The politics of information: Problem definition and the course of public policy in America
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چکیده
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, law professor Campos (2015) drew attention to the troubling problem of rising tuition costs at public universities in the United States, which have quadrupled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past 35 years. Although the piece generated much debate about its questionable headline claim that state appropriations to public higher education have actually increased (for contrasting data, see The College Board, 2014), a more defensible secondary point that Campos makes is that much of the rise of higher education spending is being driven by the well-known expansion of academic administration (for a trenchant critique, see for example, Ginsberg, 2013). As Campos notes, ‘administrative positions ... grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009’, compared with far more modest growth in tenure-track faculty. Whereas some significant part of this growth is linked to rising administrative salaries, a quite consequential part of this picture is the marked growth in the number of programs that colleges and universities are expected to administer. As an investigative report by Marcus (2014) put it, ‘since 1987, universities have also started or expanded departments devoted to marketing, diversity, disability, sustainability, security, environmental health, recruiting, technology, and fundraising, and added new majors and graduate and athletics programs, satellite campuses, and conference centers’. Importantly, programs like these are the kind that one might expect from a modern university that is accountable to its stakeholders: expanding support systems for students, improving a university’s commitment to limiting its environmental impact, complying with federal reporting and disclosure requirements, and providing access to high-quality research and teaching technologies. Many of these follow from the university’s interest in remaining open, engaged and participatory. Moreover, as these programs are put into place, they generate new flows of information that tend to make administrative growth self-reinforcing: Information demands action. For universities, action means new task forces, committees, monitoring programs, and staff positions.
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تاریخ انتشار 2015