The Volokh Conspiracy
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Lawless III: It's the Bureaucracy, Stupid
CRT gets all the attention, but this less-sexy part is equally important—if not more so.
As I wrote on Monday in my introduction to Lawless, the crisis in higher-ed is different than the decades-old complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, university officials placate, facilitate, and even foment illiberal mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the cancellation crossfire. And that's a story of growing bureaucracies.
In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don't teach grew at about twice the rate of students, while tuition at public colleges more than tripled. Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the government fails to collect or disclose uniform data.
What all this really means is that students are paying more and more to fund an expanding cohort of well-compensated bureaucrats, without getting anything in return. And this isn't just a budget issue. Administrators are more radical than professors, and not steeped in norms of academic freedom, all of which detracts from the educational environment.
Those who once were technocratic paper-pushers ensuring compliance with federal financial aid and antidiscrimination regulations have morphed into enforcers of radical race and gender ideology. The great political economist Mancur Olson detailed how the growth of bureaucracies ultimately causes the decline of nations. And that's precisely what's happened in academe, as well-paid apparatchiks enforce codes that chill speech and eviscerate due process.
In recent decades, the growth in university bureaucracies has far outpaced the growth in faculties and student bodies. Department of Education data shows that, between 1993 and 2009, college admin positions grew by 60 percent, a rate ten times that of tenured faculty. Moreover, between 1987 and 2012, the number of administrators at private schools doubled, while their numbers public university systems rose by a factor of 34. Overall, colleges added more than half a million administrators and then even more in the decade after that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects their number to grow by 7 percent a year between 2021 and 2031.
Around 2010, schools started employing more administrators than full-time instructors. Through the following decade, some, especially elite places such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and MIT even started having more administrators than students. Yale's administration rolls grew by 45 percent in 2003–21, expanding at a rate nearly three times faster than that of the undergraduate student body. At Stanford, administration grew by 30 percent in 2017–22 alone, with the biggest growth coming in the first full pandemic year of 2020–21. Stanford now has nearly twice as many nonteaching staff as undergrads and nearly six times as many as faculty. The ratios tend to be lower at public schools, but still, administrative growth at UCLA has far outpaced growth in other sectors, so there are now four times as many staff as faculty.
The disproportionate increase in nonfaculty positions is also reflected in budgets. At 198 of the leading U.S. research universities from 1993 to 2007, administrative expenses increased by 61 percent per student, while instruction-related expenses increased by only 39 percent. That trend has only accelerated. For the 2018–19 academic year—the last year before Covid-related expenses made everything look even worse—degree-granting institutions spent $632 billion, but less than 30 percent of that went to instruction. Between 2009–10 and 2018–19, instructional expenses per student grew by only 8 percent, while overall expenses grew by 114 percent.
When looking specifically at law schools, it's particularly hard to do any sort of statistical analysis. The American Bar Association, which is the accreditor and thus main national regulator of legal education, constantly changes its reporting methods and disclosure formats. Since 2011, the ABA has not disclosed purely administrative numbers, instead reporting only "administrators who teach." After 2016, it stopped reporting on the number of administrators altogether. We do know that from 2011 to 2015, the number of full-time faculty declined by 14 percent, while the number of "administrators who teach" grew from 1,752 to 2,032, a 16 percent increase.
Part of that story is the belated adjustment of legal education to the Great Recession, which restructured the private legal market and led schools to cut costs. But regardless of market forces, it's clear that the ratio of teachers to bureaucrats has gone in the latter direction. The statistics for administrators appear not to be publicly available since 2016, but given the growth in this field generally, it's safe to assume that the problem has only gotten worse.
One example of the exponential growth of law-school administrators comes from Boston University. In 1950, the full-time administrative staff at BU Law was just six people. By 1960, it rose to nine. Then it jumped to 22 in 1970, 30 in 1980, and 60 in 1990. Growth slowed in the 1990s, with administrative staff numbering 72 in 2000. While these numbers are a bit old, they show a bureaucratic growth rate of 1,100 percent even before the last couple of decades' explosion. Interestingly, BU's rival, Boston College, experienced a similarly amazing growth rate during that period, 788 percent. By comparison, over that same half century, the number of faculty increased by half the rate of admins at BU Law and even less than that at BC Law.
Having gained a sense of the overall academic bureaucrat trends, let's turn to the DEI component. It wasn't until after the Supreme Court's decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 that universities began integrating diversity officers into higher, student-facing administration. Some of these administrators serve as special advisers to university presidents and deans, even when their colleagues or superiors in student or faculty affairs positions don't play such a role.
A 2021 survey of 65 large universities comprising the old "power five" football conferences found that the average school has more than 45 people devoted to DEI—more than the average number of history professors. Indeed, DEI is the fastest-growing segment of the educational bureaucracy, with staffs on average four times larger than those providing legally mandated accommodations to disabled students. (The study was careful to exclude people whose primary responsibility was in Title IX, equal employment opportunity, or other legal obligations.)
The average school had 3.4 DEI staff per 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty. Syracuse University was the worst, with 7.4 DEI staff for every 100 professors. At the University of Michigan, 163 people had authority over DEI programs, a number that grew to 261 by 2023—and double that when partial positions are included, at an annual cost of more than $30 million.
The dramatic increase in noninstructional staff has driven tuition higher for decades, without benefiting students. That is, campus climate surveys show that students' satisfaction with their college experience generally, and with campus diversity specifically, doesn't correlate with the number of administrators, let alone the size of DEI offices.
Universities no longer see their role as facilitating a search for truth or, for law schools, producing skilled lawyers or furthering the rule of law. Instead, as a co-author of that 2021 report put it, they employ an army of educrats "who either distract from that mission by providing therapeutic coddling to students or subvert truth-seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy."
Providing students with staff to hold their hands while they "process" the trauma of disappointing elections infantilizes students, who should be preparing for serious careers in the legal workplace. Instead, DEI offices enforce narrow perspectives through orientations and trainings, to the detriment of the intellectual inquiry that students need to become better lawyers. They also take power away from faculty who are supposed to be instilling professional norms and give it to political commissars who have little regard for the core mission of legal education.
