Last November, the information came out in connection with a secret internal report that Yale now had more administrators than faculty or students:

The numbers:

5,042 administrators

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“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.

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The report discussing this astounding proliferation of bureaucracy (and its negative impact on teaching) was never released and quickly swept deeply under the Woodbridge Hall rug.

But these things have a way of coming out, despite coverup efforts and, what do you know? somebody evidently leaked the damaging report to the alumni reform organization “Fight for Yale.”

Sample:

“[T]here are currently 31 people with the title of ‘Vice President’ (or ‘Associate Vice President’) at Yale and also 7 with the title of ‘Vice Provost’; this may be compared to only 5 Vice Presidents in 2003-4 and 14 in 2012-13. Table 4 provides some
other counts of people with titles with the words ‘student affairs,’ ‘student engagement,’ ‘student life,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘strategic initiatives,’ or ‘sustainability’ in their job titles. …”

Last November, the report came out that Yale now had more administrators than faculty or students:

The numbers:

——————————————

Apparently, Yale produced an internal report back in January of this year discussing this astounding proliferation of bureaucracy (and its negative impact on teaching) which was never released and clearly swept deeply under the Woodbridge Hall rug.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has some information about the contents of “The Report Yale Doesn’t Want You to See.”

“University professors,” David Graeber wrote in these pages in 2018, “have to spend increasing proportions of their days performing tasks which exist only to make overpaid academic managers feel good about themselves.” That’s an assessment corroborated by a draft report on the “Size and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale,” dated January 2022 but not yet released. (At the moment, the report appears to be in limbo, circulating privately but with no official stamp of approval. Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for Yale, said only that “the Senate voted at its closed-door May 2022 meeting to postpone discussion of the report until a future date.”)

In an appendix, the authors of the report — the seven-person governance committee of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences — have collected several anecdotes from faculty members that they say are symptomatic of an increasingly intolerable burden of bureaucratic oversight. “Disrespectful,” “demoralizing,” “infantilizing,” “opaque” — these are some of the adjectives that appear. One professor compared dealing with Yale administrators to “interacting with an insurance company.”

The governance committee’s thesis is that these afflictions all stem from the numerical increase in administration even as the size of the faculty has remained stagnant. The authors cite a 2018 Chronicle report showing that Yale has the fifth-highest ratio of administrators to students in the country, and the highest in the Ivy League (for comparison, peer institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford were 24th, 35th, and 55th, respectively). Between 2003 and 2022, the draft report states, “we note increases in administrative positions in various units of at least 150 percent. … This compares with an increase in just 10.6 percent” for tenure-track jobs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

And not only is the number of administrators growing, but so are their salaries. The seven “upper administrators” who remained in the same role between 2015 and 2019 received “roughly 8.25 percent per year” raises, a rate far out of step with what faculty members got. As depicted in the report, Yale’s upper administration is both bloated and greedy.

The report is — or will be, if the university ever releases it — the result of a long period of concern over the ballooning administration.

RTWT

HT: to Steven Hayward via The Barrister.

The numbers:

5,042 administrators

——————————————

“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.

——————————————

Oldest College Daily:

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members.

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.

According to eight members of the Yale faculty, this administration size imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with students’ lives and faculty’s teaching, spreads the burden of leadership and adds excessive regulation. By contrast, administrators noted much of this increase can be attributed to growing numbers of medical staff, and that the University has proportionally increased its faculty size.

“I had remarked to President Salovey on his inauguration that I thought the best thing he could do for Yale would be to abolish one deanship or vice presidency every year of what I hoped would be a long tenure in that position,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “Instead, it has seemed to me that he has created one upper level administrative position a month.”

RTWT