Burdens

 

Jen Sorensen, November 2023.

Things David Brooks ("Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts") is worried about:

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, [University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson] illustrates how administrators control campus life by citing the rules they have devised to govern how members of the campus community should practice sadomasochistic sex: “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, nonconsent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal nonconsent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Do institutions really need to govern private life this minutely?

Uh, yes. There are surely lots of overregulated campus activities, but you really do need to be careful about this one. Before somebody, as they say, gets hurt, I mean when they didn't actually want to.

Anyhow, Professor Edmundson's main complaint in the Liberties article seems to be that he is now expected to do some extra work when he's reporting on his year's academic activities:

I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider.  So I had a lot to tell my friend about administrative interference with academic freedom....

At least I think that's what the essay is about, not campus BDSM regulation, from the part of the very long opening paragraph I can see without subscribing or accepting the offer of "two free articles per month" if I give them my email address, which I've decided I don't care to do with a magazine called "Liberties Journal" that publishes expensive-looking articles by Cass Sunstein, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Leon Wieseltier, I may get back to that. 

And Brooks is writing about yet another thing, though he drops a poisoned mention of the DEI thing into the piece:

His real subject is the development of what Frankfurt School sociologists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were referring to in their 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment as the "totally administered world" controlled by various agencies and institutions under the monopolistic conditions of late capitalism, as described by Deborah Cook:

Observing the emergence of a new oligarchical ruling class in many Western states, Adorno argues that this class has disappeared ʻbehind the concentration of capitalʼ, which has reached such a ʻsize and acquired such a critical mass that capital appears as an institution, as an expression of the entire societyʼ [cite from Adorno's 1942 draft "Reflections on Class Structure"]. Owing in part to the concentration of capital, then, the ruling class was becoming ʻanonymousʼ, making it much more difficult to identify those in control.

Haha, just kidding, Brooks has no idea his idea is 80 years old and Marxist.

But the Marxism does emerge from the examples he cites, as in the case of healthcare, where administrative costs account for 30% of the difference in costs between the US and other OECD countries; half of that going to the private health insurance industry, and the other half to private providers' general administrative costs (and the immense salaries of executives who spend their time cadging donations off the rich), and quality reporting and accreditation through private agencies. (Other excess costs, as you know, come from US failure to control drug prices, and much higher salaries for doctors and nurses who must pay off crazy educational loans.)

The same goes for colleges and universities: Brooks writes,

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

But nonfaculty employees include not just managers but financial drudges, IT workers, lab and field scientists, engineers and architects, counselors and social workers, librarians and ed tech workers, arts and sports and media people, healthcare professionals and support staff, campus security, and food service, all of which are really necessary to keep the places running. As for the article he cites on the Cal system (from 2015), it adds that

Only about a quarter of the UC system’s budget is made up of “core fund” spending on the educational mission, they point out. The remainder encompasses everything else, including five medical centers that are more than self-supporting and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which helps bring in the billions of dollars in government grants and contracts that UC researchers attract each year.

Plus of course most tertiary education has virtually stopped hiring tenure-track faculty because schools are so poor, and try to make do with low-paid adjuncts.

None of this is to suggest that over-administration and administrative burden aren't a problem in the US. They absolutely are problems. But not so much for tenured septuagenarian professors like Mark Edmundson getting forced to admit that he isn't doing anything for diversity, equity, and inclusion by leaving the spaces in the form blank, as if he cared. Or me trying to get a free look at an article in Liberties Journal, for that matter.

The problem is really for the victims of administration designed to prevent people, often members of minorities, from having access to benefits or enjoying their rights, as examined with reference to government in Pamela Herd's and Donald Moynihan's Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (2018):

Through in-depth case studies of federal programs and controversial legislation, the authors show that administrative burdens are the nuts-and-bolts of policy design. Regarding controversial issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. For instance, legislators have implemented administrative burdens such as complicated registration requirements and strict voter-identification laws to suppress turnout of African American voters. Similarly, the right to an abortion [was, until Dobbs,] legally protected, but many states require women seeking abortions to comply with burdens such as mandatory waiting periods, ultrasounds, and scripted counseling. As Herd and Moynihan demonstrate, administrative burdens often disproportionately affect the disadvantaged who lack the resources to deal with the financial and psychological costs of navigating these obstacles.

And the designers, of course, are Republicans, intent on punishing the poor and disadvantaged for having needs, with "work requirements", intrusive verification procedures, online documentation for people who may not have access to computers, making services hard to find and hard to find out about, and so on. David Brooks has no interest, of course, in such matters. He's too busy contemplating Professor Edmundson and his safe word (I'm guessing it's "academic freedom!").