Universities Try To Halt Administrative Bloat

Studies indicate that university bureaucracies are growing, both in absolute terms and relative to other institutional functions. Researchers have long decried this trend, reasoning that the growth of administrations can come only at the expense of research and teaching. The causes of administrative growth are complex, and drastic measures often are required to stop the ever-increasing costs. However, some institutions have had success in cutting their administrations down to size. The opinion that many researchers have about administrators is crystallized in a joke making the rounds of the Internet. It tells of the discovery of a new chemical element-"administratium"-with unusual physical properties. Administratium has no protons or electrons. It has one neutron, 14 assistant neutrons, 70 vice neutrons, and 161 assistant vice neutrons. Administratium has a three-year half-life, but instead of decaying it undergoes a reorganization in which the assistant neutrons, vice neutrons, and assistant vice neutrons all exchange places, which curiously results in an increase in atomic mass. STREAMLINING: Sam Houston State president Bobby Marks notes that administrative costs decreased dramatically under a faculty-developed reorganization plan. Erwin Chargaff, a professor, emeritus, of biochemistry at Columbia University, devised a somewhat more sinister metaphor. Chargaff wrote that universities have been "invaded by a particularly malignant form of bureaucratic cancer: the numerous newly created positions of various vice-presidents, chancellors, provosts, deans and associate and assistant deans etc. show no form of contact inhibition and keep on sprouting additional administrative jobs" (Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 1:N51-N52, 1976). EXPONENTIAL INCREASE: University of Virginia's Clive Bradbeer acknowledges that the number of administrators has risen with number of complex government regulations. Clive Bradbeer, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Virginia, recalls that when he arrived at the university in 1964, the dean's office in the medical school seemed to be run by a single secretary. In those days, "there was a separate building where the nurses lived. That whole building is now filled with administrators. . . . I walk through that building quite a bit, and I'm amazed at all the people in there. I wonder, what on Earth are they doing?" Part of what they're doing is administering increasingly complex government regulations, many of which relate to scientific research. "Certainly there are more regulations, for example, in terms of the chemicals you use and the disposal of those chemicals. I suppose that requires some increase in administrators," acknowledges Bradbeer. Functions such as overseeing animal research and the use of radioactive substances also require specialized administrative offices. The Animal Research Act of 1986, for example, requires that institutions oversee animal experiments and housing. Protocols for all experiments involving animals must be submitted to a committee for approval, and these activities must be thoroughly documented for the federal government. All of these tasks require administrators (R. Finn, The Scientist, May 26, 1997, page 1). Additionally, the increasing recognition of the importance of moving research from the lab to industry necessitates an office of technology transfer, whose function is to obtain and license patents (see Profession). NO ACCOUNTABILITY: Wayne State biochemist Marilynn Doscher maintains that administrative expenses continue to grow unchecked. But some faculty members don't agree that every new administrative function is necessary or desirable. Marilynn S. Doscher, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Wayne State University in Detroit, has a hypothesis to explain the proliferation of administrators at her institution. "Being a public urban university, we have joined almost every possible program-for education of inner-city youth, you name it. We've got a huge list of institutes and so on, all of which have their administrative expenses. . . . And it seems to be growing. This could be some kind of subjective faculty paranoia, but it just seems to go on and on, and there's no constraint. They don't have to speak to the stockholders; they don't have any bottom line on their product." And Doscher is skeptical that significant change is possible. "Right now it's a conspiracy of silence. Clearly the administrators aren't going to be calling somebody up and saying, 'Guess what, there's too many of us and we're too expensive.' And the faculty just sort of throws up their hands." TOP GROWTH AREA: Penn’s Robert Zemsky’s analysis has found that science staff who directly support research constitute the most rapidly growing administration group. National numbers do seem to indicate that it's not just "subjective faculty paranoia"; administrations have been expanding. "What is clear is that the percentage of the work force in research universities [that constitutes] tenure-track faculty is getting smaller and smaller," comments Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. "And the question is: What's growing?" Zemsky's analysis reveals that the most rapidly growing group is the technical and professional staff who are in direct support of faculty research, such as postdocs and lab tech- nicians. The next fastest-growing group includes the people who run student services-offices such as admissions, student activities, and career counseling and placement. The third class-"pure bureaucratic administration"-is not growing as fast as the other two, calculates Zemsky. "My best estimate is that the bureaucratic staff has been growing somewhat between a half a percent and 2 percent a year [in absolute terms]. They are certainly growing faster than the faculty." In a study of the 15 public universities in Michigan, Marc Cogan, an associate professor of humanities at Wayne State University, determined that expenditures for administrative functions increased far faster than did expenditures for instruction between 1977-78 and 1993-94. During that time, total expenditures rose 215 percent, expenses for instruction increased 178 percent, and expenses for administrative functions rose 238 percent. The number of full-time faculty members fell 2.97 percent during that period, while the number of administrators rose 55.21 percent. But whatever the size of the problem, what are its causes? Surprisingly, there are some indications that the growth of administrations is a situation that faculty members have in part brought upon themselves. According to Zemsky, the problem has two components, which he calls the "ratchet" and the "lattice." "One of the things that's been driving the phenomenon is that the faculty are working harder, but in terms of institutional duties they're actually doing less," explains Zemsky. "The 'ratchet' is the degree to which the faculty pursue always having more discretionary time. If one faculty member gets a slightly lower teaching load, the next thing you know all of his colleagues have a lower teaching load. If one faculty member gets excused from advising, the next thing you know everybody gets excused from advising. OPEN THE BOOKS: Putting "administrative costs right in front of everybody" forces administrators to be more responsible, contends Harvey Mudd president Jon Strauss. "As the faculty withdraw, somebody's got to perform all those tasks," reasons Zemsky. The university hires professional administrators to take over, and they organize themselves into ever more complex bureaucracies. "As those bureaucracies take hold, they tend to grow. Like mathematical lattices, they just keep completing themselves ad infinitum." Jon C. Strauss, the new president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., sees the growth of university administrations from another point of view. "This growth was made possible by tuitions going up five and six points faster than inflation during the last 15 to 20 years. That's clearly slowing. We're clearly rate-limited on revenue now, and that's going to force an adjustment." PAPERLESS CAMPUS: Computers have helped minimize increases in administrative costs at the University of Delaware, says president David Roselle. Universities are using several different strategies to make that adjustment. One class of solutions is technological. "This year we will have eliminated all internal uses of paper for doing business on the campus," says David Roselle, president of the University of Delaware, proudly. When he began his term in 1990, Roselle set about developing ways to perform most or all administrative functions by electronic means. "The very first thing we did this with was requests for vacation leave," he recalls. "There used to be great piles of them and you would sit down and autograph them, and now it's all done electronically." In addition, "Under the old system it took 12 days for a purchasing order to clear the campus. Now we average under a day. . . . Think about all the people keeping track of things [such as those] and filing copies. Think about all the purchasing agents talking on the telephone with vendors, collecting information, opening envelopes, and so forth. We decreased the purchasing staff by 25 percent just as soon as this system was put in place." Roselle's approach seems to be working. According to official university data, since 1990 funds allocated for academic units at Delaware have grown nearly three times faster than administrative budgets. Academic budgets have increased by 5.5 percent annually, while administrative units received yearly increases of just 2.15 percent. Another class of solutions is political, and the experience of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, proves that if the political will is there, radical administrative streamlining is possible. When president Bobby K. Marks was a dean in 1980, the university had 10,601 students, four vice presidents, eight academic deans, and 33 department chairpersons. The faculty developed a major reorganization plan in the early 1980s, and now, although enrollment has grown to 12,564 students, there are only three vice presidents, four deans, and 26 department chairpersons. Robert Zemsky's ideas on the growth of university administrations can be found in an article called "The Lattice and the Ratchet," which was authored by the Pew Higher Education Roundtable sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust. The article appeared in Policy Perspectives, 2(4):1-8, June 1990. Faculty leadership was critical in making the changes work, notes Marks. "It wasn't something that was just handed down from the central administration. It was a plan that was developed by the faculty themselves, and as a result it was pretty widely accepted across the campus. We started back in those years with a specific objective of decentralizing authority, and when you give a dean as many departments as some of those four deans, they have to operate on a decentralized basis." Strauss, who was a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon and Washington universities, a chief financial officer at the universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California, and president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute before assuming the presidency of Harvey Mudd, advocates taking advantage of the invisible hand of the market in reducing administrative budgets. "I'll tell you what I've done that has always worked," remarks Strauss. "You put [administrative] costs up front. Basically what you do is put the different academic units on a revenue-expense budget, and put the cost of their administrative services right on the budget. . . . If you put these administrative costs right in front of everybody, they stop growing. It's very dramatic. In part the administrators become more responsible because they have to defend what they're doing, and they get lots of pressure from faculty and others to restrain their costs and the growth of costs." But Zemsky advocates a more active approach. "I think that these administrative functions, to use the technical jargon, need to be rationalized. We need to get out of a number of bureaucratic businesses that we're in. "Let's make a command decision that we're going to reduce this set of people by 25 percent," suggests Zemsky. This is not what usually happens, he maintains, even when the political will to reduce administrative costs seems to be present. "What we tend to do in academia, because we're all vested in academic proof, is we try to devise the ideal system. And of course that's always subject to argument, and at the end of the argument it turns out we really need two more people that we didn't know we needed. So if you really want to reduce the system, you do what businesses do: You make the decision first that the system shall be smaller. Now let's get on with the business of designing a smaller system." Merely reducing administrative budgets in times of crisis won't work without this fundamental restructuring, maintains Zemsky. "Part of the problem is when you cut bureaucracies, bureaucracies have a stake in proving that, 'If you cut us 15 percent, then we're going to create 15 percent worth of hell, since that's how we prove we're essential.' So there's a kind of war that goes on, and in the end they grow back, because the first decision is not: 'We're going to get smaller.'" In the end, though, Strauss maintains that with increasing pressures for restraint in the growth of tuition costs, decreases in higher education's administrative budgets can account for only a very small percentage of the needed economies. "We're in this peculiar phenomenon where our faculty and staff expect that their wages and benefits will increase at least as rapidly as in the for-profit sector. [But] the for-profit sector has made real gains in wages possible through increased productivity. We have not increased productivity at all. In fact, if anything, most measures suggest we've reduced it. And so the only way you can get real growth in salaries and wages in a people-dominated industry is through prices. And if you're going to restrain prices, as we now are out of societal pressure, the net effect has to be reductions in real wages and salaries. So that's our conundrum." Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., can be reached online at finn@nasw.org.

Universities Try To Halt Administrative Bloat

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