[aprilthird2021]

Anecdotally I have heard similar things from top tier institutions in the US as well. They are all in recession mode basically and actively cutting classes, staff, and lecturers.

This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

[bonsai_spool]

> This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding federal funding'

[aprilthird2021]

I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed

[bonsai_spool]

> I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed

That is not true. Those happened in 2024.

The extortionate demands are happening in 2025.

The campus protests are clearly a pretext.

[yongjik]

Yeah it's more like "clamp down on higher education."

I've said it multiple times, Trump and his folks see higher education as the enemy, the anti-Christ that corrupts their vision of America. Protests and admin bureaucracy (give me a fucking break) are just convenient excuses.

[kadushka]

I hope they're cutting their bloated administration departments before cutting classes and lecturers, but I'm not holding my breath.

[awesome_dude]

> bloated administration departments

Can you demonstrate how those administration departments were bloated (in any way)

edit: re-added "administration" which I had, for some reason, neglected to add, thinking that it was obvious that that was what I was talking about.

[kadushka]

Yes, this fact is well-known and has been widely discussed. The first two google search results provide the stats:

https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-b...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

[kenjackson]

The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more details would be really helpful. For example MIT and CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy, but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.

I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.

[araes]

There's some examples in the first link, with the implication they're representative (unknown whether they are, yet, "detail about the distribution")

> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”

> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.

[awesome_dude]

I have a suspicion that as an entity such as a University (or government, or business, etc) gets larger, its bureaucracy/administrations needs grow (at a much faster rate)

[awesome_dude]

Both of those links (thanks for providing them) only talk about raw numbers, no real in depth analysis of whether the administrators are needed at those levels, or not, nor even how they classify someone as being an administrator.

[sherburt3]

Feel free to do your own analysis

[awesome_dude]

Do YoUr OwN ReSeArCh has joined the chat ^

[layman51]

I don't have any serious evidence, but the idea of "bloated administration" has been a meme for many years and I remember this humorous article describing it as a new chemical element floating around since around a decade ago: https://meyerweb.com/other/humor/administratium.html

[awesome_dude]

Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers"

That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the first place.

[kelipso]

I know a current professor who has been in the same department for 15 years and the admin bloat thing is definitely real. Just tons of new people employed for who knows what. Maybe the numbers are out there maybe not (who is looking at them?) but it’s definitely not an imaginary thing or made up for political purposes.

[awesome_dude]

An anecdote describing feels is political.

This is why i want hard facts.

[aprilthird2021]

They are cutting both from what I hear from lecturers in top schools