You know there are too many administrators when even The Nation argues there are too many administrators.* More importantly, though, everyone regardless of political bent is against “administrators” in the abstract but almost no one lists which administrators should be on the chopping block. Too few articles and polemicists say, “These are the 100 positions I’d eliminate at the University of Washington.” If a school decided to fire its “Diversity” department in the name of cost cutting, The Nation would be the first publication screaming about racism and institutional indifference and the betrayal of high-need populations. Everyone rails about administrators, but no one has concrete plans to halt their proliferation.

Consider UC-Berkeley’s “Vice Chancellor’s Office for Equity & Inclusion;” perhaps UC-Berkeley doesn’t need seven “equity and inclusion” teams or 17 employees in the Vice Chancellor’s Office for Equity & Inclusion.** The staff includes several financial analysts and a graphic designer exclusive to that office. California’s public salary database shows that that graphic designer earned $75,800 in 2014. The Development Director earns $109,000. The Executive Assistant earns $91,400. The Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion earns $209,000 a year. And so on. But UC-Berkeley will probably never cut this department (maybe that’s a Good Thing).

One sees this elsewhere. At Marymount Manhattan College, last week I got an email about a “Change of Title IX Coordinator.” That’s another part of one administrator’s job that didn’t exist decades ago. In addition, the email says the school “undertook an assessment of how best to comply with evolving federal and state legislation.” Which is another way of saying, “We spent a bunch of time and man hours.” Followed, since this is a large, modern organization, by numerous email followups. There were also “mandated student, faculty, and staff trainings” (emphasis added). Maybe that work is good and maybe it isn’t, but it’s still indicative of the time and energy and activities that otherwise hated administrators are doing.

(Title IX, by the way, is the subject of Laura Kipnis’s hilarious, expensive Title IX inquisition. I wouldn’t blame you if you left this somewhat dry article to read her funnier, ribald essay.)

I don’t want to pick on any particular school or even the education industry specifically. Regulatory compliance costs are increasing in virtually all industries, including the financial industry (link goes to a PDF) and many others. We rarely consider the systematic effects of regulatory compliance and instead think of each particular regulation / requirement in isolation. Nonetheless, when we get a lot of regulatory and other mandatory or optional costs together, we see the need for more lawyers, bureaucrats, administrators, and other people who all need to be paid and who have to be at least somewhat good at abstract thinking, writing, and statistics.

To be sure, the presidents and so forth making $500,000 or more per year is obscene on its face, but those are a relatively small number of positions, and, while I agree that college presidents should behave more like part of the university and less like corporate titans, I’m not sure that a small number of overly paid people is the biggest problem. I am sure that the next time I see someone announcing that we need to first fire all the administrators I’ll send them this post and get nothing in response.

* But here’s one, alternate explanation.

** Much of this post and its research came from a friend, who gave me permission to publish it.