Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University (Oxford UP, 2013). (Link.)
There are three big problems with Ginsberg's book.
First and foremost is its lack of connection to any story of neoliberalism in and around HE. Take the Bayh-Dole analysis for example. It's pithy, punchy, and memorable, with its talk of "triple dipping" (public direct support, indirect cost capture, and patents) and the "scientific anti-commons." But Bayh-Dole didn't appear out of nowhere, and Ginsberg has no account of its roots. Nor really does he have an account of the erosion of public support for state schools, rise in tuition, taking on of institutional debt, etc.
Second, he doesn't really look at different sectors of US HE; many of his examples are mix-and-match anecdotes from private and public schools -- Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, and Chicago cheek-by-jowl with stories from Tennessee, Michigan, and regional publics.
Third, while he now and again discusses admin preference for cheap and disposable labor as driving rise in NTT hiring, he doesn't connect the last dot and look at GTA labor. He thus takes a wrong turn (IMO, of course) with his line about "overproduction" of PhDs, without distinguishing people looking for clinical or industry work, and without discussing admin destruction of demand for TT hires caused by GTA and NTT labor, instead using the telltale "jobs available" formulation -- as soon as I see that I think the author hasn't thought the issue through properly. For me it's not (alleged over-)supply of humanities PhDs that's the problem, it's the (under-)demand for TT (or even good NTT) jobs that's the problem.
So yes, for sure, the examples he collects are outrageous, but without the political economy framework there's nothing here that a reasonably attentive faculty member won't have picked up by observation after a few years. It's a good overview and a good collection of stories of administrative takeover, with some statistical analysis here and there. It should be read by graduate students and new faculty, but it can't compare with the explanatory power of Chris Newfield's books (link and link), which remain the gold standard.
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