Comment by inglor_cz
5 days ago
They could also possibly fire some administrators. Not every vice-provost out there is strictly necessary.
Just a few years ago, Harvard Crimson carried an op-ed complaining about the bloat:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
Cannot edit my original comment, because I wrote it 16 hours ago, but I am somewhat surprised by the fluctuating up/downvote count, going from 0 to 6 and back.
It seems that the very idea that some employees in academia might be superfluous is very disagreeable for some HNers.
Why? Institutional bloat is a well known problem, it happens in private sector, public sector, churches, military, wherever you can think of. It probably already happened in Ur and Nineveh. Why should academia be somehow immune from this problem?
And if it is not immune, shouldn't it try to do something with it?
There was a massive increase in tuition in the last generation or so. How much of that extra money goes to the core mission of the universities, and how much is spent on "nice to have extras", starting with opulent campuses and ending with "Standing Committees on Visual Culture and Signage"?
Everyone has to trim the fat down a bit from time to time. Even Google and Meta. Why not Harvard.
People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.
People in HN have been complaining about university admin bloat for many years. In this thread, the problem is it’s political and people struggle with the cognitive dissonance about that stuff.