I can't imagine such a tactic would work. The administration would pivot to "rewarding departments with increasing enrollments" or "actually we never had a principle here" or "our only mission is producing IT staff". What makes you think they'd care about the quality of education?

That is a genuine problem at the intersection of professionalism and economically 'rational' management. Someone who's a professional, in the sense of having an ethical commitment to providing a service to the people they serve to the best of their ability, is really vulnerable to abuse by management that's willing to exploit that commitment.

That is a genuine problem at the intersection of professionalism and economically 'rational' management. Someone who's a professional, in the sense of having an ethical commitment to providing a service to the people they serve to the best of their ability, is really vulnerable to abuse by management that's willing to exploit that commitment.

1: It might not work. I was just thinking that the only language admin seems to care about is the number of enrolled students, and thus all grievances must be translated into that currency.

It's interesting with doctors too. Some work for themselves and are in a fee for service mindset, so the more they do, the more money they make, but some on salary do more for their patients and yet are expected to see mor patients. Sometimes hospitals try to give the, extra support - but it's all in the service of the doctors seeing more patients or at least managing more of them - sometimes while seeing them less.

Principal-agent and informational problems across the board, no? Doing this requires someone have a comprehensive understanding of every task that goes into educating a student, its time taken and value added, and can boil it down to "amount of reasonable time to allocate per student" in a way that makes sense to both teachers and administrators. You can sometimes do this in a factory, harder in a university (or indeed a hospital).

The whole concept of management hierarchy may be due an uproot in these settings.

I think the only understanding the administration needs is knowing how hard it would be for the faculty to switch jobs.

I told my wife there were better jobs than teaching at a university She said she wanted to be a teacher. She doesn't feel that way anymore.

My university unit (staff, not teaching) is in the same bind, of course, and over the last 5-6 years the perverse outcome has been that we go chasing more and more outside projects with grant funding so as not to lay off too many people. So the work we're expected to deliver actually keeps growing as staffing keeps shrinking, and because the grant-funded projects (which are generally useless as far as improving anyone's education or life) get the most attention from the noisiest people, it's the core university services that keep getting crowded out and degraded. We in the trenches speculate a lot about what kind of collective action could right the boat, but it feels like trying to allocate a dry well.

If you can get grants, you can probably sell-out to pharma for way more money.

I have a friend in STEM field, full prof at an OK university in New England. He's described over the years the patterns of abuse by administrators, of faculty, not just at his school, but at others. There's a famous story about Donald Knuth (he of _Art of Computer Programming_ fame) being asked by some wet-behind-the-ears-with-an-MBA-associate/assistant-dean-type what he did for the university that justified his tenured/named chair. But I digress ...

Heebie, there's no short-term solution to your problem. But there is a long-term one: unions. It's the only one. Oh, and fucking smash down with a fucking hammer on all high-level administrator salaries. All. Of. Them. Without mercy.

I know you write about "our administration is also sweet and earnest" but I also remember when the drivers of techbuses for my employer were unionizing, and one of the drivers I'd gotten to know (when I told him I supported this effort) said "I'm paid well enough, I don't need a union". This is just wrong. Collective bargaining, worker power, is important even if management is treating you well. I well remember in France (25yr ago, gee I hope it hasn't change) that every fall, it seemed like every union would go on strike for 1-2 days. Just to remind everybody that they were there, that they had power, and that management shouldn't mess with them. Yes, it's inconvenient for everybody else. But in a world where management DGAF, not about workers, not about consumers, not about collateral damage, it's the only way.

And I mean not merely unionizing at your school, but at all the schools in Texas, so that administrators have to go really far afield to find replacements scabs.

But short-term, the *most important* thing you can do? Smash administrator numbers and salaries. Start yesterday.

Smash administrator numbers and salaries.

My sister has spent a career mostly as an academic administrator -- she just retired at an age maybe 10 years younger than when I'll be able to retire. She has been paid extraordinarily well over her career.

I understand the broad outlines of the gripes against college administration -- and am feeling particularly annoyed with it now that I am paying a public college tuition that, in real dollars, is many times what I paid as I worked my way through school.

But I've never gotten around to giving her shit about it. She's a reflective person and I'm sure has considered these issues. I'll be interested to see how/whether she chooses do defend her profession.

If you are in a position where you can sell out, you get paid better. It's probably also easier to form a union.

I'm not saying you need to sell out to find fulfillment, just that you should from time to time see what people with similar skills in different fields are making, what their work conditions are like, and whether they are actively abetting evil or just benefiting from late capitalism.

pf: "But I've never gotten around to giving her shit about it. She's a reflective person and I'm sure has considered these issues. I'll be interested to see how/whether she chooses do defend her profession."

Warren Buffett said that he should be paying higher taxes, and demonstrated that he paid a lower effective tax rate than his adminstrative assistant. Some GrOPers argued that if he felt that way, he could always donate his money. Paul Krugman pointed out that there was nothing inconsistent or hypocritical in both taking advantage of the laws as currently-written, and arguing for them to be changed in ways that hurt oneself: he pointed out that once upon a time, it was called "being civic-minded".

I'd hope that your sister could separate her personal situation (and that of her friends, perhaps) from the larger world in which we live, and its incentives and barriers. I work in I/T, and while I've done pretty well, I 100% realize that *all* us programmers should be paid less, and nurses (!! nurses!) should be paid more. Among other jobs/professions. I'm the son of a doctor, and I feel the same way about doctors: too damn overpaid, give that $$ to nurses and home health aides and ... and ....

It's a difficult thing to separate one's own situation, from a cold assessment of the world. I hope your sister is up to the task. But it's not easy to do.

15: what kind of nurses? Some of the RNs make a fair amount of money. An experienced ER nurse in Boston can make 100-130k.

To get back a bit to the OP: what do you think happens if the resource constraints just... keep on? It looks to me as though people learn less in college/university and there's no academic signal saying so (or there's only a really late one?), and our whole technocracy just... knows less?

If society doesn't need formal academic teaching -- if certificates and on the job training and `learning how to learn' are doing it all -- isn't it a winning strategy eventually to quit paying the Anglican vicar degreed professionals their cut?

11.1: I don't know this famous story, but from my experience the idea that a famous, tenured professor at a university like Stanford would in any way be abused or threatened by a low-level administrator seems absurd. It's much easier to imagine the professor failing to fill out some paperwork and then unleashing a torrent of "don't you know who I am?" abuse on a hapless administrator who points it out.

Unless you count that the former chancellor used to wave at me because he thought he was supposed to know who I was when we passed on the street, I don't think I ever met an administrator in 12 years working for the local university.

essear: I have it on good word that it happened, and quite a while ago. More recently, I was told that an ACM and IEEE Fellow who basically invented critical technologies used in chip design, and with a named chair at Stanford, doesn't get summer salary. Which is .... incredible.

Bostoniangirl: It's good that some nurses are getting paid well. I think though, that many, many nurses aren't, which is part of why we must import them from other countries. Also, I think it's useful to put numbers on things. I know of two doctors in a rural Red State, who each make north of $600k -- neither of these doctors were able to get into US med schools, and went to med schools in the Caribbean. The kind of money that many doctors make is *obscene*. Yes, it's slowly coming down due to corporatization. But that money just goes to administrators and execs: it isn't getting to the people who actually do the *work*.

I think we should be wary of judging professions by what people at the high end make. median pay of an RN in the US is $73k. Median for doctors? $194k. I was unable to find median pay info for specialists, but you can see here (https://medium.com/nomad-health/complete-list-of-average-doctor-salaries-by-specialty-e2bbbc0a6186 ) that it's pretty damn high.

To come back to the OP, the real issue here is that administration amasses power, never gives it up, and is structurally at odds with labor (== faculty, adjuncts, grad students). Administration needs to be tamed, and the best way to tame them is to do to them, what they're trying to do to faculty:

(1) overwork their asses until they drop
(2) cut their numbers
(3) cut their pay

Sorry, I meant to say that that link was for *mean* (not median) salaries, and broken out by specialties, and it's pretty damn high.

clew: "what do you think happens if the resource constraints just... keep on?"

I think we already can see, from what's happening in the humanities: the ongoing casualisation of all teaching, and eventually a degradation of standards as a result. In fields where teachers do significant research, this will result in even-further divorcing those who teach from those who do research, and the teachers will become a second-rung of temp workers. It will enhance a winner-take-all culture, and in research, that's a bad thing, because good ideas can come from unforeseen places. Eventually I think it results in a more-lethargic, more-frozen-in-place academic culture, as everybody is trying to get their piece of the pie, and nobody is actually doing the real work of scholary inquiry and communication.

It's already pretty bad in lots of places. Citation-ranking algorithms are resulting in crazy gaming of the system, for instance. All of that is a result of winner-take-all races, and what's happening in academia is just one of them.

I'm not an academic, but I'm sufficiently adjacent that I'm pretty disturbed (and have been for 25yr) at the growth of numbers and cost of administration. It's gotta be stopped, or the university as we know it will *end*.

And sure, there are other forces killing the university, too: remote instruction, recorded lectures, etc, etc. But this is just another. And something else: those other forces sometimes work to make it more-efficient to deliver teaching to students [and sometimes that doesn't work out]. When they work, the efficiencies will be captured by and enjoyed by *adminstration* and not by faculty. When they don't work, administration will push down on faculty to make up the difference. Whereas, if faculty had admin at their mercy, those economies would flow to faculty.

Shit rolls downhill. Trickle-down economics at work. Gotta get those admins under your boots before it's too late.

More recently, I was told that an ACM and IEEE Fellow who basically invented critical technologies used in chip design, and with a named chair at Stanford, doesn't get summer salary. Which is .... incredible.

Summer salary is what faculty are able to pay themselves, typically out of external grants, over and beyond their base salary--because most ladder-rank faculty salaries are nine-month salaries (which are typically paid out over twelve months, but that's beside the point for this conversation). In other words, if my base salary is $120k, that would be a nine-month salary (that, again, the university would pay me over twelve months). But then if I had an external grant--or some other sweet deal--I could also pay myself up to an additional 3/9ths salary during the summer. If the person you're talking about isn't able to do that, it's because they haven't won a grant that allows them to do so. There's nothing incredible about that, I don't think.

Having just read the rest of 20, forget I said anything.

10- I sold out because I wasn't able to get grants*. The only grant I wrote that got funded was approved six months after I left, after they took me off as PI.
My wife picks up some extra money teaching two online classes a year as an adjunct. If she were trying to make a living that way it would be a horrible job with meddling admins** but she doesn't care if they fire her so it's low stress.

*Not the main reason- I was paid out of enormous multicenter grants so didn't have to self-fund to keep my job there, but the funding model was pretty messed up in general.

** In the past she's told them the syllabus*** sucks and offered to help fix it and they said don't be a busybody. This year she offered Zoom office hours to help struggling students and got in trouble because it's supposed to be an asynchronous-only class. By having OH the admin said she was disadvantaging students in other sections (despite the fact that they issued her a university Zoom account that apparently she was never supposed to use.)

***It's a teacher ed course they haven't updated in 10 years despite all the changes in curricula, standardized testing, etc. Her students have said the syllabus doesn't match standards but the university apparently doesn't care as long as they pay.

10- I sold out because I wasn't able to get grants*. The only grant I wrote that got funded was approved six months after I left, after they took me off as PI.
My wife picks up some extra money teaching two online classes a year as an adjunct. If she were trying to make a living that way it would be a horrible job with meddling admins** but she doesn't care if they fire her so it's low stress.

*Not the main reason- I was paid out of enormous multicenter grants so didn't have to self-fund to keep my job there, but the funding model was pretty messed up in general.

** In the past she's told them the syllabus*** sucks and offered to help fix it and they said don't be a busybody. This year she offered Zoom office hours to help struggling students and got in trouble because it's supposed to be an asynchronous-only class. By having OH the admin said she was disadvantaging students in other sections (despite the fact that they issued her a university Zoom account that apparently she was never supposed to use.)

***It's a teacher ed course they haven't updated in 10 years despite all the changes in curricula, standardized testing, etc. Her students have said the syllabus doesn't match standards but the university apparently doesn't care as long as they pay.

If you can apply for grants and be competitive, you can probably sell out.

20: again, the idea that at a place like Stanford, the administration is overworking tenured faculty and cutting their pay is just silly. The problems that Heebie U. has, or that adjunct faculty anywhere have, are not the problems that tenured faculty at a school like Stanford have. Yes, there are famous people who are annoyed that they don't get grant funding like they used to, but that's because funding is competitive and is based mostly on what you've done in the last few years, not lifetime accomplishment. I know famous people who think they are overworked because they teach the same 1 class per semester that everyone else in their department teaches. (I know one person at a Stanford-like school who is currently being made to teach a "real" class for the first time in maybe 15 years, whose reaction was hilarious--"I'm supposed to assign homework every week? But that means I have to spend time thinking about teaching every week! How am I supposed to do that and do research?")

Based on knowledge of vaguely similar departments at similar schools, I'm pretty confident that whoever it is that you're talking about who doesn't get summer salary wouldn't have to teach more than one class a semester and gets paid more than $200k/yr in years without summer salary (probably much more, given that Stanford has to compete with Silicon Valley to keep people in that field). They're hardly a victim.

And, right, Stanford is on a quarter system, so they might even get the sweet deal where they only teach in two out of three quarters each year.

If people are making that kind of money, selling out seems unnecessary.

They just sell out for even more. Professor at my old place left a few years before I did, he is now my boss' boss' boss (great grandboss?). I'm sure he was making mid six figures as a professor plus outside consulting. Now he's making mid seven figures.
So yes unnecessary because no one needs that much money, but still highly lucrative.

Agreed with essear and SP. Stanford is the absolute WORST example of a place where a tenured science professor can complain. Even at Harvard and Yale at least the bio departments are pretty cutthroat and hire so many faculty that no individual one gets a ton of resources. You may want to say "Even at Stanford, this happens" but I think it's because their lot is so good that the only people who complain are people who spend all day thinking "Why am I still here at all when I could be making millions in the private sector", and everyone pays attention to their least complaint.

von wafer, essear: TL;DR I fear you're getting distracted. I cite Stanford b/c I know those stories well. I'm a CS researcher, after all. The *thrust* of my argument is that *no* administration can be trusted *anywhere* and that faculty must unionize and work across institutions regionally *everywhere*. I would have hoped that that was clear.

I have stories of another prof at a much-lower ranked institution. The thing is, at some level it's kinda like the poor doctor, whose doctor father had his own practice and was well-respected in the town, but this young guy has to make do with a job at the hospital and a fixed salary. I mean, there are two ways of thinking of that:

(1) boo-hoo, poor him
(2) if it's getting bad for him, and the money flowing into the medical sector continues skyrocketing, then *somebody* is getting paid outrageously. And that somebody is *management* and their cronies

Look: let's pretend I didn't share any of those stories, and instead posted a few links to articles about how awful adjuncts have it, everywhere in America. Nothing changes in my argument -- nothing. I mean, I pointed out that casualisation was a big problem, and the future of all American academia, unless the trends are stopped.

I pointed out that casualisation was a big problem, and the future of all American academia, unless the trends are stopped.

And administrators are going to stop these trends how? TT faculty is a lot more expensive than casual faculty, growth in non-faculty staffing is significantly driven by growth in the number of rules and standards universities have to follow, and funding is squeezed for most institutions outside the top tier. Million-dollar presidents' salaries are gross, but that's not where most of the money in higher ed is going.

I pointed out that casualisation was a big problem, and the future of all American academia, unless the trends are stopped.

And administrators are going to stop these trends how? TT faculty is a lot more expensive than casual faculty, growth in non-faculty staffing is significantly driven by growth in the number of rules and standards universities have to follow, and funding is squeezed for most institutions outside the top tier. Million-dollar presidents' salaries are gross, but that's not where most of the money in higher ed is going.

DaveLHI: "TT faculty is a lot more expensive than casual faculty, growth in non-faculty staffing is significantly driven by growth in the number of rules and standards universities have to follow"

(1) administration isn't going to solve casualisation of faculty unless they're *forced* to.
(2) there's a well-known pattern whereby the salaries of top execs drive salaries all down the line. Start at the top, and watch that "trickle-down". And yes, eventually superstar faculty will see their relative pay cut, too.
(3) It's a funny thing, the OP (and I 100% believe heebie's story) talks about how faculty are being pushed every damn year to do more, for the same pay. Maybe put the shoe on the other foot? Kick these administrators' asses for a change?

Look: I don't mean to be mean, but your position can be boiled-down to "there's nothing that can be done, oh woe". But that's not true: yes, there is a finite pie. So put those other pigs on a diet. No, it's not the solution to all problems. But it's a start to a solution. And wowsers, it's the same problem, everywhere we look. Everywhere.

Last: I *dispute* the argument that all these positions are being solely driven by new requirements. Sure, there are new requirements. But old ones are gone. When the organization that allocates resources, sees new requirements, do you really think they think about how they can economize their own perks and workforce? Or maybe, just MAYBE empire-builders think: "gee, I need all MY staff, but those guys over *there* can economize"?

36: you don't know enough about the issues to understand the anecdotes you're using as evidence. You don't care enough about the issues to read a couple of paragraphs other people write. Got it.

Anyway, DaveLHI has it right above: administrative bloat is a thing. Skyrocketing administrative salaries are a thing (though relatively rare). But the former is caused by some combination of an increasingly complex regulatory apparatus, an effort to serve an increasingly diverse (along several axes) student body, and an increasingly cutthroat competitive landscape. The latter is caused by capitalism, which is always the problem everywhere it exists. The two together don't come anywhere near being the root cause of the budget crises facing public universities. The issue there is massive cuts to state funding, which cuts are largely driven by political polarization, an obsession with austerity as the cure to everything that ails us, and shifting priorities in the aftermath of the Cold War. The other issue is these sorts of conversations tend to flatten the landscape of higher education, suggesting that what happens at Stanford has much to do with what happens at the University of Wisconsin which has much to with what happens at Heebie U.

What's happening at the University of Wisconsin is everyone is getting sick.

von wafer: (1) show me a senior administrator who has the sort of work life of an assistant or associate professor. Then we'll talk.

(2) Yeah, no shit there are other factors. My *point* was that in the presence of those other factors, it is *faculty* who get the shiv in the back, not senior administrators.

(3) Oh, and one of the good outcomes of cross-university unionization, would be that maybe, just maybe, faculty unions could push back on some of the "race to the bottom" spending on amenities that (yeah, I agree) seem to be gobbling up university budgets.

But hey, you wanna live in a crab bucket world, I guess it's your choice.

Over at LG&M, there have been a number of threads about the response in higher ed, to covid. And most of the profs (there are a bunch who comment there) have told stories of the dangers they're subjected-to, in order to keep their jobs. The lack of any sort of care on the part of adminstration oppressive boot of management on their necks and lungs. Etc. One exception (there are probably a few others): Erik Loomis' University of Rhode Island. He's repeatedly described how he and his fellow workers have the choice and discretion to either teach face-to-face, or remote, and how his *union* has made this possible.

Look: I'm not an academic: I got kicked-out decades ago. But I know enough who were suffering before this covid nightmare, and for whom conditions are only getting worse, to know that this is a watershed moment for all you academics. Either you stand up and smack down management, or whatever you agree to now, will become the new normal after covid passes.

Don't pretend that somehow once this is all over, management is going to give up any concessions you make.

1) Senior administrators have very different work lives than ladder faculty, it's true that people doing very different jobs are doing very different jobs.

2) You suggested that Stanford STEM faculty are getting shivved, and that's just an insanely stupid contention. You either have no idea what you're talking about--which, given that you seemingly don't know how summer salary works, seems likely--or you're being disingenuous or tendentious. Maybe it's both?

3) If you can figure out a way to get Stanford or University of California faculty to unionize, let's talk. Professional organizers have tried. It hasn't worked. My colleagues, much to my dismay, don't want a union. Such is the crab bucket world in which I scuttle.

4) I have no idea what people are saying over at LGM. I have no idea what people who comment there are experiencing. I only know that full professors in STEM fields at Stanford are experiencing very different things than associate professors in literature at the University of Wisconsin who are experiencing very different things than contingent faculty in any field at Heebie U. The differences matter. Talking about the academy as if it's monolithic is dumb. It's New-York-Times-op-ed page dumb: institutions of higher learning don't just run the gamut from Vassar to Yale.

5) This may be a watershed moment for everyone. We won't know for a few years. In the meantime, management is different at different institutions, because institutional cultures, personnel, and norms of shared governance differ. But if you think academics are on the front lines of Covid-related threats to job security or working conditions, you may be right. For my part, I think job security and working conditions in the academy were threatened before the pandemic, and those threats may grow more dire because of this crisis, but nowhere near as much as in other fields. Again, though, it doesn't do much good to talk about the academy as though it's just one thing.

If it isn't just one thing, why does everybody say, "I'd like to thank the academy"?

They like to keep it indeterminate in case there are repercussions.

He's repeatedly described how he and his fellow workers have the choice and discretion to either teach face-to-face, or remote, and how his *union* has made this possible.

We did it this way at Heebie U. All instructors made their own choice of teaching modality, full stop.

To be frank, a major reason that we did it this way is that I'm faculty queen this year, and it hadn't yet occurred to me that it could go any other way, and so I said, "the first thing to do is survey the faculty and find out their preferences so we can figure out how to accommodate them," and that ended up framing everything going forward. This was possibly during finals week in May because I was already in a lather about how on earth the fall would work. So it was before we were tainted with the knowledge that elsewhere it was unfolding differently.

The administration was a bit nervous that too much would be online, but it ended up falling naturally in the ~45% remote ballpark, and everyone was ok with that.

Did you think to ask anybody at Stanford first?

(1) show me a senior administrator who has the sort of work life of an assistant or associate professor. Then we'll talk.

Do you mean their jobs are different, or their career path is different, or that they just don't work as hard/much?

"the first thing to do is survey the faculty and find out their preferences so we can figure out how to accommodate them,"

Did they do any sort of covid risk assessment? Or was it purely down to personal preference? Just curious.

Asilon!

I think he meant that no administrator has to work nearly as hard, with as little security and as much responsibility, as people clinging to the academic career ladder

to 50: at my U, the initial rollout was "Tell us why you need to teach at a distance and HR will evaluate your case. Then HR denied everything. Like, you are sole caretaker to your immune-compromised live-in mother, with pre-existing respiratory problems? Denied! You are 67 years old yourself? Denied! At that point many employees were literally in tears and after a backlash, the policy changed to "all faculty and all students can decide unilaterally what they prefer to do, no questions asked." Which led to the odd policy/koan that students could be face-to-face with a teacher who was remote, but things seem to be stumbling along.

To the OP, I would say that for the faculty, lecturers and adjuncts at our U, very conservatively our teaching duties have doubled because of, in some cases, teaching two cohorts for each class plus a remote streaming contingent, and having to redesign all exams and quizzes and homeworks (and science labs!) to be deliverable remotely, to students who will often have internet issues. And AIHMHB through a 'furlough' they cut pay at the same time, without cutting the athletics budget by a drop, or the policing budget. It's chaos in the teaching side of things. We'll see what happens after this year.

Curious to know who 52 and 53 is. Not cutting the athletic budget a drop stings.

If a lurker breaking in to comment, let me be the first to note that adopting a consistent pseudonym is helpful and that "Wry Cooter" is still available.

OOPS! my browser always remembers until now. I wish I had grabbed Wry Cooter but I am chill.

Did they do any sort of covid risk assessment? Or was it purely down to personal preference? Just curious.

Are you asking if we had them provide a reason why they're at risk, if they wanted to teach remotely? We did not ask why. We just asked them what they planned on doing.

In fact, back then I thought we'd be forcing people to teach remotely who wanted to be on campus, because I thought we'd be most limited by classroom space and insuring that everyone had a six foot radius around them. (A few classes did have to decide between going remote or being split half-zoom, half-F2F. But this was not a major issue.)

Also, we have officially decided to send the kids back as long as the risk level stays yellow. I have SO MANY thoughts and feelings.