The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters [Hardcover]

Once upon a time, within living memory, universities were essentially run by the faculty. The faculty took responsibility for what we now term `student life' issues as well as the curriculum. They even dabbled in athletics. Knute Rockne, who graduated magna cum laude, taught chemistry before he became Notre Dame's head football coach. When I attended Notre Dame many years later there were faculty living in Lyons Hall, a sophomore dorm. The prefects and rectors throughout the dorms--C.S.C. priests, by and large--were also members of the faculty. Faculty lived with students at other universities, of course, Harvard and Princeton, e.g., and dealt with `student life' issues there.

When I taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1969-1981) every significant academic administrative post was held by a faculty member and all of the supporting positions (associate deanships, e.g.) were held by a part-time faculty member. Some associate deans served longish terms, some only three years. The requirement was that you would continue to teach and do research in your department while you held the administrative position and return to your department when your term was completed.

While not entirely gone and not entirely forgotten, that world has been replaced by a bureaucratized university filled with administrators and administrative staff. Dr. Ginsberg tells this story and describes its implications in this bittersweet book. The story is sad; fortunately, Dr. Ginsberg has not lost his sense of humor. Moreover, he has not lost his courage, for he names names and names institutions as he details the most prominent offenders.

The general public often consider `the growth of administration' to essentially mean the proliferation of vice presidents and other `higher' officials. The actual growth, as Dr. Ginsberg explains, has been in nonteaching, nonresearching `academic' staff--what he calls `deanlets' and `deanlings'. In the modern university the number of students has expanded dramatically, the number of faculty has increased, but not dramatically; the number of higher administrators has increased; the number of nonteaching academic staff has exploded.

Some of these appointments are easily explained. Many are information technology professionals. Some are the `enrollment management' and `diversity' professionals. Faculty advisors have been replaced by `professional' advisors (often in response to a curriculum which is too complex for anyone to understand). Development staff have proliferated, and so on.

This is not always a problem. If development staff bring in far more dollars than they cost (16 cents on the dollar is a frequent guide number; 8 cents on the dollar is often seen) that is all to the good, assuming that development dollars match university priorities. And after all, what are public universities to do when their state contributions have been shrinking since the 1970's? Interestingly, though, the largest growth in the number of deanlets and deanlings has been in the private universities.

Their activities are often lumped under the catchall term, `student services'. These are the holders of hands and the providers of luxury. They do the work that the faculty refuses to do (in their narrative); their numbers are growing; their ultimate aspiration is to enjoy the status, compensation and prominence of the faculty.

Why is this a problem? Because it raises educational costs exponentially. Because these individuals tend to see the university as a business and students as customers. Because they distort the university and divert it from the pursuit of its core activities. Because they intrude in curricular areas, setting up parallel programs that are generally banal and less challenging than the traditional curriculum. Because they are paid for by the growth of contingent faculty. Tuitions rise and students are taught by part-timers while their hands are held by full-timers.

Dr. Ginsberg believes that much of this is calculated. He acknowledges that there are some good administrators, but he believes that many are involved in ongoing power plays to shift the university's efforts and authority from its libraries and laboratories and classrooms to its administrative conference rooms. Many of these individuals are thoroughgoing careerists whose personal aspirations trump the needs of their institutions, people who stay long enough to position themselves for their next jobs, often leaving chaos in their wake.

He ridicules their constant meetings, their tendency to stage corporate `retreats', their mouthing of platitudes and chasing of the latest management fads. In many cases he is absolutely, dead solid perfect, correct. These individuals are a blight on the academic world. His depiction of their pomps and works is deadly accurate, e.g. their preparation of `strategic plans', utterly worthless documents which provide the rationale for holding up current decisions until the plan is complete (by which time the planner will have gone to his next job, trumpeting his ability to craft a strategic plan and promising to do so at his next institution).

Dr. Ginsberg recognizes, of course, that there are also dedicated individuals who exhibit institutional loyalty and do their best to advance their college or university. There are even some administrators who continue to teach and do research and recognize those activities as central to the university. Would that there were more of them.

What he does not provide is an account of how the careerists have risen to power, though he does acknowledge the complicit role here of trustees and professional search firms. In part, I believe, we have technocratic, careerist administrators because the positions they fill have become unattractive to people for whom salary is less important than the development and dissemination of knowledge. The contemporary university is a litigious place; it is a bureaucratized place; it is a heavily-regulated place; it is racialized, politicized and corporatized. In some ways it receives `leadership' appropriate to its condition, though not always.

Dr. Ginsberg's proximate frame of reference is Johns Hopkins, an institution with a very large number of hand holders (Vanderbilt actually wins those sweepstakes) and a strong interest in civility- and diversity training. He asks the question (to which, of course, there is no rational answer, but many political ones), why should search committees be subjected to diversity training and racial-sensitivity training by ignorant neophytes when the membership of the search committee includes world-class experts on questions of race? And how will this `training' serve any useful purpose in the face of the fact that in one recent year there were only 10 African-American Ph.D.'s produced in Mathematics and 13 in Physics? It will take up faculty time and it will create careers for the trainers, but it will not increase the number of available African-American Ph.D.'s. The `diversity' is in the diversity training office, not in the Math or Physics department.

This is an interesting book. It is passionately argued, straightforward in its facts and justified in its concerns. I hope that it reaches a wide audience.

Most contemporary critics of American higher education (e.g., Andrew Hacker, Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Shaefer Riley, Charles Sykes, and others ad nauseam) take a perverse populist pleasure in hating on the faculty. According to an oft-repeated, basically anti-intellectual argument (each time trotted forth as if it were a shocking new discovery), the woes of the modern college or university all emanate from overpaid, underworked, vain academics who pursue ever more abstruse topics to the detriment of the students whose educations they neglect. Benjamin Ginsberg's "The Fall of the Faculty" bursts onto this tired scene with a spirited defense of the faculty and of the traditional aims of the university: fostering original research and the education of students. These activities are the responsibility of the faculty, who historically have not only performed that research and education but who also for generations took responsibility (with the help of a few administrative staff members) for governing and running their schools. This is the faculty that has made American higher education preeminent in the world. But it is indeed a faculty that is under siege.

As Ginsberg meticulously lays out in his analysis (unlike the author of many a trade book, Ginsberg knows how to use a footnote), the number of academic administrators over the past forty years has been growing far more rapidly than that of students or faculty members, and the financial investment needed to support them is mainly responsible for many of the worst sins of higher education, including galloping tuition increases and the creation of an underclass of powerless and underpaid contingent faculty. Administrators and other professional staff now far outnumber faculty. As their power grows, the power of the faculty declines; the traditional curriculum is replaced with a mind-numbing "shadow curriculum" of life-skills courses. Resources that could be spent on scholarship and teaching pour into expensive, time-wasting administrative retreats, strategic planning exercises, and assessment initiatives that usurp faculty responsibility for the evaluation of students and academic programs. Even worse, some of these activities ultimately result in social engineering experiments that stifle the very academic freedom whose protection is the sacred trust of the university. Without freedom of thought and speech there can be no real education or disinterested research. Chapter 5, on the history and importance of tenure as a means of safeguarding that freedom, should be read by everyone who cares about higher education. As Ginsberg makes abundantly clear, in recent times the courts have not been friendly to the protections of tenure, and administrators seize upon many pretexts (most recently financial exigency) to breach them.

The writer of this review has been a faculty member for 27 years at a well regarded liberal arts college with a strong tradition of faculty self-governance; she moved a year ago into an administrative position at her school, from which she plans to return to teaching after a few years. As a long observer of the higher ed scene and as an insider, she is in a pretty good position to comment on Ginsberg's characterization of the academic scene, and she is sorry to report that it is for the most part accurate, even if she finds the book's tone sometimes annoyingly mordant and self-righteous. Like Ginsberg, who admits that he is personally acquainted with some wonderful, hard-working and effective administrators, she knows that such administrators are not hard to find. Her own office is populated with them, and her home institution is less plagued by the problems Ginsberg discusses than most schools. Nevertheless, she thrilled with delight at Ginsberg's skewering of ubiquitous administrative slogans and phrases such as "best practices," an excuse for mimicry that she has heard many a time over the past year. Even at the best run schools, the overall structure of incentives in higher education has clearly been working in recent decades to produce a deadening administrative bloat, which this book fearlessly and frankly diagnoses.

I would disagree with Ginsberg only in the responsibility he assigns to the faculty to combat the problem. To be sure, in his "what is to be done" chapter, he does admit that he and other faculty members are wrong "in succumbing to the temptation to shirk administrative service." But he quickly backs off from that tepid call to arms by explaining that faculty can hardly be blamed for such avoidance given that administrators rarely listen to them or make use of the reports of committees that he sees as mostly part of a larger effort to co-opt the faculty in their own marginalization. But the faculty really does need to make a more vigorous stand against the all-administrative university. It needs to stop shirking. While paying the fault of shirking some lip service, Ginsberg tends to discount its importance as a major cause of the status quo, preferring an administrative hunger for power. My own experience, however, suggests that shirking is much more widespread a human foible that ambition. The faculty rarely resists the administration. They are too fond of disingenuously leveraging their own pet projects and political commitments through administrative channels, and they are all too happy to have administrative duties taken off their plates when given the opportunity. For the most part, rather than protesting the metastasis of the administration, faculty typically demand more administrative assistance.

So, while I found the defense of the faculty here refreshing, in the end I believe that Ginsberg makes his faculty allegiance something of an excuse for a disturbing quietism; he wants Trustees or the media, or anyone else, to come to the rescue. But it is the sleeping giant of the faculty that needs to shake off its indolence and take responsibility for reclaiming the noble ends of higher education. This book makes an excellent start. Let's hope it finds a wide and comprehending readership.

As a tenured faculty member of 20 years, currently employed at a research university that was mentioned a number of times in Ginsberg's book, I quite looked forward to reading what he had to say. I found several elements of the book lived up to my expectations. I found Chapter 5 (describing the rise and fall of the tenure system) to be fascinating. I thought his idea that the media should deduct points from institutional rankings for administrative bloat to be inspired; while I suspect that its long term practical result would be the "creative reclassification" of many administrative activities as teaching activities, in the short run it would focus governing boards on how to cut university staff. His arguments that administrators--rather than faculty or students--are the group most motivated to support institutional policies leading to political correctness were intriguing. I also felt that his recommendation that doctoral student output be reduced in fields where supply outstrips demand for new hires was both courageous and sensible.

Despite these excellent elements, I find myself unconvinced with respect to Ginsberg's central thesis: that the growth of administration in U.S. universities can be explained as a quest for power. There are two reasons for my skeptiscism. The first doubtless reflects the difference in our underlying disciplines. Whereas his (political science) tends to view motivation from a power perspective, mine (business) tends to rely more heavily on economic consequences. For example, I view money money as fungible. From my perspective, then, the complaint that FSU earned nearly $400 million from licensing pharmaceuticals to BMS (p. 189) but also laid off tenured faculty from several departments as a result of budgetary problems (p. 192) are necessarily related. Would FSU's need to layoff faculty have been reduced if it had not earned revenue from its patents? Similarly, I suspect that a fair number of the grant misappropriations that he described in the language of personal power would more properly be characterized in terms of waste (some of the expenditures should never have been approved), agency theory (individuals attempting to maximize their salary and perquisites) and sloppy accounting (a self-interested purchase allocated to a grant account may be treated as a crime; that same purchase funded from a different revenue account becomes a matter of waste). Similarly, when he discusses the unilateral decision of Johns Hopkins University to launch a business school, he fails to mention the role that was likely played by a sizeable gift from a private source (hence, the Carey Business School) nor does he mention the fact that Johns Hopkins had long been offering a highly ranked (albeit unaccredited) MBA degree through its continuing education arm. A great deal more discussion regarding the power implications of that reorganization would have been necessary to support his interpretation. As an aside, I would further add that if liberal arts faculty approval were required to launch a business school, I doubt there were be a single business school in the U.S.

By far my biggest problem with Ginsberg's treatment is the way he minimizes faculty responsibility for the current state of affairs. In particular, I do not see how a book that purports to describe the running of a university can omit the term "consensus" from its index. As an individual who has sat on many committees, I can state categorically that committees chaired and run by faculty members are, in my experience, vastly less likely to make a decision than those where administrators take the lead. As faculty, our collective need for consensus has grown so pathologically intense than coming up with any decision other than: a) maintaining the status quo, or b) forming a subcommittee to further study the problem, is nearly impossible. Under such circumstances, if any decisions need to be made, the administration is likely to have to make them. Like it or not, higher education in the U.S. has become increasingly competitive over the past 50 years. We faculty members, particularly the dwindling number of us with tenure, seem to believe that we can safely ignore the economic consequences of our personal decision to focus our intellectual energies on disciplinary research while teaching as small a number of students as possible. I do not believe that to be possible in today's world, if it ever was. And I write this as a faculty member who has never held an academic administrative assignment.

I also feel that a great many of the examples in the book could have benefitted from a deeper (and less biased) treatment than is likely to be found in sources such as the Chronicle of Higher Education or campus newspapers. Here, I draw upon personal experiences. For example, the reader would get the impression that the administration at Harvard was systematically dismantling its general education curriculum, presumably against the will of the faculty (p. 179). I find this perplexing in light of the fact that when I attended Harvard (1972-1975), the general education requirements were much lower than they are today. Moreover, the challenge with general education at Harvard has not--to the best of my knowledge--typically been a battle between administrators and faculty. To the contrary, I have always heard it described as a conflict between the sciences and the non-sciences. There has never been a problem with getting scientists to take courses in the humanities at Harvard; there has always been a problem with the reverse. Similarly, one would get the impression from his treatment of the University of South Florida (p. 196) that the administration unilaterally reorganized the school in an effort motivated by a desire to dismiss tenured and tenure-track faculty, using a $52 million budget shortfall as an excuse. My own sense of that situation, based upon my membership on relevant committees, was as follows: i) faculty members were not included in the decision process, and complained bitterly about that fact, ii) that there was no consensus among faculty members about what should be done, nor would one have been likely to emerge, and iii) something needed to be done quickly and--in retrospect--the administration's decisive actions (on many fronts) at that time meant that the tenured and tenure-earning faculty at USF fared far better than their colleagues at any of the other universities in our state. I also question the notion that the proliferation of "learning assurance" standards across U.S. universities represents a conspiracy to acquire more power on the part of administrations determined to undermine faculty academic freedom. In Florida, at least, those most interested in seeing these standards created and enforced appear to be legislators interested in exerting greater control over how state tax dollars are spent.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, I believe Ginsberg's book offers a piece of the explanation for the growth of administration and the costs of higher education. Its weakness is its determination to view the process purely in terms of power dynamics. That conspiracy-driven perspective does, however, make it fun read.