Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence college, has been under fire lately for pointing out the obvious—that college staff, especially those with student-facing roles, are much more liberal than the average American.
This seems like a no-brainer, especially to anyone who has even a glancing affiliation with colleges. It’s not even a surprise that the left-leaning media doesn’t love the fact that Abrams is pointing it out.
But I believe there’s another reason that Prof. Abrams is under fire: nobody wants to admit that university staff exist.
There’s this myth, that is perpetuated by nearly every book or article I’ve ever read on the organizational structure of the university, that the academy is an eternal battle between the faculty and the administrators.
Unlike what you may be thinking (“administrative assistant”), in a college setting the term administrator is always used for upper level management—chairs, department heads, deans (and all the flavors of “deanlet”), AVPs, the Provost, and the university’s president.
To most faculty and administrators, academic staff don’t count in the organizational structure of the university, because most of them don’t have PhDs. This therefore disqualifies them from having a brain, or making any kind of decision, or influence.
Unfortunately for the faculty, who could not get anything done at a university without their staff, this is wrong. Most of the time, faculty come up with the ideas and the staff handle most, if not all, of the execution.
Faculty and administrators rely heavily on staff to get things done, without having any idea of how it all happens. They just say the words, and *poof* the action is accomplished.
Deep down, they know they don’t do anything, and Prof. Abrams is helping to unmask this fact.
Universities and colleges are really complex institutions. Trustees often have other careers. They’re looking at the economic health, fund raising, buildings being built, degree programs, and so on. They’re not in the weeds. you have to be in the weeds to see what’s going on. That’s why I wrote this op-ed.
So much attention is paid to presidents and deans and faculty and students. But there’s another pillar people seem to forget. That’s the growth in this huge bureaucratic glut that functions in an almost autonomous way.
From the inside, this is 100% true.
The staff were hired to do the things that the faculty don’t want to do, which include things like budgeting, maintaining files, and dealing with students.
I was surprised that, though media coverage of free speech often fixated on professors being very engaged in these fights, if we take an empirical look, which I did, one of the things that emerges is that faculty are generally quite disengaged from campus life and their students. Spending time with students is not something that most faculty like to do, despite reports often showing they are on the front lines protesting with their students. College administrators, meanwhile, are very heavily engaged. …
In this case, I believe Prof. Abrams meant “administrators” in the assistant sense, not in the dean sense.
Either way, it’s true. Faculty often show more loyalty to their discipline than to anything else. It puts a monkey wrench in any of the organizational theory books that assume that the university is something to which people are “hired.” No. Faculty perceive themselves as working for their disciplines and their peers inside that discipline.
If you are a super-liberal person who cares more about advancing social justice than you do a salary, one of the easiest things you can do is get a job in Student Affairs at a university. You can basically do what you want, get front-row access to impressionable college students, and get great health benefits.
And faculty, to keep their status as the big-brains who make everything happen in a university, are happy to perpetuate the myth that these staff don’t exist—often because the student affairs and academic affairs wings of colleges only intersect at the very top of the heap. But that is another story for another day.
It sounds like Prof. Abrams has a book coming out. I’m interested to read it.
2019-04-07 at 6:25 pm
This is an interesting observation. In my part of the world these staff are generally call “professional staff” while “academic staff” are the PhDs. “The Administration” is the same. The status of professional staff is an ongoing point of tension in the universities that I’m familiar with.
2019-04-15 at 9:35 pm
“Professional staff” would be a useful designation!
There always seems to be some sort of labor dispute going on with universities, be it with staff, graduate students, adjuncts, faculty, or who knows what other group.