Administrators are Ex-Academics Who Have “Crossed-Over”
University-based knowledge workers often have lots of advanced degrees. Some of those workers—either due to a desire to move up the ranks, a yearning to earn excessively higher incomes, or delusions of grandeur—decide to cross-over to administration. This involves leaving the ranks of the general faculty in their departments, ceasing their classroom instruction, halting their research agendas, and usually allowing the connection to their disciplines atrophy. Instead, administrators move deeper into the bowels of university bureaucracy.
Highly-educated people are not necessarily society’s most intelligent people, but they are some of the more stubborn. It takes many years of patient rule-following and attention to detail to earn advanced degrees. This results in university knowledge workers having lots of insight into their areas of study, as well as a positive orientation toward learning. Administrators or future-administrators are the same, but they also tend to assume that they possess particularly important insight and intelligence, which make them uniquely suited to lead these complex bureaucracies. Like national-level politicians, administrators usually possess a narcissistic belief that they themselves are crucial for the organization's success. As opposed to the democratic governance of a faculty senate or the federated democracy of academic departments, admins believe they alone can solve other people’s problems.
Admins are attracted by greater pay and higher prestige associated with admin positions that don’t really exist anywhere else in society, except universities, such as “dean” and “provost”. Presidents may be the most ego-maniacal; they are self-promoters-extraordinaire. When seeking to climb up the steep ladder of university bureaucracy, admins must partly appease the general faculty they have abandoned. But, primarily, they must impress other admins, especially those higher up the food-chain. Many admins seek to make lateral or upward leaps from their current position to another. They must catch the favor and approval of top-administrators, who are less impressed by the popularity with the faculty than with their adherence to higher admins’ policies and goals. Admins move-up the ranks because they impress other admins, not because they serve faculty well.
There are a few helpful social science theories that explain the general ineptitude and selfishness of admins. These theories are not specific to universities, but are used to interpret managers and administrators in all types of organizations. The infamous Peter Principle dictates that “people rise to the level of their incompetence”. This means that people who do their jobs well (according to management standards), tend to get promoted to higher positions. But once they cease to be good at their jobs, they tend to languish. Thus, at any given moment, a complex organization’s bureaucracy has many highly-placed cogs that aren’t particularly skilled at their current positions, thus dragging down the entire machinery. This theory overlooks how some faculty self-limit their climb-to-the-top out of principle—they are not necessarily all incompetent. But, many admins have an inflated sense of self-importance and overconfidence in their abilities. Thus, they’re apt to fall prey to the Peter Principle.
The Iron Law of Oligarchy, described by Robert Michels, pertains to the tendency of top leaders in organizations to slowly detach themselves from the interests of the rank-and-file. Michels was highly interested in organizations like social democratic political parties and labor unions that are otherwise rather concerned about social justice and empowerment. Nonetheless, overtime, leaders start to see their interests as interchangeable with the interests of the organization itself. They don’t seek to empower active participation among the rank-and-file, since the mass just tends to get in the way of their plans. When all sorts of organizations increase in size, this distance between the leader(s) and the rank-and-file grows, until “democracy” becomes just a pretense of performative voting for a leader, who does whatever they want once in power.
University admins are impacted greatly by the hierarchical structures they adhere themselves to. In order to “get ahead”, they play “the game”, which comes at great cost to the rank-and-file faculty and the university itself.