A few months ago, one of the New York Times’ columnists, David Brooks, wrote a column that I think is pertinent to recent developments at Wellesley. 

Brooks is one of the Times’ center-right writers, and so is often scorned both by the Times’ more liberal readers as well as conservative non-Times readers. Brooks sometimes acts as a pop sociologist, which is fun when he’s onto something and, as the kids (used to?) say, “cringe” when he’s not. This time I think he was onto something.  

Brooks’ theme was the bureaucratization of American society. He argued that the situation is “especially grave” in academia, where administrators of various stripes are being hired at rates many times those of the faculty. The consequences of hiring more administrators, Brooks argued, are straightforward: “The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control . . .” Administrators by their nature create new rules and controls, so the result is increasing regulation of all kinds of student, faculty and staff endeavors. 

Does this sound a bit like what’s going on recently at Wellesley? (And, I might add, at colleges and universities around the country in their handling of the Gaza protests?) I’ll note just a few indicators:

• We learned that student services administrators had created their own system for disciplining students, completely bypassing the College’s honor code process.

• Student services administrators also seem to control the student elections. Apparently in student elections the winners are announced but not the vote totals. When students recently voted to ask that the vote totals be released for one type of election, the administrators refused.   
• I am not aware of a crime wave at Wellesley, given that it is located in a prosperous, low-crime suburb, but key cards have been added to just about every building entrance, apparently in the interest of security, but also potentially allowing the College to track everyone’s movements on campus. (Meanwhile I’m told faculty, staff and students at MIT successfully pushed back against a similar keycard system there.)

I can assure students that this phenomenon also affects faculty, though in more subtle ways. Some examples include myriad “training sessions” for faculty and staff, greater centralization and regulation of the budgeting process for academic departments (whose total budget is a small fraction of that of the College), a profusion of forms and rules and the ever-growing use of Workday as an orderly, centralizing tool for documenting all activities and decisions on campus.  I’m sure students, faculty and staff could add many more examples to this list. 

None of these rules, processes or controls are arbitrary or badly intended. They are perfectly rational and defensible. Mostly the rules, controls and processes are aimed at controlling risks – ensuring that the College and its inhabitants are safe from any danger, be it legal, physical, mental, budgetary or political. The honor code process, for example, is revered, but also, because it is participatory and “amateur,” has the potential for going off the rails and creating greater controversy. An administrator who desires to keep things quiet — and not have the story of the disciplinary processes land in The New York Times — would much prefer to wrest control from an institution at least partially run by faculty and students.  

My concern is that for administrators, controlling risk can become the paramount objective, one that overrides all other considerations. If you’re an administrator in charge of security, and something bad happens in a campus building that could have had a keycard, you might well be blamed. If you’re the College’s lawyer, and a lawsuit is brought that lands in the media and distresses some donors, people will wonder if you did enough to prevent it. If anything unfortunate happens to a student — an injury, an altercation, a suicide attempt — the first question will be, is the College somehow liable because of some administrative failure? So the impulse is to scour the campus, looking for every potential source of risk and irregularity, and then create a rule or process or control that, whatever its other effects, reduces the risk.    

This campaign of risk reduction is particularly tempting because the tradeoffs seem, both to the administrator, as well as to many students and faculty, minor. Is it really such a big deal if the more sensitive cases of student discipline are taken away from the honor code committee? Do students really have to know the vote totals in student elections? What’s the problem with using your keycard everywhere on campus? Why can’t faculty, those prima donnas, be expected to sit through a few training sessions? 

But while each individual decision may seem minor, I’m convinced that cumulatively all this administrating, controlling, regulating and processing has serious costs. (On this point, I am tempted, as an academic, to quote two of my favorite social scientists, Max Weber and Alexis de Toqueville, at some length, but I will restrain myself.) Bureaucratization undermines the sense of community and fellowship on campus, because freedoms that were exercised together — to make honor code decisions as a community, to mourn or celebrate a thumping election victory, to get a drink at the student pub! — are curtailed. Bureaucratization undermines creativity and individuality.  

Most of all, bureaucratization treats everyone on campus as children. Sometimes we — and I include faculty in this as well — do in fact act like children, and bumble in ways that can create costs and dangers for the College. But do we want to design campus life around every possible lapse in judgment? To do so, Brooks writes, is to amplify the view that people “are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid” and so “need administrators to run their lives.” It is a perspective that fears rather than applauds initiative-taking. That seems to me at odds with the great tradition of the liberal arts.

I don’t have a simple solution. Again, there are always plausible rationales for every rule that is imposed. Administrators can almost always tell a great story about why they should be in charge. Still, I would urge everyone on campus to at least consider pushing back against the way we are slowly, rule by rule, bureaucratizing campus life.