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Usually it’s a bad sign when administration moves away from the place of production. Things often don’t end well. Mercedes did this in the 80s and 90s and I have also heard people say that Boeing’s move to Chicago was the turning point when the company went downhill.

My company also has a corporate headquarters where there are thousands of well paid people keep themselves busy creating training materials and processes that look good but are ultimately not practical or just stating the obvious in new words.

> Perhaps the most salient example of this ever-expanding bureaucracy is Stanford's shiny new 35-acre campus in Redwood City, which houses only non-academic administrative staff

Is this really a good example of administrative bureaucracy growing out of control?

I mean, if you had to pick a group of people to move off your university campus due to space constraints, it seems like administrative staff would be the logical choice. Moving certain departments off-campus, or letting fewer students live on-campus would both be worse for the academic environment.

In addition, Stanford has consistently ranked near the top of all universities in research output while also providing free tuition to any student whose family makes less than $150K per year. Doing this costs a lot of money. Where do they get that money from? Mostly donations and grants. It takes a lot of people to administer grants (which tend to come with lots of rules on how you account for the money) and to schmooze with donors, etc. But the end result -- funding high-quality research and providing a free education to thousands of students each year seems like a pretty good outcome.

I couldn't tell you if it's "out of control" (your words), but it sure is a salient -- i.e., prominent, noticeable -- example of bureaucratic growth.

Whether the "corporatization" of US high education will prove a good or a bad thing in the long run, it remains to be seen.

A big driver of the bureaucratic growth is the growth in federal funding, and the significant documentation requirements that the federal government puts on recipients of Grant Funding. (This is things like effort reporting, overhead allocations, purchase applicability and allocability, etc. You can read many of the specific details in OMB Circular A-110: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Circul...)

It's not federal funding per se; it's the requirements that come along with it, usually in the name of preventing 'fraud' or 'abuse'. I wholeheartedly believe you could spend a lot less on oversight, tolerate a small amount of wasteful spending, and come out far, far, far ahead. The flip side of this, however, is that some (usually Republican) congressman would be able to rant about how scientists are wasting your tax dollars.

Nobody, certainly not the dean, wants to deal with that kind of negative publicity. And so, every order gets stamped and signed and countersigned, often with an eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining the "business purpose" of the item.

This still doesn't totally stop idiots from ranting about "Who buys video games and cocaine to monkeys?!" or "Why do shrimp need a treadmill?" However, it gives the university a little bit of cover--and since a lot of this work gets lumped in with other stuff, no one ever figures out how much time and money that wastes.

> Perhaps the most salient example of this ever-expanding bureaucracy is Stanford's shiny new 35-acre campus in Redwood City, which houses only non-academic administrative staff.

The idea of a separate campus just for administrative staff feels like a real-life version of Douglas Adams' Golgafrinchan Ark B: https://everything2.com/title/B+Ark

Except we can't ship them into space.

On behalf of the science departments: "We're willing to try!"

that reminds me, I must clean my phone.

> At the top of this bureaucracy are college and university presidents earning seven figures a year and also earning additional income from sitting on corporate and non-profit boards.

s/earning/receiving/

How much do all the administrative salaries add to the average student's tuition bill?

> According to federal figures, as of a few years ago, the number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at US colleges and universities has more than doubled in the past quarter century, outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty.[a]

Just as an aside - this does include professional staff, which is advisors, academic support staff, and other student facing services. The problem with higher ed statistics like that is that it makes no effort to separate the assistant to the assistant to the assistant provost from the academic coaches. One of the two of those positions actually provide value to the student experience.

It also doesn't include the payroll and financial assistants to the department receiving $30 million in grant funding to hire researchers. The salaries of those staff come out of the $30mil in grant money, but in the aggregate data, it looks like the university is spending more.

> One of the two of those positions actually provide value to the student experience.

It's not clear at all that academic coaches provide value to students.

Being advised by actual professors would provide far more value to students.

>It's not clear at all that academic coaches provide value to students.

Whoa there, I need a citation for that, and I need a strong citation for that. It literally flies in the face of higher education research. Here's one study from the WWC, indicating strong evidence of effectiveness for coaching: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/study/72030. And that was after 30 seconds of searching.

Actual professors provide value to upper-division students who (a) have a major already, (b) have study skills and other skills necessary for success, and (c) are at their terminal institution.

For the other (on my campus) 65% of students, coaches are more effective in terms of completion and spring to fall retention.

Hmm, was not aware of that. I was thinking of how I would have preferred a professor as a mentor, but maybe looking back from the perspective of someone who has already achieved a, b, and c.

>Whether this corporatization proves a good or a bad thing in the long run, it remains to be seen.

Is it? How could it end up being a good thing?

Bureaucracy always pops up somewhere where there is money floating around like a patch of moss grows in humid tree bark. It doesn't produce anything of value besides justifying its own existence

> Bureaucracy always pops up somewhere

Sometimes expressed as the Iron law of oligarchy [0] or the The Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Interesting article. What I find the most interesting (and isn't explained) is how Michels justified then going to the fascist party. Did he conclude "Well, since oligarchy is inevitable, might as well try to join one I agree with"?

First you adopt an anti-democratic mindset, then you read accounts of classical antiquity, and then things kind of fall into place on their own.

Technically bureaucracy has one function taken for granted - consistency at scale. Even with bueracratic kerfluffles their algorithmic approach is usually far more consistent.

It also tends to be more organizationally driven than dynastic or personal. That is partially why even corrupt ones were an improvement over literal feudal fiefdoms historically.

It is still often a source of mediocrity and stagnation but we should remember why they existed in the first place. They do need periodic reform and streamlining certainly.

> "...and 'MBA-ization'..."

unless you hold an MBA degree, this phrase really weakens your critique, because it rests on a trope rather than experience. you could have easily left it out and it would have only strengthened your credibility.

nearly everyone has experienced corporatocracy, either as an employee or a customer (rarely as an executive or involved shareholder), but most people don't have MBAs and can't speak to how it directly influences organizational structures and behavior (if at all).

the "ever-expanding bureaucracy" you reference is a direct, if unintuitive, consequence of privileging capital over labor. middle managers seek power and prestige through bureacracy because it reflects the values of capital holders (money and strict hierarchy, for example), rather than the creators and doers who seek power and prestige through demonstrations of skill.

to change this, we need a fairer balance between capital and labor (not a wild swing of the pendulum). we need to better reward the makers, not the rent-seekers. laws and norms and expectations and literally who we look up to needs to change.

So, I have been professional staff at two different major universities in the past.

It's easy to point at certain areas of staff growth as excessive (cue someone quoting the number of "diversity" administrators at college X) and I agree there's plenty of areas of waste.

However, the big picture is that I think the "big research university" has defined it's mission as something which is inherently going to be an extraordinarily complicated enterprise to run.

And other trends outside their control have contributed as well.

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If you think about the "research" side, most are attempting to run cutting edge labs in basically every domain, at once. That's very difficult to support from a facilities, technology, etc perspective. You wind up with numerous small groups with complex, completely different needs and few economies of scale, unlike running say, a huge R&D lab in one domain/small set of domains like pharma or semiconductors or something.

Reduced direct state funding means that universities are ever more dependent on alumni support, grant money, other fundraising, and monetization of R&D development (patents/IP). All of which require a sizeable quantity of people to oversee who do not teach or research. It is, or should be a net positive in terms of finances if you're doing it, but it certainly doesn't make stats like employee ratios look better.

On the student side, the growth in fancy student housing/services is well-covered ground I won't repeat, but is also a contributor to costs.

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The article mentions outsourcing, but fails to mention that most functions typically have reasons why they're difficult to outsource. That's not to say that none can be done, but "it's not that easy" is also true.

They mention security as an example.

Most campuses have full police departments with sworn officers, empowered to make arrests, file criminal charges, carry firearms, and so on. They can't hire an outside company to do it in their place, and given the size disparity with the towns they often exist in, local police would be unable to provide a sufficient level of service. (Nor would local taxpayers be accepting of funding it to support an entity not paying property taxes).

For public universities, this is also often a matter of state law. Ex: The NY State University Police is a state agency that handles policing at SUNY schools. No SUNY campus head, or even the head of the SUNY system, has any power to outsource that function.

There's also a not invalid perception of a different level of professionalism (even with issues with American policing) and level of required training between "private security" and "actual police officers" in most places.

The "town and gown" separation is a tradition born from the upheavals of the Reformation, not some natural law. Many places have abolished it successfully.

The whole of Australia, for example.

> At the top of this bureaucracy are college and university presidents earning seven figures a year and also earning additional income from sitting on corporate and non-profit boards.

That they're a certain tier of upper management for whom it's expected and normal that they engage in a bunch of activities at what is assuredly less than "full time" attention to any one of them and among which they cannot possibly be keeping their work totally separate and interests perfectly straight, while employees have to beg to "moonlight" or start their own side-hustle a lot of places, is one of the facts of corporate culture and the state of current capitalism that upsets me the most.

Like, pick one. Either it's super-important that all of us and especially people taking home tons of pay at the top of the pyramid are entirely on-board with a single employer or venture, or those not reaping such huge benefits should have the same freedom of association and freedom with their time as those at the top. I'll take either—the former would probably fix some major systemic problems we have while the latter would make my life easier and simpler.