[fastaguy88]

It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environmental health and safety, IT support, etc etc.

A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".

This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)

[nobodyandproud]

I think, however, the total count is extremely important.

Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our collective knowledge together with its students.

That’s it.

If the university makes more money from treating patients than teaching its students, then its mission can’t help but shift.

Likewise if the bulk of the staff are not focused on teaching and educating, then its mission can’t help but shift.

This is a problem.

[fastaguy88]

> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our > collective knowledge together with its students.

> That’s it.

Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.

Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.

No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.

You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.

[op00to]

Is it? I disagree. The university I went to has a mission to “conduct research, provide education, and engage with the community to improve the lives of people and the environment”. MIT’s is to “educate students and advance knowledge in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship”.

It’s not a problem. You just have a narrow view of what you think our higher ed institutions should be.

[nobodyandproud]

You’re certainly welcome to disagree. But I strongly disagree that it’s not a problem.

If higher learning isn’t the core mission, then there are better ways to advance knowledge and improve the lives of people and the environment.

Per https://jsri.msu.edu/publications/nexo/vol-xxii/no-1-fall-20...

> This has had several consequences for the governance of universities: 1) the role of shared governance has receded in importance in the day-to-day governance of universities; 2) the balance of power and authority has shifted toward administrators; and 3) faculty have been subjected to a series of performance measures that disproportionately values productivity over shared governance participation.

Publish-or-perish and shoddy research is a direct result of this shift in the mission, as measurements became all but expected.

By the time I entered uni the 1990s, things were shifting negatively in higher institutions.

[op00to]

I've worked for both big R1 Universities as well as top-tier independent research institutes. I ran computing facilities that supported bioinformatics facilities, and spent my day interacting with both research leaders (PIs/faculty) and administration.

I don't believe point #1 - I have been involved in shared governance bodies as a student and staff, and at least where I've spent time, these bodies are strong.

For point #2, I never saw any shift of authority to administrators. In fact, I left academia because I was given a mission to centralize computing resources to ensure we're responsible stewards of the data we held. Instead, PIs would end-run around shared computing facilities, spending their own grant money on high end workstations, USB drives. I left and went into big tech because I was tired of fighting with essentially 50-100 small fiefdoms. The administrators were powerless, and if they tried to force the PIs to submit, they PIs would simply go someplace else.

For #3, while "impact factor" took on a larger role, I did not see a problematic shift in how we did science. Everyone was given adequate resources to participate in governance. If anything, the outsized influence individual PIs had over how they did their research made it more difficult to ensure data was stored safely, analyses were reproducible, and so on. That, to me, is a greater risk than the fear that administration was telling researchers what to research.

There are problems with higher ed in the US, but I don't understand how to equate a perceived shift away from "shared governance" with deep fundamental issues in the mission of our higher ed system. We need both a focus on educating young people (need to have fresh minds and bodies to keep the research machine churning) as well as basic AND cutting edge research to keep progress moving forward.

[nobodyandproud]

For #2, are you saying the administration doesn’t hold the purse strings?

Why the resistance to the top-down approach?

Nobody resists if it means more resources; and faster procurement of resources.

Instead it seems researchers are forced to navigate politics and raise funding.

Or do you mean that each department has its own IT department and it’s resisting consolidation?

For #3: It’s not about resources but about how “impact factor” is measured, and whether it’s useful a useful metric.

Often, for example little attention is given to confirmation of a suspected dead-end. That still requires in-depth knowledge of the subject, is still research, and advances knowledge.

[op00to]

For #2, yes - the administration doesn't hold the purse strings. Each PI gets their own grants, and thus can control how much of the money is spent, barring overhead. I had to make a value proposition for the PIs to explain to them why they couldn't afford NOT to modernize their data storage. Unfortunately, it's cheaper to go to Staples and buy a USB drive than it is to pay for properly archived storage.

The resistance to the top down approach was, to me, misunderstanding the risks of storing their data outside of a safe place, and a fear of losing control of their data.

The last institute I worked at was focused on basic biomedical research - dead ends were what we chased all day!