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Why isn’t Scarborough addressing administrative bloat?

SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies

Published: September 4, 2015

After a summer of upheaval and recrimination, everyone with a connection to the University of Akron has a theory about what President Scott Scarborough is up to.

While everyone in the greater Akron area has a connection to the university – it has been a key driver in the city’s transition from heavy industry to a knowledge-and-tech-based economy – I certainly have greater than usual connections. I go to school there, I used to teach there, my wife recently retired from there and many friends and relations are either current or past employees.

My hypothesis is that Scarborough is enamored of a set of faddish, think tanky ideas about reforming higher education along conservative lines. Many of the changes he has made fit the mold of conservative education reform. He is cutting the workforce. As part of that effort, he is outsourcing work to private (in two cases for-profit) companies which has the effect of eliminating positions with civil service or public employee protection. The budget cuts accommodate state funding reductions but unlike other area universities, the president is not publicly questioning the wisdom of those reductions. As noted in an earlier column, the vision of Akron as a “polytechnic” suggests an alternative to liberal arts.

All of these changes were pushed through over the summer in a manner reminiscent of the governor’s threat early in his first term that people would get run over by “the bus” if they did not readily accept the changes he planned on making.

Moreover, Ohio has been a testing ground for conservative K-12 education reforms – charter schools, for-profit school management, vouchers, value-added testing among them – (which aren’t actually working, but that’s a different column.) Scarborough answers to a board of trustees appointed by the same governor that touted those reforms.

All of which suggests that there exists a conservative playbook that we can look to if we want to know the next move. But there is one point in the conservative criticism of higher education about which Scarborough seems uninterested. A number of conservatives (along with more left-leaning groups of professors and university employees) have pointed out that much of the escalating cost of higher education is due to administrative bloat – the increasing number of high level administrators and the increasingly high salaries they receive.

If Scarborough has any plans to address the bloat, he has not yet even hinted at them. He has not identified any high-level positions to be eliminated. And thus far, the administrators he has hired have come in with substantial raises over their predecessors – most notoriously the new dean of the Honors College and the athletic director.

All of the above supports a second hypothesis I have been working on – this one about administrative bloat generally. As noted, it has been a talking point for conservative critics of higher education, but those administrative salaries have been galloping at the same time as a parallel development that conservatives do not quarrel with – the escalating salaries of top corporate managers and the resulting widening of the wage gap between the super-rich and everyone else.

Scarborough has been subject to more scrutiny for what he has cut than what he is spending, so he has not had to justify the higher salaries for his hires. He needs to be asked if he actually attempted to bargain any of these people down. If he is, he will probably reply that we need to pay such salaries to secure talented managers. In the current market, they require higher salaries (or at least very expensive olive jars.)

If indeed the salaries reflect the market for administrators it is because of the effect that those escalating manager salaries are having on the market for managers. The fact that compensation of top managers occurred at the same time as a series of policy changes that both eroded the bargaining power of workers and favored wealthy people generally suggests that the two are related.

Furthermore, markets are not always as mechanistic as economists would have us believe. They reflect ideas people have about value as much as intrinsic value. The ratcheting private sector salaries have been accompanied by belief among those hiring that the management skill set is rarified and special. Escalating administrative salaries in higher education may well be reflecting the fact that people actually believe that these people have special abilities that require those salaries.

If Scarborough had announced that the fiscal challenges at the university were so dire that everyone – including top administrators – would be seeing cuts, he could have preserved some good will with the broader community while simultaneously addressing ongoing problems in higher education generally. It is worth asking why he chose not to.


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