They've Got Us Outnumbered

March 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Full-time jobs in higher education:

• Faculty - 48.6%
• Administrators - 51.4%

The data are from the National Center for Education Statistics (part of the Department of Education) and are reported at Inside Higher Ed.

They’ve been gaining on us for a long time, but this year they’ve finally overtaken us. In part, it’s because Parkinson’s law* leads to the mitosis of administrative positions. But the other part is the key term “full-time.” Universities increasingly rely on adjunct faculty – part-timers who get paid piecework to teach one or two courses. In my own department, there have been several semesters when over 40% of our courses were taught by adjuncts.

It’s a great system. The adjuncts are usually good teachers – often better than the full-timers. Teaching is the core of their work, they do a lot of it, and because they teach at so many different schools, they have a diversity of experience that’s an asset in the classroom.

It’s good for the university too. It allows the administration to maintain “flexibility.” And most important, it saves a bundle of money. Hence the preponderance of administrators over faculty.

Still, most of us want to retain the fantasy of colleges and universities as institutions of higher learning, not higher administration (or, as with the superendowed elite schools, institutions of higher financial exploits).

I think I have the solution: adjunct administrators.

Instead of hiring another Vice-president for Administrative Organization or another Dean of Organizational Administration, hire part-timers. Low salary, no benefits, no long-term commitment.

I’m a department chair, and at least half of what I do in that role could be done by an adjunct – signing forms that I don’t read, writing recommendations that say nothing, nodding sympathetically while listening to complaints from students. Administrators higher up the line do these same things. I know because I see the lines for their signatures on the same forms and recommendations.

I’m not saying fire anyone. But the next time an administrator or two retires, give the real half of their work to one person, and hire adjuncts to do the other half. After all, the two most important areas in the university – computer tech support and parking – are already staffed mostly by part-time hourly employees, often students. And they generally do a good job. Well, maybe not the parking.

* “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
“An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals.”
“Officials make work for each other.”
The total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rises by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

Not to Mention the Finns

March 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sex – is there anything that better exemplifies cultural variation? Maybe food. Americans are famously comfortable with excesses of eating – restaurants advertising “all you can eat” as though gluttony were a virtue, as Steven V. Roberts (Cokie’s husband) once said. European ideas about eating and drinking have a different emphasis. The French, notably, emphasize not quantity but quality, proportion, and aesthetic pleasure.

Our ideas about sexual indulgence, however, are somewhat narrower than those of Europeans. Even New Yorkers overwhelmingly thought that Gov. Spitzer should resign for having patronized prostitutes. (Spitzer’s legal problems may center more on money laundering than on sex, but I doubt that “structuring” was what the public was thinking about in judging the governor.)

Meanwhile in Finland this very same week, the foreign minister admitted to sending hundreds ofcell phone text messages to a topless dancer and her porn actress sister, and he’s not resigning. The other cabinet ministers have rallied to his side. Maybe the Finns will approve of anything so long as it’s done on a Nokia.

And according to the story (in the Daily Mail but it seems to be legit), the prime minister too had his non-marital sex life exposed without any loss of public support. A former lover published what the Mail calls a “steamy kiss-and-tell account of their relationship” just before the general election last year. He was re-elected anyway.


Hat tip to Jonathan Kulick at The Reality-Based Community for the link to this story. The title of this post, for those not familiar with ancient music, is from Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It”:
The Dutch in old Amsterdam do it,
Not to mention the Finns.
Folks in Siam do it;
Think of Siamese twins.

Confidence Games

March 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservatives have been whining about universities for quite a while now, complaining about political correctness and liberal bias. They do seem awfully greedy, those conservatives. They control just about everything, and they're still not happy. As Rick Hertzberg (or was it Todd Gitlin?) said a few years ago, the conservatives get both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court . . . and we get a handful of campuses.

The public apparently did not share the conservatives’ dismay about academia. Each year the Harris Poll asks people how much confidence they have in the people who run the major institutions in the country. Here are some of the results.

The Presidency and the Court, much beloved of conservatives in the Bush years, suffered a steep decline in that period. Even the military lost a third of its very confident supporters in a 5-year period (Iraq? Gitmo? Abu Gharaib?).

Meanwhile, we politically correct academics have held our own. We are now looked upon more with more confidence than the White House, the Court, organized religion, and big business (along with several obvious also-rans not shown here, like Congress, Wall Street, TV news, etc.)

Does This Mean My Drug Co-pay Will Go Up?

March 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Placebos work better if they cost more. That’s the finding reported in the New York Times and surprisingly few other papers.

Dan Ariely asked subjects to estimate the degree of pain relief they got from a pill. Some were told that the pill cost a dime, others that the pill cost $2.50. All the pills were placebos, and a majority of people in both groups reported “significant pain relief.” But that number was higher among those who got the expensive pill (85%) than among those who got the ten-cent version (61%).

Ariely is an economist – his new book Predictably Irrational is on the business best-seller lists – but his explanation is physiological: “Sick humans secrete substances you just can't buy over the counter.”

Maybe so. But what makes the brains of the $2.50 people secrete more of whatever that substance is? Anyone who has taken the intro social psych course should recognize this as our old friend Cognitive Dissonance. If we’re paying this much for it, it must be good. Otherwise, the cognition that we are paying dearly for the pill conflicts with the cognition that it’s not working.

We can’t very easily adjust our estimate of the cost. But pain is more subjective, so we reduce the dissonance by changing our estimate of pain relief. You get what you pay for, as my mother says. And even if you don’t, you’ll think you did.

In one of the classic experiments conducted by the early Dissonators (Aronson and Mills, 1959), women who wanted to join some group had to go through a sort of initiation. Those who had a tougher initiation (I think they had to read aloud some slightly off-color passage – this was the fifties, remember) rated the group as more worthwhile. Those who were admitted easily, on the other hand, didn’t think so highly of the group once they were in.

Or as Marx said, “I wouldn’t join any club that would have someone like me as a member.” (You knew which Marx it was going to be, didn’t you?)