University Waste

Universities are absurdly wasteful. As a case in point, here is how the tenure process goes, in my experience:

We have a 3-person committee, within the department, to evaluate the candidate. This committee has to review the person's record over the past 6 years, including their research, their teaching, and their service. The candidate also writes up statements about each of these things. Both undergraduate and graduate students are also given the chance to write letters about the candidate, and generally several of them will do so. The committee then writes up a report on these things, which will be 15-25 pages long, single-spaced. This takes at least several hours for each of the three committee members.

The committee also solicits letters from 6-8 outside people. These outside people each spend at least several hours reading samples of the person's work (articles and possibly a book) and writing up letters (each several pages long) commenting on the person's research and their suitability for tenure. By the way, each of those articles was itself already evaluated by referees and editors in the process by which it got to be published in the first place, but it is evaluated again by these letter-writers. So each of these papers is getting reviewed about a dozen times by different people, all just so they can say whether the author is good, not to learn anything about the subject matter of the papers.

Then the members of the candidate's department (in a moderate-sized department, perhaps 20 people) all get to look at the candidate's file, including the same work samples, the 6-8 outside letters, and the report by the committee. After looking at all of that, the members all discuss the case for 2 hours at a meeting, and then vote. After the vote, the department chair writes up a letter summarizing the discussion and the vote outcome.

All of this then goes to a college personnel committee, which then gets to look at: samples of the candidate's research, other documentation of the candidate's work over the last 6 years, the candidate's own statements about that work, the 8 outside letters about the candidate, the committee's 20-page report on that work, and the chair's summary of the discussion of that work. The personnel committee then discusses the case, votes, and then writes up yet another report, before sending all of this on to the dean. Then up to other levels of administration, ending in the Regents.

So how many times does the same piece of work have to be evaluated? Over a dozen. How many "reports" have to be written on the same thing? Counting the outside letters, about 10. And how many man-hours have to be expended on a single personnel decision for a single employee? I would guess about 200. 200 man-hours just to decide, in a normal case, whether to keep or fire someone. Almost all of that labor is utterly redundant: it consists of people doing the same damn task over and over again.

That's one example of how the academic world works. There doesn't seem to be anyone in the system asking "Are we spending too much time on this?" or "How can we do this efficiently?"

This particular example -- making a tenure decision -- is mostly wasting time of regular faculty members. However, there is a whole class of university workers who do nothing but administrative tasks all year -- the administrators. This class keeps growing as the existing administrators make up new positions so they can hire more administrators to work under them. The main job of administrators is to come up with administrative work for themselves and everyone else to do.

Another type of case is the case where the administration creates a committee to form a "strategic plan", a "vision", or something like that, for the school. A bunch of people then go around the university, having hours of meetings with faculty in dozens of different departments, writing up documents about their "visions" for the university, possibly prompting faculty members in multiple departments to spend hours writing up documents detailing their own "visions", etc. These documents will be filled with vague, barely-meaningful catchphrases like "diversity" and "inclusive excellence" that administrators like. They won't produce anything of value to anyone else; the documents are their own ends. After that, everyone goes back to their regular work, until it's time to produce another report.

People outside the academy sometimes wonder where all the money going into universities goes. Students at my current school spend over $12,000 a year for tuition and fees ($32,000 for out-of-state students). I would estimate that an average professor, teaching 4 courses of 40 students each (which is normal here), is probably bringing about $192,000 a year into the university (i.e., that's about how much the students are paying). Full time teachers (8 courses per year) would bring in twice as much. Where does all that money go? Some goes into the professor's salary; most goes somewhere else. There is physical maintenance of the university, of course, and then there are all the administrators, who are the most highly paid members of the university (because they are the ones who set everyone's salaries). There simply is no limit to how much money you can use up, accomplishing nothing, if there is no one around actually working to stop waste.

The popular image of universities is that they are mainly about teaching; also, they are about doing research, pushing the frontiers of human knowledge. More and more, though, what university employees are actually engaged in is time-wasting administrative tasks, like writing up reports about reports about each other, sitting in long meetings repeating themselves, and talking about the university's vision. This is annoying to people like me, who actually value the stuff that is supposed to be core mission of the university: creating and disseminating human knowledge.