In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-​Administrative University and Why It Matters,
From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-​faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon
More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes.
many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World.
I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”
The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs.
in the past few years, many elite colleges and universities have cast themselves as “anti-​racist” and “decolonial” enterprises that hire “scholar activists” as instructors
“recruiting social-​justice-​minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged.” But once these administrators got exactly what they asked for—a campus-​wide display of social-​justice activism—they realized that aesthetic rebelliousness and actual rebellion don’t mix well, in their opinion. So they called the cops.
The ultimate problem isn’t just that too many administrators can make college expensive. It’s that too many administrative functions can make college institutionally incoherent.
