The UNC system in North Carolina is adapting itself to a roughly 16% budget reduction from the last session of the General Assembly. UNC officials are talking about cutting programs, reducing the number of classes, increasing the average size per class and worst of all....raising tuition and fees. Those of us who have had experience in the UNC system know all that is smoke and mirrors.
If the UNC officials want to know where they can cut, not only 16% of the total budget, but probably twice that much need only order a copy of a new book that will soon be coming out. It is entitled The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters by Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at John Hopkins University.
East Carolina University's Joyner Hall Library photo by Stan Deatherage
Ginsberg documents the growth in recent years of the number of administrators in the university system nationwide. The highly respect
Inside Higher Educaiton says:
In prose that is by turns piquant, sarcastic and largely dismissive of many administrators, Ginsberg marshals anecdotes from his 40 years of experience at Hopkins and Cornell University, as well as from accounts from other campuses. He juxtaposes these with historical analysis and data showing that the growth in the ranks of administrators (85 percent) and associated professional staff (240 percent) has far outstripped the increase in faculty (51 percent) between 1975 and 2005. "Generally speaking," he writes, "a million-dollar president could be kidnapped by space aliens and it would be weeks or even months before his or her absence from campus was noticed."
Ginsberg lays at administrators' feet a host of perceived ills: the increased curricular focus on vocational education instead of one grounded in the liberal arts; an emphasis on learning outside the classroom in lieu of core academic disciplines; the transformation of research from an instrument of social good and contributor to human knowledge to an institutional revenue stream; and the limiting of tenure and academic freedom.
The larger result, he argues, is that universities have shifted their resources and attention away from teaching and research in order to feed a cadre of administrators who, he says, do little to advance the central mission of universities and serve chiefly to inflate their own sense of importance by increasing the number of people who report to them. "Armies of staffers pose a threat by their very existence," he wrote. "They may seem harmless enough at their tiresome meetings but if they fall into the wrong hands, deanlets can become instruments of administrative imperialism and academic destruction."
Carl O. Moses, the provost, dean of faculty and a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Susquehanna University, as well as chair of the American Conference of Academic Deans said that, while he shared Ginsberg's concern that the growth in non-teaching employees had pushed up the cost of college, he saw this growth as necessary to deal with a changing student body. "Our population of learners is much more diverse on dimensions almost too numerous to list," Moses said in an e-mail, while stating upfront that he had not yet read the book and wanted to step carefully in critiquing it. "The needs of those students are correspondingly more diverse, and a dean of students, a conduct officer, a housing coordinator, and a chaplain just are not enough anymore."
Not only does Ginsberg reject the idea that student needs are served by administrative growth, he dismisses the argument that this increase has been a necessary response to mounting demands from government and accreditors. He points out that the ratios of students to administrators vary widely from one institution to the next -- and even between public and private institutions (the rate of administrative growth at private colleges has, in fact, been double that at publics).
Based on my fifteen years of experience in the UNC system I would concur with Dr. Ginsberg, even while admitting that I myself participated in the phenomenon he describes. When I started at ECU I taught four classes per semester. Shortly afterward I moved into a part-time administrative position while retaining my faculty position but with a reduced load. Typically from that point on I taught graduate one class per semester. Yet I held a fulltime faculty position. One class means teaching 3 hours a week. But my schedule was not different from half our fulltime faculty in our department. Most had "released time" for administrative duties. The teaching load was shifted to part-time faculty, euphemistically called "adjunct faculty." If our department was typical, it is safe to say that if every faculty member taught a full load that we could have taught the same number of students and classes with less than half as many fulltime faculty. We certainly could have cut 16% without the students even knowing anything had been cut.
In the UNC system, the reason this situation exists is because of the way resources are allocated. Rather than allocating positions and mandating that each position teach a prescribed number of classes (typically at the graduate level this would be four three-hour courses per week), the UNC system allocates dollars. The dean or department chair then uses those dollars to hire lower paid part-time instructors and that leaves money to pay the salaries of faculty positions that have released time to do administrative jobs.
The other game that is played is with "lapsed salary" funds. These are funds that are budgeted for positions that may not be filled for a full term. So if the position is budgeted but no one is in that position the money lapses into the overall budget. It can then be re-allocated by the administrators for administrative positions. After those positions exist for some time they are picked up on the continuation budget and viola, you've created new administrative positions.
And a variation of this game is that every now and then the higher powers mandate budget reductions. A vacant faculty position may be cut to "revert" funds back to Raleigh but the administrative positions that have been filled by lapse salary funds are not cut because someone is filling the position and the First Rule of the bureaucracy is: Cut dollars, not people.
And then there is the "revolving door." Here a faculty member is "promoted" to an administrative position, but bombs out (typically because they have never had any training or experience in management) and is moved back to a faculty position, but almost always at the same administrative salary they were earning.
The games consume way more than 16% of the total funds for most departments.
The solution? The state should allocate positions in higher education like they do in K-12 education and then restrict the use of those positions for anything other than what they are allocated for. They should allocate a specific number of faculty teaching positions and a specific number of administrative positions. I would even suggest they allocate a specific number of teaching positions that teach a prescribed number of hours, another allotment for research and yet another allotment for service. Anyone assigned to a split teaching/administrative/research/service position should be paid proportionately from the various allotments. Just that simple.
I would add that I do not agree with Dr. Ginsberg's lament of the demise of faculty governance. That epitome of unionization is the cause of much of what is wrong with higher education, along with tenure. The solution is not to take power away from the administration but to make the administration competent and accountable. But that is another topic for another day.
Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.
