Posted on the door of political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg’s office on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus is a newspaper story clipped out of the university-sponsored JHU Gazette. The headline: “Edgar Roulhac, vice provost for academic services, to retire.”

The article is equally dry, but a friend of Ginsberg’s, knowing his particular qualms with university administrations, taped it there for the professor to read. According to the article, Roulhac “assisted and guided the president and provost in advancement of the university’s mission, goals and priorities” and “assumed broad academic planning oversight and stewardship for the advancement of JHU’s full- and part-time academic programs . . .”

Ginsberg is unimpressed by the story’s accolades: “There are a lot of people like him in every university. They say the faculty vegetates with tenure, but the administrators are here forever and ever and never did anything to begin with.”

That represents the essence of Ginsberg’s latest book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press), in which Ginsberg takes readers into the bureaucracy of university administrators, in his view a top-heavy army of generals who do little to advance the cause. He coins the term “deanlets” to describe the assistants to the assistants with puffed-up titles and vague job descriptions, and questions what, exactly, they do with their time and everyone else’s money.

The book delves into a broad range of topics, from the treatment of minorities on campuses and how it affects a university’s operations to the history of academic tenure. But where it’s strongest is in its analysis of the data about the ever-rising numbers of administrators and the dwindling amount of faculty, who are having increasingly less say in the world in which they teach.

“The problem is administration, bureaucracy is self-perpetuating,” Ginsberg says. “Those who find themselves in a bureaucratic career path want to increase the importance of what they do. They want to aggrandize their role.”

And in order to accomplish this, Ginsberg asserts, administrators seek to increase their numbers, thereby increasing their ability to circumvent faculty and board members and justify diverting money to operating costs, travel funds, and inflated salaries. The end result is schools where teaching and research cease to be the function of higher education and instead are simply a means to an end.

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