Cut the Fat

Pick one person, at random, off Yale’s New Haven campus. Keep your eyes closed—don’t peek!—and ask them what it is they’re doing here. Incredibly, it’s just about as likely they’ll tell you they’re an administrator as an undergraduate student.

Yale has got a lot of non-academic staff on payroll. Some do important IT work, or clean the halls or feed the students—but around half, more than 6,000, are “managerial & professional,” or M&P, staff. Their duties are often decidedly more nebulous.

You can find M&P bureaucrats installed in every corner of every department at Yale. We’ve got a Center and an Office and a Committee and a Procedure and a Protocol, and oh my God, one million IRBs, for every single little thing.

And it’s not like all their work goes on only in the background—certainly not all these jobs are of the bullsh– variety. No, their impact can be felt.

For instance, sometime during our first couple weeks on campus, all freshmen were made to spend an hour and a half in a sex harassment training. A freshman counselor told me that he had sat through the same curriculum seven times. If I remember correctly, during my group’s training, we: one, learned that sex harassment and assault are bad, and that we shouldn’t do them; two, learned that if you do get sex harassed or assaulted, you should tell a bureaucrat or a cop about it; and three, performed skits about these kinds of scenarios.

What exactly was the point of participation in this program, much less sevenfold participation? Was there anyone in that room who planned to go around harassing and assaulting their classmates, without the understanding that it would be wrong to do so? What precisely could be gained by a 90-minute explication of that principle?

Research suggests that, in fact, almost nothing worthwhile is gained. Mandatory sexual misconduct trainings like these tend to have three big effects. First, they’re pretty good at convincing people that comments like “you look good in your jeans” are always inappropriate harassment—11 percent of participants think so before the training, and 20 percent after.

Second, they discourage women from reporting harassment—88 percent say they would do so before the training, and only 76 percent afterward. Apparently, they fear retaliation at a higher rate after sitting through a training session. This, I think, is not a shocking outcome for a program which is all about how common and scary sexual assault is on college campuses. Fear-mongering, as it turns out, mongers fear. 

Third, they make students angry. 63 percent of men react negatively to sexual misconduct training—they often feel like their gender is “unfairly targeted”—and so do 39 percent of women—they sometimes describe the experience as isolating. “[W]hen I walked in there, I was having a comfortable conversation with my neighbor who was a man and by the end it was like we were trying to distance our seats as much as we could from each other,” one woman told researchers.

All that is to say, harassment trainings help good-looking jeans-wearers to receive fewer compliments, women to feel more afraid of their classmates, and the campus community to become polarized against its administration and itself. On top of all that, everybody loses an hour and a half off their very finite lives—some, seven times that much—and Yale is out however many millions of dollars it took to design the curriculum, train the student workers, and more than generously compensate all involved.

Even outside of mandatory trainings like these, superfluous bureaucratic interference is inescapable at Yale.

Remember the performative male contest? Remember how cute, harmless, and fun it was? Five hundred students spent an afternoon outside, watching some goofballs drink matcha and pretend to read—how nice!

Do you also remember how the event’s organizers were reprimanded by the administration because they didn’t fill out all the right forms, and officially register themselves in all the right ways to be allowed to have a nice, fun, harmless time here at Yale?

This sort of wide-ranging fun-policing isn’t easy to pull off, it takes serious manpower. Recall our one-to-one undergrad student-to-bureaucrat ratio: we have more managerial and professional staff here than we do academic faculty, by a wide margin. And they don’t come cheap! Yale pays its M&P staff well, with generous benefits. Estimating, modestly, a $100,000 average M&P salary, plus around 30 percent in fringe benefits, those 6,274 bureaucrats likely cost us close to $800 million per annum. 

For reference, that’s 15 percent of the entire university’s operating budget.

It wasn’t always this way, back in 2003, Yale employed just 3,500 bureaucrats to 5,307 undergraduates. And in the olden days—when Old Campus dorms had operational fireplaces, and a Jewish person like me wasn’t allowed within fifty miles of New Haven—the bureaucracy was utterly negligible.

Where did it all come from? It’s hard to say for sure—maybe a general cultural shift toward safetyism. But whatever it was that kicked things off, it didn’t have to do much. Give one administrator even a modicum of power, and you risk beginning what I like to call the self-perpetuating doom loop of bureaucratic bloat.

In essence: bureaucracy will ever find new ways to create its own problems and justify its own existence. Take, for instance, the much-publicized—and I might add, just about only publicized—consequence of the Provost’s 90-day hiring freeze: the residential college pottery studios, left without a general manager, can’t open!

You might wonder just why they can’t open—after all, fully-trained student workers are standing by in each individual studio, and asking the same question. Well, answers the administration, it’s simply “Yale-wide policy to require a general manager.”

I would bet, at any odds, that whichever Committee on Procedural Policy Protocols in the Office of Managing and Professionalism made that rule, is headed by an individual with a title shockingly similar to “general manager.”

In fact, no matter the rules and protocols against it, I’m sure we could make do without the pottery general managers. Heck, I bet we could even find some way to consolidate those five hundred million different employees at the Title IX Office, SHARE, and OIEA who design and implement the trainings which appear mostly to scare young women out of reporting their abusers. Call me crazy, but somehow I doubt the incidence of assault would skyrocket if Yale was home to somewhat fewer than 26 different Deputy Title IX Coordinators!

The present budget crunch provides, in fact, a golden opportunity to cut short the self-perpetuating doom loop of bureaucratic bloat. Instead of curtailing faculty raises and forcing researchers to cut their non-salary budgets, maybe it’d be worth taking a closer look at the legions of less-than-useless M&Pers we have on payroll. 

Right now, all the most important, most fundamental functions of the university—the learning and the research we do here—are being sacrificed, in order to preserve purely time-wasting jobs and institutions. Why not cut the superfluous nonsense instead?