Will the academic humanities survive the twenty-first century? Frank Donoghue says no. Do they need to? No again. In fact, the humanities could well be better off without the academy.

In the economic climate of the last 40 years, traditional universities—not just for-profits—are becoming both research-and-development labs and vending sites for multinational corporations. The state of affairs bears most directly on universities in the public sector, as documented in Gaye Tuchman’s meticulous and depressing ethnographic study, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Since the 1970s, public higher education has ceased to be considered a civic responsibility and has become another kind of entity. James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996, acerbically characterized the trend during his tenure: “We used to be state-supported, then state-assisted, and now we are state-located.” He’s right. Today the University of Michigan receives about 8 percent of its operating budget from the state.

Thus universities have had no choice but to function increasingly as corporations and to form partnerships with corporations, and this turn of events fundamentally alters their institutional dynamic. Research was the first to feel the effects. The Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 stipulated that federally financed research done by faculty members that results in patents belongs not to the professors but to the universities that employ them. Of course, the legislation is only relevant to applied sciences—areas like hypertension studies, for example. But the prospect of marketable products (patents) makes universities an appealing investment for corporations, in particular, because those corporations now have to negotiate only with upper-level administrators, and not with an assortment of free-agent faculty members.

More generally, Bayh-Dole also inaugurated the era of earmarked corporate donations. That, in turn, is important because such sources of revenue are all that’s keeping state universities afloat. Ohio State, for example, ranks third in the country in bringing in corporate donations. Elite private universities, by contrast, rely much more heavily on alumni donations. Top recipients of those funds were Washington and Lee University, Bowdoin College, Princeton University, and Cornell University.

The shift in the material base of the university leaves the humanities entirely out in the cold. Corporations don’t earmark donations for the humanities because our research culture is both self-contained and absurd. Essentially, we give the copyrights of our scholarly articles and monographs to university presses, and then buy them back, or demand that our libraries buy them back, at exorbitant markups. And then no one reads them. The current tenure system obliges us all to be producers of those things, but there are no consumers.

So, will the humanities survive the 21st century? My guess may surprise you, in light of the trends I’ve just rehearsed: Yes.

Intelligent popular novels continue to be written; the nonfiction of humanists who defy disciplinary affiliation (Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Garry Wills, among others) will still make best-seller lists; and brilliant independent films (like Slumdog Millionaire) will occasionally capture large popular audiences.

The survival of the humanities in academe, however, is a different story. The humanities will have a home somewhere in 2110, but it won’t be in universities. We need at least to entertain the possibility that the humanities don’t need academic institutions to survive, but actually do quite well on their own.

Some people may argue that, even if the humanities flourish outside academe, some group will have to train the new generation of public humanists how to read and write. Perhaps, but I see no compelling reason that those trainers must be college professors. There were many great poets, playwrights, and novelists in the United States long before 1922, when the University of Iowa became the first university in the country to accept creative projects as theses for advanced degrees. Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, persuasively charted the migration of humanists from the world of literary magazines to academe. As working conditions in the humanities wing of the university continue to erode, what’s to stop those humanists from migrating again?

When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the 21st century, we’re really asking, “Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?” That’s not really an intellectual question but a self-interested professional one, because we humanists would like to see ourselves as stewards of the curriculum. In reality, though, we are not, nor have we been for the last two generations. Curricula change over time, and the humanities simply don’t have a place in the emergent curriculum of the 21st century.

Donoghue teaches English at Ohio State; his latest book is The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.

Ironically, if faculties could get behind the idea of a strong core curriculum, they would be ensuring the place of the humanities in the university well into the future–as a vital part of every college student’s necessary two-year general education in the liberal arts. They would have to live with the fact that it’s really no longer terribly viable to major in English or art history or philosophy–let alone to vastly overproduce PhDs in those fields. We’d see the shrinking and perhaps consolidation of departments–and the shrinking and consolidation of majors and graduate study. We’d also, perhaps, see those fields become more oriented around rational vocational training for careers in things like high school teaching. And that is a very good thing.

The decline of the academic humanities tends to be talked about as a tragedy. But it’s not a tragedy to adjust in ways that serve students well. It’s only a tragedy for those wishing to occupy tenured positions in moribund fields–and that’s not a tragedy at all. It’s a reality check.

One can only take so much crowing and baying about the bursting of the higher ed bubble. It’s everywhere in the news right now, and the Battle of the Fingerpoint is raging apace, and perhaps your gorge is rising, too. Perhaps, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, you just don’t want to soak yourself in the gloom and doom and shame and blame that have become the affective corners of our national debate about education reform.

Perhaps, instead, you’d like delicious sentences.

Here are some:

He belonged to that class of men–vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever–who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.

Here are some more:

Patty’s mother was a professional Democrat. She is even now, at the time of this writing, a state assemblywoman, the Honorable Joyce Emerson, known for her advocacy of open space, poor children, and the Arts. Paradise for Joyce is an open space where poor children can go and do the Arts at state expense.

The first sentences are the opening lines of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar. The second batch is from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which critics are suggesting might be the American War and Peace.

What I love–the way both writers are making art (not to be confused with the Arts!) out of their wearyness with smug, blinkered lives and, in the case of Franzen, the political posturing that comes with them.

I’m all for cutting college costs, scrutinizing where the money is going, trimming bloat, and making a dollar go further in higher ed. That means I also think that the job description of the professor needs some rethinking–with, for example, a re-valuing of teaching, and, in the humanities, a move away from ye olde unreadable monograph as the key to the tenure kingdom. It also means I favor real post-tenure review for the declining numbers who actually have tenure–the kind of post-tenure review that will actually register and respond to dead wood who don’t pull their weight. And, as those who read this blog regularly know, I’m in favor of moving away from tenure entirely, and into a fixed contract model that honors academic freedom while holding profs accountable and enabling institutions to recover some of the flexibility they urgently need if they are to navigate the era of economic scarcity that higher ed, with its bursting bubble, is entering. I’d also like to see things like expensive sports subsidies disappear–and I say that as someone who was herself a scholarship athlete once upon a time. First things first and all that.

When I mention professors in the same breath as I mention reform, I often incur the anxious wrath of academics who fear what the bean counters will do to them if they get any more traction than they already have. My response tends to be that we can’t do nothing in a crisis situation simply because we fear that the wrong people will step in and do the wrong things. I always say the solution is for those who really care about higher ed’s educational and scholarly missions to get involved in trying to resolve the issues that have arisen on their watch–not in a way that polarizes matters further (as, for example, faculty unions do) but in a way that really speaks to students, parents, and taxpayers. I say they need to do that before it gets done for them. That’s the only way to ensure that the right reforms get made–that the baby (liberal education) doesn’t get thrown out with the bureaucratic bathwater, or, alternatively, drowned in it.

Texas A&M is offering us an example of what such drowning looks like:

Frank Ashley felt the shifting winds several years ago: As state officials embarked on accountability measures for K-12 teachers, he said, he told his faculty colleagues that public sentiment would eventually demand such measures in higher education.

Now, Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and the public better understand who, from a financial standpoint, is pulling their weight.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member’s salary. When the document — essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members — is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

“If you look at what people are saying out there — first of all, they want accountability,” Ashley said. “It’s something that we’re really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we’re working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on.”

This looks to me like a rubric for proving that the arts and humanities are worthless, since those professors don’t tend to be bringing in funding from the NIH or major pharmaceutical companies. It creates an incentive to teach large, impersonal lecture courses rather than small, hands-on seminars. It also incentivizes doing nothing in the way of teaching outside the classroom–prep time, continuing education, one-on-one work with students, advising, independent studies, grading carefully, and more all appear to be missing from the assessment of faculty “worth.” Finally, it provides a means by which unwanted colleagues can be shown to be without value–if you want to drive an English professor out, assign them to teach small courses. And bingo! You can now show they they are not pulling their weight.

Bottom line, as expressed by Peter Hugill, an A&M geology professor and president of the local AAUP chapter: “As being partly paid by the public purse, I believe we owe the public some degree of accountability — I don’t have a problem with that at all. … What I have a problem with is silly measures.”

The proposed plan has yet to be presented to the regents. When it has, it will be opened for public comment.

Check out Glenn Reynolds and Jay Greene on administrative bloat, government subsidies and requirements, student expectations, mission creep, and academia’s bureaucracy problem.

It’s a lonely life, but someone has to do it. Usually, it seems, “someone” is “me.” That’s been as true since I left academe as it was when I was there, teaching undergrads to write. So I was cheered to find I am not alone:

If being a pedant means that you care passionately about the English language, then Bernard welcomes the charge,” says Bernard Lamb’s publicist.

For the past 40 years, Lamb, emeritus reader in genetics at Imperial College London and president of The Queen’s English Society, has been on a quest to improve standards of English among his students and the general population.

His latest book, The Queen’s English: And How to Use It, published this week, explains why good English matters and how to achieve it.

Aside from the crucial fact that “there are thoughts that we cannot consciously have unless we have the right words and an ability to use them in coherent sentences,” Lamb points out that language also matters to employers.

His book cites the head of an online recruitment agency who reports that a third of job applications from graduates with good degrees from good universities are rejected because of poor English in their CVs. Too many people are “far too relaxed” about the issue, he believes.

In the 1970s, Lamb was working with a Sri Lankan research student who politely pointed out that there was room for improvement when it came to his own spelling and grammar. “I started learning the rules of spelling, using a dictionary more, learning about prefixes and suffixes, and playing Scrabble with the student,” he explains.

She won the first 80 games – but the pair ended up as finalists in the national Scrabble championships.

A keen teacher, Lamb then set out to improve his students’ use of English.

“They were making really crucial errors, like writing, ‘Bad diet effects a woman’s pregnancy,’ which means it makes her pregnant, rather than it ‘affects’ her pregnancy. They wrote about ‘complimentary’ genes instead of ‘complementary’ genes.”

One error he particularly enjoyed came from a student who wrote about a cow being fertilized by “seamen.” But he still knocked a mark off: “It is bad science.”

The Queen’s English is peppered with cartoons and humorous examples of student “howlers.”

When Lamb introduced lectures for first-year biology students on how to write scientific English, the students “had a good laugh over the errors,” but then promptly went and made them.

The best policy is for teachers to correct errors “in a kindly, constructive fashion” throughout the education system, he believes.

“If you make it clear to students that bad English leads to bad science, and bad science will be penalized, then they will do something about it. They don’t like losing marks.”

However, most university staff “totally ignore” errors of English, and some are unable to identify them, he fears. At Imperial, he says, “the other staff really weren’t that interested. You don’t get promotions for doing things like that, you get promoted for your research publications. It is no one’s priority at university.”

Correcting also takes time, and teachers “want to be popular.”

“If no one else does the correction, they stand out, and students think they are pedants. It is a matter of trying to change the culture.”

To raise the profile of the issue, Lamb has taken to running surveys of his students’ errors. The results have attracted national publicity, including the headlines “Prof hits at spell shock” and “Tutor to shame students who just can’t spell.”

This got him into trouble with Imperial. “It wasn’t the done thing to have any kind of criticism of our students,” says Lamb, whose other books include How to Write About Biology. “I got into hot water. I made it clear that it isn’t ‘knocking our students,’ it is knocking general standards. I get on very well with my students and always have done,” says Lamb who, with his wife, held a dinner in his home each year for his personal tutees.

While some students have protested that it is “not his job” to correct their English, others have been very grateful, he says.

Lamb, 68, joined The Queen’s English Society in 1981 after seeing a notice in a newspaper. “I thought, ‘A national organization that fights for higher standards of English? I want to be part of it.’”

In his role as president, he lets people in the public eye know when they have made an error, and he has recently written to several national newspaper journalists.

“The more people who are fighting for good English, the better. It is in everyone’s interest,” he says.

I’ve never corrected the grammar of a journalist or public figure–but I’ve sure wished someone would. It’s a jungle out there!

Lamb is right about the abdication of responsibility among teachers–too many who aren’t English teachers don’t think it’s their job to be concerned about whether their students can write. That problem runs from the basics of grammar, spelling, and syntax to the broader challenges of expressing complex ideas, developing arguments, and so on. And the issue isn’t just that it’s time-consuming to comment on student writing. As Lamb notes, there is an awful lot of “the blind leading the blind” going on. I’ve found that’s true even when it comes to English teachers.

It used to take me forever to grade papers. I made students submit them electronically, as Word documents. And then I used the “track changes” function to line edit while also commenting on the macro-issues of expression, logic, flow, and so on. Students were responsible for reviewing the edits, for making sure they understood them, and for not making the same errors and committing the same infelicities in their next paper. If they did, their grades suffered. A 5-7 page paper would take me upwards of thirty or forty minutes to grade, including writing global comments at the end. I’ve always wondered about teachers who say they can blow through student papers in 20 minutes apiece or less. What are they really doing?

Cato’s Neal McCluskey explains:

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

I’m a huge fan of the DC OSP — I’ve visited the neighborhoods it affects, met families with kids in the program, talked with the kids themselves, seen the life-changing impact the scholarships are having, and witnessed the despair brought about by Congress’ decision to cease funding–and so kill–the program. The folks who benefit from the program are, demographically, strong Obama supporters. The betrayal they felt when he presided over the decision to pander to the unions is not to be described.

I do appreciate that the Obama administration, led by Duncan, has taken some necessary and controversial steps in the right direction. The stands they have taken for charter schools and merit pay for teachers have flown in the face of the teachers unions’ self-interest–and that was courageous. And say what you will about whether the federal government has any business getting involved in pouring money into states for public education via the Race to the Top competition–that process motivated states to stand up to unions and to commence a much-needed reassessment of whether the K-12 system serves teachers or students. Colorado–which sadly did not get any of the funding–actually passed a bill tying teacher tenure to student performance. That’s major stuff in the world of ed reform.

Still, Duncan should not be politicizing the work of ed reform–he should be working to de-politicize it. And if he’s serious that education is the civil rights issue of our era–and I think he’s right about that–he’s got to start taking seriously the idea that kids in failing schools need alternatives now, and that charter schools alone are not enough. They don’t have time to wait for the system to reform itself–particularly when, in the absence of strong competition, it is not likely to do so.

Camille Paglia on college education, core curriculum, job creation, and mental health:

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more. Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class.

Yes, an elite education at stratospheric prices will smooth the way into law or medical school and supply a network of useful future contacts. But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career? There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.

The trades get a bad rap in our culture–and they really shouldn’t. As we press for the college degree as the one-size-fits-all index of job preparedness and global competitiveness (we are led in this by our commander in chief), we dumb that degree down and make it worth less and less. Meanwhile, there are many smart, talented people who are not at home in an academic setting, but can absolutely soar working with their hands, and doing the creative problem-solving and loving craftsmanship that comes with that.

As many of you know, I taught at a boarding school a few years ago. Academically, this school was doing so much that was wrong. But one thing it got really, really right: thanks to a thriving arts program and a twice-weekly “work program,” every kid in the school had the chance to throw pots, paint, sculpt, chop and shift wood, stoke the wood stoves that heated all the buildings, garden, cook, and so on. Kids who got really interested in one thing or another could acquire carpentry skills, or learn to weld, or similar.

The thing about being a plumber or an electrician is your job isn’t going to get exported. And you can see the work you do, and measure its value. An awful lot of people graduate from college–or grad school–with only an ability to manipulate words. And often their abilities in that regard aren’t all that great. That’s dangerously ungrounded stuff — economically unsound, and, for many, personally unsatisfying. We need to expand our definition of what constitutes a respectable career path, and what counts as viable training for the workplace.

The University of Louisiana is voting today on a proposal to make it easier to remove tenured faculty. The reasons are economic–and the reactions, centered on concerns about academic freedom and job security, are anything but:

The University of Louisiana system’s Board of Supervisors plans to vote Friday on a proposal that would make it easier to dismiss tenured professors—a move that has upset faculty members throughout the system’s eight campuses, as well as national faculty organizations.

“This could impact the quality of education offered in the classroom and the ability to recruit qualified people, including at both faculty and administration levels,” said Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary for the American Association of University Professors.

System officials say the contemplated changes are driven by a tight budget. The proposals “are solely precipitated by a set of decreasing resources,” said Randy Moffett, the system’s president. “There are no other intentions.” State financing for has been reduced by 17 percent since the 2008 fiscal year, and Mr. Moffett is anticipating another drop of approximately $95.3-million in the middle of 2011 when federal stimulus funds expire.

Still, some professors fear that three parts of the proposal could drastically reshape academic employment.

Under one of those, a “reduction” of a program could become a legitimate cause for terminating tenured faculty members. Currently, tenured positions can be cut only because of financial exigency or the complete discontinuance of a program.

Mr. Moffett said the proposed new language was added to include special circumstances left out in the currrent policy, such as the restructuring or scaling back of specific academic programs.

Lisa Abney, provost at one of the system’s campuses, Northwestern State University, said such a change would provide more flexibility so the university wouldn’t have to eliminate entire programs in response to budget cuts. Her institution has undergone an extensive restructuring to deal with financial constraints—including the merging of three departments and the elimination of seven different majors. Six tenured faculty members were laid off as a result.

But the language worries professors. A tenured professor at a system campus, who did not want to be named for fear of being targeted for a job cut, said the main concern is that the word “reduction” is vague. The professor said that it could be interpreted arbitrarily, especially in universities with tense faculty-administrative relations.

The professor said the proposal has already created a “poisonous atmosphere” at his institution because many colleagues are afraid to speak in opposition, fearing they could be fired if the measure is passed.

And so on. The proposal also includes a measure that would reduce how much notice the university has to give tenured professors that it plans to downsize–from upwards of a year to three months.

This is not the first such standoff we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last. Tenured faculty have been warring with administrators over costs, efficiency, and academic freedom for years. Still, in the present economic climate, these battles are intensifying because the economic pinch is getting tighter. There is an endgame quality to the argument at this point. And while faculty are right to be worried, they polarize the debate and ensure the outcomes they don’t want when they dig in their heels, refuse to take economic reality into account, and persist in taking intransigent positions that look, on the surface, to be noble and idealistic, but are actually, in the end, enormously self-serving. The concern here is not academic quality. If it were, the professoriate would be up in arms about how poor academic quality is these days and would be taking steps to do something about it. Rather, the concern is job security. And while that’s a legitimate concern, it’s also the case that tenure is an exceptional, arguably ineffective, expensive perk that is no longer sustainable at most of our colleges and universities. This is a frightening and worrisome fact, from the faculty perspective, but it is a fact.

That said, I’d like to see what the University of Louisiana is doing to reduce costs and shrink its administration. To take an example drawn from one of its campuses: The University of Louisiana at Lafayette ranked 89th out of 196 surveyed schools in a recent study of administrative bloat. In recent years, the number of admins per 100 students has risen by 43.9 percent, while the number of faculty has only gone up 9 percent. Enrollment, during the same period, has gone down by 1.4 percent. If there’s a need to trim academic programs, surely there’s an even greater need to reduce the bureaucracy? Then there’s athletics. Louisiana-Lafayette heavily subsidizes its sports programs–and has increased those subsidies substantially in recent years. In 2008, more than half of the school’s $11 million athletics budget came from “allocated revenue,” or in-house subsidies.

If Louisiana’s faculty members want to have a productive conversation with the administration, they need to engage with them on the level of economics, budget allocations, administrative spending, and sports subsidies. And there is plenty to discuss there. “Why are you funding football at the expense of academics?” is a much stronger question than “Why won’t you let me keep my tenure when the university is going broke?”

UPDATE: The vote has been postponed.

George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki is a strong critic of the higher ed status quo, and has some skin in the game when it comes to rethinking governance models–several years ago he ran for the Dartmouth board of trustees as a dark horse alumni petition candidate, and he won. The election was much discussed in the higher ed press, and was an important part of a larger power struggle at Dartmouth about who should have a say in how the college is run, and whether entrenched inside interests should carry the day. So he’s a governance reformer, if you will, with an eye to returning our colleges and universities to a form that compels them to focus on their educational missions and their obligation to serve not themselves–but the public good.

A new study has just come out about the mammoth administrative bloat that we’ve seen in higher ed in recent years. It points out, among other things, that from 1993 to 2007, hiring and spending on university admins increased at twice the rate of hiring and spending on faculty. Zywicki notes that this fact has major implications for how we think about higher ed reform, and for how we assign responsibility for the problems we are seeing now:

Many observers believe that the problem with higher education is that universities are basically run by its employees–the faculty–and that the faculty’s interests are not aligned with those of the students who they serve. But what [Jay] Greene’s report hints at is a larger trend at work–more and more universities are run by their bureaucrats, not the faculty, and the incentives of bureaucrats are even more poorly aligned with student interests than the faculty. University organization is so screwy these days, that even though faculty incentives are so poor, governance would probably be improved (at least in the short run) by empowering the faculty against administrators.

That’s a serious claim–the faculty have, as he notes, tended to be the focal point of much of the criticism that has been leveled against colleges and universities for their failure to fulfill their education missions as well as for their failure to maintain the system of peer review with integrity. I’m still thinking that latter is on the faculty–but the former is certainly more complicated.

Zywicki offers some thoughts on where all the money for the bloat came from, and speculates about how we might go about getting unbloated:

Jay focuses on the role of government subsidies in feeding the bloat of academic bureaucracy. That seems plausible to me. The other factor that strikes me as perhaps relevant is that during most of that period university endowments grew at record rates. This essentially gave university presidents and their minions a huge slush fund to play with without actually having to raise new funds from alumni. This created a growth in agency costs for senior university administrators. Finally, this allowed universities to continue giving raises to faculty while expanding the bureaucracy even more. Thus, the growth in bureaucratic spending was not coming out of a zero-sum pot, so that faculty were not monitoring the growth in the bureaucracy as much.

Finally, I suspect this might also reflect the developing model of university president as CEO. As university presidents have come to be more like CEO’s of universities, their entourages have grown as well. Universities have come to take the look of a top-heavy bloated corporation like General Motors, with Vice-Presidents layered one atop the other. In a world of lax budget constraints owing to flush endowments, it is easier to fritter away resources on unproductive bureaucrats and internal empire-building.

The acid test, of course, will be whether the financial downturn will lead to the scaling back of these bureaucratic empires. Ironically, it appears that one of the Obama Administration’s priorities is to funnel more money into higher education–which will reinforce exactly the sorts of pressures that Greene highlights. Higher education almost perfectly converts subsidies (whether direct or aid to students) into higher prices. With no real reason to expect that those subsidies will be used to promote better substantive outputs instead of internal agency costs.

More generally, I think that for some time academic reformers have focused on issues like tenure and other elements of faculty governance in thinking about reforming higher ed. But this growth of administrative bloat is a whole new issue and one that might prove more difficult.

“Might prove more difficult” is an understatement. It’s already demonstrably true that at many schools feeling a pinch, it’s not administrative salaries or positions that are being cut, but faculty ones. I’m reminded of Jonathan Rauch’s devastating book about how, once you create a special-interest bureaucracy, you can never get rid of it, Government’s End.

What are the edu-wonks reading during the last lazy (or not so lazy) dog days of summer? National Journal asked the following questions: “What education-related books are you currently reading, or have read, that you would recommend to others? Why? What is the most important education article you have read in the past year? Why?”

As one would expect, most of the responses consist of dutiful lists of non-fiction tomes that have some bearing on some pressing aspect of education. These are well and good. But let’s be honest: Devouring those things is a lot like devouring sawdust a lot of the time. I plough through a fair number of such books myself, and I would have to say that I don’t even regard the activity involved as “reading” per se. Yes, my eyes track all the words. Yes, I follow the argument and make notes and marks in the margins. Yes, I cross-reference and read the footnotes and mine the bibliographies. But it’s professional excavation work, necessary but not fun. (Maybe if I were a born wonk it would be fun — but, as Nixon might have said, I am not a wonk!)

There are a few exceptions, though, and these are the ones that drew my eye. Alexander Russo, who writes for This Week in Education, mentions that he’s reading The Corner, the 1997 non-fiction look at a Baltimore street corner that led authors Ed Burns and David Simon to create the unbelievable HBO series The Wire. I cannot say enough about The Wire, and I agree absolutely that it’s about, among other things, the failure of inner city public schools (that becomes explicit later in the series, with a season devoted specifically to a former cop turned teacher). But The Wire is also about so much more–about the impossible end-game of law enforcement in chaotic, dying cities; about the spontaneous emergence of free-market entrepreneurship in the hood (via the drug trade); about the leviathan-like power of bureaucracy to stifle, deflect, and destroy human creativity and will. If this series is new to you, change that.

Diane Ravitch, whose writing about the history and politics of public education in America is not dry-as-dust, is re-reading Moby Dick. “Watch for the Ahabs among us,” she writes. I’m a big fan of re-reading. Great books grow with you, and are entirely new upon re-reading every few years.

Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, is an animal. He and his Kindle have been tearing it up this summer. Highlights include Stuart Buck’s Acting White (“powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap”) and David Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown (“Unlocking the truth about America stimulates something in kids that can rarely be accessed in any other way. As Ms. Ravtich showed us in her stunning book The Language Police, we must get away from textbook-based, state-board-of-education-controlled, bastardized, and bowdlerized US history. To my mind, this means giving up on content standards for history as such tools give states exactly the power no true American would want them to have—the ability to write, re-write, and suppress the very things we so desperately need our children to learn”). I think Ravitch is embracing content standards in the form of a national curriculum — in the wake of her rejection of school choice — but that’s another argument for another day.

Me? Setting aside the ed reading I do for work — I’m vastly enjoying Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I always like to try to solve my murder mysteries, rather than just letting them wash over me. So I sat up late last night reading Leviticus, which is pivotal to the novel’s pattern of serial killings, looking for clues. Didn’t find any — but learned a lot about burnt offerings and ways that pigeons, rams, goats, and more may be used to cleanse away sin.