How My Committee Assignment Made Me Pay More Attention To Conservatives

So it suddenly dawned on me that one of my (innumerable) committee assignments has made me more sympathetic to a certain key conservative criticism of government.

This committee--let's call it C1--is one of those high-level committees that makes decisions that affect lots of people. I could say a lot about this committee, and little of it would be good I'm afraid. I'm not sure how typical my university is; there is fairly good evidence that--wanna-be, second-(at best)-rate institution that it is--it is often on the cutting edge of academic badness, always looking for the Magic Bullet That Will Change Everything. I could go on and on. But back to the point at hand. What I see is this:

(a) a bureaucracy and (b) a complex of rules and regulations metastasizing completely out of control.

It's not even that individual policies are bad--though many are. It's that they are spiraling out of control. You sometimes stumble upon these things and you see that there's a baroque structure of policies within policies, like one of those fractal patterns, smaller and smaller bits of micro-management asymptotically approaching the infinitely trivial.

So, if this is the kind of thing that's going on in government, I can certainly understand being concerned about it.

It's like the administration is getting bigger and bigger, and more and more faculty are moving into positions that are partially academic. And as more and more faculty are being selected by a system that is less and less focused on intellectual and pedagogical matters and more and more focused on administrative/bureaucratic ones, the institution moves closer and closer to being a machine the primary purpose of which is to form new committees (sub-committees, working groups, "task forces," etc.) and generate new policies. Now, I'm all for the rule of law and the minimization of arbitrariness--we've just overthrown an arbitrary and authoritarian Chair in our department, so I know what that's all about. But I get the feeling--though it's little more than that at this point, that here's the way academia used to be:

You hired smart people, who had internalized the fact that they had important responsibilities. You trusted their professionalism, but put some policies in place to get things back on track if they went wrong.

And the way it is now is rather more like:

You hire people who can be good cogs in a machine. The primary end of the machine is to make sure the machine runs with machine-like precision. You add more and more epicycles to make sure that less and less is left to the discretion of the individuals (who are, remember, commonly something like experts in their fields).

It's not clear that this is right, and it's to some degree an exaggeration, and this is probably where the disanalogy with government comes in. But I'm really just talking about my experience in academia and why it has made me sit up and take notice when conservatives say similar things about government. I now vividly see how such a bureaucratic explosion can be bad, and why we would want to avoid it. It's like spending great effort to create an institutional monster that you will, eventually, have to spend great effort fighting.

Add that many of these policies have been made by people who aren't terribly intelligent and you've got a whole new kind of problem. You get a "synergy" as some of my fellow committee-folk might say. But that's a whole different story--a story about the alarming mediocrity of much of academia. And as more and more of the curriculum is devoted to weaker, fluffier, more vocational and otherwise less-rigorous subjects--e.g. business (most notably marketing), "communications," "kinesiology," and the various and sundry special niche sub-sub-sub disciplines like women's studies and so forth--it's just going to get worse. But that's a different screed for a different time.