Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities

The Rise of the Administrative Class

58 In the summer of , I was sitting at a bargaining table with ten university administrators, discussing the different ways of assessing the quality of teachers in the University of California system. I started to get frustrated because the conversation was going nowhere, but then I realized that no one on the other side of the table had ever taught or had studied teaching in their life. It was at this point that I began to discover the true absurdity of a research university: most of the people employed by these important higher education institutions have no background or training in education. Instead of universities being run by the faculty, these schools have become giant corporations controlled by competing interests, and although instruction is one of the institutions’ many concerns, it rarely becomes the main priority of administrators, lawyers, human resource experts, and other staff. Moreover, as the number of tenured faculty relative to the number of students goes down, the number of administrators always seems to increase. This chapter is dedicated to understanding why this class of employees keeps expanding and how this expansion undermines undergraduate education. Growth by Committee The secret history of the research university is that as these institutions have expanded, professors end up losing their power to the administrative 5 the Rise of the Administrative Class tHE RISE oF tHE ADmInIStRAtIvE ClASS 59 class. For instance, professors used to advise their students about what courses to take, but now there is a whole group of professional advisors who perform this task. Also at one time, faculty raised funds, negotiated contracts, and put together budgets, yet all of these tasks are now performed by highly paid professional administrators. Likewise, faculty used to sit on committees that would oversee the development of the curriculum and make sure that faculty were covering what they were supposed to teach, whereas now it is usually a dean of instruction who watches over these matters. In other words, as faculty lose control, administrators move in and take charge, and this change ends up costing universities more money and giving more power to people who are not primarily educators.1 I once got to see how this whole process works firsthand when I was teaching at a University of California campus. This story begins with the creation of a task force to study the effectiveness of general education courses that were also supposed to teach writing and communication skills. Early on, the task force discovered that due to the use of large lecture classes and inexperienced graduate student teachers, many of the writing-intensive courses were offering no writing at all, and some of the courses that did require graded writing were taught by teachers who had no training or background in writing. Also, due to the large size of most of the classes, it was impossible for students to work on their verbal skills, since there was rarely an opportunity for students to speak in class. The task force then cut to the heart of the educational problems of large research universities: the classes were too big to perform their intended function, and the people teaching the lecture classes and sections had no expertise in the required subject matter. After performing this important function of examining the quality of instruction, the task force came up with one central solution, which was to hire an administrator to make sure that people were teaching what they were supposed to teach. Therefore, instead of requiring smaller, interactive classes or faculty trained in the teaching of writing, the committee decided that it was best to pay someone a lot of money to make sure that people at least appeared to be doing the right thing. This process reveals one way that the administrative class grows as undergraduate instruction suffers.2 60 WHy PUBlIC HIgHER EDUCAtIon SHoUlD BE FREE No One Is in Charge Perhaps the biggest reason why administrators keep increasing as instruction is shortchanged is that universities have taken on so many different missions that there really is no one in charge—no one who has a finger on the whole enterprise. For instance, many universities now run medical centers, research laboratories, venture capital enterprises, and community service centers, and although all of these activities have some connection to education, they have virtually no direct relation to undergraduate instruction. In fact, as I pointed out in chapter , the undergraduate instructional budget at...