Provost Draper wants to put you in a new major today
By 
This amusing diatribe in the Chronicle of Higher Education takes dead aim at the advertising culture that has now body snatched everybody in American university central administration, more specifically at the author’s own institution (Virginia Tech), but really everywhere:
Claiming that “almost every business sector around the world” has been disrupted by automation in the 21st century is outrageous.
The goal of this naughty sentence is to create a sense of rapid and frightening change. It’s notable that [it] turns not to the work of scholars but to a report from the McKinsey consulting company. Among people who study these topics, McKinsey’s projections around new technologies and their impact on jobs are famously lousy. The technology scholar Jeffrey Funk has observed that McKinsey made some of its most drastic claims about the potential of artificial intelligence “by extrapolating from claims made by various startups” — in other words, McKinsey projected from hype.
It’s in McKinsey’s interests to make it seem like the looming technological future is dramatically different and scary as hell, because McKinsey wants to sell you its services. McKinsey uses unrealistic claims about the nature and rate of technological change to create an opening for what one of its reports calls “bold, well-targeted interventions,” and that’s what the author of the piece in Virginia Tech Magazine does too: “Virginia Tech’s motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), demands that the university meet this moment, and indeed, it is growing to play a bolder role in the world, expanding programs that will support and direct the progression towards the future.”
Ah, so that’s why a university publication contains such inaccuracies. We’re getting a sales pitch.
Publications like these hype up unrealistic projections of near-term technological change because moneyed interests, including entrepreneurs, start-up executives, venture capitalists, and, yes, universities, want to keep us invested in their visions, however tenuous. But their starry-eyed image of the future obscures more mundane and troubling realities. Scholars like Robert J. Gordon, Jeffrey Funk, and Aaron Benanav have shown that deep, economically significant innovation has plateaued, even decreased, since the 1970s. Others have demonstrated that research productivity has been decreasing for decades — it takes more and more people to make incremental improvements.
Meanwhile, college students have taken on mountain ranges of debt at a time when wages for college graduates have stagnated. How does, say, a land-grant university like Virginia Tech meet this moment?
Now, I realize that “Students Load Up on Debt While Wages for College Grads Stagnate” is not a winning headline for a glossy PR publication. But universities have a moral duty to bring their rhetoric back down to earth. Shouldn’t their publications educate and inform? Is it OK for university organs to spout bullshit?
It may not be OK but it is inevitable, once universities become businesses. A business’s reason for existence is to generate profit; profit generation requires advertising; and advertising itself is the art of telling plausible-enough lies to entrap people to spend their money on the basis of false pretenses.
Hence:
In May, the Advancement Division at my university renamed its morning publication, which had been called the Virginia Tech News, as VTx. X, we are told, stands for EXPONENTIAL. Sorrow and hilarity compete in the hearts of the attentive.“Exponentially More Videos,” “Exponentially More Features,” etc. — that’s what the banner on top of VTx’s web page advertises as you navigate the site. This is ridiculous on one level because it is simply nonsense: If the office produces 40 “news” stories this week, will it publish 1,600 next week and 2,560,000 the week after that?
The deeper problem, though, is not illogic but tawdriness and lack of character. “Exponential” is a Silicon Valley buzzword often associated with “the singularity,” the idea that technology is changing at an ever-accelerating rate.
The other key characteristic of the business world is that businesses compete with each other, which means each is always trying to expand its market share at the expense of its peers. This works pretty well for producing cheap cheeseburgers and smart phones (though not so well for the people actually making those products), but it’s a ridiculous model for institutions that are putatively dedicated to expanding and transmitting knowledge. Thus we have the absurdly wasteful ratings game, in which central administrators compete with each other to spend money as inefficiently as possible, in order to defeat each other in a sharply negative sum contest for hierarchical status.
As a wise man once pointed out, the whole reason the ratings exist is to provide a competitive frame to justify spending ever-more money, while complaining — falsely — that due to “funding cuts” your institution is having to make do with less:
The career path of professional university administrators creates all sorts of perverse incentives from an institutional perspective, because the path to lateral advancement is always to spend more money: to “grow” the institution with more programs, more initiatives, more centers, more splashy hires of one kind or another, and in particular more shiny new buildings — the dreaded edifice complex — until the PUA moves on in a few years to the next institution, where the process can be repeated.
All this, of course, means that the people running American universities have to be positively obsessed with increasing revenue, in order to pay for all this resume-enhancing growth. For example, the annual expendable endowment income of my alma mater, the University of Michigan, is now equivalent, in constant inflation-adjusted dollars, to what was the combined total annual expendable endowment income of all the nation’s 1,497 public colleges and universities when I was an undergraduate 40 years ago. (During this time Michigan’s endowment has grown from $115 million to $12.5 billion).
Spending levels at elite universities have become mind-boggling: in real dollars, the operating budgets of these places have nearly tripled over the past 30 years. Example: in 1989 Princeton had a total operating budget of $848 million in 2020 dollars: a sum which included a six million dollar operating deficit. In fiscal 2020 the school’s operating budget was $2.3 billion, which included an enormous operating surplus — the school had pulled in more than three billion dollars in total revenue during the previous fiscal year.
And all of this has a perverse trickle down effect, as schools further down the hierarchy spend sums that would have been considered absurdly profligate at HYPS a generation ago, but which are now considered the minimum necessary to maintain and enhance institutional “excellence” — a term which, like the other MBA buzzwords used compulsively now by top university administrators, is never actually defined in any concrete way, beyond spending more money this year than you spent last.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen this process play out particularly spectacularly at American law schools, but what has happened inside them is merely the keeling over of various canaries in a much larger, increasingly toxic coal mine.