When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite
systematically over the last generation as part of the general
neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that
what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees
(or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want
to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient...
If you have to control people, you have
to have an administrative force that does it. So in US industry even
more than elsewhere, there’s layer after layer of management—a kind of
economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is
true in universities. In the past 30 or 40 years, there’s been a very
sharp increase in the proportion of administrators to faculty and
students; faculty and students levels have stayed fairly level relative
to one another, but the proportion of administrators have gone way up.
There’s a very good book on it by a well-known sociologist, Benjamin
Ginsberg, called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford
University Press, 2011), which describes in detail the business style
of massive administration and levels of administration—and of course,
very highly-paid administrators. This includes professional
administrators like deans, for example, who used to be faculty members
who took off for a couple of years to serve in an administrative
capacity and then go back to the faculty; now they’re mostly
professionals, who then have to hire sub-deans, and secretaries, and so
on and so forth, a whole proliferation of structure that goes along with
administrators. All of that is another aspect of the business model.
