Was an analysis of administrative bloat quashed? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. âUniversity professors,â David Graeber [wrote in these pages]( in 2018, âhave to spend increasing proportions of their days performing tasks which exist only to make overpaid academic managers feel good about themselves.â Thatâs an assessment corroborated by a draft report on the âSize and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale,â dated January 2022 but not yet released. (At the moment, the report appears to be in limbo, circulating privately but with no official stamp of approval. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for Yale, said only that âthe Senate voted at its closed-door May 2022 meeting to postpone discussion of the report until a future date.â) In an appendix, the authors of the report â the seven-person governance committee of Yaleâs Faculty of Arts and Sciences have collected several anecdotes from faculty members that they say are symptomatic of an increasingly intolerable burden of bureaucratic oversight. âDisrespectful,â âdemoralizing,â âinfantilizing,â âopaqueâ â these are some of the adjectives that appear. One professor compared dealing with Yale administrators to âinteracting with an insurance company.â The governance committeeâs thesis is that these afflictions all stem from the numerical increase in administration even as the size of the faculty has remained stagnant. The authors cite a 2018 Chronicle [report]( showing that Yale has the fifth-highest ratio of administrators to students in the country, and the highest in the Ivy League (for comparison, peer institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford were 24th, 35th, and 55th, respectively). Between 2003 and 2022, the draft report states, âwe note increases in administrative positions in various units of at least 150 percent. ... This compares with an increase in just 10.6 percentâ for tenure-track jobs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And not only is the number of administrators growing, but so are their salaries. The seven âupper administratorsâ who remained in the same role between 2015 and 2019 received âroughly 8.25 percent per yearâ raises, a rate far out of step with what faculty members got. As depicted in the report, Yaleâs upper administration is both bloated and greedy. The report is â or will be, if the university ever releases it â the result of a long period of concern over the ballooning administration. For the Yale Daily News, the student journalist Philip Mousavizadeh [reported]( on that concern in November of last year. âAccording to eight members of the Yale faculty,â Mousavizadeh wrote, the administrationâs âsize imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with studentsâ lives and facultyâs teaching, spreads the burden of leadership, and adds excessive regulation.â (One of those eight, Nicholas Christakis, also sat on the governance committee that authored the report. The other members of the governance committee were Hélène Landemore, David Bercovici, R. Howard Bloch, Gerald Jaynes, Maria Pinango, and Larry Samuelson.) In response, Provost Scott Strobel wrote a [letter to the editor]( construing the professors quoted in Mousavizadehâs article as pitting faculty against staff. âI take strong exception,â Strobel wrote, âto any view of Yale that privileges the needs of our students and faculty while dismissing the invaluable contributions of any of our staff.â He went on to sing the praises of health-care workers, IT specialists, mental-health counselors, and so on, all of whom helped Yale to weather the pandemic. âWhile I and many of my faculty colleagues could continue our work from home, many of our staff were on our campus, in our buildings and with our students. Staff have been essential workers on the front lines, readying campus for our safe return.â The professors quoted in Mousavizadehâs article were talking about deans and deanlets; Strobel pretended to think they were also talking about facilities workers. To advertise the letter, Nate Nickerson, Yaleâs vice president for communications (and therefore, according to the draft report, one of Yaleâs 20 highest-paid employees â albeit clocking in at the bottom of the list) sent an email to managers encouraging them to share Strobelâs âbeautiful tribute to what we together do ... with staff in your units. No pressure, of course â just forward the link above as feels natural.â The authors of the report, presumably anticipating more criticisms like Strobelâs, take pains to define their targets. âThe committee emphasizes that this report is not primarily concerned with the many members of the Yale community who fill staff and support positions. Our primary focus is on the general administrative structure of the university.â Elsewhere, the committee âreiterates that its focus is not presently on the number or allocation of the staff that keeps Yaleâs daily activities running on the ground. Many of the personnel at Yale do not play a role in the increasingly burdensome policies and procedures of the administration.â The authors acknowledge that their data-gathering is somewhat improvisational, a necessary evil, they say, given the administrationâs failure to provide official figures on many of the relevant topics. Running like a refrain throughout the report are pleas for more information. âDespite repeated efforts on the part of the Senate Budget Committee over the past few years to obtain meaningful information about the budget and its deployment, the administration has not made current and past administrative costs transparent.â Later, a note of irritation creeps in: âWe note that the lack of transparency about this topic by the administration is itself a problem.â And later still, buried in a footnote, âWe cannot know, because we do not have the requisite transparency to make such an assessment.â Perhaps the administration feels too burdened by onerous paperwork to find the time. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Itâs Time to End Higher Edâs Gimmicky Sales Tactics]( By Barmak Nassirian [STORY IMAGE]( Teaming up with online program managers comes at a steep reputational cost. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [When Students Harass Professors]( By Alicia Andrzejewski [STORY IMAGE]( Women and people of color are most at risk. Colleges must do more to protect them. THE REVIEW | OPINION [A New Vision for College Excellence]( By Miguel Cardona [STORY IMAGE]( Upward mobility should be the rule, not the exception. Recommended: a Salman Rushdie Roundup - âReese is home in Pittsburgh recovering from a fairly superficial knife wound to his eyelid, which he sustained while holding down the legs of the man stabbing the novelist.â In The Atlantic, George Packer [on the people who saved]( Salman Rushdie.
- âIt has always been clear to me that god is unlike human beings in that it can die, so to speak, in parts.â In Granta, [Salman Rushdie on literature and the sacred](. (From 1990, when Rushdie was in hiding.)
- âForget for a moment about the imperative to defend the freedom of speech â which, however important, remains a merely âformalâ freedom; here is something even more important: to love someone who has the sense and wisdom, almost totally unknown in our mendacious and shitty age, to pursue the truth in the mode of wonder.â In The Point, [Justin E.H. Smith]( on terrorism, expression, the fragile human body, and presidential assassinations. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( Community colleges and the students they serve were disproportionately hit during the pandemic. Learn how steep enrollment declines and the pandemic's economic fallout complicated these institutions' road to recovery, and what strategies leaders can use to reset and rebuild. [Order your copy today.]( NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2022 [The Chronicle of Higher Education](
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037