Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities – Tablet Magazine
We generally think of fossilization, the replacement of bone and tissue by minerals, as a process that only makes contact with campus life at the paleontology museum. Yet a parallel variant is destroying American academic life, as universities substitute administrators for faculty and boost their outlays for administration at twice the rate for faculty. Responsibility, not just for processing Federal Student Aid forms and parking permits, but for the process of forming young minds, is being transferred from the faculty, selected for the originality and quality of their thought, to administrators who can be swiftly deselected should their expressed views depart from the orthodoxy. Today, even tenure-track faculty must think twice about the reaction of administrators as they conduct independent research, speak in the classroom, or express opinions.