
The Staggering Administrative Bloat of Universities - peterkshultz
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/04/the-staggering-administrative-bloat-of-universities.html
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refractal
If you look at what the UC Office of the president does, there's a huge scope
there that the other examples probably do not have
[http://www.ucop.edu/about/](http://www.ucop.edu/about/)

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magila
It's easy to make an impressive looking list of responsibilities for
administrative offices. The thing is many of those bullet points include words
like "help", "support", "promote", and "oversee". It's very hard to judge just
how much work is going into those things and how important it is. You can have
endless rows of "support" staff doing important sounding things that are
actually totally superfluous to getting actual productive work done.

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mljoe
Anecdotally, when I was IT student sysadmin at a major university, I don't
recall ever seeing admin staff doing actual work. Often times, you'd walk
through the hallways and see rows and rows of offices of people screwing
around on the Internet, or even playing video games. A good part of our job in
IT itself was super slow as well except for the first two weeks of every
semester, so we weren't much better. My boss would play WoW on the clock.

~~~
WillyOnWheels
I love anecdotes! When I was an IT admin at a major UC Berkeley university,
all of the admin staff that supported our group worked super hard from 9am to
6pm, then they went home.

There was an extremely old clerk who as far as I can tell had been sentenced
to entering in data on a Mac SE. No WoW.

~~~
existencebox
I'll throw in my anecdotes. Used to be a sysadmin at a "Rather shiny" east
coast university.

Mixed bag. Some IT worked extremely hard, carried whole group, others did
almost nothing. I have stories about coworkers that make WoW look positively
productive as a workplace activity.

Same went for admin staff. A few of them clearly did 90% of the work, whereas
a few did almost nothing. (and this was widely accepted and known)

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jbooth
This could have been an interesting article about a real problem, but it's
just 3 paragraphs of ranting about political straw men.

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verylongname
I'm sure there is a lot of waste in the UC Office of the President. But
Universities have become huge, complicated behemoths with many functions
besides education.

I recently saw a breakdown of where the money for one of the UC campuses comes
from. About 50% was from the associated Medical center, about 25% was from
federal research grants (many of which had PIs in the medical school and
medical center), about 15% from tuition, and 10% from other sources (not
broken down further). This wasn't UCSF, either, where I would expect the
medical center's budget to dwarf everything else.

I don't think it would be too far fetched to call it a medical center that
happens to have school with 30K undergraduates attached. I wonder how the cost
of running the chancellor's office there compares with the costs of
administration of a medical services company?

Of course, at this point aren't Yale and Harvard basically hedge funds?

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WillyOnWheels
I decided to explore what else this blogger blogs about, who I believe blogs
from Arizona:

"Take the Pledge: Let's Take A Year Off From Giving To Our Universities"
[http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/04/take-the-
pledg...](http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/04/take-the-pledge-lets-
take-a-year-off-from-giving-to-our-universities.html)

"How The Left Is Changing the Meaning of Words to Reduce Freedom -- The Phrase
"Incite Violence"

Wealth Creation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy

Statism Comes Back to Bite Technocrats

He actually has a few views I can agree with, and links to plenty of things I
read every week, but I don't think his analysis is particularly technical or
hard hitting.

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callalex
Where's the rest of the article? This is a great opening statement followed up
by...nothing.

