Fall of Faculty

This was an excellent interview with the author of The Fall of Faculty The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Here are some excerpts from the interview: 

Q: In your book, you refer frequently to "deanlets and deanlings." Can you please tell me a little more about what you mean?A: I wanted to emphasize a major shift that’s been underway for several decades. Deans have an academic background. Years ago, they were part-time and always part of the faculty. This is extremely important because, like the faculty, they saw the university as an instrument of teaching and scholarship. Today, we have a cadre of professional administrators. I called them deanlets to give emphasis to the difference. They either have no faculty background or they decided early in their careers that their talents lay elsewhere. To them, what used to be the means is now the end. Instead of an institution serving teaching and scholarship, teaching and scholarship serve the institution.

Q: You describe administration as, like many bureaucracies, a kind of self-perpetuating entity that seeks to expand as a way of justifying its own existence. What are the most egregious examples?A: In the book, I provide a number of examples. I tell the story from my own experience of our summer program, which had one administrator and 400 students. It was given over to a professional deanlet. It soon had 400 professional staff members and one student. And no one seemed to care.
Q: What impact do you hope this book will have?A: I hope to wake up the faculty. We’re like the residents of a Japanese city living next to the ocean and thinking the tsunami won’t affect us. I also hope to alert university boards. When they read the administration's propaganda organs, I want them to understand that the institution they love needs their help. They didn’t come to Hopkins or Georgetown or Princeton to work with our deanlets. They came to work with our faculty.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education#ixzz1gOCeZmUO Inside Higher Ed