The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (review)

This is a book with a single-minded agenda by an academic with impressive credentials. Benjamin Ginsberg is David Bernstein Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center For the Study of American Government and Chair of the Government program of Advanced Academic Programs at Johns Hopkins University. His skills as a political scientist are directed at exposing what for him is the largest possible scandal about American higher education: that university and college administrators have captured the castle, and have done this by setting the educational agenda that used to be the faculty's privilege and responsibility. These administrators, to paraphrase Ginsberg's declarations in his first chapter, are mostly without faculty experience, view management as an end in itself, and find the intellectual life of teaching and research subordinate to expanding their own domains. He lays out the results of this infiltration that threatens or already has conquered and reduced faculty influence in university affairs. (His own university, Johns Hopkins, is a prime offender.) The administrators are a conquering army of "vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants." He tells us that "at some schools, the faculty has already surrendered and is hoping that the Geneva Convention will protect it from water boarding." One of the "tables" he provides is titled Administrative Growth at Public and Private Institutions, 1975-2005, which shows a sixty-six percent growth in administrators at public institutions (from 60,733 to 101,011), and even more surprisingly a 135% growth in the administrators and managers at private colleges. He does not believe that external pressures from the federal government, accrediting boards, and state agencies explain this phenomenon, since if that were true the state schools that must answer to external pressure would show more administrative growth than private institutions, and this is not the case.

Yet alongside this alarming administrative growth, the faculty-student ratio has remained fairly constant over the past three decades; the dramatic change has occurred rather in the "administrative and staffer per student ratio." Another of Prof. Ginsberg's tables documents the striking change, from one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer for every fifty students (1975), to one administrator for every fifty-eight students and one staffer for every twenty students (2005). His unsurprising conclusion is that educational institutions have chosen to spend their resources on administrative instead of faculty instruction. In his conclusion to his section on administrative growth, he cites a recent report of 2010 in which an external review committee was created by the Johns Hopkins administration to evaluate the School of Arts and Sciences:

The committee, consisting of five experienced academic administrators and chaired by former Columbia provost Jonathan Cole, evaluated the school's research and teaching efforts and concluded that these could be enhanced by—you guessed it—an expansion of administrative authority at Hopkins. The faculty suggested that administrators neither do research nor teach students, but what do we know?

At this, appalled and wondering how such a travesty could have been perpetuated by this review committee, we are directed to "Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Science, Visiting Committee Report, spring, 2010."

This puts a reader like myself in a problematic situation. How could this external review committee have been so blind, so grossly self-serving? And just where and how did the Hopkins faculty suggest "that administrators neither do research nor teach students"? Were faculty consulted, then omitted from the report because, as Ginsberg puts it sarcastically, "what do we know?" The book continues in this manner, evoking a nightmarish vision of the travesty Ginsberg sees happening in American higher education. In this travesty, large numbers of managers and "deanlets" do "little besides collecting checks and engaging in make-work activities that siphon off...