Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on February 21, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission.
The University of Florida employs one administrator for every four undergrad students, according to an analysis by The College Fix.
The Fix analyzed data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and found the public university in Gainesville added 1,000 new administrator jobs in the past 10 years.
In the 2022-23 school year, the university employed 7,376 administrators, or 250 per 1,000 undergraduate students, a 12 percent increase from a decade prior. By comparison, the university’s enrollment grew by just three percent during the same time period.
The University of Florida employed 6,745 administrators and support staff employees in the 2013-14 school year. This includes student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, and legal and other non-academic departments. This worked out to 223 administrators per 1,000 students.
Florida State University is similar in size to the University of Florida – but FSU employs one administrator for every ten undergraduate students.
This administrative overhead includes the university’s public relations team, none of whom responded to multiple emailed requests for comment sent in the past weeks.
Director of Communications Brittany Wise did not respond to four emails and a voicemail left in the past six weeks that asked for comment on administrative growth.
Vice President for Communications James Wegmann and Associate Vice President for Communications Steve Orlando did not respond to four emails sent in the past month that asked for comment on the administrative growth. The Fix also asked if President Ben Sasse had plans to look into cutting positions and for any additional context on the data.
Some of this administrative overhead is related to the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, though this may be headed to reversal.
The latest data shows that UF’s DEI initiatives consisted of the equivalent of 24 full-time employees. DEI initiatives cost the university $5.3 million, $3.3 million of which is state funded.
Chief Diversity Officer Marsha McGriff made $300,000 per year as of November 2022, according to public records.
Last year, Florida’s university system announced its intentions to revise DEI initiatives.
More can be done, political scientist says
A political scientist who researches DEI said the public university is making some changes.
“UF has made progress, especially in building alternatives to DEI programming. It has invested significantly into the Hamilton Center, which appears to be a model academic center for classical education in the country,” Scott Yenor with the Claremont Institute told The Fix via email.
“The system is also changing its general education requirements to better rid core courses of obviously partisan left-wing academic departments,” the Boise State University professor said.
“UF’s central DEI office has also changed hands too,” he said. “Its former DEI Provost has left the university.”
Other changes are “cosmetic,” Yenor said. For example, the law school’s “Asst. Dean of Faculty Diversity and Community Relations is now Asst. Dean for Experiential Learning & Engagement,” he told The Fix.
He had similar criticism of the pledge by 28 Florida university presidents to cut DEI, calling it “quite modest.”
“Nothing in the statement cuts to the core of decisively ending wokeness in higher education,” Yenor wrote for Newsweek in February 2023.
“There were no promises to even trim the number of DEI administrators,” he wrote. “Neither are efforts to recalibrate curricula mentioned.”
“That such proverbial table scraps stir conservative hopes is a sign of desperation after decades of ineffectual reforms to higher education. For anything to actually change, a much bolder approach is needed.”
Photo by Jillian Cain — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 96562792
This is another one of those false numbers. It takes the number of administrators for both Graduate and Undergraduate programs and compares it to the number of undergraduate students. It is just a bad use of statistics to generate outrage.
This is actually better than Stanford and some others, where the number of administrators exceed the number of students!
The ratio may even be higher than this because there often are a lot of faculty who get “release time” for administrative and quasi administrative posts.
There are two easy ways to detect it — first, is the professor on more than one budget line? Does the annual payroll amount provided by the campus differ from the amount provided by the system office. Most institutions will only print one check and the database you want is the one used to print checks because it will combine all the other amounts.
The other way to look at it is in terms of “release time.” Professors are expected to teach a certain number of courses per semester, it varies widely, and there are two ways to teach less. First you can “buy” release time out of your grant — you are the PI and one of the things you put in there is paying the university whatever it wants for you not to have to teach a class (or even any classes at all). It’s a set sum that varies from department and institution and is largely based on what they’d have to pay for someone else to teach the course and (in the case of an adjunct) theoretically supervise the adjunct.
You can also have release time AWARDED to you — the rationale is that you are doing some sort of admin work for the university, time that you could instead be teaching, so you are released from teaching a class as compensation.
This is common amongst department chairs — you could probably teach 2-3 classes in the time you spend breaking up fights amongst your collegues not to mention everything else. I’ve also seen departments with a rotating chair with a rotating stipend — no one wants the job, so hey, we all get KP in turn.
What you want to watch for are OTHER release times, particularly for DEI subjects. Outreach. Enhancement. Intervention, Etc…. The nice thing about doing it this way is (a) the professor has tenure and the related protections while (b) the person also shows up as a professor.
THE OTHER THING AT PLAY HERE is the conversion of colleges into indoctrination centers, with the replacement of Pedagogy with Psychological Treatment.
In addition to everything else, you need a vastly greater number of staff to facilitate the latter because where pedagogy involves the student thinking and learning on his own, psychological treatment requires that the student only be permitted to think “approved” things and be forced to regect “bad thoughts.”
Just sayn…