts, universities have invested heavily in administrative units that generate revenues.
• Mission creep: colleges and universities strive to be like the most prestigious institutions, and the most prestigious institutions are research-oriented. Shifting to a research orientation requires different spending priorities.
• Administrative lattice: faculty focus on the things that advance their careers, meaning they increasingly abandon administrative tasks, requiring more administrative staff.
• Regulatory burdens: colleges and universities are now required to comply with a range of regulations and provide regular performance reports, all of which require staff and money.
• Growth in enrollments: there are more students to serve, and the services they require are more costly than in the past.

Ginsberg largely dismisses many of these explanations. He contends that the explosion of administration in higher education is internally-generated. He believes that administrators are motivated by the desire to self-replicate. In order to advance their careers, they must put all emphasis on image polishing, money making, and vision setting. The larger their fiefdoms become, the better their prospects for promotion up the ladder. In order to ascend the ladder, administrators must constantly chip away at the power of faculty members. They do this through a variety of strategies, including commissioning studies and task forces, invoking strategic priorities, employing managerial buzzwords, and favoring a demand-side view of curriculum development. The latter technique basically means making curriculum changes based upon what they perceive student-consumers want.

These ideas are persuasive on some level, as I saw the palpable conflict between administrators and faculty during my time working in a provost's office. The techniques of administrator power-hoarding were also evident to me. Yet there are two problems with Ginsberg's notion of a self-propagating administration at odds with the faculty. First, he doesn't actually provide evidence that this is happening. Aside from disproving, in his eyes, external sources of administrative growth, he does not show through data that administrators are simply interested in expanding their spheres of influence. Second, he does not adequately address the fact that the line between administration and faculty can be a fuzzy one.

Indeed, the managers he derides often come directly from the ranks of faculty. While it is true that some institutions are hiring outside academe for top-level positions, many--if not the majority--of vice presidents, vice provosts, deans, associate deans, and so on were once faculty. This means that the "all-administrative" university was not invented out of thin air by a group of management obsessed outsiders. It came from former faculty forced to make decisions in difficult times. Some of these individuals were interested in prestige and advancing their own careers. However, many of them simply wanted to do good work and return to their academic posts after serving institutions they love. 

The golden age of higher education, according to Ginsberg, was a time when there were more faculty than administrators, and administrators tended to be part-time (keeping one foot in their departments). Not coincidentally, this was also a time when institutions were expected to do a lot less, and higher education was far less accessible to vast swaths of the American population. To buy Ginsberg's argument, we need more evidence, which is precisely why a colleague and I are undertaking our research. Some of this research should tackle the administrator-faculty separation assumed in Ginsberg's book. For the "all-administrative" university to be a tenable concept, we need to see proof of a substantial shift in motivations and perspectives as faculty become managers--such a sizable shift, in fact, that they can no longer be identified as faculty.