How the rise of woke ‘educrats’ is destroying higher education

The nation’s universities, particularly so-called elite ones, are in crisis. Speakers are shouted down, professors are afraid of students, students can’t discuss certain topics, and nobody trusts the gowned “experts.” And that’s before Hamas’ attack on Israel revealed these bastions of progressive enlightenment to be the heart of antisemitism in America. Why is this happening?

Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in school 25 years ago isn’t so much that faculties have shifted left. They have a bit, and millennial professors are more activist than their boomer elders, but this is not just the latest conservative lament about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, university officials at best placate, and at worst foment, illiberal mobs that stifle education. And that’s largely a story of growing bureaucracies.

The statistics on the growth of nonteaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at public colleges more than tripled. Those trends have only accelerated, though useful statistics are hard to come by as surveyors change methodologies and the Department of Education fails to collect or disclose uniform data.

What all this really means is that students are paying more and more to fund an expanding cohort of well-compensated bureaucrats, without getting anything in return. And this isn’t just a budget issue. Administrators are more radical than professors, and not steeped in norms of academic freedom, all of which detracts from the educational environment.

A 2018 survey found that faculty had a liberal-to-conservative ratio of about 6 to 1, with 13% of our nation’s professors self-identifying on the right. Students are more balanced: 42% of freshmen called themselves centrist, while 36% said they were liberal and 22% conservative. In contrast, two-thirds of higher-ed administrators self-identified as liberal — with 40% calling themselves far-left — and only 5% said they were on the right. That makes for a liberal-to-conservative ratio of 12 to 1.

Those who once were technocratic paper-pushers ensuring compliance with federal financial aid and antidiscrimination regulations have morphed into enforcers of radical race and gender ideology. The great political economist Mancur Olson detailed how the growth of bureaucracies ultimately causes the decline of nations. And that’s precisely what’s happened in the academy, as well-paid apparatchiks with no connection to universities’ teaching and research missions create and enforce codes that chill speech and eviscerate due process.

In recent decades, the growth in university bureaucracies has far outpaced the growth in faculties and student bodies.  According to Department of Education data, between 1993 and 2009, college administrative positions expanded by 60%, a rate of growth 10 times that of tenured faculty.  Moreover, between 1987 and 2012, the number of administrators at private universities doubled, while their numbers in central offices of public university systems rose by a factor of 34.  Overall, during that period, colleges added more than half a million administrators and then even more in the decade after that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects their number to grow by 7% a year between 2021 and 2031.

Around 2010, schools started employing more administrators than full-time instructors. Through the following decade, some, especially elite places such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and MIT even started having more administrators than students. Yale’s administration rolls grew by 45% in 2003–21, expanding at a rate nearly three times faster than that of the undergraduate student body. At Stanford, the number of administrators grew by 30% in 2017–22 alone, with the biggest growth coming in the first full pandemic year of 2020–21. Stanford now has nearly twice as many nonteaching staff as undergrads and nearly six times as many as faculty. The ratios tend to be lower at public schools, but still, administrative growth at UCLA has outpaced growth in other sectors, so there are now four times as many staff as faculty.

The disproportionate increase in nonfaculty positions is also reflected in budgets. At 198 of the leading US research universities, spending on administrative functions has been rising faster than spending on instruction and research. From 1993 to 2007, administrative expenses increased by 61% per student, while instruction-related expenses increased by only 39%. That trend has only accelerated. For the 2018-19 academic year — the last year before COVID-related expenses made everything look even worse —degree-granting institutions spent $632 billion, but less than 30% of that went to instruction. Between 2009–10 and 2018–19, instructional expenses per full-time student at four-year institutions grew by only 8%, while overall expenses grew by 114%.

Or look at Harvard, which has long regarded itself as the crown jewel of American higher education. Harvard’s administrative payroll nearly doubled in this century’s first two decades. In 2020, the school spent $47,706 per student on administration, which is just under the cost of undergraduate tuition (not including fees, room, and board). This bureaucratic growth accounts for almost the entire increase in the annual cost of attending Harvard.

The trend of having higher-ed institutions run by bureaucrats rather than academics intensified in 2023 when Harvard named Claudine Gay as its next president. Even without the revelations of plagiarism that forced her resignation barely six months later, Gay had a thin scholarly record, having authored 11 unremarkable academic articles and no books. But she came from a privileged background and was elevated for advancing progressive orthodoxy while checking the right intersectional boxes. She is the apotheosis of an anti-intellectual movement that values identity and activism over merit and education.

The Gay episode encapsulates the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) aspect of bureaucratic bloat. It wasn’t until after the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, approving the using race in admissions, that universities began fully integrating diversity officers into higher administration. That led to the creation of a plethora of new jobs specifically focused on those issues. Diversity officers play a direct role in presidential decision-making that typically bypasses executives of equal or higher rank in areas such as research or finance.

A 2021 survey of 65 large universities comprising the old “power five” football conferences found that the average school has more than 45 people devoted to DEI — more than the average number of history professors. Indeed, DEI is the fastest-growing segment of the educational bureaucracy, with staffs on average four times larger than those providing legally mandated accommodations to disabled students. (The study was careful to exclude people whose primary responsibility was in Title IX, equal employment opportunity, or other legal obligations.)

The average school had 3.4 DEI staff per 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty. Syracuse University was the worst, with 7.4 DEI staff for every 100 professors. At the University of Michigan, 163 people had authority over DEI programs, a number that grew to 261 by 2023 — and double that when partial positions are included, at an annual cost of more than $30 million. 

At larger universities, campus-wide DEI structures are replicated in colleges and departments, including through centers focused on providing services to people with particular racial, ethnic, or gender identities. Virginia Tech has a vice president for strategic affairs and diversity, who is supported by an associate vice provost of diversity education and engagement, and in turn by assistant provosts for (1) diversity and inclusion and (2) faculty diversity, plus several directors. These DEI offices are further supported by communications teams, program associates, and other aides. The number of DEI offices created or filled has spiked dramatically since the “racial reckoning” that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. 

The dramatic increase in noninstructional staff has driven tuition higher for decades, without benefiting students. That is, campus climate surveys show that students’ satisfaction with their college experience generally, and with campus diversity specifically, doesn’t correlate with the number of administrators, let alone the size of DEI offices.

As Jay Greene, who co-authored that 2021 survey, pointed out, “the real danger of universities hiring so many staff who do not engage in teaching or research is not the expense but how it corrupts the core mission of higher education.” Universities no longer see their role as facilitating an open search for the truth or, in the case of law schools, producing skilled lawyers and the furtherance of the rule of law. Instead, they employ an army of educrats “who either distract from that mission by providing therapeutic coddling to students or subvert truth-seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy.” 

Providing students with staff to organize their social lives and hold their hands while they “process” the trauma of disappointing elections infantilizes students, who should be preparing for serious challenges in the workplace and public square. Instead, DEI offices enforce narrow perspectives through orientations and trainings, to the detriment of the intellectual inquiry that students need. They also take power away from faculty who are supposed to be instilling academic norms and give it to political commissars who have little regard for the traditional mission of higher education.

Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, from which this essay is adapted.