Bret Devereaux

Any discussion of higher education these days runs into the phrase 'administrative bloat.' it is *everywhere* but a lot of the folks who use it won't define what it means, which leads to a lot of confusion - there are a lot of people in the university who could be 'admin.' 2/xx

Let's start with who I do *not* mean, when I talk about administrators. First off, you have 'departmental staff' (some of whom may work in curricula or centers or other sub-department organizational units, but doing the same thing). 3/xx

Dept. Staff are your student services, accountant, HR staff who work inside the department; large departments often have a department manager who oversees the rest. A large department might well have 2 student services (undergrad and grad), an accountant...4/xx

...a general admin assist. who also does front-desk and aids faculty (scans, copies, mail, etc), along with a dept. manager who often handles HR as well. Smaller units will combine these roles, often down to just 1 or 2 people. 5/xx

Dept. staff work in the department (physically-offices near faculty); report to the dept. chair (who is a faculty member; position typically rotates among senior faculty). While they do 'admin' and sometimes have 'admin' in their job titles, they are not what I mean. 6/xx

The other chunk of staff I want to pull out are staff in traditional university admin. units - registrar, bursar, academic advising, library. I don't have good data on them (they're harder to pick out than dept. staff) but my impression is they haven't grown much either. 8/xx

So when we talk about administrative 'bloat,' we should be clear we do not mean these folks. Those basic functions have existed for a long time, they're generally not super-well compensated, and they are necessary. I tend to call them 'staff' rather than admin to be clear 9/xx

So where is the admin. and bloat? Let's start with university governance. At the top of most universities, you have a chief executive (names vary: president/chancellor/rector - gonna say chancellor henceforth), who typically as a no. 2 administrator, the provost. 10/xx

Beneath the provost are 'deans,' each of whom oversees a school/college, which in turn is made up of a bunch of academic departments, where the faculty are (headed by a chair, selected from/by dept. faculty). Deans are typically senior faculty pulled up from the depts. 11/xx

So profs are in depts., depts. report to a college (run by a dean), which reports to the provost and chancellor. And often you had a few subordinates who might report to the provost and run all-university-services like the registrar, or the bursar. 12/xx

I want to note, titles for all of these things vary a TON. Like, UNC has a cashier's office headed by a Cashier, where UMASS has a Bursar's office headed by a bursar and FSU has a 'student business services' office headed by a 'Director' and THESE ALL DO THE SAME THING. 13/xx

But we've got our ideal organization: chancellor, provost, deans/colleges, depts./chairs, a handful of registrars/bursars, etc. Seems simple, direct, fairly rational. So now let's make a mess of it. With vice-provosts and deanlets. 14/xx

To oversimplify a bit, when you bring in business-world managers to the provost or chancellor positions, promising to 'shake up' the university, they are going to want to do stuff, which means creating new units to do those things. 16/xx

Those new units need someone to run them and these tend to be professional adminstrators, rather than elevated faculty (like the old deans and provosts). They have any number of titles - vice provost, vice president, asst. dean. Each university is different. 17/xx

Those new administrators (who are paid typically quite a bit more than traditional university staff, like dept. managers, registrars, bursars, etc) need staff, so they hire staff to run the new centers/initiatives etc. All of which costs money, of course. 19/xx

These initiatives tend to stack up over time, so you get a layer-cake of new initiatives on top of old centers, all of which keep running and soaking up funds. Sometimes you have multiple initiatives designed to solve the same problem, all running in parallel. 20/xx

The other big structural change with the business model - it's a fairly common initiative - is an effort to create centralized administration by pulling functions out of the departments or colleges and putting them together in big new university bureaucracies. 21/xx

Often this is a 'service center' or 'business center' - you can often tell it's new because it exists in a big off campus building (because it's new building for new unit). The *promise* of these things is that they'll be cheaper and more efficient than dept staff. 22/xx

Which you can understand: these business-model guys were brought in to fix cost-growth, remember? The *problem* is that they don't work. Moving functions away from depts. (or registar/advising/etc) makes it harder for faculty/students to use them. 23/xx

So depts./colleges refuse to give up their staff in these roles - they want someone down the hall, not halfway across campus (or sometimes off of it!). So the promised cutbacks on dept. staff never materialize; instead both fill out the same paperwork in parallel. 24/xx

And of course the deanlet or vice-provosts of each unit fight to stick around and get more staff and resources. And so all of these centers and initiatives - often designed to save money - end up costing more money. 25/xx THREAD CONTINUES...

...and in turn that compliance burden both means you need more staff at all levels, and at the same time creates demand for initiatives and centers and more centralized administration to handle new compliance paperwork. To be clear, that's being imposed from outside...27/50

...sometimes by state legislatures that have gone to war with the universities (and like imposing lots of compliance rules on teaching), sometimes by the federal government. All of it costs money and it gets tied up with universities trying to be lawsuit proof. 28/50

Because, of course, you show that you are trying to be in compliance with <regulation> by creating a new administrative unit with a dedicated vice/assistant/deputy dean/provost/chancellor to oversee it. It doesn't matter if they do anything - they just need to exist. 29/50

Which gets us to the sticky problem with expanding administrations and why everyone likes to hide behind the phrase 'administrative bloat' without actually talking about who they mean...30/50