Are You in a ‘BS Job’? Thank You for Your Work. No, Really.

Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle

The anti-administrative diatribe is as much a part of modern academe as whiteboards and department meetings. With some variation, it goes more or less like this: If only those useless/venal/anti-intellectual bureaucrats would stop proliferating like toadstools, teachers could teach, students could learn, and campuses could thrive the way they did … well, whenever.

The Chronicle has published a trove of such laments. A quintessential example is David Graeber’s recent reflection, “Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone,” a combination of elegance and condescension worthy of the late, great actor George Sanders. “Office workers,” observes Graeber, “are typically kept on even if they are doing literally nothing, lest somebody’s prestige suffer. This is the real reason for the explosion of administrative staff in higher education.” Then comes the incontrovertible evidence: "[I]f the testimonies I’ve received are anything to go by, many of those people don’t end up doing much; some administrative staff will inevitably end up sitting around playing fruit mahjong all day or watching cat videos.” While Graeber is writing chiefly about his experiences in Britain, he does include the United States in his indictment.

For the first 15 years of my career, I was a full-time faculty member, and for most of those years, I am now rather ashamed to confess, I was rather Graeber-like in my contempt for “the administration.” Almost all of the things with which I was unhappy must surely be attributed to the relentless, metastasizing administrative machine. Then I became part of the machine, working alongside others who were part of it, and realized that most of the BS had been coming out of my own mouth.

Are there administrative staff members who are overpaid and underworked? Absolutely, just as there are faculty members who take advantage of the lifetime guarantee of tenure to put in less effort than their colleagues do. But both examples are, in my experience, the exception and not the rule. The vast majority of administrative staff members with whom I have worked at two colleges are smart people who put in long hours trying to do their best to advance the mission of their institutions.

Trends in Higher Education, published by the College Board, has collected data on student/staff ratios in higher education over time. From 1995 to 2015, the ratio of students to noninstructional staff members at public institutions rose from 8.6 to 9.2. In other words, there were more students per staff member in 2015 than there were two decades earlier. At private, nonprofit institutions, the ratio rose slightly, from 5.6 to 5.8. At both types of institutions, the number of students per instructional staff member declined over the same period, probably because of an influx of adjuncts and graduate instructors.

There is nonetheless a good deal of evidence to suggest that the number of administrative positions in certain areas has grown in recent decades more rapidly than that of tenure-track faculty positions. The reasons for this are far more complex and justifiable than “prestige"enhancement.

Detailed information on how the distribution and responsibilities of administrators have changed over time is difficult to find. Let me offer some suggestions, based on my experience of 35 years in the academy. When I began full-time teaching, in 1984, the following areas either did not exist or existed only in the most skeletal form: information-technology departments, Title IX enforcement, mental-health services, disability services, and diversity-and-inclusion programs. Accrediting agencies were far less demanding, and the number of federal and state regulations with which colleges were required to comply was far smaller.

All of those areas now require administrative staff members, and most require people to manage those staff members. At Macalester College, we have 29 people who work in information-technology services, many of them classified as “administrators” and none of them doing “literally nothing.” We have two full-time administrators responsible for Title IX, and they are more often overwhelmed than underworked. We have six people in our department of multicultural life — all stretched to their limit — and 17 in our health-and-wellness Center. The most common complaint I receive from students and faculty members is that we don’t have enough administrators.

The reality is that administrative work in higher education today is often achingly difficult. Many of the most prominent issues dividing American society — racial and gender discrimination, immigration, mental health, economic disparities — are playing out with particular force on college campuses. William H. McRaven, a former admiral and commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command who recently stepped down after only three years as chancellor of the University of Texas system, called being a college president “the toughest job in the nation.”

That might be an overstatement, but it touches on a truth: Not since the period of Vietnam War protests have presidents — along with provosts, deans, and even those belittled associate deans — been faced with more relentless pressure or confronted with more intractable problems. Throw in the enormous financial challenges at most institutions, and the unblinking eye and unfiltered anger of social media, and it is not surprising that the average tenure of presidents is growing shorter.

We can, of course, yearn for the “good old days” before computers, when colleges were far less diverse, when sexual assault and harassment were mostly ignored, and when the mental health of students was largely their own concern. Or we can accept the fact that actual people are needed if we are to take on the additional work that is now expected of colleges and universities. Some of that work is distracting and bothersome, but most of it is important.

I would invite those who demean the work of “the administration” to spend a day or two shadowing a Title IX officer, or a director of residential life, or a disability-services coordinator, or a dean of multicultural life — administrators all — and compare the number of challenging hours they work with the number of cat videos they are watching. It might be instructive.

Brian Rosenberg is president of Macalester College.