An interview with Simon Enoch, Senior Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, on the phenomenon of administrative bloat.

Administrative bloat is generally defined as the excessive growth of administrative costs and positions within an organization. In the academic context, this refers to universities increasingly hiring large amounts of administrative staff, often to the detriment of faculty.

Simon Enoch, a Senior Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), sat down with The Sheaf to discuss the phenomenon of administrative bloat, its origins and the potential effects it could have on Canadian universities.

The phenomenon of administrative bloat first began to noticeably take shape in the United States and is most apparent in universities that have grown their administrative staff so much that, at times, it outpaces the growth of undergraduate students. For example, from 2003 to 2019 at Yale University the administrative staff grew by more than 1,500 while the student body saw just 600 more students. According to Enoch, these administrative positions “tend to be very high paid [and] tend to have a lot of support staff. The question is, is that actually necessary, and could the cost of U.S. higher education come down if there was an attempt to try and streamline those positions?”

Some drivers of administrative bloat are for legitimate capacity reasons. As Enoch explains, “You have more need for mental health counselling or things like that, [so] you’re gonna have to hire more people at the university. You have more students coming from out of [the] country, [so] we’re going to need more [support].”

But Enoch’s concern remains with the excessive growth of executive administrative positions. “Things like deans, presidents, vice presidents, executive directors, things like that. And the extent to which the growth in those sorts of high-paying, high-powered positions [is] justified, even given the changing nature of the university, how much of [this growth] is justified?”

While there has not yet been a substantive study conducted by the CCPA on if administrative bloat affects Canadian universities, the worry now for researchers such as Enoch is whether administrative bloat has begun to bleed into universities in Canada.

The concerns that some university faculty have around administrative bloat are largely about their workload and autonomy, which affects their ability to fulfill their roles as instructors and researchers.

“The old way of doing things was that, for the most part, faculty would take time out of their teaching duties to actually do the administration… They have the teaching mission [and] research mission of the university front and center, because that’s what they’re passionate about.”

When administrative roles used to be filled by professors, universities were more likely to be driven by academic concerns that revolved around teaching and research. In other words, non-faculty administrative staff used to be more likely to need faculty support to get anything done.

“But as we transition to the modern university, you have more professional administrators [and] professional managers filling these roles, and faculty are increasingly less consulted. And when that happens, I think you also lose that focus on the teaching and research mission. Professional administrators and managers will have their own interests [that] might not necessarily be the same as a tenured academic who’s an experienced researcher and teacher, so there’s a mismatch there.”

This is not to say that there are no benefits to the increase of non-faculty administrative staff. Some professors were uninterested in having to do administrative roles, or simply not effective administrators, and so these tasks were outsourced to permanent administration jobs.

However, as more administrative roles are taken from the hands of faculty, the less universities are apt to focus on their research and teaching mission, according to Enoch. 

If universities are placing less emphasis on teaching or research, then what areas are they becoming their primary focus? Enoch proposes that administrators are more likely to focus on their own pet projects and goals or orient the university towards being an institution focused on vocational training–i.e. preparing students to gain employment after graduation. While vocational training is a necessary part of a university, too much focus on that aspect has the potential to hamper other areas of what universities have to offer.

“[Vocational training] is not at all a bad goal, but is it the end–all be–all of the university? [We think of] the university as an institution of learning, a place that’s supposed to inspire people to pursue knowledge [and] its role in creating citizens [and] research. My fear is that by relinquishing the administrative role from faculty, universities are going to deviate from their historic mission of creating knowledge-hungry citizens.”

“And that’s what governments want, right? They want to be able to say that kids who go to university are going to get jobs. That placates parents. It makes them feel better. I can totally see that. But we have the polytechnical system that also does that, [and] polytechnical [is] a fantastic system that provides training and skills for lots of people. But is a university a fundamentally different institution? I think that’s the conversation we need to have–is its output perhaps more than just ensuring that people have the credentials to be able to get [a] job?”

In addition to the financial consequences of raising tuition to pay for administrative bloat, Enoch warns that the quality of education is also affected by the phenomenon.

“The degree to which resources and money are moved away from the research and teaching aspect directly affects students in the kind of education they get. We already know that tenured faculty is declining, and more and more of the teaching load is made up by adjunct professors, who tend to have very precarious work. They’re usually PhD students who are travelling to and from different universities. They have no time to research. They’re teaching multiple classes. Their workloads are insane. They’re paid less than tenured faculty. Is that the best kind of instructor for a student to have? This sort of overworked, overwhelmed graduate student who has no stability?”

“Wouldn’t it be better [to] know that when you go to university, you know that your instructors are experienced, long-term tenured faculty that also have a research project [and] can bring their own research into their teaching field?”

According to Enoch, the first step for students to address the issue of the increase in administrative positions and their salaries is to ask their university for justification. “Why do we have all these provosts, deans, vice presidents. Put the onus on them to justify the spending.”

When asked for a comment on the concerns of administrative bloat, USask’s communications team responded with justification for the growth in administrative positions.

The university commented that “the number of senior leadership positions at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has increased by five per cent since 2020,” and that the university has been “operating in an atmosphere of increasing regulatory and governmental oversight, which requires additional resources to administer.”

USask has also stated that “importantly, administrative growth has not outpaced enrollment growth over the same period (since 2020), and investments have been intentional in student support services, including student wellness and mental health, and safety and security.”

USask also publishes “a list of staff and faculty with salaries above $125,000. Of this list, about 79 per cent are academic staff and 21 per cent are administrative staff. It should be noted that the rate at which senior administration salaries have grown over the last decade has significantly lagged the rate at which the cost of living has grown over the same timeframe.”

It remains unclear whether faculty across USask departments feel that administration has affected their autonomy or workload. Enoch suggests that concerned students should have this conversation with their professors about the impact administration has on their roles as teachers and researchers. “Talk to faculty. Ask them what their experience has been working in the modern university, and] do they feel like their ability to deliver quality teaching or research has been affected by administrative bloat?”