and gay and lesbian studies in the wake of external and internal pressures associated with corresponding social movements. Also opposed by some faculty for not having a proper academic basis, these have nevertheless become standard features on many university and college campuses. Combined internal and external forces have most recently produced a growth of programs and departments in environmental studies.
Among the great paradoxes of administrative accretion is that all kinds of fortunes—both good and bad—provide motives for increasing it. In good times the motives seem self-evident. They call for increases in administrative staffs for newly forming research institutes; augmentation of counseling; financial aid and other student services; establishing and expanding sponsored research offices to capitalize on expanding opportunities; and beefing up development and fund-raising staffs to exploit expanding opportunities. Bad times would seem to call for shrinkage of administration, but it does not shrink. In the “new depression” (Cheit 1971) of the 1970s and 1980s, which involved shrinking enrollments and shrinking sources of support, the rate of growth of administrative personnel between the decade from 1975 and 1985 was 60 percent, while the growth of faculty was only 6 percent (Zemsky, Wegner, and Massey 2005). Why should a period of relative poverty call for such expansion? The main causes are increased pressures to gain a competitive edge in seeking students, securing financial aid, private gifts, and state support—all diminishing but, as a result, calling for greater investment in staff simultaneously to squeeze out what can be squeezed under the circumstances. Administering organizational cuts also calls for staff time in determining what these might be and how to deal with resistances to them. As a result of this paradox, there seems to be no time in the history of colleges and universities that does not call for some kinds of new administrative staff, whether to maximize gains or minimize losses.
Such are the major lines of structural accretions that have in the long run created the multiversity, or the distinctive American “bundle” referred to by Parsons (1973). The process has been realized mainly in the universities, largely because they are less constrained by law and tradition from expanding, and because external sponsoring agencies choose universities on account of their relatively unconstrained ability to take on new activities and because they are, by knowledge and reputation, “the best.” Donors, foundations, governments, and businesses prefer to choose “the best” to maximize the success of their own funding.
The accretion principle has also affected other segments of higher education, though less so than the universities, by mechanisms, as follows.
State colleges, many of them having evolved from teachers’ colleges, have had a long history of competition with and emulation of the state’s universities. This has taken the form of changing their names to “state universities”; striving for equity in teaching loads, salaries, and sabbatical relief; building research into their programs; and adding advanced degree programs (though most are excluded legally from offering the doctorate and some professional degrees). Many of these efforts involve adding programs and units, and thus constitute accretions. Status striving is the main engine: universities compete with one another for external sources as a means of expanding their activities, programs, and standing; state universities compete with universities to approach status equality. The long-standing striving of the polytechnics to gain parity with the universities in the United Kingdom is a conspicuous example from abroad.
Accretion in the community colleges is still another variant. As mainly public institutions they have traditionally been restricted to two-year degree programs (and prohibited from offering others), though some have succeeded in converting to four-year colleges, and many states now permit granting of baccalaureate degrees by community colleges—an accretion. Research at the community college level has been minimal. The main form of accretion has been curricular: continuing to offer preparatory liberal-arts transfer programs but expanding their curricula—typically in response to market opportunities and demands and the political influence of localities exercised directly and through governing boards—to offer more specialized vocational courses (Griffith and Connor 1994). The expansion of “preparation for life” courses without abandoning the other lines of instruction is a further example. Within each of three general categories, programs and units are added as demands or opportunities arise.
In addition to proliferation within organizations, the failure to abandon what has been added in the past is an essential ingredient of accretion. This is not a feature unique to educational institutions—organizational inertia is real and alive everywhere—but it is extreme in educational institutions, and it is important to understand why. I offer of the following considerations:
There exists no ready mechanism for “going out of business” in the academy, as is possible through the mechanism of failure in commercial markets. Public institutions traditionally have been recipients of annually appropriated block grants from state governments as their main financial support, with varying degrees of control over specific programs or units within them. State governments are reluctant to let the institutions they have formed go out of business; it is difficult to imagine any one of the fifty states of the union deciding to junk one of “their” institutions—much less, the flagship university of the state—rational though that may be on administrative or economic grounds. Legislatures meddle in the administration of their institutions, but they are reluctant to kill them. Private institutions are governed more autonomously, though governing boards have also been reluctant to shut them down unless extreme economic conditions make it absolutely necessary.
We must also point to the institution of academic tenure. Insofar as an academic unit involves tenured faculty as members, this constitutes a barrier to elimination. Tenure as an institution refers primarily to academic freedom, though over time it has accumulated the element of permanent job security. It is, in principle, legal and acceptable to terminate tenured faculty when units are eliminated (below, pp. 111-12). This occurs, but with great reluctance on the part of administrators, who either avoid the possibility or find places for tenured faculty in other units. The consequence is that “[tenure] inhibits managerial flexibility in moving faculty and changing academic institutions” (Rhoades 1998: 84). We will return to other aspects of academic tenure later.
A third reason arises from a set of social science axioms that apply especially to academic institutions. The logic is as follows: if you take on a new function, you must add new a new structure to perform it (an organized research unit, an administrative division, a special office); if you create a structure you also create a group of people to staff it; and if you create a group, you also create a new constituency, one which, typically, includes as one its primary interests its own survival and enhancement. By this logic the process of proliferation of functions also generates internal political constituencies. These press their interests through strategies of argument, influence, and stonewalling, mainly in budget-preparing and budget-renewing seasons. It is a final part of this axiomatic system that administrators, for reasons of political survival, tend not to go in for outright killing of units but to shave around the edges. In hard times you stop cutting the grass, but you don’t cut the faculty. Summarizing the patterns of cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, with many periods of budgetary adversity, Altbach cites the reluctance to alter drastically programs or priorities and instead to make broad, general cuts:[S]upport staff were eliminated and maintenance was deferred. A hiring freeze was put into place, salaries were frozen, and part-time teachers replaced full-time faculty. Libraries were unable to buy books, and journal collections were cut. Yet only a handful of colleges or universities violated the tenure of senior faculty. Departments were seldom eliminated, even where enrollments were low. Administrators tried to “protect the faculty,” even at the expense of rational planning or institutional development. A few of the weakest private colleges merged or closed. Virtually no public institutions were closed, even where campus closures or mergers would have been in the best interests of the statewide system. (2001: 34)
As an external advisor to Yale social sciences in the 1990s, I witnessed that university’s effort to eliminate, selectively, several “problematic” academic departments evolve first into a significant faculty revolt and then into
