The best economics post you'll read in a while: Stanley Fish, uber-intellectual, asserts that academic administrators are paid more than faculty because they work harder and more effectively. King at SCSU Scholars replies au contraire, Deconstruction-Breath: they get paid more because of a compensating differential!

Comments

[Steve Margolis]

Fish is actually making two mistakes. First, as King and Lee note, he has ignored the matter of compensating differentials. Second, he repeats a mistake that he made in an earlier Chronicle article, confounding marginal and total values. In introductory economics classes, we work hard at teaching this distinction. We succeed with about the top two-thirds of our students.

In this article, Fish's confusion about marginal and average values is revealed in this: "[W]ere the administrators to disappear, they [the faculty] would not be able to put one food in front of the other." But the economic issue is seldom whether or not we should have any of something, it is how much of that something we should have. In this case, the question isn't whether we should have administration at all, it's whether we should have a little more or a little less. The total value of administration is, as Fish argues, quite large, but the marginal value can still be small, even negative.

I was a department head for seven years that ended last June. They were very good years. Judging from my experience, we would be better off with less administration.

I'm sorry to read about new administrators who find the faculty to be childish and narcissistic. Their lives as administrators will be hard. They will soon leave unless they are paid a lot. Your job as an administrator is to work closely with faculty and help them to pursue their professional objectives. Those things are rewarding if you respect your colleagues but are difficult and unpleasant if you hold them in contempt.

Let's hope they're just lying, figuring it will keep their salaries up.