Following up on yesterday’s discussion on the long-term rise of administration: it occurred to me after hitting send that there’s another aspect to the rise of administration I forgot to mention – budgeting.  Historically, administration has to some degree grown as a function of the complexity of budgeting, for some very good reasons.

A hundred years ago, budgeting in higher education was a fairly simple affair because universities didn’t actually do much (by today’s standards, anyway).  A small number of professors – never more than a hundred or so and usually far fewer – who were on relatively low pay (a hundred years ago, tenure was in part a recompense for professors’ modest pay, quite unlike today), taught students in low-tech classrooms.  Some sciences had fairly low-cost labs.  If money stopped coming in – as it did during the depression – then people took pay cuts, or layoffs occurred.  Balancing budgets in such situations was really not that difficult.

The cost base of universities took off in the first 25 years after WWII: more students, more profs, more research, etc.  And for awhile that was OK, because government spending kept base.  It was les trentes glorieuses, or whatever that Golden Age was called in your neck of the woods: that is, the years when favourable demographics, ludicrously cheap oil and a total absence of competition from underdeveloped countries meant that western economies could spend money on just about anything and resistance to higher taxation seemed churlish while everyone was getting richer.

But it couldn’t last, and during the 1970s money became scarce, as it has been ever since.  In consequence “administration” came to the fore for two reasons: the first – in countries where institutions were more autonomous and market-oriented – was to raise more money through advancement and government relations and to make money go further through estate management and finance.  But the secpmd was because someone needed to make strategic allocation decisions, and faculty are absolutely 100% incapable of doing this on their own.

To be clear, I don’t mean that they are as individuals unable to do this; indeed, many of them prove quite capable of doing it as soon as they get promoted into administrative jobs.  But collectively, professionally, they can’t do it.  In fact, let me go a bit further: the entire basis of the modern university rests on the fact that academics collectively can’t budget strategically.

Modern universities, by definition, bring together multiple disciplines; indeed the “uni” in the word implies a unification of knowledge (yes, I know that’s not the origin of the word, but we’re talking modern idiom here).  But, the entire secret to making different disciplines co-exist within the same institution is that they never pass judgement on the quality of one another’s work.  This was the subject of one of my all-time favourite books on higher education, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement by Michèle Lamont: whether through professional courtesy or enlightened self-interest, when it comes to evaluating work done by academics on other fields, profs simply let those inside each discipline take the lead.

(The exception, as Lamont notes, is Philosophy profs.  They think they know everything about the epistemological roots of every other discipline and are therefore qualified to comment on them, while no one else is allowed to do the same for Philosophy because, duh, no one else could possibly understand it.  This, she strongly implies, is why everyone in universities hates their Philosophy department).

Now, in the everyday running of things, this is all fine.  But imagine the university takes a hit to its budget of say 5%, and the institution has no way to determine which parts of the university are doing well and which are not; which ones have opportunities and which do not.  Without a central administration capable of making judgements like this, what you end up with is “everybody gets a five percent cut”, because that’s what the collective professoriate would inevitably have to say because it is incapable of rendering such judgements.  It’s not quite a case of turkeys boycotting a vote on December holiday feats, but it’s close.

(To be fair, one does sometimes see administrations which, for the sake of internal peace, come up with grand schemes like “everybody gets a five percent cut”.  I would argue that, more often than not, this is the sign of a weak administration – certainly one which is not adding a whole lot of value, anyway.) 

The counter-argument from the Academic Oligarchy (that is, the ranks of the professoriate which believe that they and only they should have the right to budget), is essentially “who is any administrator or group of administrators to decide what is quality and what is not”?  Taken to an extreme, this position says “actually, yeah, we are all actually as good as one another, so give us all that five percent cut” (you tend to hear this particularly from those faculty associations dominated by academics from disciplines which are generally seen as being not-so-hot).  Slightly more sensibly, the argument is that any judgement of good or bad is inevitably clouded by ideologies about “value” which, yes, but you know, meh.  All judgement is clouded by ideology; but no one pulls out that objection unless it’s a judgement they disagree with. 

Anyways, the point is: as the professoriate has become more numerous, more expensive, and ever-harder to layoff, universities have become financially more brittle and less able to deal with fluctuations in revenue.  Strategic budgeting is a way to deal with this while at the same time ensuring that the overall reputation of the institution remains as intact as possible, by preserving the things which matter most.  Could academics do it collectively?  Yes, but only by abandoning the core principle of disciplinary non-interference at the heart of the modern university.  Ain’t going to happen, and probably wouldn’t be a good thing if it did.