Right-Wing Talking Points Are Spreading
By Michael Meranze
As some of you may have seen, the Goldwater Institute has issued a new report on administrative bloat in universities. Not surprisingly, the report points to the incredible growth of administrators (relative to faculty, students, and staff) over the last decade and a half. But there are several things that should give us pause--especially since their way of framing the subject is gaining traction in public debates. For one thing, as the chief author Jay Greene has admitted, the report has an extraordinarily elastic definition of administration--to include among other categories: librarians, student counselors, music directors, etc. More importantly, the report assumes that the reason why there has been administrative growth is because of increased public funding (or "subsidies" as they prefer to call it). No evidence is provided for such a correlation (and indeed the privates have grown administratively more quickly than the publics) and indeed it seems to have escaped the author's attention that public subsidies per student have been declining in real dollars during the last 15 years.
The report trots out the usual praise of the University of Michigan and claims that Michigan is proving more effective in cutting administrative bloat because it is less dependent on public funds. There is no recognition that part of the reason why Michigan looks like it receives such a small percentage of its funds from the State is because of the importance of its medical complex (apparently every campus has one) or because it has raised money by dramatically increasing its out of state students. It is all good because it has cut out an amorphous group of administrators and it has done this because its state funding has been cut.
Now clearly, the Goldwater Institute is pushing a particular ideological line (and interestingly they adopt some of the progressive talk about administration taking away funds from instruction and research in order to reach their privatization point). But we should all recognize that the notion that the problem with universities is that they are not subject enough to market discipline has become more than a right-wing point. Wherever you look there are writers and administrators and policy makers arguing that the real problem with the University is the persistence of things like tenure and faculty governance.
These are not arguments that we can simply ignore. As the Goldwater Institute report shows, even the critique of administrative bloat can be used to argue for the destruction of the public basis of higher education. It is important to figure out ways to make positive arguments for how we think higher education needs to be reformed. If not, others will make the decisions for us. In fact, they have already begun to do so.
As some of you may have seen, the Goldwater Institute has issued a new report on administrative bloat in universities. Not surprisingly, the report points to the incredible growth of administrators (relative to faculty, students, and staff) over the last decade and a half. But there are several things that should give us pause--especially since their way of framing the subject is gaining traction in public debates. For one thing, as the chief author Jay Greene has admitted, the report has an extraordinarily elastic definition of administration--to include among other categories: librarians, student counselors, music directors, etc. More importantly, the report assumes that the reason why there has been administrative growth is because of increased public funding (or "subsidies" as they prefer to call it). No evidence is provided for such a correlation (and indeed the privates have grown administratively more quickly than the publics) and indeed it seems to have escaped the author's attention that public subsidies per student have been declining in real dollars during the last 15 years.
The report trots out the usual praise of the University of Michigan and claims that Michigan is proving more effective in cutting administrative bloat because it is less dependent on public funds. There is no recognition that part of the reason why Michigan looks like it receives such a small percentage of its funds from the State is because of the importance of its medical complex (apparently every campus has one) or because it has raised money by dramatically increasing its out of state students. It is all good because it has cut out an amorphous group of administrators and it has done this because its state funding has been cut.
Now clearly, the Goldwater Institute is pushing a particular ideological line (and interestingly they adopt some of the progressive talk about administration taking away funds from instruction and research in order to reach their privatization point). But we should all recognize that the notion that the problem with universities is that they are not subject enough to market discipline has become more than a right-wing point. Wherever you look there are writers and administrators and policy makers arguing that the real problem with the University is the persistence of things like tenure and faculty governance.
These are not arguments that we can simply ignore. As the Goldwater Institute report shows, even the critique of administrative bloat can be used to argue for the destruction of the public basis of higher education. It is important to figure out ways to make positive arguments for how we think higher education needs to be reformed. If not, others will make the decisions for us. In fact, they have already begun to do so.
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