The Staggering Administrative Bloat of Universities
This chart is from a recent state audit report of Janet Napolitano's office at the University of California, an audit I already wrote about here.
Obviously Napolitano's office is particularly bad as compared to peers, but she has 1667 staff and spends over a half billion (billion with a B) just on the office of the President! This is not in any way shape or form the total administrative size of the system - each university has its own administrative staff, for example. This is just her central office. This is a staggering number. It equates to every student in the system paying over $2500 a year just for the central headquarters staff that they will never see, this is before the first dollar is spent on their individual campus -- or God forbid -- on teaching or academics. To my mind this is way more of a scandal than her hiding a money reserve in various accounts.
This begins to get at a conflict I keep expecting to happen, but doesn't. Time and time again, particularly in places like California, we find examples where agencies that are supposed to be serving the public are in fact diverting much of their resources to maintain the staffing levels, salaries, and rich benefits and pensions of their employees. For years I have expected some sort of civil war on the Left, where Progressives figure out that providing things they care about (e.g. education, parks) is being limited by the huge resources that are being diverted to government employees. Just look at the chart above -- California Democrats have twisted themselves into knots trying to find an incremental $50 or $100 million of funding for the California public university system, and here it is -- I can see an easy $400 million one could easily pull out of Napolitano's office. Unfortunately, government employees and their unions are a big force in electing Democrats, and so they are reluctant to challenge these folks. It is a classic example of "do you care about the things you say you value or do you care about power" and so far in places like California the answer has been "power."
