bloataway

It's an unpopular sentiment, but room for faculty like this can in my opinion be made pretty easily by firing a lot of administrators. In my department alone there are thirty staff whose responsibilities can be grouped under "corporate communications/contracts/fundraising". Each are paid six figures. If there was some tallying up of their money spent on salary alone vs. the amount of donations or research gifts they were responsible for, they would be far in the red. Yet for some reason, they have been allowed to persist for years. Back-of-the-envelope calculations say that we could get about $5,000,000 by doing a little belt tightening in our department alone (and they would not be missed).

Why do we need so many provosts, deans, and vice presidents? They don't bring in research money (professors do, writing grant proposals) and they don't bring in alumni donations (nobody knows what does that). In the scheme of things the larger problem is reduced state and federal spending on higher education but in the short term it seems that the logical action is in front of us, but we would instead prefer to milk the little people until they die.