How Students Are Furthering Academe's Corporatization: By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to diversity problems, they are empowering administrations at the expense of the faculty.

By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to diversity problems, they are empowering administrations at the expense of the faculty.

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This past fall, the Core Strike Collective, a collection of student groups at Bryn Mawr College, submitted a list of 16 demands to the college administration. At the top was a call for mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training for students, faculty, and staff. The students, insisting on robust “quantitative and qualitative assessments,” asked for a data dashboard to track 38 proposed equity metrics concerning recruitment, retention, and financing.

Demands for diversity training and other DEI initiatives such as bias-response teams have been central to student protests against racial injustice since 2015 and have only proliferated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Many student demands have been framed in terms of resisting capitalism, corporate logic, and labor exploitation. The Core Strike Collective called out Bryn Mawr as “a corporation that poses itself as an educational institution.” Indeed, the University of Virginia scholars Rose Cole and Walter Heinecke applaud recent student activism as a “site of resistance to the neoliberalization of higher education” that offers a “blueprint for a new social imaginary in higher education.”

But this assessment gets things backward. By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to execute their vision, replete with bullet-pointed action items and measurable outcomes, student activists are only strengthening the neoliberal “all-administrative university” — a model of higher education that privileges market relationships, treats students as consumers and faculty as service providers, all under the umbrella of an ever-expanding regime of bureaucratization. Fulfilling student DEI demands will weaken academe, including, ironically, undermining more meaningful diversity efforts.

The rampant growth of the administration over the years at the expense of faculty has been well documented. From 1987 to 2012 the number of administrators doubled relative to academic faculty. A 2014 Delta Cost Project report noted that between 1990 and 2012, the number of faculty and staff per administrator declined by roughly 40 percent. This administrative bloat has helped usher in a more corporate mind-set throughout academe, including the increased willingness to exploit low-paid and vulnerable...