If there is one thing that unites academics, it is cynicism about university administration. To outsiders, this seems weird, because senior university administrators are, with relatively few exceptions, actually academics themselves. Many, in fact, return to faculty ranks after finishing their term. So why are these two sides always seen as being so drastically opposed?

Here’s my hypothesis.

Members of the Senior Administration are the interface between academia and the non-academic world. Academics expect senior administrators to explain to the world outside how the world should be arranged so as to maximize faculty utility. Senior administration would, on the whole, like nothing more than to do this. They, too, are faculty, and on the whole they have the same interests as the rest of the faculty in arranging external funding and regulatory agencies to arrange their affairs in a way most convenient to academic staff.

The issue, though, is that Senior Admin are not simply a megaphone through which faculty can talk to funders. They are also the conduit by which major funders—and by this I mean students, governments, and philanthropists—talk to academia. And most of what those people have to say, academics don’t want to hear.

The most important thing those funders have to say is that they wish higher education would cost less (this is seemingly true almost no matter what the actual cost/price is). They are therefore skeptical about claims for new money. Administrations reflect that back to the faculty both in the way that they argue for money and in the way they administer budgets (in both cases, cautiously).

Stakeholders also have a lot to say about things like which fields of study deserve investment (more STEM), time-to-degrees (shorter), freedom of speech, etc. Some of these views are dumb. But they are the views of funders. You can talk all you want about institutional autonomy, but funders are autonomous too. If they want to withhold money, they will. Senior Admins—BY DEFINITION—are doing their jobs when they navigate these shoals. And this often means asking some faculty to do things they would prefer not to do or take the university in directions some faculty would prefer not to go. Their job is to balance competing demands of internal and external stakeholders. It might not always seem like this is what they are doing, but I would argue that is mostly because internal and external stakeholders misunderstand each other so badly and have so little frame of reference to understand each other’s motives, that neither side recognizes what Senior Administration is actually doing.

And as a result, Senior Admins are suspect. Despised, even, in some quarters.

It’s not entirely clear to me what an alternative theory of Senior Administration might look like. It’s not like either the inside/outside translation function or the resource allocation function can simply disappear. Governments in particular demand institutional interlocutors who can speak for and bind the institution and get it to behave like a strategic actor: to do and “achieve” things corporately. This often sounds batshit crazy to professors, who very often see this “corporate” view of the university as being in conflict with their own understanding of it: that is, as a vast holding company for individual professors’ research agendas. But, at the risk of repeating myself: this is not how funders understand universities. In fact, most funders would be horrified by that kind of description of a university. And yet, it is the job of Senior Administration to keep both sides happy.

Now to be clear, this description above isn’t meant to absolve Senior Administration of all sins. There are good managers and bad managers (we might have more good ones if institutions took management training for academics more seriously, but that’s as may be). They make good decisions and bad decisions, and enough bad decisions can lead to some serious consequences (see Laurentian among others) for entire institutions. Sometimes others have to pay for the mistakes of Senior Admin. This is all Bad. And yes, like any bureaucratic system Senior Administration has a tendency to grow via scope-creep and empire-building. This is of course no different than management in any other field of human endeavor, but that doesn’t mean we should either accept or excuse these things.

The thing is, though, cynicism doesn’t simply flourish in the presence of bad management. Even where you have very good management, it doesn’t take much poking around to find faculty who are convinced that the Administration are “up to no good.” Why? Because Senior Administration is an intrusion of the outside world into university life. Their presence and discourse are irritating to faculty who just wish the outside world would go away, leave us alone (but leave some money at the door).

But the alternative to Senior Administration playing this intermediary role is not a world in which outside funders (mainly government) leave teachers and researchers alone: it’s a world where funders (mainly government) play a much more direct role in university management. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.