The Impact of Woke ‘Educrats’ on the Deterioration of Higher Education
The elite universities of our nation are facing a critical crisis. Speakers are being silenced, professors feel intimidated by students, meaningful discussions are stifled, and there is a pervasive distrust towards the so-called “experts” in academia. This issue has been exacerbated by the recent attacks by Hamas on Israel, which have exposed these institutions as hubs of antisemitism in America. What’s driving this troubling trend?
To be frank, the shift we’re witnessing now compared to my college days 25 years ago isn’t merely about a leftward drift among faculty. While there has been some movement and millennial professors tend to be more activist than their boomer counterparts, this isn’t just another conservative critique of academia’s supposed liberal agenda. The reality is that university administrations, at their best, appease and, at their worst, stir up illiberal movements that hinder educational discourse, primarily due to the rise of bureaucracies.
The statistics surrounding the growth of non-teaching staff are staggering. From 1993 to 2012, the number of non-teaching university employees surged at approximately twice the rate of student enrollment. Meanwhile, public college tuition has risen more than threefold in that same timeframe. This trend has continued to escalate, but comprehensive statistics are hard to find due to changes in survey methodologies and the Department of Education’s failure to maintain or release consistent data.
This situation effectively means that students are shouldering an increasing financial burden to support an expanding elite of well-compensated bureaucrats without receiving any benefit in return. This challenge transcends mere financial concerns. Administrators are often more radical than faculty members and are not bound by principles of academic freedom, which detracts from the educational atmosphere.
A 2018 survey indicated a liberal-to-conservative ratio among faculty of about 6 to 1, with only 13% identifying as right-leaning. In contrast, students exhibited a more balanced view: 42% of freshmen identified as centrist, while 36% were liberal and 22% conservative. However, two-thirds of higher education administrators identified as liberal, with 40% considering themselves far-left, resulting in a liberal-to-conservative ratio of 12 to 1.
What was once a role focused on compliance with federal regulations concerning financial aid and anti-discrimination has transformed into a position enforcing radical ideologies around race and gender. The eminent political economist Mancur Olson elucidated how growing bureaucracies contribute to national decline — a reality that has manifested within academia, as expensive bureaucratic roles, disconnected from the essential missions of teaching and research, proliferate and enforce codes that suppress free expression and undermine due process.
In recent years, the expansion of university bureaucracies has drastically outpaced the growth of faculty and student bodies. Data from the Department of Education shows that between 1993 and 2009, the number of administrative positions in colleges grew by 60%, a rate tenfold that of tenured faculty. Furthermore, from 1987 to 2012, private university administrators doubled, while those in central public university offices increased 34-fold. Over this same period, colleges added more than half a million administrators, with expectations for continued growth at about 7% annually from 2021 to 2031.
By around 2010, the number of administrators had surpassed that of full-time faculty. Over the next decade, elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and MIT saw their administrator count exceed that of their student body. At Yale, administrative positions shot up by 45% from 2003 to 2021—growing nearly three times faster than the undergraduate population during that timeframe. At Stanford, administrative growth alone accounted for a 30% rise just from 2017 to 2022, with the swiftest growth occurring during the 2020-21 pandemic year. Currently, Stanford maintains nearly twice as many non-teaching staff as undergraduate students and nearly six times the number of faculty. Although ratios may vary at public institutions, administrative expansion at UCLA has similarly eclipsed other sectors, resulting in four times as many staff compared to faculty.
This significant growth in administrative roles is reflected in institutional budgets. At 198 of the country’s foremost research universities, administrative spending has been outpacing instructional and research expenditures. Between 1993 and 2007, per-student administrative costs skyrocketed by 61%, while expenses tied to instruction rose only by 39%. This trend has worsened. In the 2018-19 academic year — the last before COVID altered financial landscapes — colleges spent $632 billion, yet less than 30% was allocated to teaching. From 2009-10 to 2018-19, instructional costs per full-time student at four-year institutions surged only by 8%, while overall expenses increased by a staggering 114%.
Consider Harvard, which has long positioned itself as a leader in American higher education. This institution saw its administrative costs nearly double in the first two decades of this century. In 2020, Harvard allocated $47,706 per student for administration costs—almost equivalent to the cost of undergraduate tuition (excluding additional fees, room, and board). This bureaucratic expansion largely accounts for the entire increase in Harvard’s annual attendance fees.
The trend of universities being overseen by bureaucrats rather than educators magnified in 2023 when Harvard appointed Claudine Gay as its new president. Even without the subsequent plagiarism scandal that forced her resignation just six months later, Gay possessed a notably unimpressive scholarly record, with 11 mediocre academic articles and no published books. However, her privileged background and adherence to progressive orthodoxy secured her appointment, epitomizing a movement that prioritizes identity politics and activism over intellectual merit and education.
Gay’s situation typifies the DEI-related bureaucratic expansion. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which permitted the use of race in admissions, universities began fully integrating diversity officers into higher administrative ranks, resulting in a surge of new roles focused on these matters. Diversity officers now play significant roles in presidential-level decision-making, often overshadowing executives handling research or financial issues.
A 2021 survey of 65 large universities within the historic “power five” football conferences revealed that the average institution employs over 45 individuals dedicated to DEI efforts, exceeding the average number of history professors. Indeed, DEI has emerged as the fastest-expanding segment of educational bureaucracies, with its staff on average being four times larger than those mandated to provide accommodations for disabled students. (This study was prudent to exclude personnel primarily responsible for Title IX, equal employment opportunity, or other legal mandates.)
The average institution had 3.4 DEI staff per 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. Syracuse University ranked highest, with 7.4 DEI staff per every 100 professors. At the University of Michigan, 163 individuals managed DEI programs, with that number rising to 261 by 2023 — a figure that doubles when including partial roles and carries an annual cost exceeding $30 million.
Larger universities replicate their campus-wide DEI structures across colleges and departments through centers aimed at serving specific racial, ethnic, or gender identities. Virginia Tech, for instance, has a vice president for strategic affairs and diversity, supported by an associate vice provost for diversity education and engagement, and further assisted by assistant provosts dedicated to diversity and inclusion and faculty diversity, alongside several directors. The establishment or staffing of DEI offices has surged markedly since the “racial reckoning” following George Floyd’s death in 2020.
This exponential rise in non-instructional staff has propelled tuition rates upward for decades without yielding any concrete benefits for students. Student climate surveys indicate no correlation between satisfaction regarding college experience and the number of administrators, let alone the size of DEI offices.
As Jay Greene, co-author of the aforementioned 2021 survey, noted, “The real concern regarding universities employing such a large number of non-teaching staff isn’t simply financial — it’s how it distorts the foundational mission of higher education.” Institutions increasingly fail to see their role as facilitating an open search for truth or, in the case of law schools, producing skilled legal professionals and upholding the rule of law. Rather, they now employ a legion of bureaucrats that either distract from this mission by offering therapeutic reassurances to students or undermine truth-seeking by enforcing ideological conformity.
By providing staff to assist students in organizing their social lives and helping them “process” the trauma from disappointing elections, universities risk infantilizing students who should be preparing for significant challenges in their future careers and civic engagement. Instead, DEI offices propagate narrow viewpoints through orientations and trainings, compromising the intellectual exploration that students require. Moreover, this shift redistributes power away from faculty tasked with fostering academic standards, granting control to political enforcers who show little regard for the traditional aims of higher education.
Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the upcoming book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, from which this essay is adapted.
