Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia. By Scott Scheall.
Most people don’t realize how fundamentally broken the institutions for training tomorrow’s policy-makers are.
The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.
An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.
Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence.
The professoriate, with some justification, views administrators less as leaders to be admired than as annoyances to be tolerated. For a productive academic, a move into administration, high salary and resplendent office notwithstanding, seems less like a promotion than banishment.
The incentives flip for those who do not manage to develop fruitful research programs. Within a few years of entering academia, young professors often find that they are not likely to produce the publications, citations, and grants that tenure requires. By this time, though, they have invested almost a decade of their lives in the study of specialized topics that leave them poorly equipped for comparably remunerative work outside the university. For them, an administrative position seems like salvation. …
Administrators see faculty not as the prime movers of learning, the front line advancing the university’s scholarly mission, but as fussy nuisances to be managed or otherwise ignored.
Deans, provosts, and even presidents are now disproportionately drawn from the large pool of unsuccessful academics. The talented stay where they are; the rest become overseers, having drifted into positions where scholarly talent has no purchase. …
Inevitably:
The consequences of academia’s misincentive structure are harmful. Instead of being deployed in support of rigorous research, limited resources are redirected, by its own administrators, to the university bureaucracy. Hiring and promotion decisions reward the administration’s favorites, the compliant box-checkers, rather than more accomplished, if less accommodating, scholars. Instead of focusing single-mindedly on scholarly excellence, young professors are encouraged to build alliances with administrators. …
The mission of a university is the disinterested pursuit of truth through rigorous scholarship. The internal labor market of a university, however, tends to place those who fail at this mission in positions of authority over those who succeed.
In universities, the incompetent supervise the competent….
Stanford now employs some sixteen thousand administrators and staff persons to support a faculty one-seventh this size. [And only 22% of this year’s incoming class are white.]
Contemporary American academia is just the kind of social system about which Hayek warned, one that promotes individuals with personal traits inconsistent with the system’s alleged objectives. Those who fail at the basic academic mission too easily find snug sinecures from which to tyrannize those who succeed.
Administrators are mostly failed researchers. They have higher salaries and decide policies — like DEI for admissions. But they are mostly superfluous, given that universities did quite well with only a few administrators until the 1980s. Administrative positions are often soft jobs for people with the “right” politics, put in charge of the institutions that train — and obviously indoctrinate — the young people who will be tomorrow’s opinion-makers.
The political types decided a few decades that truth didn’t exist and only power matters (aka critical theory). But researchers are truth seekers — they are the reason universities exist and why universities are valuable. Or used to be. Modern universities are mostly run by political types who favor power over truth, on higher pay than the truth seekers, churning out new generations of power mongers.