The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All- Administrative University and Why It MattersBenjamin Ginsberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 248 pp. $29.95This is a horrifying book: I cannot recall ever being so upset so quickly, even by overviews of or commentaries on the economic, political, or militaristic debacles that have haunted the world during the past century. Because I have dedicated my professional life to academia, before I began to read, I alerted myself to be vigilantly objective, but I was roiling with anger after a mere paragraph or two. Not that I was unaware of the situation. My mother, my father, and I have just under 200 years invested in formal education: learning, instructing, and even a bit of administering. From the time that I was old enough to understand matters, all I ever heard at the end of each day was a recitation of what had occurred in my parents' schools. The problems usually, though not always, stemmed from inept or demagogic administrators who caused a great deal of ongoing harm. I never met the early tyrants, but now 60 years later, I still recall their names. Eventually my father moved on to college teaching, but matters here were even worse. My own experiences as a professor at two major universities confirm much that Benjamin Ginsberg offers in this extremely important study, although I was lucky to work closely with three deans who were extremely efficacious and kind, at least to me. I never had any trouble or problems with administrators. I prospered. However, as the chair of the grievance committee at an institution with 750 full- time faculty members, I was aware that other bodies rolled- right offthe campus (although, ironically, this was not always an administrator's fault). Despite my knowledge, I was immediately enlightened: Ginsberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins, has brought together a panoply of miseries inflicted on the professoriate and by extension on students as well as on higher education generally. Though all academics are aware of most of the points he makes, it may never have occurred to them (or to me) that what is being done is based on a hidden agenda, one that is extremely detrimental to the faculty. In the recent past, professors had a great deal of power and used it to teach and make discoveries in their fields, thus forwarding the two primary goals of an academic institution: instruction and research. Slowly but inexorably, administration has increased its own size (adding deans, associate deans, assistant deans; provosts and their subordinates; and so on, interminably but superfluously) and its power, delimiting and deflecting faculty influence in the decision- making process; whereas in the past, it would have been difficult or impossible to build a new arena, pay a football coach five million dollars a year, or alter the curriculum without full faculty cooperation, today the faculty may be the last to learn that some major alteration has been instituted. Ginsberg calls this "rampant administrative blight. " Throughout this study, he adduces frequent apposite examples, some in great detail, to prove his points. So, for example, the lack of faculty influence at Boston University is demonstrated by the fact that a high percentage of professors "loathed and feared the dictatorial President John Silber," but they were unable to divest themselves of their leader.One of the major negative alterations in higher education has been the substitution of adjuncts (part- timers) for tenured or tenure track faculty. In 1976, 31 percent were adjuncts; by 2005, this had increased to 48 percent; during the same period, however, part- time administrators had decreased from four to three percent. Ginsberg cites the egregious case of the University of Maryland's main campus where one will find 29 vice- presidents and assistants of various stripes and denominations. Many earn more than $200,000 a year. As this university retrenched (a contractual arrangement that generally allows for the dismissal of tenured professors), the administrators' salaries soared. …