The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative
University and Why It Matters
By Benjamin Ginsberg
(Oxford University Press, 264 pages, $29.95)
When I began my college search, a family friend jokingly
referred to university as a four-year sleepover. He went to Yale.
And he was right.
Universities pitch themselves to new students as beacons of
social acceptance rather than academies of higher learning.
Magazines and books rank schools according to factors far beyond
the classroom, counseling parents to ensure the financial future of
their children by selecting “the right school.” Schools send
brochures touting climbing walls and focus-grouped slogans about
the kinds of students that attend, rather than the kind of learning
they can expect.
These books follow the horserace of SAT test-prep, “college
culture,” and a variety of other non-essential concerns recently
lampooned by the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson in
Crazy U, which addresses the shocking build-up of a
university-admissions-industrial complex seemingly engineered to
make parents go bankrupt or crazy, whichever comes first.
Ferguson’s bewilderment is part of at least a half-century-long
tradition of universities “selling out.” William F. Buckley’s
God and Man at Yale railed against the “established
non-belief” and “collectivist philosophy” of his alma mater—in
1951; Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
chronicled the flight from a core liberal arts curriculum to more
“relevant” studies; Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals
skewered the intellectual bankruptcy of modern academics.
Other less partisan books, such as Alan Charles Kors and Harvey
Silverglate’s The Shadow University, launched a nationwide
effort to protect the civil liberties of students under attack by
politically correct bands of college administrators who sought to
limit free speech to appointed “free speech zones,” or expel
students for not getting with the program. All took issue with the
sudden shift in focus from learning as it was classically
understood to the concerted effort to indoctrinate students into
unquestioning automatons, regardless of political philosophy.
Benjamin Ginsberg’s book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise
of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, pins
the blame for that shift on a new politburo-like administrative
style of university governance. In six chapters spanning 248 pages,
Ginsberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins, reveals the sea change in
American higher education in which the modern university has been
gobbled up by bureaucracy, marketing, and a wholesale disregard for
learning. Academic concerns have been left behind.
Ginsberg’s salvo is rooted in his five decades in academia,
during which schools have gone from being driven by faculty ideas
and concerns to being “controlled by administrators and staffers
who make the rules and set more and more of the priorities of
academic life.” Administrators either refuse to consult faculty or
wholly ignore their unsolicited input. Presidential searches are
not conducted by committees of qualified academics, but are
outsourced to special firms, which then write off any potentially
controversial candidates, leading tragically to the “most boring
and conventional candidates.”
Worse still, these administrators have little to do, leading
them to create make-work projects, such as retreats, conferences,
and “strategic planning” meetings. “Little would be lost,” Ginsberg
writes, “if four out of five staff meetings (they could be selected
at random), were canceled tomorrow.”
Any recent graduate of a university will recognize the products
of these meetings: Mandatory sensitivity trainings, offices of
“campus life,” special staff-led seminars, or dormitory-based
programming seeking to “enhance cultural understanding.”
Fundraising appears to be the only thing these bureaucrats are
well equipped to tackle. Even during the recession, colleges were
able to raise money owing mainly to the dedication and nostalgia
among alumni. But then, Ginsberg notes, administrators appropriate
the money “to support more administration.”
During a recent President’s Staff Meeting at one Ohio community
college, 11 of the 18 agenda items “involved plans for future
meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings.” Other
schools charted out similar Russian-doll meetings about meetings,
squandering money that could have enhanced the faculty or benefited
students in financial need.
Yet the public doesn’t see the inefficiency. According to a
study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 percent of
Americans express “a great deal” of confidence in large
corporations as a whole. Forty-eight percent, on the other hand,
indicate a great deal of confidence in colleges and universities.
This, Ginsberg argues, allows functionaries to fundraise even more
successfully.
In 2007, American colleges and universities raised nearly $30
billion in gifts. Harvard raises an average of $600 million per
year. This is all thanks to the professionalization of fundraising
based on the techniques of Charles Sumner Ward, who found ways to
prop up the YMCA in the early 20th century by going beyond
door-to-door fundraising aimed at a select wealthy group. Ward
appealed to a large base of small donors, and was able to secure
larger rewards as those donors became older, more successful, and,
most important, more nostalgic. An entire consulting industry
sprang up, and soon universities were competing to recruit or
retain top “development officers” who could boost school budgets
and keep tuition competitive.
Effective fundraising also allows university presidents to hold
on to their schools’ massive endowments. This gives them more
autonomy and shields them from the kinds of market pressures that
could force a greater focus on academic rigor. When testifying
before Congress in 2008, college presidents argued that they should
not be required to justify their favorable tax status by spending
at least 5 percent of their net worth each year. They “failed to
mention that endowment income helped to free them from having to
consult their faculties regarding university programs and
priorities.” A large endowment was “needed to sustain the
all-administrative university.”
That administration can go beyond being simply costly—it can be
downright spend-crazy. American University’s president, Benjamin
Ladner, and his wife (who called herself AU’s “First Lady”),
demanded that AU build them an expensive new “official residence”
complete with a waterfall. Before Ladner was eventually dismissed
he and his wife had managed to spend $220,000 on chefs, $54,000 on
drivers, $44,000 on alcohol, and $100,000 on a social
secretary.
THE PROBLEM FOR GINSBERG is that he neglects to make a positive
case for the faculty. It’s no small thing. The assumption that the
faculty has somehow been chafing at the bit to take on more
responsibility in administration defies common experience. Ginsberg
himself makes note of Cornell Prof. Theodore Lowi (at the time of
my attendance, the school’s highest-paid professor), who boasted of
writing a popular book on the presidency while being truant from
meetings he was expected to attend. Ginsberg thinks the example
explains why professors mustn’t cede authority to administrators
who will fill the vacuum, but it really illustrates the cavalier
way in which many tenured professors treat any administrative
activity as a burden on their academic freedom. Small wonder
administrators have decided to look elsewhere for help in staffing
the kinds of programs that college rankings favor. Few serious
scholars in physics want to develop dormitory housing programs.
Tenure (and the disappearance of mandatory retirements) has made
it all too easy for professors to dodge administrative
responsibilities. Why bother with this small stuff when you can
dwell in the library or your study without consequence? Meanwhile,
Ginsberg notes with sadness that tenure has become increasingly
rare, thanks to a glut of desperate Ph.D.’s willing to forgo
tenure-track positions in favor of the rare paycheck. But these
“mini-professors” are the very product of an inflated university
system that pumps out graduates without regard to the markets they
enter.
In fact, AU’s Ladner himself was a philosophy professor prior to
becoming the spend-crazy president who gave rise to scandal. Hunter
S. Rawlings, a very popular classics professor at Cornell, became
president, yet during his tenure made no notable effort to reduce
the infamous “Big Red Tape” that only contributes to a competitive
and stressful campus environment. His successor, David Skorton,
recently wrote in the Huffington Post that the cost of
going to college is far too high, all while announcing a new
multi-million-dollar research facility on Roosevelt Island in New
York City.
When professors enter administration, they are just as likely to
continue the endless campaign for growth.
It’s not simply that faculty members are reluctant to make
changes. The book ignores the links between faculty ideology and
bureaucratic efforts. While Ginsberg rightly indicts the trendy
attempts to enforce measures of political correctness on campus, he
makes no effort to point out that these views were in vogue during
faculty summits in the late 1960s and 1970s, when, as Thomas Sowell
says of his tenure as a Cornell economics professor in A
Personal Odyssey, administrators and faculty alike worked
toward establishing more “relevant” curricula. The new bureaucratic
bloat is the illegitimate stepchild of that era.
The university needs a shake-up regardless, and Ginsberg’s
enjoyable and accessible book makes that absolutely clear, using
data and anecdotal experience gathered within the walls of the
Ivory Tower. It’s a rude awakening for all those who saved money
for college, and instead got a four-year sleepover.
