Are universities sleepwalking into disaster?

I’ve recently read this article everyone has been getting excited about called ‘On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities.’ It claims that there has been a significant growth in what, quoting Graeber, the author describes as “bullshit jobs” and “bullshit practices” in universities. The author rightly proposes that universities should refocus their activity, seek to minimise unnecessary regulation and concentrate on core business. He also notes correctly that universities have borrowed from the private sector, sometimes with good reason but at other times unwisely. But he is convinced, and this is the core of the piece, that there has been a significant growth of staff in professional services who are doing work which is antithetical to the academic enterprise. This is the growth of “bullshit jobs” as he calls them, a phenomenon which has also been described for many years across higher education, in North America and in the UK, as “administrative bloat.” 

All this means that “we are sleepwalking into disaster.” By “we” he means, I think, intellectuals and particularly academics. He argues that among the reasons for this is the “corporatization of academic institutions” which:

instead of facilitating academic work, these systems have created obstacles to performing the core mission. Corporate academia is subverting academic life. It’s destroying academia from within. The reason is simple. To undertake corporatization, universities have borrowed principles that they think work in the private sector. These involve creating layers of administration to run different sectors of our institutions.

He also states in relation to university spending in the UK that between 1995 and 2019 “while spending on university departments roughly doubled, the amount allocated to administration and central services more than quadrupled.”

Where is the evidence for “administrative bloat”?

It is undoubtedly true that there has been a growth in staff numbers in universities but these multipliers (extracted from a 2020 polemic arguing for radical change to universities and significant shrinkage of the sector) really don’t explain at all what has happened in HE. “Administrative bloat,” a really rather unpleasant term, is simply not supported by the evidence and the attitude it represents, along with the categorization of some professional services roles as “bullshit jobs,” is not remotely helpful when looking to establish rational ways forward in times of financial stress.

The idea that there has been massive recruitment in professional services roles over the past few decades is not supported by the data. These roles, often defined unhelpfully by what they are not, as “non-academic” jobs, have in fact not grown as rapidly as academic roles. The latest HESA data on staff in UK HE shows that growth in academic staff numbers outstrips that in “non-academic” roles if we look back five and 15 years:  

• Academic staff numbers have grown from 223,525 in 2019/20 to 246,930 in 2023/24, an increase of almost 10.5%. But the growth from 2008/09 to 2023/24 is actually 38%.

• In terms of so-called “non-academic” staff, the numbers increased from 196,720 in 2019/20 to 206,765 in 2023/24, a 5.1% uplift. In this case though the growth from 2008/09 to 2023/24 is only 1.5%.

Beyond the UK, Alex Usher has recently reviewed claims of “administrative bloat” in Canadian higher education and has discovered that the rhetoric really is not supported by the data.

A 2021 report from the Policy Institute at King’s College London explores the changes within this “non-academic” staff population and identifies a shift from more junior, lower paid roles to more senior managerial appointments within this growth. This could be attributed at least in part to changing nature of operations, organisational complexity, the legal and regulatory environment as well as the increasing importance of the student experience and the need for investment in student recruitment activity. But the King’s report also argues that centralisation is going on too (although there is not a great deal of evidence to support this) and there is little control exerted over this growth in senior management positions. It is further suggested that any cuts have been focused on academic staff rather than professional services – it is too early to tell though the extent to which this applies in relation to the current round of restructuring and redundancy announcements across the sector.

But overall, although there has been growth in professional services numbers in recent years, this is a very long way from the “administrative bloat” claimed by some. And, whilst there may have been a shift in the balance from more junior roles to more senior posts, there is no reason whatsoever to infer from the data that these are “bullshit jobs.”

Professors and Booking.com

The article is not just concerned with “bullshit jobs” though, it’s “bullshit practices” too and the author really does go to town on some forms of external contracting or outsourcing. Sometimes these are necessary, universities cannot do absolutely everything themselves, and it is often more cost-effective to procure services from external expert agencies who are able to make economies of scale rather than set things up yourself (and thereby expand the cost of central professional services, which merely adds to the identified problem). These may be external companies providing electricians, catering services or web design or, indeed, travel agencies.

He is particularly outraged that “last year the University of Oxford gave £3m of the £15m we spent on travel to the travel agency we had contracted with” and also argues that the real cost is much higher because of the staff involved within the university in terms of approvals and processing of expenses etc. Individual academics can just do all this themselves much more cheaply – it’s just a few clicks surely to book that flight and accommodation and all much more efficient than being required to go through an agency where all the costs look more expensive and you can’t stay in the nice hotel by the Arno that you stayed in last summer because it’s not on the approved list?

The tedious reality which anyone who has engaged with budget airline websites or hotel comparison apps in earnest knows is that the booking process always takes a great deal longer than you think it will and it never turns out quite as cheap as you expected. Moreover, you are on your own with no support and no fallbacks or alternatives or 24-hour support lines in the event of a cancellation or a crisis. You are arranging your own insurance too and the rates in the hotel might not be as good as you hoped either. But the more important perspective on this is that if everyone has to arrange this stuff themselves, that is thousands of academic person hours which should be dedicated to activities relating to education, research, knowledge exchange or some other aspect of core university business which are being frittered away on low level transactions for which even the most junior lecturer would say they were paid too much to do.

The author concludes: 

In a very short time, we have created not only silly systems of governance and regulation, but are also manging to subvert academic life through the creation of bullshit jobs and, I would argue, bullshit practices. Each of the administrative burdens that we are confronted with on a daily basis might seem small on their own but cumulatively they amount to a ‘mountain of small things’ that is killing academia. Was research, teaching and innovation really performed worse previously when we didn’t have so many administrative burdens? Have we become more or less efficient at doing what we are really supposed to do—our core mission—in modern universities? Are we creating burnout and need for wellbeing in staff simply because of the new bullshit tasks we impose upon them.

No back office, no bullshit

Many years ago I wrote a piece for Times Higher Education on my unhappiness about the term “back office” and the often casual, unthinking use of it in order to identify a large group of professional services staff who play a vital role in the effective running of universities but who often find themselves treated as second class citizens. These professional staff are often viewed as if they were Victorian servants who generally remain below stairs and are now the ones who appear to be labelled as having “bullshit jobs” and creating “bullshit practices” purely it seems with the aim, directly or indirectly of subverting the academic mission.

Leaving aside the fact that many professional staff are unequivocally front-line, the idea that the other staff who help the institution function and who support academic staff in their teaching and research are just doing “bullshit” work  is just not right. If academic staff are to deliver on their core responsibilities for teaching and research it is essential that all the services they and the university need are provided efficiently and effectively. There is not much point in hiring a world-leading researcher if she has to do her all her own printing and copying, spend a day a week sorting out visa issues for international postgrads or trying to renegotiate professional indemnity insurance because there aren’t any other staff to do this work. Do we really want to see professors pushing lawnmowers, issuing parking tickets or sorting out maternity pay arrangements? These services are required and staff are needed to do this work to ensure academics are not unnecessarily distracted from their principal duties. Although provision of these services is not in itself sufficient for institutional success, having people to do this work is necessary to support the creation of an environment where the best teaching and research can take place. These are not “bullshit jobs” and the aim really is to reduce rather than increase the burden on academic staff and shield them from the most unhelpful external interventions and distractions.

So, let’s please not have any more of this inaccurate, divisive and unhelpful talk of “bullshit jobs.”.