Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...

I don't have an opinion about the bill, but thought this anecdote was relevant.

Implicit here is that there is or should be some sort of linear or sublinear relationship to admin and the student body. If the number of admin grows faster than the student body, is that strange, and is it bad?

1) is that strange?

It's not clear this is strange. First, Universities are highly modular organizations, so there's a lot of duplicated effort. Let's say it takes 5 faculty, and 3 admin to run a department that services 10 students. We open a new department and double our students, so we have 10 faculty, 6 admin, and 20 students. But now with all those students, we need two Teaching Assistants. Turns out that hiring an admin to manage the teaching assistants frees 2 faculty to do more research, so we hire another admin to do that. Student population stays the same. The students need a health center now because the local health facilities are insufficient, so now we need to open a whole health center and that requires 3 new staff with 2 admins. So admin has grown again with no new students.

You see how this can go? For a place line Yale or Stanford, which offer full hospitals, law schools, giant sport facilities, manages dozens of buildings, hundreds of programs and degrees, food services, safety services, IT services, library services... all of these things require coordination and management, and that can easily balloon without adding a single new student.

2) is that bad?

Now, the argument is usually that the students don't need all these things. Well first of all, the standards are much higher than they were even when I was in school in the 2000s. Back then research at an undergraduate level was optional, these days it's required or you are not competitive as a candidate. What does that mean? It means more undergrads in research, so we need more faculty support for undergraduate research experiences. That means freeing up faculty time with services like graders, research offices, legal offices, tutoring support, student services, and all the administrators that go with that. But it frees up faculty time to work 1:1 with students, which, was the goal.

However if you look at that from the outside, you see "administrative bloat". Take all that away without understanding the why, and you end up with fewer administrators, but the faculty have to do more work now chasing grant money and grading. If you don't want them to be doing that, we need to figure out as a society how to dole out research grants, but until then, it is what it is.

Secondly though, universities aren't just for students. My argument is in fact they are towns, and they are there for everyone there. Students, faculty, staff, admins, the general public, the cafeteria workers, the IT people, the librarians, police, the children at the campus daycare, program director at the arts center, the sports facility managers... everyone. A university is a livable, walkable, self-contained town where everyone is focused and oriented on the pursuit of higher education. What a great thing to have in our society, which by and large is oriented around the pursuit of profit.

I think the more our society becomes focused on profit, the more universities will be forced to grow their scope. If we want them to dial back, let's invest in our local communities.

All of this is part of a larger war on public education in Texas:

Book bans, accusing librarians of stocking pornographic material, pushing radical conservatives into school boards, accusing public grades schools of teaching CRT, passing blatantly unconstitutional bills to force religion into public schools (like the one forcing the ten commandants to be displayed today), and trying to defund public schools by pushing the voucher program for unregulated privatized schooling.