A number of good points have been made about administrative bloat and the “adjunctivization” of academia. Coup;e these with the fact that the liberal arts in general – and the humanities in particular – have gotten a bum rap in today’s world (I would go as far as to say that these subjects have been vilified of late as witnessed by the title and premise of this post).
Given that one of the criteria used for gauging school success is looking at the “return on investment” in the years immediately after completion of undergraduate studies, humanities and liberal arts majors often don’t have salaries that are as high as their counterparts that have obtained “pre-professional” and “professional” degrees such as engineering, computer science, business, etc. While the latter group might fare better on these ROI measures than those that have majored in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, if one looks at both groups’ respective salaries 15 or 20 years down the line, humanities majors do just fine, thank you very much.
The problem as I see it is not that there are too many PhDs in the humanities being minted, but rather that humanities programs are, as discussed above, hiring adjuncts and “highway fliers” at a fraction of the cost of tenured and tenure track professors, and that universities are not able to replace tenured faculty as they retire. Departments see enrollment dwindling, which creates a vicious cycle. I predict that the pendulum will one day swing back as we realize that we have generations of students graduating college that cannot read or write well and that don’t have sufficient critical thinking or rhetorical skills to make logical and persuasive arguments.
Data regarding administrative bloat at the UCs show that the biggest problems are not necessarily at the top levels of administration, but rather at mid-level management levels. @prof2dad’s figures are supported by an article in the LA Times, wherein among other things, they note:
"While big paychecks for those in UC’s senior management group — including the president, the chancellors and other top administrators — attract the most attention, they comprise less than 1% of the $27-billion budget, officials say. It is the next layer of well-paid administrators that has grown most significantly over the last two decades. From 2004 to 2014, the management and senior professionals ranks swelled by 60%, to about 10,000, UC data show.
“There is a huge cadre of middle managers and upper middle managers, and that is where the bloat is,” said Charles Schwartz, a UC Berkeley physics professor who retired in 1993 and has spent much of his time since then crunching the budget and issuing a series of sharp critiques.
Administrators now outnumber tenure-track faculty members, whose ranks, over the same decade, grew by just 8%, from 8,067 to 8,722, and have not kept pace with rising enrollment.
As more of the teaching burden has shifted to adjunct and part-time instructors, students say their face time with tenured professors has shrunk and their class sizes have grown."
And so it goes…
Here’s the article:
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html