The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education

Zywicki, Todd J.; Koopman, Christopher

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2939915

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The related phenomenon of 'administrative bloat', experienced anecdotally as the seemingly endless multiplication of senior administrative positions in an ever more complicated bureaucracy, is reflected in the growing share of university expenditures allocated to administrative functions (Brownlee, 2015: 109;Shore and Wright, 2000). All of this constitutes an upwards redistribution of resources among university personnel, a trend well documented in American universities (Zywicki and Koopman, 2017), but also in evidence across other Anglo-American countries (Polster, 2015).…”

Section: The Neoliberal University: Key Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Work reorganization in the neoliberal university: A labour process perspective

Ross

Savage

2021

The Economic and Labour Relations Review

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This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of the extent and effect of neoliberal processes at different institutions. The authors use conceptual tools from labour process theory to highlight the ways that neoliberalisation has resulted in academic work that is fragmented, deskilled, intensified, and made subject to greater levels of surveillance, hierarchy, and precarity. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the importance of combining political economy and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, to highlight the way that external structural conditions and subjective processes combine to create new labour processes to which participants find themselves consenting and actively reproducing. JEL Codes: J5, L2

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Section: The Neoliberal University: Key Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Work reorganization in the neoliberal university: A labour process perspective

Ross

Savage

2021

The Economic and Labour Relations Review

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“…The tremendous growth documented in this study also provides empirical support for the argument that managerial and professional staff have become more central to the mission of higher education across all types and sectors. Though increases in non‐faculty personnel have been characterized negatively as drivers of administrative costs or “bloat” (e.g., Zywicki & Koopman, 2017), others have argued that such a view, which juxtaposes professional staff against faculty, ignores the value and “productivity” that these staff contribute to the institution (Rhoades, 1998). As demonstrated in subsequent chapters of this volume, colleges and universities are reliant on these staff to achieve their institutional missions and goals and the growth observed in our findings provides additional evidence of the increasing investment in managerial and professional staff.…”

Section: Discussion Of Study Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the Growth and Demographics of Managerial and Professional Staff in Higher Education

Frye

Fulton

2020

New Drctns Hghr Edu

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This chapter presents a descriptive analysis of the growth of managerial and professional staff from Fall 1993 to Fall 2011 across institution types and sectors, and a detailed snapshot of the demographic composition of these staff in Fall 2016. Our results indicate tremendous growth in the population of non‐faculty staff over time, and reveal key patterns in staff employment by gender and race/ethnicity.

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“…This group described a disconnect between the advances in basic science and the delivery of better healthcare that is due to high research costs, limited funding, career disincentives, regulatory burdens, fragmented infrastructure, incompatible databases, a shortage of qualified investigators and willing participants, and practice limitations. To this can be added increases in the bureaucracies involved in the translation continuum that have grown exponentially in the past 20 years (Lazebnik, 2015;Zywicki & Koopman, 2017), whereby "many in the translational and clinical research fields would rate the effect of bureaucracy as somewhere between catastrophic and ultracatastrophic" (Emmert-Buck, 2014). The CCR study noted that clinical research proposals were being funded at only half the rate of those submitted from the basic sciences (Sung et al, 2003), with others estimating that only 10%-30% (Butler, 2008;Szilagyi, 2009) of the NIH budget was allocated for clinical research.…”

Section: The Translational Research Continuummentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Translational Paradigms in Drug Discovery and Development

Williams

2021

Current Protocols

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Despite improved knowledge regarding disease causality, new drug targets, and enabling technologies, the attrition rate for compounds entering clinical trials has remained consistently high for several decades, with an average 90% failure rate. These failures are manifested in an inability to reproduce efficacy findings from animal models in humans and/or the occurrence of unexpected safety issues, and reflect failures in T1 translation. Similarly, an inability to sequentially demonstrate compound efficacy and safety in Phase IIa, IIb, and III clinical trials represents failures in T2 translation. Accordingly, T1 and T2 translation are colloquially termed 'valleys of death'. Since T2 translation dealt almost exclusively with clinical trials, T3 and T4 translational steps were added, with the former focused on facilitating interactions between laboratoryand population-based research and the latter on 'real world' health outcomes. Factors that potentially lead to T1/T2 compound attrition include: the absence of biomarkers to allow compound effects to be consistently tracked through development; a lack of integration/'de-siloing' of the diverse discipline-based and technical skill sets involved in drug discovery; the industrialization of drug discovery, which via volume-based goals often results in quantity being prioritized over quality; inadequate project governance and strategic oversight; and flawed decision making based on unreliable/irreproducible or incomplete data. A variety of initiatives have addressed this problem, including the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which has focused on bringing an unbiased academic perspective to translation, to potentially revitalize the process. This commentary provides an overview of the basic concepts involved in translation, along with suggested changes in the conduct of biomedical research to avoid valleys of death, including the use of Translational Scoring as a tool to avoid translational attrition and the impact of the FDA Accelerated Approval Pathway in lowering the hurdle for drug approval.

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The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Work reorganization in the neoliberal university: A labour process perspective

Work reorganization in the neoliberal university: A labour process perspective

Mapping the Growth and Demographics of Managerial and Professional Staff in Higher Education

Improving Translational Paradigms in Drug Discovery and Development

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