I don’t know. Is there not massive administrative bloat everywhere? It can’t be all misallocated.
And anyway, if I take a $300k salary you might see in industry, and split it between 1 associate professor at $150k and 2 admins at $75k, the admins get to WFH and all three get to have enriching time with their families where a single partner isn’t the sole caregiver, is that not the kind of community that educated people are agitating for anyway?
Universities are the future of work, not some sort of flawed or regressive past. I don’t know for certain if it’s a bullshit job. I know those people are happy though. You can argue all day for paying adjuncts more, or whatever, and I agree, but in principle, the admins are the community. They are the spouses and recent grads, they are the moms and dads.
The place where it is harmful is not the bloat. Like everyone’s income is someone else’s expense. It’s such a reductionist view, to complain about anyone who is getting paid to do something that isn’t exactly the same thing as you are doing. It’s harmful because those admins are shutting down communities, be they fraternities or co-ops, as a sort of vengeance plot against the people who wronged them when they were in college, which students never asked for. These college aged vengeances are the same thing motivating angry commenters against education in HN threads. No matter what the party, the sense of exacting vengeance is the nasty and bad part. Not the money.
Historical universities were originally an acculturing opportunity for the upper classes who were often not obliged to work, and modern universities broadly provide the same services to a more egalitarian cohort.
Work preparation was never really something they were optimized for, although there's now about three or four generations of them erroneously being treated that way in political and social discourse. In that view, it's no surprise that universities don't quite know what do with themselves or that many of their graduates find themselves drowning in profound debt while struggling to find work related to their studies (since their studies were about becoming cultured, not preparing for work).
Most people work in trades of some kind, and there have always been much more effective and efficient ways to learn trades than through universities.
We should be ashamed of every dollar wasted on this lazy-middle-class-New-Deal that wasn't spent helping children in poor schools in the same nation. Luckily, the research for how best to help those schools is being done in Universities.
And anyway, if I take a $300k salary you might see in industry, and split it between 1 associate professor at $150k and 2 admins at $75k, the admins get to WFH and all three get to have enriching time with their families where a single partner isn’t the sole caregiver, is that not the kind of community that educated people are agitating for anyway?
Universities are the future of work, not some sort of flawed or regressive past. I don’t know for certain if it’s a bullshit job. I know those people are happy though. You can argue all day for paying adjuncts more, or whatever, and I agree, but in principle, the admins are the community. They are the spouses and recent grads, they are the moms and dads.
The place where it is harmful is not the bloat. Like everyone’s income is someone else’s expense. It’s such a reductionist view, to complain about anyone who is getting paid to do something that isn’t exactly the same thing as you are doing. It’s harmful because those admins are shutting down communities, be they fraternities or co-ops, as a sort of vengeance plot against the people who wronged them when they were in college, which students never asked for. These college aged vengeances are the same thing motivating angry commenters against education in HN threads. No matter what the party, the sense of exacting vengeance is the nasty and bad part. Not the money.