Fire Them All
Crimson | Brooks Anderson ‘25
In a bold, unsparing piece, Anderson ‘25 calls for the elimination of Harvard’s administrative bloat through job cuts and taxes. Anderson documents that Harvard has “filled its halls with administrators…for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators” and “when only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population.” The solution to “outrageously expensive” tuition? “Cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility…we may need legislative solutions as well, such as tying tax-free status and grants to responsible spending or outright raising the endowment tax.”
“Of the 7,000-strong horde,” Anderson argues, “it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience….the aggregation of these frivolous, bureaucratic time-and-money-wasters may have made college as outrageously expensive as it is.”
Anderson attributes the exponential rise in tuition to administrators— “the increased cost seems to lie within the administration and its tendency to solve problems by hiring even more administrators. In a 25-year timespan…American colleges added over 500,000 administrators at a hiring rate double that for faculty.”
At the same time, “It is no secret that Harvard and its peers have amassed fortunes that are largely kept safe from the clutches of the Internal Revenue Service … Amidst rhetoric among Harvard students calling for higher taxes on large corporations and the wealthiest Americans, it seems strange that Harvard’s $53.2 billion, Yale’s $42.3 billion, and Princeton’s $37.7 billion are left off the hit list.”
The solution? Cut excess and tax the rich— “I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution…we may need legislative solutions as well, such as tying tax-free status and grants to responsible spending or outright raising the endowment tax.”
Related:
Harvard Alum Silverglate: Bloated College Administration Makes College Unaffordable (Quillette, 11/2/22)
Administrators are Strangling our Universities (Tablet, 9/18/22)
Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators (NYT, 2018)
