Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at UC-Riverside, writes in the Boston Globe:
...The story of Bloat 1.0 is that through a combination of local, state, and federal laws, fear of litigation, or simply the need to do something in the face of some problem, administrators start creating rules and mandates that take on a life of their own... At the University of California, where I work on the Riverside campus, the hiring process for faculty positions requires a brief report on every candidate who applied for a job and didn’t get it. Candidates on any short list must submit official legal affidavits that they have not been found guilty of any form of workplace misconduct before they can advance to a final round of interviews.
All of these mandates require someone on campus to verify, process, and enforce them. And for every violation, there must be some process by which sanctions get recorded or appealed. Rules like these pervade the entire university, for low-stakes and high-stakes practices, many connected to the educational mission, but most unconnected. Because every rule must have administrative oversight, compliance, documentation, and sometimes even legal review, the university has to manage all the people involved in making, enforcing, and reviewing these rules. More people are in charge of standing in the way of the educational mission than actually facilitating it.
Which brings us to Bloat 2.0. The promise of digital infrastructure is to be able to do bureaucratic tasks more cheaply and efficiently. In principle, just like spending on administrative staff should make the essential functions of administration less burdensome, spending on software should make spending on administrative staff less essential.
But in higher education the opposite has happened. Millions and millions of dollars are being spent on digital infrastructure and the hiring of administrative staff who must oversee and mitigate problems caused by the digital infrastructure itself.
The University of California system promised that $170 million in spending on a single digital infrastructure project would cut administrative bloat by $753 million over its lifetime. Instead, the project took seven years and ballooned to $942 million in cost — and the finished project was so poorly designed and difficult to use that an entirely new IT unit had to be created just to keep the software functional. The savings on staffing were zero.
Making and passing out a syllabus now requires rounds of compliance with a variety of rules set by administrators, the state, and the federal government. Every professor knows that what starts as a two-page syllabus of readings and assignments now ends up being six to eight pages because of a variety of statements that administrators require or advise us to include — such as policies and procedures for students who are pregnant, bullied, sexually harassed, in need of religious accommodations, having their civil rights violated, or sensitive to disturbing content. Taking attendance requires ensuring that students are logged on to the right software, are connected to the right Wi-Fi routers, and have their geo-locating trackers on. One professor at UC San Diego tells me that new course approvals went from a six-month process to a two-year backlog, largely because of expensive software that requires ongoing maintenance...
Full story at https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/09/opinion/higher-ed-college-costs-administrative-bloat/.
Well, maybe there's a remedy:
No comments:
Post a Comment