Administrative Bloat in Academia

This, "Administrators Ate My Tuition," via Leiter, is right on the money. We've got so many deans, sub-deans, deanlings and deanlets that we literally can't keep track of them all. Add in an army of "coordinators" for the disastrous and widely-reviled general education program the administration at my school forced on us, and you get even more of these folks. Then, of course, there are the administrators associated with the innumerable programs, centers, initiatives and inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary this-s and thats.

Where is your tuition money going? It's a fairly easy question to answer. It's going to prop up lots of highly-paid and vastly unnecessary administrators, a preposterously beautiful campus, and innumerable distractions and amusements for students, including over-funded sports teams. Vast wealth might flow to some faculty at some schools...but there are many of us out here, doing yeoman's work, and it is barely trickling down to us at all. Hell, most of us aren't even the kinds of people who care much about money, and our salaries are still commonly insulting.

Don't some professors teach very little? Yes. Not most of us. Don't even most of us get summers "off"--i.e., to devote to scholarship? Yes. Wouldn't tuition be cheaper if professors had to teach more classes? No, because people like me would quit. Part of why most of us took this gig is for the flexibility and time to devote to research/scholarship. Try to make us teach 40 hours/week, and we'll go get easier, higher-paying, less-frustrating jobs. You'll be left with the profs who don't devote any time to their classes anyway, so teaching an extra one or two won't matter to them.

So, you want to lower tuition costs, don't look to the faculty, look to the administration. They're the ones with the big fat salaries, and they're the the ones making the decisions about--to use two examples from my own institution--building new football stadiums and adding palatial new wings to already palatial fitness centers.