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From an op-ed at Harvard Crimson (via Marginal Revolution):
[snip]
I enjoyed reading the article, and as someone not at all affiliated with Harvard I am happy to argue against some of the ideas the author expressed.
Firstly, a quibble about facts:
Yes, the sticker-prize tuition at Harvard has grown, as it has at other private colleges. But the question ought to be: do students actually pay more? According to College Scorecard, students [1] pay on average just under $14,000 per year--for everything, including living expenses. I don't have comparable data for 1986, but that's lower than the median for 4-year US colleges (which is around $19,500).
One may argue that all US colleges have bloated administration and thus increased cost, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But at least let's acknowledge that, regarding actual cost of attendance, Harvard seems to be doing better when compared not just to its peers but the set of all accredited US 4-year institutions.
Now, for the challenge that the author kindly provides:
I don't know any actual specifics, but I am willing to bet (a modest amount) that at some point in the past decade there were student protests at Harvard regarding the choice of art on display. Probably the protests involved non-white students, or people speaking on behalf of non-white students, and their main objection was something like: people of color don't feel welcome at this institution because all the prominently-displayed portraits are of white people. Likely some professors were part of the protesters.
Whatever your opinions are as to the validity of the protesters' claim that the choice of art affects non-white students, the protests themselves would be disruptive and/or stimulating to the educational experience. The president's response to create the task-force on the issue has calmed the protests (taking away the disruptive aspect ) while taking seriously the vocal minority's concerns. For those who found the protests stimulating to the educational experience (which includes acquisition and polish of social norms, and not merely subject matter studied in one's classes), the president's response models how one goes about addressing strongly-expressed concerns over some issue of institutional inertia.
It's still reasonable to ask: was the process that the president cost-effective in achieving its objectives? I would love to see someone try to analyze that! In my experience, service on such committees isn't directly compensated, though it does suck up substantial time. Like, did those six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators have better things to do? They were either on that committee because they were deeply interested in the issue (the students and faculty), or because they were the nine administrators. Did those administrators have languishing tasks which would have actually been more important to address than calming down vocal protesters current and future? Will that new administrative post be filled by an already-existing Harvard employee, or are they actually hiring a brand-new administrator?
Inquiring minds kinda want to know.
[1] At least, students who filled out FAFSA and received any federal financial aid.
It's worth pointing out that Twitter is still fully operational two weeks after losing some huge percentage of its staff.
People on this very board were calling for near-certain failure due to key staff leaving. And while it's too early to say definitely, I think it's not too early to start updating in the direction that no, these staff were not in fact necessary to the continued operation of Twitter.
I'd imagine that the administrators of a university are even more unnecessary.
Software is fundamentally no different than other kinds of industrial endeavor when it comes to the infrastructure. It's fundamentally a blue-collar profession for people who desperately want to pretend it isn't. Pays the same, too (boom towns skew this average though).
In both industries, it takes an order of magnitude more people to construct something than it does to maintain it, but the people who maintain it are a trade unto themselves. The software industry calls them "developer operators" (to be fair, in most companies there's nothing "developer" about them... but the corruption of the term doesn't dismiss what it was fundamentally made to describe); the real world calls them "millwrights".
The bottleneck in development is ultimately how parallelizable the work is, which is why software companies that employ a lot of developers have to grow breadth-first (it's very difficult to justify throwing 10 people at a simple API; you need 10 "areas of concern" and they all need to be slowly growing). The developer's favorite line is "like asking 9 women to make a baby in one month" for this exact reason.
However, software is unique in that the operators of the system work remotely for free. So you actually can fire every single one of your local operations staff that aren't relevant to the fundamental operation of the system and still make just as much money in a pinch; yeah, you run the risk of losing institutional knowledge when it comes to improving or modifying the system... but Twitter (nor any company in dire financial straits) doesn't need to do that, so it's the first thing to go (after the sinecures).
I take a different opinion of this: the sinecure positions are there because they're important to fundraising. If some Blue-leaning rich dude wants to change the world, well, "change the world" is what the university is selling. But they're not very good at changing the world because R&D is hard, and all the things that could make a real difference are banned, so the only thing they even have to sell is social change. And "if you can help pay our admin's salary, we'll help shape our graduates in the political direction of your choosing" is something that will get people to open their wallets.
Besides, what else are the rich going to do? Venture capital? That's risky and has the same problems. By contrast, paying people with the power to fail the next generation if they refuse to DIE has a demonstrably positive return on investment.
And that's why the claims about Twitter going down just made no sense to me. If the engineers were good and they made a stable system, they would not be necessary for the continued stability of that system. If the engineers were bad and made an unstable system, then good riddance surely.
However, on the issue of improvements, I'd also like to note that, as a Twitter user, the rate of improvements to the system has actually increased since Musk took over. What I'm not seeing is a lot of people updating their priors based on Musk's success. Perhaps it's natural to stick one's heads in the sand and think "not me - I am necessary".
this is just wrong. one of the big reasons why is scaling and new features are very significant changes to the system. twitter would need much less reliability work if there wasn't any new code being deployed, or anything being scaled up. but neither of those are true.
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They all have financial (a business' bad heuristics as to your necessity is to your advantage) or political (wokes mad their jannies aren't in charge no more) to pretend they don't know (or exaggerate/lie if they do).
Why would they speak out to their detriment?
(Meanwhile, the people taking advantage of this information are not posting about it, either because they're preparing layoffs of their own, because they're trying to acquire labor at a relative discount, or because they're too busy otherwise.)
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