The professional administrative class’s role in the dismantling of the humanities

This op-ed about the goings on at West Virginia University makes a number of good points, but provides an incomplete critique of the fundamental forces at work:

Democratic politicians need to fight back in these culture wars, defending the humanities (rather than disparaging them) and loudly dissenting from the view that education is just job training. College presidents like Mr. Gee should promote and recruit rather than cutting and running. An unholy alliance of far-right ideology and mercenary venture capitalists has politicized the classroom. We must reject their vision of America and insist that a liberal arts education accessible to more than just the elite is one of the great foundations of a democracy.

All true, but that unholy alliance wouldn’t have been possible, or at least not nearly as successful, without the self-dealing of the professional administrative class, who have transformed universities into quasi-businesses precisely because they wished to transform themselves into quasi-C-suite executives.

Here’s a small but telling example: Stanford Law School’s operating revenues have, in real dollars, more than tripled over the past 25 years! I can pretty much guarantee that the basic educational experience of a Stanford law student today is not much different than it was 25 years ago, which is to say that this incredible explosion in revenue represents almost pure rent-seeking by those within the institution who are in a position to profit from this explosion, which is to say primarily the professional administrative class of both the law school and the university.

Stanford and similar schools provide extreme examples of much broader phenomena in American higher ed. Beyond that, the hierarchical obsessions that have come to dominate higher education in the age of university rankings ensure that the behavior of the super-elite super-rich schools become the model that everybody else is trying to copy, with catastrophic results for anything resembling fiscal sanity and rational social policy.