Why Ending Tenure Is Only a Start – Tablet Magazine
The surplus bureaucrats found on today s college campuses come in two major forms retinues and diversity bureaucrats. The retinue phenomenon has long been familiar to students of bureaucracy: The more people below you whom you supervise, the more money you can demand to be paid as a manager. So you get a ratchet effect, in which university presidents who aspire to be paid like CEOs or Wall Street bankers get raises for supervising a proliferating number of vice presidents, and the vice presidents in turn can claim raises by multiplying their own retinues. Deans create jobs for deanlets, who then claim they are overworked and need deputy deanlets.
A more recent phenomenon is the growth of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) jobs in bloated university administrations as a concession to left-wing identity politics activists. The expansion of the diversity bureaucracy on American campuses in the last decade or so has been amazing. In 2018, Mark Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, calculated that the university at which he taught had nearly 100 diversity administrators, of whom more than a quarter made more than $100,000 a year.
Like all bureaucrats, whether public, private, or nonprofit, administrators and supervisors tend to come up with unnecessary tasks to justify their salaries. At many universities, in order to be considered for salary increases in annual merit reviews, professors are now required to have authors on reading lists who are racially and sexually (not intellectually, religiously, socioeconomically, or geographically) diverse, as determined by the latest U.S. national census.
Needless to say, having bureaucrats label reading list authors by race is disturbing in itself. During the Third Reich, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt suggested that a J be put next to the name of all Jewish authors in scholarly citations, to warn Aryan scholars and students of Jewish bias. Will American university professors in their annual salary evaluations be punished by university diversity bureaucrats for having too many Jews on course curricula?
And what about gender and sexual orientation? How university diversity bureaucrats, assigned to evaluate professors in annual salary reviews based in part on the number of nonmale, nonheterosexual authors they assign in their reading lists, will be able to ascertain which authors, many of them long dead, are or were straight, gay, lesbian, or nonbinary, is a mystery. The DEI curriculum review committee s notes on William Shakespeare, who wrote passionate love sonnets to a man, might read like a report to J. Edgar Hoover s FBI: Shakespeare, William. Married with children, but with suspected LGBTQ+ proclivities. Assign to Approved Nonbinary Authors Quota as well as Cisgender White Male Heterosexual Authors Blacklist.
The contemporary American university is an enormous Kafkaesque bureaucracy teetering on top of a small Dickensian sweatshop. If we don t count the sports teams and the research institutes, the university consists of preindustrial artisans, the instructors, divided between a small and shrinking group of elite tenured artisans and a huge and growing number of impoverished apprentices with no hope of decent jobs with all of the artisans, affluent and poor, crushed beneath the weight of thickening layers of middle managers.
RTWT — this is pretty good.