Big Spending Corporate Universities By James Reed

The blogger Eugyppius reports on the European scene, not only on the Covid plandemic, but the decadence of the universities. However, in a recent informative piece he ventures across the pond to look at the goings on with American public universities. He had spent some time as an academic at top level American universities. He observed, that what the Wall Street Journal had recently reported on as being true: that there is insane spending on building programs, most of which relates to landscaping and do not improve resources for students.

Now that in itself is not of much interest to us in Australia, only something like this does seem to be occurring across this country, and is not yet being examined by critical politicians. I do not want to name names, as my following comments are about a university outside of my state. This unnamed place has a building company that has been active for literally years. While they did some building renovations, that took over a year to complete, some odd things are apparently done. One involved wrecking a structure by a lawn area, outside a historical building and digging up pavement. It remains a sealed off area of rubble, which my sources say has been sitting there as an eye-sore for about two months, or more.

As observed in the American situation, there does not seem to be developments to improve student resources, such as say, more computer rooms. The concern is also with aesthetics. Expensive woke outdoor “artworks” were put up about a year or more ago, at the same university. I imagine that this is just the tip of the iceberg of the way the modern Australian corporate university operates, and spends. It would be a good measure that if these places pride themselves on the corporate model of business, with their riches from overseas students, then like corporations, they start paying tax.

The issue is important, as a lot of this nonsense is just financed by the long-suffering Australian tax payer. Accountability time, I think!

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-managerial-menace

“Back in August, the Wall Street Journal ran a long article on the insane spending of American public universities, with special emphasis on their proclivity for expensive building projects. This is an issue very close to my heart. I spent over a decade in American academia, at several different very wealthy institutions, and every semester of my experience was marred by major, highly disruptive, noisy and openly unnecessary building. Most of these schools have a long line of extravagant projects planned generations into the future. They routinely tear down structures thrown up mere decades ago, only to replace them with larger and newer architectural monstrosities double or triple the original size. They are constantly ripping up squares and walkways only to repave and re-landscape them with ever more elaborate modern sculptures, fountains and hedges. The last school I worked for spent 18 months “improving” the lawn in front of my office building. Among other things, they dug a massive winding trench through it, which they filled with water to make an artificial creek. Then they planted weird reeds everywhere and constructed various bridges so pedestrians could traverse their fake wetland. They turned a modest grassy area with a few simple brick walkways into a monstrous muddy outrageously expensive eyesore.

You have to ask, at some point, what all this is even for. Near the end of my time at that school, some faculty committee produced an assessment of campus facilities and how they had grown over the years. I was amazed to find that, despite hundreds of millions wasted on construction since 2000, classroom and faculty office space remained stubbornly insufficient and had not expanded for decades.

From the article at the link:

The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. 

Then they passed the bill along to students.

The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America’s poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. 

Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis—even though it’s among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. 

The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program.  

The spending is inextricably tied to the nation’s $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.

Construction is merely the most visible extravagance modern American universities have allowed themselves. They are also spending vastly more on personnel, especially administrators. The University of Connecticut has increased its spending by 73% between 2002 and 2020, “Much of that … driven by personnel costs, with spending on benefits more than tripling.”

More:

Many university officials struggled to understand their own budgets and simply increased spending every year. Trustees demanded little accountability and often rubber-stamped what came before them. And schools inconsistently disclose what they spend, making it nearly impossible for the public to review how their tuition and tax dollars are being used. 

“These places are just devouring money,” said Holden Thorp, who was chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008 to 2013 and is now editor in chief of Science. Offering everything to everyone all at once is unsustainable, he said. “Universities need to focus on what their true priorities are and what they were created to do,” he said.

So what’s happening?

A conventional thesis is that schools have difficulty marketing their academic programmes to students; what faculty do and teach is opaque to outsiders and difficult to showcase on campus tours. Instead, they compete on amenities and facilities, seducing prospective enrolees with shiny libraries and dining halls. There is surely something to this, but as explanations go, it’s unsatisfying. It doesn’t explain how this competitive spiral began in the first place, and it also can’t account for the truly massive build-out of the administration. Yale University, to take just one example, hired more than 1,500 new administrative staff in the sixteen years between 2003 and 2019. Many of these managers have baffling titles and either provide no obvious services or are actively annoying.

The phenomenon before us is perhaps too blunt and obvious to notice at first. Federally-backed student loans increased the amount that schools could charge, and as they raised tuition to claim this money, they had to do something with it. For the most part, that something amounted to expanding the ranks of those cadres responsible for spending money, namely the administrators and their subordinate staff, as well as those things which administrators manage, such as buildings and the building of them.

Via some mechanism, in other words, the institutional apparatus of the university itself – including its central managers and its physical manifestation in the form of the campus – has absorbed the new resources. I submit that this is a less-than-obvious outcome. The increased funding could have been an occasion for simple corruption, for example. The existing administration and the better-connected faculty could have paid themselves more and deepened their expense accounts. They did that to some extent, but not nearly as much as they could have. Alternatively, the money could have been spent on core academic functions, such as hiring more professors, increasing faculty salaries to snag the best scholars, improving research funding and facilities or building more and better classrooms. Obviously, faculty have better-appointed offices and classrooms now than they did thirty years ago, but it is almost nothing in comparison to the money p***ed away on worthless buildings and worthless managers.

For our second example, we leave the benighted world of academia and betake ourselves to the universe of nonprofits. Consider this amazing Twitter thread from last year on the Wikimedia Foundation. As anybody who has ever used Wikipedia knows, the site is constantly begging for donations, frequently with obtrusive banners.

These appeals have worked: The Wikimedia Foundation has pulled in millions of dollars, even as the cost of web hosting (about $2.5 million/year) has remained constant. As it turns out, less than half of the Wikimedia budget has anything to do with running Wikipedia. With the rest of the money, the Foundation have vastly expanded their staff; the organisation now employs 400 people and by the end of 2021 they had accumulated over $230 million in assets. Because they now have vastly more money and more people than they need to run a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, they have become a grant-making institution. Many of their staff run things like the Wikimedia Alliances Fund, which “supports organisations that can contribute toward the strategic direction of the Wikimedia Movement, especially those that promote knowledge equity.”

Many Wikimedia grant recipients are absolutely atrocious. The Twitter thread highlights a few examples. Among them is something called the STEM en Route to Change (SeRCH) Foundation, which has received money from the Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund “to expand our repository of content highlighting the experiences, technical expertise, and traditional knowledges of STEM practitioners who have been historically excluded.” They have a YouTube channel sporting 5 videos and 177 subscribers, and an equally deserted blog that has been mostly dormant since 2022. Somewhat more serious is Borealis Philanthropy, a leftoid culture war operation that has partnered with Black Lives Matter and in 2021 had total revenue of $83.9 million. Their “Racial Equity in Journalism Fund” received $250,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation in 2021 “to support US-based journalism organizations led by and for people of color.”

Again, it helps to concentrate on what the Wikimedia Foundation have not done with the vast money Wikipedia users have given them. They have not taken the high road and poured the excessive donations into Wikipedia itself, which is surely what the their donors expected them to do. Nor have Wikimedia management simply lined their pockets with the funds, though I have no doubt they’re all compensated well in excess of their talents. Instead, we see again the ominous middle path: The institution itself has absorbed the money and expanded its managerial staff beyond all necessity.

While the Wikimedia Foundation surely hope to further their political goals with their dumb grant-making, the bewildering variety of funds, projects and initiatives they run has a much more immediate purpose, in that it gives the bloated organisation something to do. In fact a great many of these philanthropic organisations, viewed with a more cynical eye, seem to exist primarily as make-work projects for staff who pass money around among themselves. Borealis, for example, is a “philanthropic intermediary,” which uses grants from organisations like Wikimedia to make its own grants to other organisations. All of this is perverse and malicious in its own way, but it’s also profoundly stupid.”