If there is one thing that unites academics, it is cynicism about university administration. To outsiders, this seems weird, because senior university administrators are, with relatively few exceptions, actually academics themselves. Many, in fact, return to faculty ranks after finishing their term. So why are these two sides always seen as being so drastically opposed?
Here’s my hypothesis.
Members of the Senior Administration are the interface between academia and the non-academic world. Academics expect senior administrators to explain to the world outside how the world should be arranged so as to maximize faculty utility. Senior administration would, on the whole, like nothing more than to do this. They, too, are faculty, and on the whole they have the same interests as the rest of the faculty in arranging external funding and regulatory agencies to arrange their affairs in a way most convenient to academic staff.
The issue, though, is that Senior Admin are not simply a megaphone through which faculty can talk to funders. They are also the conduit by which major funders—and by this I mean students, governments, and philanthropists—talk to academia. And most of what those people have to say, academics don’t want to hear.
The most important thing those funders have to say is that they wish higher education would cost less (this is seemingly true almost no matter what the actual cost/price is). They are therefore skeptical about claims for new money. Administrations reflect that back to the faculty both in the way that they argue for money and in the way they administer budgets (in both cases, cautiously).
Stakeholders also have a lot to say about things like which fields of study deserve investment (more STEM), time-to-degrees (shorter), freedom of speech, etc. Some of these views are dumb. But they are the views of funders. You can talk all you want about institutional autonomy, but funders are autonomous too. If they want to withhold money, they will. Senior Admins—BY DEFINITION—are doing their jobs when they navigate these shoals. And this often means asking some faculty to do things they would prefer not to do or take the university in directions some faculty would prefer not to go. Their job is to balance competing demands of internal and external stakeholders. It might not always seem like this is what they are doing, but I would argue that is mostly because internal and external stakeholders misunderstand each other so badly and have so little frame of reference to understand each other’s motives, that neither side recognizes what Senior Administration is actually doing.
And as a result, Senior Admins are suspect. Despised, even, in some quarters.
It’s not entirely clear to me what an alternative theory of Senior Administration might look like. It’s not like either the inside/outside translation function or the resource allocation function can simply disappear. Governments in particular demand institutional interlocutors who can speak for and bind the institution and get it to behave like a strategic actor: to do and “achieve” things corporately. This often sounds batshit crazy to professors, who very often see this “corporate” view of the university as being in conflict with their own understanding of it: that is, as a vast holding company for individual professors’ research agendas. But, at the risk of repeating myself: this is not how funders understand universities. In fact, most funders would be horrified by that kind of description of a university. And yet, it is the job of Senior Administration to keep both sides happy.
Now to be clear, this description above isn’t meant to absolve Senior Administration of all sins. There are good managers and bad managers (we might have more good ones if institutions took management training for academics more seriously, but that’s as may be). They make good decisions and bad decisions, and enough bad decisions can lead to some serious consequences (see Laurentian among others) for entire institutions. Sometimes others have to pay for the mistakes of Senior Admin. This is all Bad. And yes, like any bureaucratic system Senior Administration has a tendency to grow via scope-creep and empire-building. This is of course no different than management in any other field of human endeavor, but that doesn’t mean we should either accept or excuse these things.
The thing is, though, cynicism doesn’t simply flourish in the presence of bad management. Even where you have very good management, it doesn’t take much poking around to find faculty who are convinced that the Administration are “up to no good.” Why? Because Senior Administration is an intrusion of the outside world into university life. Their presence and discourse are irritating to faculty who just wish the outside world would go away, leave us alone (but leave some money at the door).
But the alternative to Senior Administration playing this intermediary role is not a world in which outside funders (mainly government) leave teachers and researchers alone: it’s a world where funders (mainly government) play a much more direct role in university management. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.
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These are all good points. The position of administrators is particularly difficult, in that they have to explain how not subordinating everything to specific, imposed goals — in other words, not acting like a corporation or a branch of the civil service — will, in fact, actually produce the ends which funders expect out of universities. We will have a more employable populace if we don’t pick in advance the “jobs of the future,” for instance. For another example, we can only have a vital public discourse if we do not tell people what to think.
My worry is that many administrators simply give up on this hard work. I recall being very impressed by a speech given by Alan Rock, when he was president of the University of Ottawa, to a group of businesspeople in which he talked about the importance of co-op placements and such, but concluded by saying that UOttawa isn’t just a training institution, that it has a broad commitment to truth and education. Why doesn’t every administrator similarly close their speeches? We can hardly expect the real university — a community of scholars — to be respected by outsiders if it’s not really represented to them in the first place.
I think you’ve missed the boat on this one Alex. The issue that I hear — speaking as a faculty union leader as well as a department chair and teacher/researcher (and so speaking with a view from both sides) — is not that Administration has to negotiate between life inside and outside the tower as it is that they think they are the only ones who can and the only ones who take the external pressures facing a university seriously. It is not that they are managers but that they are bad managers.
Faculty have complained about administrators since Socrates, of course, and some of that absolutely has to do with a guild belief that they are philistines. However one shouldn’t let the universality of what is in essence an estates conflict mask actual changes in the the profession of university administration in Canada in the last three decades.
1) It seems anecdotally to be the case that administrators increasingly do NOT return to academia in any serious way after service in administration: a few might do a year or two after their admin leave, but in reality, few if any end up back teaching and researching (I’d be interested in the stats on that): The department chair who hired me had returned to academia for 15+ years after resigning as president; the business school dean at the time is currently a working academic; no subsequent President, or Provost (and very few deans) have done the same in the last 20 years or so at the U of L.
2) It seems anecdotally that administrators increasingly rarely enter executive positions from outside the administrative path (again interested in the stats): for the first time in 30 years at the U of L, for example, all but one senior admin at the U of L (dean or above) came to their position from the rank below: President was a VP, Provost was an AVP, all but one deans were ADs. The exception is ADs, almost none of whom were department chairs prior to entering the deans office
3) In relation to (2), people increasingly enter the admin track early: most of our ADs in the last decade have entered as relatively junior associate professors; when I was hired, all ADs were senior faculty.
4) The increasing understanding of Administration as “management” (e.g. through the UofM courses and Foy’s book) and hence responsible for keeping employees under control has led to a climate of micromanagement rather than professional facilitation. We are all much more late Boeing than early Google nowadays.
My sense is that the complaints you hear today are not that Administrators have to deal with the real world, but that they refuse to believe that faculty can, and so understand themselves as “bosses” rather than administrators/facilitators.
I’d have to agree with Dan, respectfully. We’d need a bigger sample with better data, but if I look at who our senior admin are at my uni and nearby ones (these are ones above Assoc Dean), few have been in a classroom or really run research programs in 20 years plus.
I think the issue for most of us is not what you lay out and from being on various president-level committees, the profs are not that naive about what the external world wants because each of us has to get funding, often from industry partners. The issue is the too-often disconnect of admins from reality we hear and save in our email folders, usually labelled ‘WTF’.
We had a former provost who sent an email advising profs that the solution to tighter research funding was simply to go and get more grants. Yes, really. And, of course, do more with less. There has been no addressing of the mission creep wherein many tasks are added but nothing is removed. Endless strategic plans that are not strategic but rather theatre – and still take 3 years to finish, just in time for the next strategic plan. All those are not mere anecdotes; they are what we get all too often.
This is uneven of course. Our current provost has been great at laying out the challenges, not panicking or bullying (unlike the mess at Queen’s, my alma mater), and telling us what the admin is trying to do. One of our other senior admin was on TVO with you recently and was stellar (clearly I am not trying to hide which uni I am at). Our admins seem to have dropped the empty strategic plans in favour of a streamlined approach that is not looking to fire people but has seriously looked at the time-wasting tasks all large organizations (private, NGO, and public) need to review and reduce on an ongoing basis. There will not be large savings of money the government keeps ranting about because the cost is not truly dollars but time – more time to teach, do research (including seeking partnerships), and mentor students generally. Time may be money but in this case the time savings are not going to cut costs. As you’ve noted, a lot of those bigger cost increases in the last 15 years actually are in IT and student services – the very things needed to make a university more nimble in e-learning and student-focused.
That is the sort of thing we expect from senior admin – not perfection but clear communication, a firm grasp of real challenges, an appreciation of the real workloads staff and profs face, and some plausible solutions that the rank and file certainly know is not wholly (or even mainly) in their control.
What I think is missing is administration peeps who can articulate the value of basic research for student skill development. Most outside academia would see my pubs as arcane super specialized basic social science research. But students in my research team learn a huge amount about how to process and learn from data that they use dry productively in non academic jobs. For example I recently connected with one former team member who was given a task by their boss to update a dataset. The boss thought it would take a month to update all the excel files. My former student did it in half a day in python and the boss was shocked that a non CS grad could do this. Much of the benefits of working at the frontier show up in student human capital.. it’s all about maximizing human capital and human potential. When I talk to industry folks they get it. So why can’t admin articulate this better to non academics?
The other issue I see is that admin do not articulate trade offs associated with alternative choices. Many times faculty have no idea what the possible choices are and just see an arbitrary choice made. This reduces faculty voice. I am fine with an admin having a different take on a trade off and making a different choice than I would make. I struggle with non transparent decision making where the outcome is a decision is clearly not thought through. I also struggle with many decisions that result in inferior outcomes for many because we are too lazy to change by making the effort to adopt best practices. Leading universities know they are in the human capital business and focus like a laser on maximizing the human capital of students, faculty and staff. It’s not that hard to do better.
I think you are too strong in saying faculty don’t care about non academic stakeholders. I want my students to get good jobs and make important contributions to the world. I talk to industry and look for ways to partner with non academics. What bothers me is how bad we are at articulating the value prop of basic research for non academics. We need leaders that can actually make the case – our sector is failing very badly at this right now.
With Dan O’s comments on this one. Some boats have missed… or didn’t make it to port in the first place.
I can appreciate the short space for these types of posts, however, this one portrays a highly simplified version of a little more complex reality. (Coming from someone who has been a Sr. Administrator and Faculty in higher ed).
The idea that all Senior Admin in higher ed. are interfacing with ‘funders’ (e.g. government) is a gross simplification – unless maybe there’s a definition of Senior Admin?
A vast number of Senior Administrators in higher ed have little to no contact with ‘funders’ – (mainly Provincial Ministry contacts). This contact is reserved to a very few administrators – plus the fact that Higher/Advanced Ed ministries have their own complex and bloated administrative structures.
Thus a VP, Finance in higher ed is dealing with finance folks in Ministries. A VP, Academic is dealing with a different set of Sr. Admin in the same ministries.
Also missed in the picture painted are the realities (and complexities) of bicameral governance. By design – and a simplification – University (and College) Presidents report to Boards of Governors and Senior Admin report to the President.
Then add into this mix the role of the Senate (or Ed. Councils at colleges) and who is “in charge” of these.
I’m gathering you know all of this inside and out Alex – but unfortunately, it seems to be missing from this post and the arguments fronted.
The reality of University (and college) administrations is that they have become bloated at many institutions, as well as complicated so that the left and right hands lose track of who’s doing what… let alone the left and right feet. As an ‘administration’ becomes bloated it must create more ‘bullshit’ roles to justify the work (ala David Graeber).
However, this also does not absolve faculty members of responsibility. The numbers point to senior and tenured faculty as a whole, ageing in place (as a result of rulings on abolishing mandatory retirement in the mid-2000s). With that also means approaches based in previous realities – for example, not one amid massive transition due to AI and Machine-Learning (ML).
Higher ed institutions — as a whole – are in deep sh*t (esp. in Canada). From Int. student caps to a ‘marketplace’ that is changing. Online education (and credentialing) is expanding so damn rapidly and efficiently. Unlike higher ed. online education can iterate and change on the fly.
The sector as a whole can continue to be bickering about faculty and admin and Boards and government… but bigger transitions are happening around these institutions. In under a decade, obsolescence may be more the reality.