"Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors—sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one’s discipline, even reading books."

In amongst all of this, I have a neighbour who is a member of teaching staff at a local University, and the stories I'm told about digitisation, low salaries, bullshit job requirements and unpaid overtime, have all contributed to me deciding that University in my country is all in all, a massive ponzi scheme, and when it all goes to shit, the Universities themselves will be the only ones to blame.

I've been shocked to see how this mentality is not duplicated in university environments. I know tenured professors at Stanford who spend countless hours arranging travel with visiting scholars, dealing with reimbursements, and other office minutiae. It boggles my mind that these people — who are supposed to be focusing on teaching and research — spend to much time on menial tasks.

It isn't that these tasks are 'below them'. Rather, it's that there are a limited number of hours in the day, and every hour they spend handling reimbursement paperwork is an hour they're not spending doing award-winning research or writing an award-winning book.

In my current company, one of the employee perks is a lunch allowance. But to get the lunch allowance, you need to get a tax receipt from the place you bought lunch, and then scan it, submit the scan to a woefully slow and painful expense system, then also physically glue it to another claim sheet, and annotate it with some more details, etc etc. From my perspective it's essentially rewarding employees who waste the company time not doing the work they were hired to do. To me it's utterly absurd that any software developer spend their day doing expense claims when a professional administrator could do the job much faster and (probably) more cost-effectively.

And this isn't the first place I've worked like this either. I miss my job 20+ years ago when we had a secretary who not only took care of these things but also did stuff like take meeting minutes too. The loss of administrative staff has made the workplace far less efficient, in my opinion.

> From my perspective it's essentially rewarding employees who waste the company time not doing the work they were hired to do.

I think they're counting on the fact that relatively wealthier employees won't miss $15 in reimbursements, or will feel 'cheap' submitting the receipts. The company has found a way to just subsidize lower-paid/cost-sensitive employees.

It's creating friction in order to get employees to self-select into (1) those who find the free lunch to be a meaningful perk, and (2) those who don't care that much. But I completely agree that it creates frustration for those who do it (and those who don't due to the time-consuming nature). I wonder if people would feel better about it if the company came out and said that they have an inefficient submission system specifically to deter wealthier employees from claiming the benefit?

There probably isn't a grand strategy when it comes to awful processes. The process was probably setup by some woefully overstretch person. No one bothered to update the process because there are too many fires from the other awful processes that was also setup by another woefully overstretch person.

It's also possible this is a hybrid — that the process grew in complexity for exogenous reasons, and when someone considered streamlining it, they realized that doing so would result in more reimbursements processed (specifically for more well-off employees) and decided to leave it be.

Doubt. And if they're overstretched it's most likely because of their own shortcomings

No, sounds more like playing whatever little amount of power they have

Maybe those are not available everywhere?

Any idea what the actual name of it is?

This is the basic reason for a lot of office perks. I'd personally prefer the cash and arrange for my own gym/lunch/coffee bar, as I don't want work to swallow up my life, but I'm in the minority.

We used to joke at my alma mater that the administrators were just trying to fill up their building to get a new one. The joke turned more than a little sour when it actually happened. And no, the university hadn't seen anything resembling necessary growth for such an explosion in administrative staff. If anything the faculties had been under cost-cutting for some years when it happened.

I think the phrase "you can't make this shit up" was coined for these situations...

"Stanford Redwood City is a center of excellence for critical administrative areas. Learn which departments are working at Stanford Redwood City."[1]

A university administration's primary objective, and successful accomplishment, appears to be administrative growth.

[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu

Why? Maximizing billable hours maximizes the amount of money the law firm as a whole makes, and thus the amount of money law firm leadership makes. Maximizing research output does not maximize revenue for the leadership of the university as much as further bloating the administration does.

I would contend that maximizing the amount of time that professors spend on the work they are uniquely qualified to do does maximize revenue for the university. It allows them to win more prizes, to cultivate and educate PhD students who can go on to become successful (to the credit of their PhD-granting institution), and educate undergrads (which can lead to more donations from parents or from grateful alumni).

I would think that on the whole, a university that was trying to maximize revenue would enable their braintrust to spend more time on activities that involve their brains.

It doesn't, but administrators' salaries aren't really connected to the university's revenue. (And if they were, they'd probably focus on building more stadiums, selling more merchandise, and doing more advertising for deep-pocketed sponsors).

> It allows them to win more prizes, to cultivate and educate PhD students who can go on to become successful (to the credit of their PhD-granting institution), and educate undergrads (which can lead to more donations from parents or from grateful alumni).

The feedback loop for publishing better papers -> getting a better reputation takes decades, and it's not even clear you'd end up with more revenue at the end of it. As for attracting donations from grateful parents and alumni, the most effective way to achieve that is lowering your grading standards.

Where is their guardianship? Their collective action at a global scale to uphold and ensure what really matters here? That the publication system evolved into what it did was probably a big red flag that modern academics were not capable or even willing. My own experience is that academics, especially collectively are sadly pretty spineless when it comes to big issues like this. So preoccupied are they with their own prestige, papers and grants they seem like broken-in domestic animals.

But as a class of professional how well do they serve society at large? I’ve brought this up with Academics before and they don’t like the topic. I feel like lawyers and doctors and even accountants do better.

It's a bit more complicated than this. The bottleneck to becoming a doctor is residency, there are currently less spots than med school graduates. Every single residency loses money, so they're supported by the federal government. Congress could increase residency funding and more residencies would be created, and in fact the AMA consistently lobbies for that, but congress has refused.

i.e. in the old days professors/students would leave the decaying institutions and start their own, seek some funding elsewhere.

The Institutionalization of Accreditation into the fact of modern capital requirements and regulatory capture at all social levels make this seem not so feasible though.

However there could soon be more of such social changes, perhaps someone could create some digital technology to facilitate analog socioeconomic action, instead of billion$ in silly valley vapourware like zuckverse or alphabets adworld.

For most of my life I was part of fundamental-ish religious group. They wanted schools and university to impart their worldview.

Had little trouble with established accreditation agencies, and as a backup created their own accreditation agencies.

Absolutely this. It's their predisposition to be preoccupied with unworldly things, that's why they became academics. They want to be left alone to do their research, and hopefully they make some new discoveries now and again. That doesn't really fly these days though - because being left alone is incompatible with being measured and recorded every waking second, which is the fetish of our age. But if you want to be left alone, you probably don't like confrontation, and sooner or later you will be doing the bidding of those that do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna#History

>The university arose around mutual aid societies (known as universitates scholarium) of foreign students called "nations" (as they were grouped by nationality) for protection against city laws which imposed collective punishment on foreigners for the crimes and debts of their countrymen. These students then hired scholars from the city's pre-existing lay and ecclesiastical schools to teach them subjects such as liberal arts, notarial law, theology, and ars dictaminis (scrivenery). The lectures were given in informal schools called scholae. In time the various universitates scholarium decided to form a larger association, or Studium—thus, the university. The Studium grew to have a strong position of collective bargaining with the city, since by then it derived significant revenue through visiting foreign students, who would depart if they were not well treated. The foreign students in Bologna received greater rights, and collective punishment was ended. There was also collective bargaining with the scholars who served as professors at the university. By the initiation or threat of a student strike, the students could enforce their demands as to the content of courses and the pay professors would receive. University professors were hired, fired, and had their pay determined by an elected council of two representatives from every student "nation" which governed the institution, with the most important decisions requiring a majority vote from all the students to ratify. The professors could also be fined if they failed to finish classes on time, or complete course material by the end of the semester. A student committee, the "Denouncers of Professors", kept tabs on them and reported any misbehavior. Professors themselves were not powerless, however, forming collegia doctorum (professors’ committees) in each faculty, and securing the rights to set examination fees and degree requirements. Eventually, the city ended this arrangement, paying professors from tax revenues and making it a chartered public university.

From what I've seen, the current university system is a very inefficient way of achieving what we're trying to accomplish.

Because obviously the current system of giving academics freedom to pursue their interests is just 'inefficient'.

The system is so broken that that only response would be to hire some "director" or "dean" of "making our education relevant again".

There is no solution other than blowing up the entire system. Maybe intentionally bankrupting some Universities would be a strong enough signal such that the ones that actually do want to stay relevant will self-select into a reform model.

Administrators hold real power in academia.

20 years ago, I was enrolled in my computer science degree, and working part-time as a programmer on a project to improve the university's "course handbook" website, and the automation of the publication of the printed edition. As part of that project, the administration ran focus groups with students and staff, to find out what their experience was with the current handbook, and how it could be improved.

In the student focus groups, the students all complained about how complex and confusing the rules around prerequisites/etc were. My own experience as a student supported that; it became even more clear to me when I tried to build a data model to capture that complexity. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything the administrative staff could actually do about it–the prerequisite rules were under the control of committees of academics, all of whom were quite convinced that this complexity was absolutely necessary.

The academic staff focus groups reported a very different concern. You see, the university handbook was actually printed in two volumes – the volume containing the degree/unit listing, which many students bought; but there was another volume, which few students ever bothered with, containing such fascinating information as a full copy of the Act of Parliament which established the university, and all the rules and regulations made under said Act. It also contained a list of all the university staff (both academics and non-academics), their job titles and qualifications.

Now, it turned out, that the publication deadline for this list each year happened before the annual academic promotions were announced. So, suppose you were an associate professor, and you just got promoted to full professor – you'd have to wait a whole year before your new title was printed in the university handbook – a situation about which a number of recently promoted academics were rather upset. The fact that just about nobody ever bought that volume, or read that section, didn't seem to register with them. The administrators involved couldn't do anything about that either – the university printer said the publication deadline couldn't possibly be moved, and no way was the university going to change the timeline of the academic staff promotion process. But I remember one administrator opining "if only some of these academics would spend as much time talking and thinking about the experience of students, as they do about their own job titles". I don't think she was wrong.

But otoh, as a human, when I hear people complaining about what is basically cleaning after themselves, I cannot feel any empathy.

I really cannot acknowledge that there exist one person in the world who is so productive every minute of the day that they don’t have the single minute required to clean after themselves.

It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo. It’s just not true.

I’m not advocating against paying someone to do all those tasks : it’s practical. But any decent human being should see this as a perk rather than some sort of human right they deserve because they are worth more than garbage mens.

Cleaning up after yourself is taking the stuff off the top of your desk and putting it in the trash can. Also taking some things like cans and bottles down the hall to the recycling bin.

I could also of course take the bag out of the bin, walk down the hall, walk down two flights of stairs, go out to the garbage area and garbage things myself. There's a difference between the two things.

If everyone is going to the garbage down stairs to throw things out yes it starts to be somewhat inefficient.

>It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo

sure, but if Tim Cook needs to take the bag out of the garbage in his office, walk out the office, take elevator downstairs to basement and throw it into the big bins there it might be that his time at that point is worth more to the company. It's really a question as what fragment of time is monetizable, a minute saved here or there is probably unmonetizable waste-time but saving greater than 5 minute increments together starts to be significant.

And the point of the example is the malicious joy of the admin staff at humiliating the academics by adding "cleaner" to their CV for wholey pointless reasons.

At the same time most academics will attest that the requirements that they have to fulfill are consistently going up, for example when computer systems are being modernized e.g. purchasing systems, it's very obvious that the requirements are made to minimize the work of the administration, which typically increases the workload of academics.

For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.

I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.

My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field.

Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less.

Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need.

You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.

From what I have seen, the answer is that academics are more or less like teachers’ pets that kept going all the way into tenure. Their whole professional being is directed at pleasing their peers at large or their superiors. They’ve been broken into a relatively harsh hierarchical way of relating to their profession. All of their intelligence has been well domesticated and easily controlled for a while now. And it’s not like they’re starving. They’re doing well, but not too well, and scarcely have any incentive to rock the boat while they’re family rely on them and become increasingly reliant on the academic career with their age making it harder and harder to fathom surviving in the real world.

Just think about the amount of time and energy they have to spend on grants to get permission to do their job through sales pitches and papers to promote themselves.

They’re like an influencer that has to re-apply for their job every three years, with the real risk of falling out of fashion every time all the while acquiring few real world skills, which looms hauntingly should the fate, that’s inevitable for most, of being cast out into it befall them.

The answer is that, like pretty much everything in society, collective action is hard for a variety of reasons. It’s a simple problem, but with no simple solutions.

But I suppose academics should have just asked you what to do, since you’ve got it figured out.

I take your point, and clearly my tone was intended to be somewhat strident. I'm not sure it is needless, though. The university and academic systems, IMO, are problematic but enjoy a special monopolistic prestige branding. Assaulting this and letting those that enjoy the privilege of working in the University system know that their positions, roles and actions and even values are more problematic than the "oh wow, that most be so interesting and you must be so smart" reactions they can get in social settings ... can, IMO, be helpful to the general situation.

> The answer is that, like pretty much everything in society, collective action is hard for a variety of reasons. It’s a simple problem, but with no simple solutions.

I agree. But part of my point, and perhaps too implicitly, was that it seems that it is harder in academia than other areas for the reasons I touched on. From my experience, senior academics (who have had some idealism knocked out of them) would consider anything collective or for the greater good of academia and research less than those in other fields.

Seems like the admin manages to do it against the scholars right? I do think there's something interesting here to explain.

We shouldn't be afraid to reach out to local laboratory research groups who produce interesting papers. Even if they don't have immediate need of your time, money, or expertise, they probably know many groups where you would be gratefully welcome to pitch in and recognized appropriately.

I don't really understand the message of this comparison. An influencer must do this every day. Are you saying professors have really cushy jobs? That's a common message, but it doesn't seem to fit the rest of your comment.

As an academic who does research that requires funding, you need grants. These grants are often referred to as the lottery because it's not always clear why some get accepted and others don't. If an academic doesn't get a grant one year, especially for two years in a row, they'll fall behind in their ability to do research and publish and risk being kicked out of the industry. Sure, an academic could try to move country for a new funding agency, but that's getting prohibitively disruptive and unlikely. This is the bit that I don't think influencers have to go through.

All of this, if you want the best people doing research, sounds good, right. Except, remember the "lottery" part above, and also that making good/interesting/exciting discoveries involves a good amount of luck that often doesn't translate to a greater likelihood of making discoveries in the future (senior academics have admitted this to me in private). And so researchers have to influencer-like work in promoting themselves by finding ways to be constantly publishing papers.

I thought tenure was supposed to solve this?

Academia in the US has been productized and the need for academic talent abstracted away. Students don't attend a given school because of specific star professors. They attend because of the things that admin does. Maintain the brand and messaging- a management and marketing exercise, not intellectual. Set up competitive housing, food, entertainment, job search and other amenities- also administrative, not intellectual. Operate the real estate and digital portfolios- also management. etc. For the lucky, manage the endowment.

I say this as a parent with 2, soon 3, college age kids. Universities in the US are hotels that provide a particular flavor of entertainment to their attendees. Particularly in undergrad.

Yes, students learn some subject domain material while there, usually, because that's what humans do in every situation they're in. But curricula are a dime a dozen. The open curriculum movements from the early 2000s, like open source, benefit those academics who are able to produce new material, harm those who cannot (but who may be good at teaching) but mostly they make it easy to commodify the actual academic talent in any given university.

And student success? Not an academic issue. It's an administrative concern. Good thing, too.

There is no action academics can take to "take back" their university. To think that something like that even makes sense is to live in fantasyland. It is neither how the university machine works (any more, if ever it did) nor is it what the payers in the market value.

No students would attend a university run by academics, rather than run by managers. Without competitive amenities and messaging, the venture would be a failure. Any that succeeded would do so because of the academics took over ran the place like managers.

Apologies for the strong language. There is no cynicism here. Just humor at the disconnect. Though expensive I find the university offerings in the US appropriate for my kids. As human beings first they need all of the things the administrative state provides. The actual intellectual/academic parts of the journey- even given the fact that they are all academically strong, 1500 SATs, etc- are relatively minor and incidental.

Cheers. Hope this helps.

I'm not sure what you're basing this claim on, since AFAIK there aren't any universities run by academics. But the reason for that has nothing to do with free competition in university education, and everything to do with government putting its thumb on the scale, both in the way it funds research and in the way it makes various forms of financial aid available so universities face zero cost pressure.

State and federal direct funding of unis in general fell off a cliff starting in the 1970s. Direct costs to students started to rise as a result. Students not being able to afford direct costs led to the government creation of the credit money regime- student loans. It wasn't govt putting some thumb on some scale- it was because direct dollars became scarce and credit dollars in all areas are cheap- and in most cases actually beneficial, because public interest credit dollars reflect actual public benefits.

Schools still have to compete for students, and tangible non-academic features always win the day. So there are constant cost and investment pressures on schools to produce a better product in tangible non-academic terms. Spending money actually brings in more students. So tuition goes up AND development outreach goes up, and wealthy donors get names on buildings etc. And because the actual academics- the individuals teaching- do not in practice make any difference whatsoever (eg US News rankings depend on student SATs, not staff PhDs), they are increasingly devalued in the equation.

My point about a uni run by academics is that were purely academic elements prioritized above all else- dorms, food, support, athletics, whatever- the school would simply not have a competitive offering.

This doesn't have anything to do with student loans being available. The same competition dynamics- which really do impose capital/expense pressures- they exist and are independent of the level of consumption funding.

Of course, Harvard is in an n of maybe 5 group, the freedom it has to manage its accounting is nearly unique and not reflective of the broader swath of thousands of US unis. In fact what is happening now is a huge consolidation and closure of enormous numbers of small colleges that cannot invest enough with a small base to compete with larger ones. A business story, like any other.

It's not because they have too many administrators. It's because they cannot afford to have more.

Hope that makes sense.

Is a big part of government putting its thumb on the scale. The only way to have truly free competition in university education is for universities to have to fund themselves entirely from payments for services rendered. Tuition is such a payment. But most State and federal direct funding is not.

> Students not being able to afford direct costs led to the government creation of the credit money regime

In other words, the government switched the way it was putting its thumb on the scale.

> Schools still have to compete for students, and tangible non-academic features always win the day.

Why? In a true competitive environment, I can't see why this would be the case, since the reason the students are there is academics, so competition would be expected to be on the basis of academics.

I can think of a few that I had never heard of in high school and people outside my field wouldn't know of but which do phenomenal work. One actually wonders how their students even know to look for them.

In any case, I would say the Colorado School of Mines is a prime example. I am a materials scientist and first really ran into them while doing some work with NREL which happened to be near their campus.

Perhaps it is a side effect of being undergrad only. Or perhaps a side effect of being populated with students who, at like 18 years old, knew they wanted to enter this extremely specific field.

But the relatively mainstream obscurity of these institutions is heavily offset by the weight they hold in their field and the near guarnatee job security it offers in niche fields...which might result in you making quite the pretty penny.

I don't doubt that they have a strong focus on teaching.

Maybe it's just an effect of being in a very niche area so that no one would notice them unless they were passionate about it already.

> And because the actual academics- the individuals teaching- do not in practice make any difference whatsoever (eg US News rankings depend on student SATs, not staff PhDs), they are increasingly devalued in the equation.

Have a look at how the US News ranking is calculated here (SAT scores are only 7%): https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...

Many of those components directly depend on academic merits, e.g. the peer reputation.

Many other rankings (especially international ones) have a large portion of the index based on research, for example having a nobel prize winner increases your score quite dramatically. There are reasons why the ivy league schools + MIT, Cambridge, Oxford ... are at the top of international rankings, and it's not the quality of the housing.

But having said that, if academic professionals are in the constant state of economic and psychological anxiety that they describe (and I think a lot of them genuinely are, and not solely due to some lack of worldly wisdom or autistic confusion), they do have some capacity to shape their situation.

All you are doing by leading with a caustic statement is putting some people - who you otherwise might be able to convince - off reading the rest of your content. The others who read because of the opening salvo didn't need convincing anyway.

Then why bother with having any academics at all? If all it is to you (and your kids) is a nice hotel, I'm sure you can actually find better accommodations and amenities for far cheaper. And children can 'network' with others also staying at the "good" hotel.

"The actual intellectual/academic parts of the journey- even given the fact that they are all academically strong, 1500 SATs, etc- are relatively minor and incidental."

And that is very much a reason for why such a situation has come to pass today - parents valuing branding far more, if not exclusively, over academics.

I think a lot of the value of being a top, exclusive university comes from being a top, exclusive university. I went to one of the best universities in the world, and I learnt a hell of a lot - but a lot of that came from the students I was surrounded with, to the point that if you took away the university and just had that academically-top student population mingle in a conference center for 3 years, I'm not sure the results would be much different. But how would you get everyone to agree on which conference center?

Apparently the University of Austin is planning to eliminate amenities: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/an...

So I guess we'll see if you're right

Even broad measures and reviews of "teaching quality" one can consult beforehand are at best statistical and simply not predictive for the experience of any given kid.

I did have that personally in some cases (and not in others) but am a consultant now who very much recognizes the importance of relationships. I have also done as much as I can to explicitly and implicitly train/encourage that sort of relationship thinking in my kids.

Neverthless! I would say:

a) one cannot solve for relationships as a basis for picking a specific university. They don't happen overnight, and have to be allowed to develop. And the instincts one has as to which university will be most encouraging of relationships for one's own kid- are only that. They are not reliably predictive.

b) Feelings of safety for the student are super important to getting to a place where relationships can develop

c) Admins in unis have much much more impact on feelings of safety than faculty. They are in effect the reason people choose a specific uni, and provide their tuition dollars. Whether kids develop relationships with faculty as a result is a downstream effect and to first approximation irrelevant to the business model

d) There is an overabundance of excellent, relationship oriented faculty. They are everywhere- from community colleges up to the Stanfords and Harvards. In fact many are out there who cannot get jobs! There are also tons of assholes of course. No university has come anywhere close to solving the "no assholes" problem as it exists in the diverse and disparate minds present in their student bodies, because there are assholes in their student bodies as well!

e) The most successful outcome for any given student in any given uni environment- the one you describe- is not deterministic, and complex enough to be difficult to model and guide. University management and administration exists to deliberately provide the safety and comfort contexts for those outcomes to emerge. The importance of any given faculty member in contributing to those outcomes in general is in the noise.

f) This productization is not necessarily bad- in fact it is likely the case that uni experience across the whole cohort is broadly more positive than it was decades ago.

Is it (much) more expensive? Sure. Could it yet be further cost optimized? Of course. Does it maybe emphasize the mean and reduce higher end outcomes at the margin? Maybe. Even if so, to my eyes, fwiw, that's more democratic. There will always be superstars. They should not be the only success cases.

Cheers, thanks again.

My question for you: why humor this absurdity?

I'm of mind that the whole thing should be thrown out.

Being an expert in one specific field does not necessarily mean that you are also an expert in labor activism.

I'm sure that a motivated group of academics could muster up the resources to learn how to solve the problem they find themselves in.

The fact that they could but don't seems to indicate to me that academics as a whole don't consider the situation as precarious as we think.

Barbarians at the gate. These organizations are already captured. Unfortunately, according to history, this will go only one way: Down.

Unrelated tangent because I recognize your name: thanks for making your course materials openly available!

Instead they think their role is to create administrative work.

* Profs lost institutional control imposed on them, and can't get it back

* Profs lost institutional control they initiated which grew bigger than them

* Profs are surrounded (by paperwork) and don't see a way out; they've become cynical as it's become a way of life

* Increased tuition to pay for increasingly expensive admin means the uni's customer is more themselves then it should be

At the macro scale the complaint here is analogous to the frustration American doctors have about patients (to much paperwork too little time with people) or Brexit. The question is why can't incentives be aligned; why aren't the purported customers (students, patients, voters resp) able to have more power? For this level of institutional failure if we see it as that, the profs, doctors, reps (resp) have got to be part of the problem sad to day.

It’s probably not worth the time, but there are usually ways to use the rules to get your way with the business office.

“Team building”, or whatever category that falls under, might be a way to get pizza.

(Note that they seem to be treating the pizza as a reimbursed meal for travel or something like that — probably an incorrect categorization).

I have a friend who knows this kind of stuff inside and out. I will ask her and post back here. It might take a day or two.

The worst part is the trip was significantly more expensive than it needed to be because of the constraints imposed by the system.

Schools, K through university, all suffer from this.

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Given enough time unions tend towards bureaucracies dedicated to serving the Union, not its members.

Frankly I think saying the Iron Law is inevitable is a little too pessimistic for me, but it’s definitely something that needs to be consciously monitored/managed.

Look no further than Martin Scorsese's The Irishman for an exegesis of other ways union leaders can increase their pay and solidify their power at little to negative benefit for union members. What happened with Jimmy Hoffa doesn't categorically indict all unions themselves, but it illuminates the continuum of soft "influence" and hard corruption. Where that doesn't exist, the pressure is there by interested parties to create it. The odds are in the favor of amassing power and wealth and strengthening a bureaucracy to further serve itself toward those ends. The iron law is upheld.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Unions aren't the big scary bureaucracy Corporations would have you believe. That's the corporations right now, and they're so terrified of unions, that they're projecting their own image onto unions.

The older employees also happen to be the union leaders.

The union movements and 8 hour workday have strong roots here, and the members of the Labor Party have historically been union members/supporters, although that changed to more management types in the mid 2000s[0].

Although they still have strong ties to Logging/Trade Unions which have become such institutions themselves, particularly the state ALP factions. This mostly puts them in a position to protect each other, rather then their "members".

There are other captured unions such as the SDA as well, which supposedly protects retail workers, but apparently is largely directed by the supermarket duopoly (Coles+Safeway).

I think the comment above on Pournelle's Iron Law really shows the current social state of omnipresent regulatory/bureaucratic capture.

The ancient Greek concept of Kyklos seems like the only kind of sociopolitical system that creates regular catalysts to shed such systems, Westminster[2] worked for a while but the aristocratic layers born from it are now clinging to the teet of its corpse.

[0]: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/45... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system

Organization A that is 80% devoted to serve it's bureaucracy will be outcompeted by Organization B which is only at 40%, presumably because it's younger.

That only works if they compete on productive end results, and I'm not sure how true that is for US universities.

A school’s academics are, in a way, secondary to the school’s brand/influence (with built in networking effects in the alumni base)

Imagine some crazy world where education-level is a protected class for employment and degree/school can’t be considered or explicitly asked about in job applications. The credential monopoly would be no more. Yet you would likely still see top colleges thrive for the same reason top fashion houses do: status signaling, brand loyalty, and a sense of belonging with patrons who subscribe to the same values

College could be another case where competition drives up costs.

Another option is to eliminate reasons to compete. Just standardize the offerings and the administrative structure required for a university. Students can choose the school that's closest to home, and go there with confidence.

Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own. There a serious lack of examples of successful large orgs where bureacracy is in fact minimal.

Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism made a good note of this, how the capitalist world of the west recreated the bureacratic culture in a host of in what are its institutions (which are obstensibly businesses) that existed in soviet russia, and in many ways surpassed those systems.

Yes, that was even heavily implied in my post you're critiquing!

This cycle of very bureaucratic orgs being outcompeted by lightly bureaucratic orgs, which then grow very bureaucratic, and are in turn outcompeted, results in a medium bureaucracy level on average in the long run.

It's more likely that the entire western system is outcompeted than it is that the current set of elite schools are outcompeted within our system, imo.

in the government this is solved when elections change power. (sort of)

in universities... i think they might just be better off having the administrators elected by the... alumni.

I miss Byte magazine

That said, I think the entire US university system needs a rethink, so I'm not upset that these bureaucrats are accelerating the process of burning it to the ground.

> The founders of the democratic tradition understood that institutions are prone to corruption. This does not mean that they cease to operate. It means, to the contrary, that they continue to function, but in ways that no longer serve their original purpose.

It's not clear to me that universities will burn to the ground. They can probably stumble along for decades down the same path if nothing changes. No, their incentives need to be corrected.

Edit: [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Also, read the Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

Universities are a bit like corporate squatters though, or even monopolies, they sit on some intellectual real estate that is incredibly overvalued and does not easily scale, and refuse to provide what society expects of them at reasonable quality and price.

The solution is actually quite simple, we should reduce the value we place on university educations, especially from these captured institutions which are the most prestigious.

Universities' top lines (revenue) consist of a few major areas: beyond tuition and any state aid (for state schools), research grants are a huge source of funding. Most of that comes from the federal government.

Most research grants have an itemized budget and, alongside the itemized budget, "indirect costs" that are often between 30-60% of the direct budget. Schools do, of course, have indirect costs associated with conducting research, such as facilities and actual administration (secretarial work, accountants, etc.). But these costs are not itemized and included in research grant budgets! It's just a percentage of the research budget.

Naturally, this both incentivizes institutions to maximize the size of the research budget and creates a large pool of nebulously-allocated money for rent seekers to try to socially capture.

At this point, I can't help but think that the federal agencies that write grants are somewhat complicit in this process.

Remove that and I just don’t believe you, outside of the most bureaucratic and exceptional companies (eg Google, where the money printing machine has led the company to insane levels of “overhead”).

I’ve worked plenty in the private sector and it’s nonsense to suggest overheads are similar In general.

I read this and thought you meant you preferentially allocated grants to universities with lower overhead rates, and was hopeful for a moment, but then:

> If the team needed $1m to do the research but the university takes half, we allocated them $2m. It was just the cost of doing business.

Right, that's exactly what being complicit is! You're the problem!

I don't know what you expect us to do though? We are required by law to make these grants to universities. It's an actual line in the federal budget. The awards are competitively selected, and overhead cost has to be disclosed and is a factor in consideration. But it's a choice between bad, and worse. No organizations have good overhead rates, although the non-profit orgs were generally better than the universities. I agree there should be reform here, but talk to the GAO or your congressional rep.

The worst was our own contractor overhead. My boss was a civil servant, but everyone else on the team was an employee of Lockheed Martin or one of its subcontractors. If we had to go through the Lockheed contract for anything (which sometimes we were forced to do), they'd skim another 15%. For doing nothing except cutting a check. That ought to be illegal IMHO, and we avoided it whenever we could.

(I do not intend to indict you personally; as you have said, individuals at your level were executing the mandate of the agency as directed and did not have power to effect change.)

Academia provides a vital service to the government, namely producing research that helps further political and regulatory aims. Indeed, this phenomenon is widely known as The Alliance of Throne and Altar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_A... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation

University administration is a juicy target and I’m certainly not defending them wholesale. But the article’s written by rich people who want to lower state taxes.

If universities have a massive, bloated and overly expensive legion of administrators, does it matter if the person pointing that out is doing so because they want to reduce the burden on students who are forced to take out massive loans or to reduce the burden on the taxpayers who ultimately pay those loans when the government "forgives" them?

there's a tendency to fall into a fallacy of thinking an argument must be wrong because it's invalid. in real life, everyone does actually care what the objects being discussed are, and restricting yourself to logical validity would constrain your thinking to the point of uselessness. by dismissing a logically invalid argument out of hand because it's logically invalid, you're falling into your own fallacy, because to assume what's being claimed is false just because what's being claimed doesn't hold for everything itself doesn't hold for everything. for instance, if i tell you not to believe someone's claim because they cheat on their spouse, you can't assume they are lying about that claim, but you also can't assume they aren't lying about it.

so if someone tells you a person is motivated by greed to make an argument, yes, it isn't necessarily true that their argument has to be wrong--here's a cookie--but that also doesn't mean they aren't decieving you. what do you know about the subject other than what this potentially interested party just told you?

anyway, pay attention to when you fall for the fallacy fallacy, it's a window into your own ideology.

But when the person you are arguing with has a permanent bent that will distort & warp every argument, it's just a defense of open society to call the person out on that bias, on their forever grinding that axe.

This mention was an excellent & valuable warning to me. That it happens to resemble an attack to some people, is, in my view, far secondary to the broad public good this post served.

No, this is changing your standards of logic to support intolerance. You don't get to decide people's motivations against their will, or accuse them of bad faith without an example of the display of that bad faith.

Without making any value judgements about the comment in question, it’s worth noting that it is possible to be both against rent seeking and take issue with the source.

These are not mutually exclusive, and the accusation is unnecessary.

There are also people who do not want to be informed if the source is “bad,” but they’ll never admit it so shouldn’t be asked, and I don’t think OP or most people here are that entrenched.

This is important because many of these conservative groups focus on making education cheaper for students, and their families, who are already wealthy. This should be acknowledged when looking at their solutions because they don’t count many Americans as their stakeholders.

What we’re talking about is discouraging people from growing their skills and contributing to society.

I can’t say why that makes sense to other people. I suppose one assumption where asking individuals to pay some minimum amount would make sense is that education is perceived as a privilege that specifically benefits individuals, so individuals should not receive such benefits for free.

However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.

We’d be shifting risk from institutions onto individuals. I don’t see a positive impact emerging from that.

We're talking about discouraging people from taking three or four years off on society's dime that won't contribute anything to society. A degree like that certainly seem plausible, and the individual is probably in a position to spot cases that higher-level oversight might miss.

> However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.

Sure, and those corporations share in the tax burden that supports people in getting degrees.

Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem (Latin for 'argument to the person'), refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious.

Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.

Ad hominems, even when not fallacious, don't tend to contribute to the discourse. If you don't have a good rebuttal to the argument, saying that the person who wrote it did so because they have an agenda is inane. Of course they had an agenda: they wrote an essay!

I’ve certainly had friends with soul-crushing experiences in academia and I’m well aware there are cost disease concerns about academia. At the same time, state universities allocations from state government have been greatly reduced over the past few decades. I think attacking university administration is an easy target, but is it, perhaps, a target in support of a larger goal of defunding public education?

I don’t think this article’s really worth much intellectual engagement, and I think it’s generally helpful for readers to understand authors’ policy agenda — I’m old enough that this was called “critical thinking” when I was in school.

It sounds like you are trying to make a bad-faith argument here and this absolutely is an ad hominem fallacy (regardless of how well you cloak it in Wittgenstein).

Some of these organisations have a long history of producing misinformation, pay-to-play commentary (oil companies, tobacco companies) and outright lies in defence of their ideology. There is no way to read anything from thie cluster of bullshit factories like heritage.org (for example) without questioning their motives, because they are obviously compromised and will go to extremes to push an agenda.

We all know information sources like this and it saves a lot of time to simply dismiss everything they have to say about anything, because if you can't trust them to be truthful on one subject, why would they be truthful about anything?

The right love to call this kind of wholesale dismissal "cancel culture" but really, it's just the natural filtering of bullshit that everybody should do.

At the very least, you’re comfortable with knee jerk judgements based on personal ideology, and I don’t think that’s good for any discussion.

How is that a reasonable way of thinking? Unless you're one of those people that assume "All Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/Communists are lying thieves, except members of $MYPARTY."

I will say I block everything Murdoch. At this stage, the chaotic evil of Murdoch news sources is not just noise any more, it's deliberately disruptive.

Now, I could picture a different situation, one where, say, I have thought a lot about academic administration, what purpose it serves, how it could be better. Where I have studied the available data on the topic and formed opinions. Then, I would read the argument despite the expectation of bias, because I want to use all the information I can find, and engage with all the arguments that other people are making, even the ones that are pushing an agenda I disagree with. Maybe I would even read it and find I agree with the argument, and update my beliefs. Maybe I would come to the comments to post how my experience and knowledge fits the argument, or conflicts with it. But that is not me, so I'm trusting the expectation of bias and moving on.

They care about power.

So here's the flaw: They label things "bloat" without explaining WHY it is bloat. They just wave their hands and say "BLOAT! BE OUTRAGED!"

What is a proper level of administration?

Where are other systems with more or less and how do they perform compared to UNC?

They claim "At NC State, in 2020-21, no less than $131 million more was spent on administrative (i.e., non-teaching) positions than on teaching ones."

Where? How? Why? Who?

They can show, but don't. That's suspicious. Especially with the adjectives they use elsewhere in the article.

For all we know the entire budget of the library ($43 million) counts as "administrative".

There is a grand total of ONE (1) hyperlink in that article: TO A WEBSITE WHERE THEY'RE SELLING A BOOK.

It's bullshit.

Anyone who falls for it is fucking stupid.

Here is access to more actual data in one hyperlink than they presented in their screed:

https://budget.ncsu.edu/budgetcentral/

This is 0% about money or bloat or whatever as they frame it, and 100% about being angry that they're not allowed to ridicule transsexuals in public anymore without being "cAnCeLlEd".

So it is ad hominem, but maybe by accident if you want to be very generous.