The Bureaucratic Danger in Academia

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt respected civil servants who brought competence and professionalism to their jobs. At the same time, however, she worried deeply about bureaucracy, which is often associated with civil service. In her early work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that bureaucracy as it developed in India, Egypt, and Algeria was a new form of government of foreign people that sought to rule and dominate them outside of legal restraints. As a non-legal government based on personal power, bureaucracy was intertwined with racism that justified the brutal colonial rule by European powers. 

Later in her career, Arendt worried that the radical expansion of bureaucracy and administrative rule in western democratic and constitutional republics would replace republican self-government with the rule by university-educated technocratic elites. Bureaucracy was thus a form of government that threatened to disempower the citizens of republics and corrode republican government. Arendt called bureaucratic government “the rule of nobody” because it is premised on the idea that thousands of people simply doing their assigned duties in their bureaus will organize a society, but one in which no one is ultimately responsible. And shockingly, Arendt also found a racial sense justifying bureaucratic rule insofar as the justification for bureaucrats is typically associated with their education and intelligence, thus creating a rift between the educated elite and the uneducated masses that, for Arendt, threatens to become the new racism. 

Just as Arendt worries about the danger of bureaucratic rule in republican governments, Peter Fleming writes about the administrative threat to universities. 

A striking feature of the modern university has been the expansion of non-academic personnel vis-à-vis teaching and research faculty. The figures speak for themselves. Let’s take the US: 450,000 faculty and 270,000 administrators were employed by universities in 1975.2 By 2009 there were 728,977 full-time faculty (a 63 per cent increase) and 890,540 administrators (a 231 per cent increase). Another study found that universities hired around 520,000 non-academic administrators between 1987 and 2012 (or 87 every working day).3This incredible surge in both numbers and spending has outpaced student growth and appears to be correlated with the employment of casual teaching staff.4 Similar patterns can be found in other countries. In the UK, academics are a minority (compared to managers, technicians, professionals and other non-teaching/non-research staff) in 71 percent of the country’s universities.[5]Academic staff numbers in Australia grew by 6773 between 2009 and 2016, whereas non-academic jobs grew by 10,327 and now outnumber academics 1.6 to 1.6
And then there’s the growth of well-paid senior executives at the top of the organisational pyramid, occupying roles that seem to have materialised out of nowhere. As Benjamin Ginsberg amusingly notes in his book The Fall of the Faculty,

Universities are filled with armies of functionaries—the vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.7

None of this can be justified by increased student numbers, more complexity or the need for a wider division of labour in higher education. Nor can enhanced ‘efficiency’ (a cherished byword in the neoliberal lexicon) be behind it. The tsunami of bureaucratic sludge often makes completing even basic tasks a practical nightmare.8 As anyone working in the tertiary sector will attest, disorganisation is the norm and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing much of the time. Although it sounds counterintuitive, this reflects the universities attempt to emulate the corporate form, which celebrates executive chains of command, technical solutions above collegial deliberation and continuous programme/performance reviews. Governing academe in this manner is a recipe for serious trouble.

The problem is, according to Benjamin Ginsberg, with the exponential growth of managers and administrators, universities are soon driven by their imperatives, not the academics who teach and research. Deans and Provosts might still assert the importance of academic freedom, public education and intellectual curiosity. But only if such qualities are subservient to predetermined technocratic targets. Otherwise they’re treated as an impediment to the smooth running of the enterprise.