Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

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> It's sad that there seems to be little internal critique coming from within universities of the complete takeover of schools by administrators

This is just patently false.

The criticism of admin bloat by faculty and students precedes the right-wing press criticism by decades, is far more harsh, and is still going strong.

The whole damn criticism, as it exists in the popular press today, can be traced quite directly back to academia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Ginsberg_(political_s...

Or a more recent example, https://home.isi.org/sites/default/files/MA59.3_Seery_Sympos...

And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)

Far from complicit, faculty and students are leading the charge, and have been since the 1980s.

BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so. and lots of serious policy proposals by the people listed above would very likely have great effect.

This policy targets students instead.

> And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)

I'm at a school that underwent a grad student unionisation drive, and pretty much everything that the union proposed would have amounted to further empowering the administration at the expense of the academics (e.g. introducing new mediator officials with extensive compulsive power over advisors if their students should feel wronged in one way or another, hiring more staff to enforce diversity-friendly admissions and hiring outcomes, ...). At least the politicised end of the student body seems to consider the administration, rather than the academics, to be their natural ally.

This is debatable and its own rabbit hole that is beat to death on other recent stories. But anyways, I understand the point, and this is why I stated:

> and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes

I'm sorry that I can't provide more details or evidence (lest I leak bits of identifying information), but as far as I can tell, our union has not made any statement to the effect of considering excessive administrative power or even bloat an issue.

An incompetent advisor can ruin a promising grad student.

Whether the union position on who should be empowered here has merit is orthogonal to the question of whether unions are broadly for expanding or reducing administrative power, no?

Your argument is simplistic and over generalizing... but it is a good example of the ideological battles we see in society. You’d probably find high demand that would justify the hiring of support staff to represent students vs faculty and vs admins in many cases. Whether this expands or decreases an administration is irrelevant. The goal of unionization is a collective voice that is acknowledged.

> BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so.

Can you give a summary of your proposals here? Skimmed the Seery article and it doesn't seem to have anything directly related to the tax code, but could be missing it.

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