When budget woes hit the State of Illinois last year, among the early suggestions made -- first by the Chicago Tribune and later by the Democratic candidate for governor (since elected) -- was to cut the “administrative bloat” at the University of Illinois. What do we need administrators for anyway? They don’t do anything except get in the way of the business of teaching by building ever more byzantine structures designed chiefly to provide cushy jobs for still more administrators.
Although these and similar statements were obviously the opening shots in a campaign whose aim was to erode state support for higher education (in many states privatization has just about occurred although blustery citizens and hypocritical lawmakers continue to claim that everything we do is made possible by tax dollars), many faculty members nodded their tonsured heads sagely and said, Yes, what do we need administrators for anyway?
No matter how bad things get and no matter how many villains are available for blame, given the choice, professors will go with administrators every time. Indeed, despised and scorned though they may be, administrators play a crucial role in the psychological economy of faculty members who wish to avoid responsibility for their own failures.
Can’t write? It must be because my department head or my dean is making life unbearable for me. Get bad teaching evaluations? It must be because I have been assigned to the wrong course, or forced to teach it in an unsuitable room, or required to teach at a time when my biorhythms are out of whack. Trouble getting along with colleagues? It must be because some administrator has turned them against me. Low salary? It must be because my supervisor is not smart enough to appreciate my true worth. Didn’t get promoted? It must be because my file was not carefully prepared and vigorously presented.
But if administration is not make-work for mindless bureaucrats and burned-out scholars who make bad decisions about their betters, what is it? The answer is that administration is, at its heart, an intellectual task. Right now, for example, my colleagues and I are faced with the following situation. Last year the campus budget took a hit of about 10 percent, or more than $41-million. Days ago it was reported that a similar or even larger hit is expected in the near future. At the moment the college’s revenues (95 percent state dollars) total about $53-million, of which $48-million is earmarked for salaries.
That leaves $5-million for everything else -- operating expenses, new programs, new hires, additional instruction, etc. Obviously, an additional cut of 10 or 12 percent would leave us unable either to pay the salaries already on the books or to provide the instruction mandated by the same folks who would be mandating the cut. (Political officials keep making statements about “fat” and scraping the “bottom of the barrel,” but they are either ignorant or dishonest or both; there is no fat, and the barrel was scraped clean some time ago.) Meanwhile -- that is, before these events unfolded -- we began a modest number of searches based on budget projections that will soon no longer apply. A few of them have succeeded; a few have failed; the rest are in process. What do we do?
What makes this problem more complicated and intractable than the problems we face as academics is the difficulty of getting a handle on it. Since the budget figures constitute a moving target, they cannot be used to determine what wiggle room, if any, we have when thinking about the searches that have not yet concluded. Should we cancel all of them and display fiscal prudence in a climate that will applaud it but probably not reward it? Should we let the searches play out and see what happens, and risk being thought irresponsible by those with the power to determine our fate? Should we let some continue and cancel others and then look forward to many hours (and days and months) of explaining the basis -- sure to be varied and conceptually incoherent -- of selection?
What, in fact, should be the basis of selection? Should we use what little we have to strengthen departments already strong? Should we shore up weak departments on the reasoning that this may be their last chance for a while to get any help? Should we save drowning departments or, in a Darwinian mood, let them go under? Should we put our money where our mouths are and stand up for diversity, or should we pass the diversity baton upward in the hope that someone in the yet-higher administration will feel the political pressure and do the right thing?
By the time you read this, we shall have moved, crab-wise, to something like a resolution, and then we will spend the next three years watching the results that will tell us whether it was the right one -- that is, whether we disappointed the right people.
To be sure, not all situations that administrators face are that momentous or dramatic, but almost all of them involve problems of coordination that require calculations of incredible delicacy made in relation to numerous (and sometimes potentially conflicting) institutional goals and obligations. To whom shall we assign space, that most precious of academic commodities? How shall we adjudicate among the need for more offices, more labs, more homes for interdisciplinary work, more student and faculty lounges? If space becomes available in a remote building, should we provide relief to a space-poor department by sending some of its members to that outpost, or would that relief be the cause of even greater ills (loss of community, divided government, etc.)?
Another set of issues lies at the intersection of the professional and the personal. A complaint is made by a faculty member against his or her chairman. The matter is not so grave as to constitute a grievance within the university guidelines, but is serious enough to threaten the internal health of the department. Do you speak to each of the parties separately and set yourself up as a judge of conflicting evidence, or do you call them both in and practice therapy without a license? Should you be attentive to the human dimension of the situation and worry about who is feeling pain about what, or should you be responsive only to the needs of the institution and settle for a truce that leaves everyone’s hostile emotions in place?
One of the responsibilities of the dean’s office in my college is setting admissions standards. Should we raise them? If we do, we will please those departments that complain about remedial courses taking up too much of their resources, but we will alarm those who believe that as an urban university we are obligated to accept students disadvantaged by a secondary-school system in disarray.
And there is the numbers question. Can we afford to raise standards if the result might be an entering class smaller than the number we need to justify the size of our current operation, or alternatively, if we already have more students than we can handle (which is, in fact, our situation), can we afford not to raise standards? Whatever we do, what will be the effect on other colleges depending on us to populate their courses? How will whatever we do look in comparison with our competitors, both local and national? What will the legislators think (perhaps a question with too generous a presupposition)? What will the trustees think? What will the citizens and parents of Chicago and Illinois think? What will the chancellor and the provost and the Academic Senate think?
My point, I trust, is obvious: In the course of making a decision, an administrator must perform a complex act of taking into account any number of goals (short and long range), constituencies, interests, opportunities, costs, dangers. At every point in a somewhat abstract calculation he or she must keep constantly in mind the forces and resources that must be marshaled if the course of action decided upon is to be implemented in a way that leaves intact one’s ability to deal flexibly with the next situation, and the next, and the next.
This is what I meant when I said earlier that administration is an intellectual task: It requires the capacity to sift through mounds of data while at the same time continually relating what the data reveal to the general principles and aspirations of the enterprise. And this is so even in the apparently simple case of fund raising. I say simple because on the face of it, both the point and the strategy of fund raising seem unproblematic: Go out and get the money and then use it.
But suppose the money you’re offered is intended for a use not strongly tied to the core of your operation as you see it? What if someone will give you big bucks to set up program X, and program X is legitimately an academic one, but really doesn’t tie into the programs you’ve already got going? The temptation will be to take the money and run with it. But something that doesn’t fit will leech energy away from what you’ve been doing. Rather than enhancing the enterprise, it might well deform it, even though on the surface it seems to be an addition of the kind all administrators seek -- more support, more faculty, more to brag about. Better perhaps to just say no, a resolve especially difficult when someone is giving you something for what appears to be nothing, making you an offer it would seem you can’t refuse.
So, once again, what do you need administrators for, anyway? You need administrators to develop and put in place and, yes, administer the policies and procedures that enable those who scorn them to do the work they consider so much more valuable than the work of administration.
Most faculty members believe that their lives would be so much easier if only administrators would get out of the way and let them get on with the job. Heaven, they think, would be a university without any administrators at all, except, of course, those in charge of payroll. The truth is that if it weren’t for administrators, there would be no class schedules and therefore no classes to teach, no admissions office and therefore no students to dazzle, no facilities management and therefore no laboratories to work in, no tenure process and therefore no security of employment, no budget officers and therefore no money for equipment, travel, lectures, and teaching awards.
James I of England once famously (and prophetically) said, “No bishops, no king.” I say, no administrators, no life of the mind.
Stanley Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes a monthly column on campus politics and academic careers for The Chronicle’s Career Network, where this article first appeared.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 30, Page B20
