“I think there has been a seismic shift from an academic culture to a corporate culture in universities across the country,” says Michael Shinagel, senior lecturer in English and dean of the Extension School.
According to Benjamin Ginsberg, author of the book “The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,” the past 25 years have seen a 50 percent growth in the number of faculty at colleges and universities in the United States but an 80 percent growth in the number of deans and provosts. The number of non-academic administrators—whom Ginsberg terms “deanlets”—has exploded by 240 percent.
“The faculty everywhere has looked around and discovered it’s been displaced,” Ginsberg says.
At Harvard, the number of ladder faculty grew by about 16 percent from 2001 to 2008. In the same time period, the number of University-funded staff in administrative or professional roles has jumped roughly twice as much, according to the Fact Book published by the Office of Budget and Financial Planning.
FAS did reduce the number of administrators and staff in 2009, from 3,100 to approximately 2,900, as part of its strategy to eliminate the $220 million two-year deficit caused by the 2008 financial crisis. But the nearly 3,000-strong operation still outnumbers the faculty.
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FROM TWEED TO PINSTRIPES
In the Faculty Club, oil paintings hang on the dark wood-paneled walls. Elegant flower arrangements brighten the hallways. And once upon a time, there was a “long table”—a place for faculty without appointments to drop in for lunch. When he was University president, Derek C. Bok would often frequent the long table, Rosovsky remembers. But many faculty say that the drift toward a more corporate structure may be eroding this kind of “meaningful human contact”—interaction that Rosovsky considers critical to Harvard’s values.
That today’s top administrators would frequent the Faculty Club seems “inconceivable” to Rosovsky. “I think President Faust might enjoy that kind of thing,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s really possible today.”
Some administrators are trying to reach across the divide. Gary P. Cormier, director of human resources consulting, recently met the chair of the statistics department at the Faculty Club—for a business meeting, to discuss performance management techniques.
“As FAS has gotten larger and larger...the challenge remains how to get buy-in and vet issues with faculty—you have to remember to do it,” Cormier says. “I think Harvard is such a big place that it’s much easier to work down than sideways.”
But this top-down structure has engendered a malaise through which the faculty and the administration see each other as separate entities.
“Harvard is very special and our job is to keep it special—the faculty and the administration certainly share that view,” says Jacobsen. “Ideally, we should be able to do that without the faculty and administration feeling like we’re on opposite sides.”
—Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.