Silverglate: Bureaucratic rule alive and well at Harvard
Free speech advocate, attorney and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate (HLS ‘67), who sought to be a petition candidate for the Harvard Board of Overseers and is now seeking write-in candidacy, exposes the reality behind Harvard’s skyrocketing $80,000 tuition—a massive bureaucratic infrastructure. “Harvard’s administrative payroll has nearly doubled between 2002 and 2020. Indeed, Harvard, as of 2020, spent $47,706 per student in administrative expenses.”
As for new leadership, Silverglate fears that Claudine Gay will only further the shift away from Harvard’s scholarly mission to one focused on racial justice. Dean Gay “is the perfect candidate to carry forward the disastrous bureaucratization of American higher education,” he writes. “If most of college administrators were laid off… our campuses could return to educating rather than indoctrinating or training students as seems to be Dean Gay’s goal with her plans for racial justice rather than academic initiatives.”
Related:
Fire Them All (Crimson, 11/29/22)
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)
