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

Benjamin Ginsberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2011

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda.

The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty.

As troubling as this trend has become, there are ways to reverse it. The Fall of the Faculty outlines how we can revamp the system so that real educators can regain their voice in curriculum policy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book takes a hard, clear-eyed look, with few holds barred, at the growing number and influence of full-time administrators in colleges and universities. It recognizes the large increase in government and other demands on the bureaucracy. But it dwells on the manifest fact--too often slighted--that administrators have their own fish to fry. Let us hope that his cautionary tale has a wide impact."--Morton Keller, Professor Emeritus of History, Brandeis University

"During my nearly 60 years as a professor, I believe this is the only comprehensive analysis of the academic civil war between the professors and the deans. Ginsberg demonstrates why and how we're losing--or have already lost."--Theodore J. Lowi, Professor of American Institutions, Cornell University

"Ben Ginsberg knows a thing or two about academic bureaucracy. He has had extensive experience with administrative impediments that come between his ideas and their realization. Instead of ranting, he has written The Fall of the Faculty, where he has employed his political insight to examine administrative bloat in higher education and to explain the many ways in which administrative authority has elbowed aside faculty governance in the running of today's colleges and universities. As a recovering deanlet and one-time acting dean, I know whereof he speaks."--Matthew A. Crenson, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

"In his lacerating 'The Fall of the Faculty,' Mr. Ginsberg argues that universities have degenerated into poorly managed pseudo-corporations controlled by bureaucrats so far removed from research and teaching that they have barely any idea what these activities involve. He attacks virtually everyone from overpaid presidents and provosts down through development officers, communications specialists and human-resource staffers but he reserves his most bitter scorn for the midlevel 'associate deans' and 'assistant deans' who often have the most direct control over the faculty. Mr. Ginsberg refers to them as 'deanlets,' but at my institution they are often called 'ass. deans.' 'The Fall of the Faculty' reads like a cross between a grand-jury indictment and a call to arms. Yet as bracing and darkly pleasurable as this call is, it is hard to imagine professors joining the resistance with so few weapons at their disposal."--The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for the Study of American Government, and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His previous books include Downsizing Democracy, American Government: Power and Purpose, and We the People: An Introduction to American Politics.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition (August 12, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019978244X
• ISBN-13: 978-0199782444
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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127 of 130 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important, Readable, Bittersweet Book July 31, 2011

By Richard B. Schwartz TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Once upon a time, within living memory, universities were essentially run by the faculty. The faculty took responsibility for what we now term `student life' issues as well as the curriculum. They even dabbled in athletics. Knute Rockne, who graduated magna cum laude, taught chemistry before he became Notre Dame's head football coach. When I attended Notre Dame many years later there were faculty living in Lyons Hall, a sophomore dorm. The prefects and rectors throughout the dorms--C.S.C. priests, by and large--were also members of the faculty. Faculty lived with students at other universities, of course, Harvard and Princeton, e.g., and dealt with `student life' issues there.

When I taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1969-1981) every significant academic administrative post was held by a faculty member and all of the supporting positions (associate deanships, e.g.) were held by a part-time faculty member. Some associate deans served longish terms, some only three years. The requirement was that you would continue to teach and do research in your department while you held the administrative position and return to your department when your term was completed.

While not entirely gone and not entirely forgotten, that world has been replaced by a bureaucratized university filled with administrators and administrative staff. Dr. Ginsberg tells this story and describes its implications in this bittersweet book. The story is sad; fortunately, Dr. Ginsberg has not lost his sense of humor. Moreover, he has not lost his courage, for he names names and names institutions as he details the most prominent offenders....

The general public often consider `the growth of administration' to essentially mean the proliferation of vice presidents and other `higher' officials. The actual growth, as Dr. Ginsberg explains, has been in nonteaching, nonresearching `academic' staff--what he calls `deanlets' and `deanlings'. In the modern university the number of students has expanded dramatically, the number of faculty has increased, but not dramatically; the number of higher administrators has increased; the number of nonteaching academic staff has exploded.

Some of these appointments are easily explained. Many are information technology professionals. Some are the `enrollment management' and `diversity' professionals. Faculty advisors have been replaced by `professional' advisors (often in response to a curriculum which is too complex for anyone to understand). Development staff have proliferated, and so on.

This is not always a problem. If development staff bring in far more dollars than they cost (16 cents on the dollar is a frequent guide number; 8 cents on the dollar is often seen) that is all to the good, assuming that development dollars match university priorities. And after all, what are public universities to do when their state contributions have been shrinking since the 1970's? Interestingly, though, the largest growth in the number of deanlets and deanlings has been in the private universities.

Their activities are often lumped under the catchall term, `student services'. These are the holders of hands and the providers of luxury. They do the work that the faculty refuses to do (in their narrative); their numbers are growing; their ultimate aspiration is to enjoy the status, compensation and prominence of the faculty.

Why is this a problem? Because it raises educational costs exponentially. Because these individuals tend to see the university as a business and students as customers. Because they distort the university and divert it from the pursuit of its core activities. Because they intrude in curricular areas, setting up parallel programs that are generally banal and less challenging than the traditional curriculum. Because they are paid for by the growth of contingent faculty. Tuitions rise and students are taught by part-timers while their hands are held by full-timers.

Dr. Ginsberg believes that much of this is calculated. He acknowledges that there are some good administrators, but he believes that many are involved in ongoing power plays to shift the university's efforts and authority from its libraries and laboratories and classrooms to its administrative conference rooms. Many of these individuals are thoroughgoing careerists whose personal aspirations trump the needs of their institutions, people who stay long enough to position themselves for their next jobs, often leaving chaos in their wake.

He ridicules their constant meetings, their tendency to stage corporate `retreats', their mouthing of platitudes and chasing of the latest management fads. In many cases he is absolutely, dead solid perfect, correct. These individuals are a blight on the academic world. His depiction of their pomps and works is deadly accurate, e.g. their preparation of `strategic plans', utterly worthless documents which provide the rationale for holding up current decisions until the plan is complete (by which time the planner will have gone to his next job, trumpeting his ability to craft a strategic plan and promising to do so at his next institution).

Dr. Ginsberg recognizes, of course, that there are also dedicated individuals who exhibit institutional loyalty and do their best to advance their college or university. There are even some administrators who continue to teach and do research and recognize those activities as central to the university. Would that there were more of them.

What he does not provide is an account of how the careerists have risen to power, though he does acknowledge the complicit role here of trustees and professional search firms. In part, I believe, we have technocratic, careerist administrators because the positions they fill have become unattractive to people for whom salary is less important than the development and dissemination of knowledge. The contemporary university is a litigious place; it is a bureaucratized place; it is a heavily-regulated place; it is racialized, politicized and corporatized. In some ways it receives `leadership' appropriate to its condition, though not always.

Dr. Ginsberg's proximate frame of reference is Johns Hopkins, an institution with a very large number of hand holders (Vanderbilt actually wins those sweepstakes) and a strong interest in civility- and diversity training. He asks the question (to which, of course, there is no rational answer, but many political ones), why should search committees be subjected to diversity training and racial-sensitivity training by ignorant neophytes when the membership of the search committee includes world-class experts on questions of race? And how will this `training' serve any useful purpose in the face of the fact that in one recent year there were only 10 African-American Ph.D.'s produced in Mathematics and 13 in Physics? It will take up faculty time and it will create careers for the trainers, but it will not increase the number of available African-American Ph.D.'s. The `diversity' is in the diversity training office, not in the Math or Physics department.

This is an interesting book. It is passionately argued, straightforward in its facts and justified in its concerns. I hope that it reaches a wide audience. Read more ›

65 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing, well informed, important defense of the faculty August 18, 2011

By Wanda B. Red VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Most contemporary critics of American higher education (e.g., Andrew Hacker, Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Shaefer Riley, Charles Sykes, and others ad nauseam) take a perverse populist pleasure in hating on the faculty. According to an oft-repeated, basically anti-intellectual argument (each time trotted forth as if it were a shocking new discovery), the woes of the modern college or university all emanate from overpaid, underworked, vain academics who pursue ever more abstruse topics to the detriment of the students whose educations they neglect. Benjamin Ginsberg's "The Fall of the Faculty" bursts onto this tired scene with a spirited defense of the faculty and of the traditional aims of the university: fostering original research and the education of students. These activities are the responsibility of the faculty, who historically have not only performed that research and education but who also for generations took responsibility (with the help of a few administrative staff members) for governing and running their schools. This is the faculty that has made American higher education preeminent in the world. But it is indeed a faculty that is under siege.

As Ginsberg meticulously lays out in his analysis (unlike the author of many a trade book, Ginsberg knows how to use a footnote), the number of academic administrators over the past forty years has been growing far more rapidly than that of students or faculty members, and the financial investment needed to support them is mainly responsible for many of the worst sins of higher education, including galloping tuition increases and the creation of an underclass of powerless and underpaid contingent faculty. Administrators and other professional staff now far outnumber faculty.... As their power grows, the power of the faculty declines; the traditional curriculum is replaced with a mind-numbing "shadow curriculum" of life-skills courses. Resources that could be spent on scholarship and teaching pour into expensive, time-wasting administrative retreats, strategic planning exercises, and assessment initiatives that usurp faculty responsibility for the evaluation of students and academic programs. Even worse, some of these activities ultimately result in social engineering experiments that stifle the very academic freedom whose protection is the sacred trust of the university. Without freedom of thought and speech there can be no real education or disinterested research. Chapter 5, on the history and importance of tenure as a means of safeguarding that freedom, should be read by everyone who cares about higher education. As Ginsberg makes abundantly clear, in recent times the courts have not been friendly to the protections of tenure, and administrators seize upon many pretexts (most recently financial exigency) to breach them.

The writer of this review has been a faculty member for 27 years at a well regarded liberal arts college with a strong tradition of faculty self-governance; she moved a year ago into an administrative position at her school, from which she plans to return to teaching after a few years. As a long observer of the higher ed scene and as an insider, she is in a pretty good position to comment on Ginsberg's characterization of the academic scene, and she is sorry to report that it is for the most part accurate, even if she finds the book's tone sometimes annoyingly mordant and self-righteous. Like Ginsberg, who admits that he is personally acquainted with some wonderful, hard-working and effective administrators, she knows that such administrators are not hard to find. Her own office is populated with them, and her home institution is less plagued by the problems Ginsberg discusses than most schools. Nevertheless, she thrilled with delight at Ginsberg's skewering of ubiquitous administrative slogans and phrases such as "best practices," an excuse for mimicry that she has heard many a time over the past year. Even at the best run schools, the overall structure of incentives in higher education has clearly been working in recent decades to produce a deadening administrative bloat, which this book fearlessly and frankly diagnoses.

I would disagree with Ginsberg only in the responsibility he assigns to the faculty to combat the problem. To be sure, in his "what is to be done" chapter, he does admit that he and other faculty members are wrong "in succumbing to the temptation to shirk administrative service." But he quickly backs off from that tepid call to arms by explaining that faculty can hardly be blamed for such avoidance given that administrators rarely listen to them or make use of the reports of committees that he sees as mostly part of a larger effort to co-opt the faculty in their own marginalization. But the faculty really does need to make a more vigorous stand against the all-administrative university. It needs to stop shirking. While paying the fault of shirking some lip service, Ginsberg tends to discount its importance as a major cause of the status quo, preferring an administrative hunger for power. My own experience, however, suggests that shirking is much more widespread a human foible that ambition. The faculty rarely resists the administration. They are too fond of disingenuously leveraging their own pet projects and political commitments through administrative channels, and they are all too happy to have administrative duties taken off their plates when given the opportunity. For the most part, rather than protesting the metastasis of the administration, faculty typically demand more administrative assistance.

So, while I found the defense of the faculty here refreshing, in the end I believe that Ginsberg makes his faculty allegiance something of an excuse for a disturbing quietism; he wants Trustees or the media, or anyone else, to come to the rescue. But it is the sleeping giant of the faculty that needs to shake off its indolence and take responsibility for reclaiming the noble ends of higher education. This book makes an excellent start. Let's hope it finds a wide and comprehending readership. Read more ›

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A narrow view of a larger problem May 11, 2012

By Keith A. Williams

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Prof. Ginsberg's book presents evidence for an alarming decline in the stature of college faculty, and assigns most of the blame to college administrators portrayed as inept and financially burdensome. Among many faculty, including myself, Ginsberg's complaints clearly resonate. Administrators' salaries and the rate of growth of the administrative bureaucracy in many colleges are truly astonishing.

The main target of Prof. Ginsberg's book is the "bewildering array of vice presidents, provosts, vice provosts, associate provosts, deans, vice deans, associate deans and assistant deans." Indeed, the typical American college has an excess of what Prof. Ginsburg calls "deanlets" and these high-salaried individuals are rather disconnected from the college's educational mission. They are a very easy target.

My main discomfort with Prof. Ginsberg's book is that it devotes little attention to the root issue, namely that "...in virtually every academic field, graduate programs have, for years, produced many more PhDs than could be absorbed by the nation's colleges and universities." From my perspective, far too many young PhDs are trained to believe that their primary mission in academia is to replicate themselves, based on the assumption that there will always be demand for PhDs. Meanwhile, the labor market screams for young professionals who come to the workplace with relevant skills, fresh ideas, the energy of youth... and less college debt. This issue is overlooked by many administrators and almost completely ignored by faculty, who have very narrow focus on their own research. This is the core issue for which both faculty and administrators seem utterly incapable of offering a solution.... Hence the rise of virtual education and for-profit institutions, which I am afraid will inevitably render the traditional academic institutions obsolete.

( As a faculty member with one foot in academia and the other in the private sector, I can report that there is an ever widening gulf between what the labor market wants and what academia produces. The inevitable consequence is a large excess of underemployed PhDs who go back to academia. Some of those PhDs manage to convince people that they deserve more salary; some do not. And so it goes.... )

Prof. Ginsberg does hint at some possible remedies in the final chapter of his book, "What is to be done." As he notes, most PhDs "especially in the humanities, will never find regular academic positions" and then courageously points out what so many of us have been muttering under our breath for years: that "universities continue to support doctoral programs in academic areas where few of their students can ever hope to find jobs." But, unfortunately, his proposed remedies leave this root issue untouched. Here is a short summary of what Prof. Ginsberg's proposes, accompanied by my own parenthetic observations:

* Boards should shift focus back to "the real business of the university - teaching and research"; (Bravo! But... who will select these enlightened board members?)
* Media should factor administrative bloat into their ratings; (Bravo! But... there is already a lot of online information on this topic)
* Faculty should defend their interests; (Like herding cats...)
* Alumni should consider directing their donations to particular programs; (Already done by many donors, to the chagrin of development officers)
* Students should avoid curriculum foisted upon them by administrators; (Unfortunately, parents and students have become powerless debt holders)

...and finally,

* There should be more short-term or part-time administrators, as opposed to those who choose administration as a career. (Which might make sense to someone who has never actually administered anything substantial. In my view, administration requires full and undivided attention, and I know very few faculty who can do it at all.)

While I agree with the intent of many of these recommendations, Prof. Ginsberg doesn't really address how to accomplish them. Short of board-level coup d'état, I am skeptical that many of these remedies could ever be implemented.

On the whole, Prog. Ginsberg's book is a well written, provocative, and an informative read which offers many valid viewpoints. My reason for not rating it more highly is that this book, like so many others, spends too little time on the root causes and too much time on symptoms. I hope that Prof. Ginsberg will consider further work on this subject and devote more time to developing detailed solutions. There is a much bigger picture than the enmity between faculty and administrators. Read more ›