John Staddon has been on the Duke faculty for decades, teaching neurobiology. He has been observing administrative bloat first hand and writes about the phenomenon in today’s Martin Center article.

The article was prompted by a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger, in which he argued in favor of using federal regulatory power to create an incentive for colleges to lower the cost of administration. Staddon thinks his goal is good, but that his solution isn’t going to work.

As Staddon sees things, administrative bloat stems mostly from the way “progressives” insist on using college for non-educational purposes, ones that are actually harmful to real education. He writes:

As many people have pointed out, this administrative shift to making sure (in the words of Yale’s president Salovey) that everyone in the ‘community feels welcome, respected and valued’ is leading to the destruction of the whole concept of the university as a church with a single creed: the search for truth.

Staddon thinks that Professor Hamburger’s solution will not change things much, as college leaders find ways to evade the impact of federal regulatory changes. The only real solution is for those leaders to return their institutions to their original educational missions.

He concludes:

The only hope for our larger universities is a change in the zeitgeist. Administrators, faculty, and students must realize that a university is not a universal comforter and not a “safe space” (except in the literal sense of being crime-free); it is not a home, as the Yale student screamingat Professor Nicholas Christakis insisted it must be. It is not a solution to the world’s ills. Its mission is not “social justice” but education, knowledge, and truth. Until the universities return to that realization, things can only get worse.