OCAAUP President John McNay appeared on “WHIO Reports,” a local news show in Dayton, to discuss the issue of administrative bloat at Ohio’s public colleges and universities. McNay was joined by conservative Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, as well as Dayton Daily News reporter Josh Sweigart and host Jim Otte.

McNay used the opportunity to discuss the proliferation of administrative positions, noting that there is one administrator for every 14 students, and the ratio of administrators to full-time faculty is about one-to-one.

“McNay suggested that one way to contain runaway administrative bloat would be to have the legislature set a ratio of faculty to administrators, such as three faculty to each administrator. Vedder said the idea had merit.

Prof. Vedder said that the legislature is “abysmally ignorant” of what is going on at the universities and suggested that while no one wants the General Assembly to micromanage institutions, it has an oversight role.

Vedder went on to say that when administrators get more money in, because they are in charge of how it is spent, they choose to spend it on themselves and hiring more people that can assist them. McNay agreed and noted the findings of Benjamin Ginsberg in his book The Fall of the Faculty and the Rise of the All-Administrative University.

Josh Sweigart asked if faculty salaries were contributing to the rise in cost, but McNay noted that raises barely have kept up with inflation.

The show was followed up by a column in the Dayton Daily News about administrative bloat driving up costs and tuition, which I discussed in a previous post: https://academeblog.org/2015/09/20/a-newspaper-report-on-administrative-bloat-some-remarks-on-the-sum-of-the-details-and-on-some-of-the-specific-details/