If you feel like you spend more time than ever in front of your screen doing pointless busywork, there’s now a name for that: “Bloat 2.0.” That’s what Barry Lam, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, calls the never-ending expansion of digital tasks required by a never-ending stream of clunky new computer programs imposed by a metastasizing mob of administrators.
In a recent essay in The Boston Globe titled “College Campuses Need to Be Liberated From Their Administrators,” Lam asks whether we can wake from this digitally enhanced nightmare.
As the name suggests, “Bloat 2.0” has a predecessor: “Bloat 1.0,” the tendency of universities to hire more and more administrators even as the number of both faculty and students remains flat or declines. Lam cites a recent study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that since the mid-1980s, the student body grew 8 percent, the faculty grew about 9 percent, and the number of administrators increased by 189 percent. “There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford,” Lam writes. The Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg named this development “the all-administrative university” in his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty.
The battle against bloat has taken on fresh salience in recent months. The members of Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education stressed that administrative growth “matters for both external and internal trust,” urging the university to “streamline bureaucracy.” Yale’s president, Maurie McInnis, has made it a priority. Cornell’s report on the “Future of the American University,” published in September, focuses less on the number of administrators than how power is distributed within the university. One member of the committee that produced the report, Richard Geddes, an economist, argues in an addendum: “There has been a substitution of faculty control for that of bureaucrats over time, which unsurprisingly has coincided with university bureaucratic growth as well as declining public trust.”
We talked with Lam about bloat in both its phases, where it all comes from, whether AI will make bloat better or worse, and if professors have finally had enough.
