Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Why Not Adjunct Administrators?

At left, is that an academic administrator? 
By http://phil.cdc.gov/PHIL_Images/20031208/87d4bff74e41427cb278526bd9cbe76a/5260_lores.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=776561

Following up on this and also on this, I ask: why not have adjunct administrators?  Well, other people have already written about this.  See this summary:

Rather than fill universities with adjunct instructors, why not replace them with adjunct administrators?

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

Worse of all, administrators isolate themselves from students behind security doors but meddle more and more in faculty and student lives.

Indeed.  A problem is that hiring and “cost-cutting” decisions are made by administrators themselves. Guess whose positions they have an incentive to protect?


The same principles apply as to why we have outsourcing and H-1B job replacement for workers, but not for management (or lawyers, economists, politicians, mass media, etc.). Economically, it's always easier for administration (of all types) to focus on the mote in the worker's eye than the beam in their own.



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