If you look at what the provost titles contain, you will find an urgent need to fulfill some political task or to be in line with some political trend. Education (learning how to think) is no longer the main goal of universities. The goal now is to have students be molded into the right shapes that match the political winds of the day (thinking what must be thought).
Education arguably hasn't been the main goal at UC Berkeley for some time; that distinction goes to research. And the concomitant money (via "indirect costs") that it brings.
It's true that more administrators are being hired to deal with diversity issues. But there are other, additional, reasons that more administrators are being hired, for example:
-- a trend of universities caring more about completion rates, and hence hiring various people in non-faculty jobs to try to keep students on track.
-- Various "transition" programs; for example, my university runs a "University 101" program
Personally, I find the need for these programs a bit questionable, but their proponents have good arguments.
Overall, as a faculty member, my impression is that universities are expanding what they consider to be their sphere of responsibility -- which means hiring more administrators and staff.
>The goal now is to have students be molded into the right shapes that match the political winds of the day (thinking what must be thought).
Do you have any examples? I feel like I've seen this sentiment expressed before but I can't get a clear image of what people mean when they say something like this.
Generally cynically it means "because they aren't biased towards my politics and assumptions it is political" regardless of the facts on the ground in a field.
Really the closest to "molding" I have seen is more indirect from is a toxic culture of petty academic knife fights with obvious ulterior motives for trying to gin up scandals to get rid of competition for tenure. Like trying to oust a community college professor years later because he made Super Columbine Massacre RPG as a teenager as a satirical art game.
It's not clear because it's not very well-founded. There's a vague notion coming from the "alt-right" that universities are being taken over by neo-Marxist post-modernists. I think it's a simplistic rationalisation that some people find comforting or easy to believe somehow. The best data you can get to back is up is the fact that academics tend to be much more left-wing. But that's meaningless; academia might simply be much more appealing to someone with left wing values in the first place. Academics have always been left wing and both the hard sciences and the humanities are left wing.
It’s because of how universities have replaced vocational training. You want someone who will sit down and do what they’re told and only make noise if there’s a problem.
It was my impression that the goal to mold students into the right shapes was also being overwhelmingly driven by the administrators - granted, that might be a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle, but I do think that reducing administrative bloat would also reduce the rightthink creep.
I don't know about in the US, but that's not the case here. Generally the trends that the appointments are following here are not political so much as "business", and I use the term loosely (thus the quotes) - it's not generally things that are all that popular in businesses but more "business bureaucracy". So we wind up with a Deputy Vice Chancellor for the Leveraging of Core Competences (I exaggerate, but only slightly).
Your comment may be true specifically in a few places but frankly it sounds like cartoonish "torn from the headlines" right-wing sour grapes more than an accurate depiction of what's going on in academia.
