On the consolidation of power within the administrative bureaucracy:
The character of the college as a micro-community of academics is being doubly subverted: from within, by the rapid growth of bureaucratic roles taken up by professional administrators, and from without, by a university seeking to centralise control and elide differences among the colleges. The more uniform the overall environment becomes, the more rapidly it will suffer from the bad decisions inevitably yet to be made.
On the metastasis of overpaid, officious administrators:
“The content of this letter is extremely important, so please read it carefully.” It isn’t often that the university speaks to its employees in this way. This was a follow-up email from the former pro-vice-chancellor for strategy and planning, David Cardwell. He wanted academics to complete his Time Allocation Survey by tabulating how many hours were spent across a vast suite of possible activities. It is characteristic of contemporary Cambridge that the strongest rhetoric it can muster is directed toward this self-serving bureaucratic exercise. Cardwell rubbed shoulders with four other pro-vice-chancellors, all enjoying a salary that is several multiples of the typical university academic, and surpasses the Prime Minister’s.
This administrative overgrowth is, by the way, a historical novelty:
All of this is new: until 1992, the role of vice-chancellor was covered in short stints by the Heads of House, who paused their college governance while the rest of Cambridge got on with what they were here to do. Now we have not only career administrators at the helm, but their five deputies, for an annual cost of around £1.5 million. All the while, the university fails to find the money to keep important subjects alive, such as the centuries-old study of millennia-old Sanskrit.
I’ve been pointing this out for years. Until very recently, administrative functions in universities were largely filled by senior academics: you got bullied into shouldering the unwelcome burden because somebody had to do it, and you drew the short straw. There is nothing that a serious person despises more than paperwork, especially a scholar, who would much rather be happily buried in whatever esoterica he has made his field of study. Forcing academics into administrative roles ensured that the people filling those offices were incentivized to keep the paperwork to an absolute minimum; the last thing they wanted was to create more of the hateful stuff.
Enter, some decades ago, the professional administrators. Initially, these usually had some sort of academic qualification, and still largely do – albeit typically in fake non-disciplines, “public administration” or what have you – but they were not in any sense scholars. They were managers. Give us your burden, they said; we’ll do all the annoying paperwork for you, and you can concentrate on your very important research, you very important scholars, you. Thus the professoriate, like gullible fools, handed over the keys to the kingdom.
Unlike professors, managers are incentivized to create as much administrative complexity as they can: the more administration there is to perform, the more administrators the institution needs, and the larger the fiefdoms senior administrators can command. Since admin typically has control of the budget, they were easily able to appropriate the necessary funds. The result has been the explosive proliferation of useless eaters with lavish salaries and ridiculous titles like Senior Vice Assistant Dean for Excellence or Junior Associate Student Life Provost. At many universities, administrators now exist in a 1:1 ratio with the student body.
Admin have sucked shrinking university budgets dry, with real intellectual consequences: they aren’t going to fire themselves, and they sure aren’t taking a salary cut, so to make up budget shortfalls academic programs with low enrolment get the axe. Butterfield’s reference to the closure of the Sanskrit program is an example of this; there are many such examples, and they are increasingly common. To brains built out of buzzwords and spreadsheets, everything is either a marketing technique or a revenue stream, and if a program isn’t popular enough to subsidize their summer vacations in Provence or social-justicey enough for them to brag to their beach friends about how progressive they are, it serves no purpose.
This ability of university administrations to close down programs illustrates something else, which is that they are the real power on campus. The academics are mere employees: they will teach whichever students the admin decides to admit, will teach those students whatever the admin says to teach them, will not teach what the admin tell them not to teach, will teach in whatever manner admin decides is best, and will evaluate the results of that instruction in whatever fashion admin mandates they be evaluated.
As members of the managerial class, university administrators are drones of the global managerial hive mind, and instinctively exert a homogenizing influence. Old, parochial practices must be jettisoned in favour of standardizing the institutions they manage.
As for our age-old titles – of lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor – these were replaced with American titles so as to be “more intelligible” to a global audience. … To conjure up a world of “assistant professors” and “associate professors”, who in fact have no supporting relationship to “the professors”, makes a mockery of that venerable system.
Administrators dislike horizontal social relationships amongst faculty. Peer-to-peer network architectures are hard to control; they prefer a server-terminal model, with management as the server through which all communications pass, and professors as the terminals, who can be regulated through systems of permissions. Thus, they set about dissolving those institutions that facilitate conviviality amongst the faculty:
It was telling that a few years ago the authorities silently closed down the University Combination Room, the 14th-century hall in which academics could freely convene outside their individual colleges.
Administration is also sneaky, adopting governance practices that minimize whatever legacy powers the professoriate still possesses:
Although in theory Cambridge academics are self-governing, the move to online voting, with minimal announcement, allows for many university policies to be driven through by those who want them enacted.
Butterfield understands full well that the problems are hardly unique to Cambridge:
All this I say of Cambridge. But these issues go right across the university sector … The public need to trust and respect the elite academic institutions they fund; but that respect is waning, as stories continue to reveal politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants. The ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle of academia. If Cambridge can’t resist decline, who can?
The obvious answer is: no one can resist this. Not Cambridge, not Oxford, not University College London, not Harvard, not Princeton, not MIT, and not Whittier College. The problem is too systemic; the rot too deep. Decades of administrative consolidation of power has subsumed the ivory tower into an appendage of the global asset management system. Generations of ideological infection by the mind virus of cultural Marxism, wokeism, critical social justice, gay race communism, whatever you want to call it, has poisoned the minds of too many of the faculty. Generations of steadily declining standards, an inevitable consequence of massively increased enrolment which of unavoidable necessity heavily sampled the fat middle of the IQ distribution, has thinned out the influence of the bell curve’s rarefied tail to statistical irrelevance. After all of this, the only way to save the university is to purge it, of the great mass of low-performing affirmative action students, of the diversity hire academics who substitute clumsy sermonizing for the scholarship they can neither understand nor perform, and most especially of the great tumorous mass of useless administrators.
Such a purge, to be effective, would need to be thorough. To be thorough, it would remove almost everyone in the system. This would be the same as destroying the system. To save the patient, one would have to kill the patient.
Therefore no such purge will take place.
Instead, the system will crumble, buckle under its own weight, and eventually collapse.
As, in fact, it is doing.
John Carter, “Crumbling DIEvory Towers”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2024-10-25.
