Is administrative bloat about requisite variety?

Meta: This is a short note that’s asking a question rather than answering it.

The massive growth of administrators in education is a very well-documented thing. For example, you can look at figure 5b from this report “Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive? Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education”¹ to see that across institution types for decade of data the ratio of non-teaching staff to teaching staff is crawling closer together. In my own institution, over the past few years we’ve gone from ~6 management FTE to ~9 management FTE per 1000 students. This is a combination of declining enrollment and increase in the headcount of management. In that time, we’ve actually lost FTE in faculty and non-teaching staff.²

This is often called “administrative bloat”. Are there too many managers? Do they have bullshit jobs, as Graeber would have called them? I don’t really have an answer but what I do know is that when I talk to people on the management side they definitely seem to be busy with real work, all day long.

I’ve been pretty upfront that I’ve been on a Stafford Beer kick lately and when reading my copy of “Designing Freedom”, specifically the second lecture, I was thinking about requisite variety in systems. In specific, I was thinking about this bit that I’ve been quoting to folks lately:

I have already suggested a list of three basic tools that are available for variety amplification: the computer, teleprocessing, and the techniques of the science of effective organization, which is what I call cybernetics. Now I am saying that we don’t really use them, whereas everyone can assuredly say: “Oh yes we do.” The trouble is that we are using them on the wrong side of the variety equation. We use them without regard to the proliferation of variety within the system, thereby effectively increasing it, and not, as they should be used, to amplify regulative variety. As a result, we do not even like the wretched things.

I feel like our shift to Workday has been an example of this. In theory, it should make things easier for both management and staff and yet it’s required a massive amount of work, money, and it just seems to have added to the complexity of our systems. We do, in fact, not even like the wretched thing!

I worry this is what’s happening in general as we’ve expanded student services, gone more and more digital and online, and are trying to serve students populations in new ways with new tools. My worry is that the “variety”, as Stafford would call it, the complexity of the system has just been growing.

I am, in fact, old enough to have taught classes, graded, &c. when only the barest bits like entering final grades were computerized and most everything was still pen & paper. I have to admit there was a lot that felt simpler back then! Not necessarily better, I’m not going to claim that. I think I can serve students better now than I used to, provide better and more personalized help, but there are more moving parts and I feel my time is far more porous to student needs than it was twenty years ago when I was a grad student getting to run my own intro. physics classes.

My concern, then, is that the disconnect between faculty/staff and management has become one where faculty see more managers accomplishing the same or less work while, from the managers perspective, they’re drowning under information overload and endless todo-lists.

Now I’m not saying everyone here is completely blameless or has made the best decisions, it’s always more complicated than that, but I do think this might be a better fit for the problems I’ve seen where a lot of administration aren’t cartoon-villains but are, in fact, just trying to keep the institutions running.

So what then is the answer? If I had that solved I’d be a hero of academia, but instead my argument is that I think we need to find ways to improve the “regulatory variety” of our systems. That probably means something more like a shared governance where faculty are more active, democratic, participants in policy and resource distribution along with a more flexible structure for how management operates, but if you held a squirt gun to my head and asked me to write a proposal for it right this moment I would come away dejected and damp.

So, instead, I’ll simply say that other people are working on this and maybe we can find something in their work to steal use.