Thoughts on academic life (4)- The Administrator Problem

Episode 4: The Administrator Problem—More Royalist Than the King

Episode 1- The Performance of Transparency

Episode 2 – The Theater of Scholarly Collegiality

Episode 3- The Q1 Journal Fetish

Think of a curriculum reform meeting where the university administrator unveiled a new “strategic excellence framework.” The presentation featured organizational charts, key performance indicators, and deliverables. The word “teaching” never appeared. “Learning outcomes” appeared twice, both in the context of “measurable assessment metrics.” The same administrator was publishing articles about critical pedagogy, and she sounds like a McKinsey consultant.

The transformation is not unusual. It’s symptomatic of a broader phenomenon: academic administrators who become more zealous enforcers of neoliberal university transformation than the external forces that initiated it—more royalist than the king.

The Managerial Turn and Administrative Bloat

Managerialism in higher education centralizes decision-making to professional managers at the expense of academic autonomy, undermining traditional governance structures where decisions were expertise-driven or collegial Parasites & Vectors (2024).. This shift is characterized by greater separation of scholarly work from management activity, increased managerial control over academic work, a perceived change of authority from academics to managers, an ethos of enterprise, and an emphasis on income generation, and government policy focused on universities meeting socio-economic needs (Shepherd, 2017).

Within neoliberal universities, scholarship, education, students, and academic staff are subordinated to managerial imperatives, with university educators denigrated and displaced by colonizing neoliberal practices that systematically invalidate and invisibilize academic work (Morley, 2023).

This administrative enthusiasm correlates with dramatic growth. From 1987 to 2012, American colleges and universities hired 517,636 administrators and professional employees—an average of 87 new hires for every working day—with administrative staff growing nearly four times faster than teaching staff. Author Richard Vedder notes that when he started teaching in the 1960s, there were typically two faculty for every non-faculty support person; today, there are more administrators than faculty at most schools.

Yet there is little evidence that the dramatic expansion in administrative and student services staffing improved students’ academic experience; some observers contend that the explosion in non-faculty staff has made it harder for faculty to educate students, in part because many administrators have to justify their existence by creating more regulations and processes. As one observer notes, “The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing.”

Distance from Intellectual Work

What’s most troubling is administrators’ growing distance from—and sometimes hostility toward—intellectual production itself. I’ve heard stories from colleagues across Turkish universities: administrators dismissing entire fields as “not strategic priorities,” research proposals evaluated primarily on external funding potential rather than intellectual merit, and scholarship described as a “cost center” needing to be balanced against “revenue-generating activities.”

Neoliberal managerialism diminishes scholarship, education, students, and academic staff by denigrating academic practices and reducing their worth to market calculations that seek to manipulate and exploit profit (Morley, 2023). Work that appears “irrational, unscientific and qualitative” became devalued compared to work that could be quantified and shown to have “direct and immediate advantage to productive, real-world economies” (Troiani and Dutson, 2021).

The audit culture administrators embrace reduces intellectual work to countable units. Universities now rigorously count and rank every aspect of production through systems such as REF (Research Excellence Framework), TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework), and KEF (Knowledge Excellence Framework), with academics and their outputs termed “deliverables” and assessed for their value in generating economic returns (Troiani and Dutson, 2021).

Poor Management Disguised as Managerialism

Despite adopting corporate rhetoric and expanding administrative ranks dramatically, universities are often poorly managed. Strategic plans proliferate without coherent implementation. “Restructuring” happens every few years, each promising efficiency while creating confusion. One example from the U.S.: a $ 172,000-per-year associate vice provost was hired to oversee committees considering an academic calendar change, defending the role by stating, “my job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.” This is bureaucratic self-justification, not management.

The ideal academic worker under neoliberalism is characterized by flexibility, competitiveness, entrepreneurial spirit, economic rationale, adaptability to precarious environments, and emotional detachment—characteristics that strip away authenticity in professional work, resulting in what sociologist Richard Sennett calls “the corrosion of character“.

Faculty are constantly surveilled and assessed, yet actual support diminishes. The proliferation of centralized administrative positions, driven by the perceived need for increased oversight and audits, has coincided with reductions in technical and local support staff who could actually alleviate academic workloads (Morley, 2023).

Weakening Critical Capacity

Where the liberal university was recognized as a space for critical thought, slow contemplation, and transformative becoming, the imperative of the neoliberal university is to continuously increase performance measurable in economic terms, imposing new auditable disciplining and quickening pace of learning, thinking, and working (Troiani and Dutson, 2021).

Administrators invested in efficiency metrics become uncomfortable with scholarship questioning these frameworks. Critical work on inequality, power, or institutional structures gets coded as “not constructive” or “lacking stakeholder engagement.” At Purdue University under President Mitch Daniels, innovations, including new programs and online expansion, have decreased faculty power, especially in the humanities, by promoting initiatives that increase the precariousness of instructional labor and move curriculum decisions away from faculty expertise (Morley, 2023)..

The Turkish Context

In Türkiye, some universities have nothing to do with what I portrayed above. They exist as nepotistic employment pools for entering civil service. Others are real universities with differing degrees of intellectual commitment. In these universities, administrators -sometimes just tend to- eagerly adopt international rankings, impact factors, and management metrics—often more rigidly than universities where these systems originated. The Q1 obsession I discussed in Episode 3 is partly administrator-driven: it provides simple, quantifiable criteria requiring no engagement with actual intellectual content.

Turkish academic administrators frequently lack international research profiles themselves, but enthusiastically enforce international metrics on faculty. They implement strategic plans copied from rankings-obsessed institutions without considering local context. They speak of “world-class university” while undermining conditions that make genuine scholarship possible.

The Unsustainable Model

The neoliberal university model is unsustainable if left to continue in its current form, requiring urgent resistance, rethinking, and reclaiming of space to learn, think, and work  (Troiani and Dutson, 2021).. Yet resistance proves difficult when administrators, nominally part of the academic community, have become primary agents of transformation away from scholarly values.

Real management requires understanding operations, making complex resource allocations, and building functional systems. Academic administrators often excel at none of these. Instead, they excel at management theater: strategic plans, vision statements, organizational charts—documents that create the appearance of purposeful action while organizational effectiveness deteriorates.

What we face is not simply the external imposition of neoliberal models but their internalization and zealous implementation by administrators who once were—or claim to be—academics themselves. They’ve become more royalist than the king, more committed to managerial ideology than the business executives they emulate, more hostile to critical intellectual work than the politicians who cut university budgets.

Until we address this transformation of university leadership—how administrators are selected, what they’re incentivized to value, how they’re held accountable—we cannot reclaim universities as spaces for genuine intellectual inquiry. The problem isn’t just neoliberalism imposed from outside; it’s administrators from inside who’ve embraced its logic and become its most effective agents.

Further Readings

Ginsberg, B. (2011). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford University Press.

Gordon, G., & Whitchurch, C. (2010). Academic and Professional Identities in Higher Education: The Challenges of a Diversifying Workforce. Routledge.

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Sarpong, J., & Adelekan, T. (2024). Globalisation and education equity: The impact of neoliberalism on universities’ mission. Journal of Education Policy.

Various authors on administrative bloat, managerialism, and neoliberalism in higher education (see the text for links).