CONTEMPLATING SOME NEW FRIDAY AWARDS. A morning drive-time show on a Milwaukee radio station includes a weekly sports feature titled Winners, Whiners, and Losers. An Inside Higher Ed commentary titled The Overworked College Administrator merits consideration for the "loser" category in that the writer doesn't identify her employer, but it is this weeks winner in the "whiner" category.

I suspect that the aversion to open discussion of administrators’ workload might be that such an acknowledgment contradicts the image of universities and perhaps of nonprofits in general as humane, caring institutions, where thoughtful deliberation, rather than wild-eyed speed, is the norm. Yet, my colleagues and I race around frantically, fragmented and frustrated by the number of committee assignments we have (yes, we are as “committeed” out as faculty are); by the hours of “pre-work” required for all the mandatory, yet largely irrelevant and often redundant, training sessions we must sit through; by the endless meetings large and small that put us even further behind than we would have been had we been feverishly producing at our desks; by the arcanely complicated bureaucratic paperwork we must complete, and the dozens of e-mails and telephone calls we are required to respond to each day, including weekends. And although we seldom have sufficient staff, we must mentor, direct, supervise, discipline and employ complicated processes to evaluate whatever staff, student workers, or interns we are fortunate enough to have snagged.

Spare me. Let's break this down. "Humane, caring institutions." What's that Adam Smith passage about not trusting the person who claims to act in the interest of others? Come off it. "Committeed out?" So take a careful look at the committees. Is a stationery committee really necessary? Presidential-level committees on the status of every sufficiently well-organized grievance lobby? A Dean of Chemical Dependency? (We pause while the Superintendent sings Nine Coronas.) "Mandatory, irrelevant, redundant training sessions?" Mandated? By whom? Somebody within the university? Turf them out. By the Government? And the academy is the training ground for Big Government? Check your premises. Irrelevant? So declare them non-productive, and tell the trustees you've found a way to run the university more cheaply. "Arcanely complicated?" Who did the complicating? "Endless meetings?" Work is what we do between meetings. Read and understand Munger's First Law of Time Allocation.

The number of administrators in higher education has grown steadily from 44,700 over the past decade or so. If there are more of us to do the work, why do we feel so overburdened? For one thing, colleges are educating more students and hiring more faculty — many of them part timers — to teach them. Seventeen million students and about 1.4 million faculty members are served and supported by about 800,000 administrators and professional staff, who recruit and evaluate the students, determine, coordinate, and award them financial aid, produce catalogs, now in print and online, schedule their courses, register them for classes, process their records, and oversee their daily lives. Administrators supervise the building and maintenance of additional classrooms, dormitories, and cafeterias in which to teach, house, and feed all these students. We write and review faculty contracts, calculate their paychecks and oversee their benefits (different for full-time and contract faculty), advertise their courses and special lectures, and keep track of academic department business.

Catch that Divine Passive, "has grown steadily." I repeat: a Dean of Chemical Dependency?? (Na-na-na-Nine Coronas) The essayist has here fallen into the "Washington Monument" trap. If readers think about the dietitian or the maintenance supervisor or the software installer as administrators, perhaps they'll think more kindly about the Dean of Chemical Dependency or the assorted directors of identity-politics centers or the managers of retention ponds, purveyors of crying towels, and assessors of the obvious who constitute, well, it's hard to improve on Thomas Jefferson, "a multitude of New Offices, and ... swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance." Work is what we do between meetings. Alternatively, with the expansion of administrative staffs comes an expanded effort by those staffs to justify their existence. That's Parkinson's Law. Did Dean Wormer at Faber College need a Dean of Chemical Dependency? "Fat, dumb, and drunk is no way to go through life, son." A Dean of Chemical Dependency has to identify the addicts and then come up with programs to "retain" them. A diversity hustler has to identify "oppression" and then be "proactive" at ending it. Work expands ...

The essayist would have us believe that this administrative expansion is somehow socially necessary.

Not only is the student population bigger, it is diverse, which often calls for customization. For example, adult learners, whose numbers have grown enormously over the past twenty years, might need schedules that differ from those of younger students, usually eschew campus living, and favor online classes or those held at satellite campuses more convenient to their jobs or homes. Administrators must arrange all of this.

Please. We have had urban universities and vocational-technical schools and community colleges that exist for this purpose for a long time. And again, catch the Divine Passive. "Numbers have grown enormously." Why? Because elementary schools failed to develop middle-class life-management skills? Because high schools failed to challenge? Because the first time through college was in a Nine Coronas haze?

A suggestion: think, carefully, about your core mission. Is it to be a selective research university with a rigorous curriculum? Don't apologize for not being an open-admissions college that offers second or third or n-th chances. If your mission is to offer those chances, be upfront in recruiting your faculty. Whatever the mission, support your faculty and reinforce their efforts when those efforts advance the mission.