To balance the budget we just need to eliminate waste, fraud and mismanagement...
How hard could it be?
Gary Smith, the Fletcher Jones professor of economics at Pomona College, has thoughts about the increasing ratio of administrators to faculty and students at colleges:
I will use Pomona College, where I have taught for decades, as a specific example of how easily my proposal might be implemented. In 1990, Pomona had 1,487 students, 180 tenured and tenure-track professors, and 56 administrators — deans, associate deans, assistant deans and the like, not counting clerical staff, cleaners and so on. As of 2022, the most recent year for which I have data, the number of students had increased 17 percent, to 1,740, while the number of professors had fallen to 175. The number of administrators had increased to 310, an average of 7.93 new administrators per year. Even for a college as rich as Pomona, this insatiable demand for administrators will eventually cause a budget squeeze.
Sure. But the Post must have given him a very strict word limit, because in his (satirical!) piece he never identifies which administrators his college could do away with. Where should we start? Here is the staff list for IT services at Pomona. In 1990 I bet they ran a much tighter ship in this department. Do we need all these people? Does he want IT to reduce staff? I’m not sure. We could turn to other departments for this small, liberal arts college. Student aid? Have you tried the new improved FAFSA yet? Admissions? Pomona has a 7 percent acceptance rate: who is going to handle all those applications? The arts? Pomona has a very fine looking new art museum, just completed in 2020, but museums take a lot of staff to run.
Could we, if we dug deeply, find some administrative positions that seem, at first look, a bit superfluous? I’m sure we could - every academic has at least one person at their institution where it is asked “what do they actually do?”. But “there are too many darn administrators” opinion pieces rank with right-wing politicians bemoaning the size of government, but then insisting “no, we wouldn’t cut that. Or that. Or that. We’d cut other stuff.”
So step up, grumpy academics. Name names.
Yeah, this is exactly right--I was thinking along these lines in 2014 when I responded these kinds of critiques. https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2014/01/31/whos-the-boss/
Today I do think there's an argument that about administrative growth that is legitimate, but it still takes getting real about what exactly we think is the growth we don't support. I think for me that's two things: excessive centralization of authority that has led to taller hierarchies in several key areas (and when you make the hierarchy longer, it isn't long before each tier of the hierarchy demands horizontal growth) and the overgrowth of residential life staffing that is a result of stepping back into in loco parentis and needing to monitor student life in ever-increasing detail. But paring back from both takes more than just losing positions--it takes a big conceptual shift that runs hard against wider trends.