Yale University should “cut the fat” and reduce its administrative headcount, a student argued recently.
Ari Shtein recently wrote his “ode to the campus bureaucracy” where he pointed out the school employs about one administrator for every undergraduate student, a stat previously reported on by The College Fix.
While some play a valuable role on campus, others create problems, Shtein wrote in The Buckley Beacon.
He said students may have to go through the same sexual harassment training seven times. Such training, Shtein said, teach students not to compliment someone’s looks. They also decrease the chance a woman will report sexual harassment, according to cited research.
He wrote:
All that is to say, harassment trainings help good-looking jeans-wearers to receive fewer compliments, women to feel more afraid of their classmates, and the campus community to become polarized against its administration and itself. On top of all that, everybody loses an hour and a half off their very finite lives—some, seven times that much—and Yale is out however many millions of dollars it took to design the curriculum, train the student workers, and more than generously compensate all involved.
Shtein also criticized administrators for interfering in harmless campus activities and “fun policing.”
The Yale student also suggested the bureaucracy is self-sustaining:
Give one administrator even a modicum of power, and you risk beginning what I like to call the self-perpetuating doom loop of bureaucratic bloat.
In essence: bureaucracy will ever find new ways to create its own problems and justify its own existence. Take, for instance, the much-publicized—and I might add, just about only publicized—consequence of the Provost’s 90-day hiring freeze: the residential college pottery studios, left without a general manager, can’t open!
You might wonder just why they can’t open—after all, fully-trained student workers are standing by in each individual studio, and asking the same question. Well, answers the administration, it’s simply “Yale-wide policy to require a general manager.”
Facing a “budget crunch,” Shtein said the university should take the “golden opportunity to cut short the self-perpetuating doom loop of bureaucratic bloat.”
MORE: Cornell has 1 administrator for every 2 undergrad students
