"The Fall of the Faculty"

9/2/2011: is a much talked about book by Benjamin Ginsberg at Johns Hopkins on the growing power of administrators. He has a long summary in the Washington Monthly:

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational
institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325
billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has
remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students
per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the
administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one
administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional
staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the
like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student
ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students
while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every
twenty-one students.  …

Before they employed an army of professional staffers, administrators
were forced to rely on the cooperation of the faculty to carry out tasks
ranging from admissions to planning. An administration that lost the
confidence of the faculty might find itself unable to function. Today,
ranks of staffers form a bulwark of administrative power in the
contemporary university. These administrative staffers do not work for
or, in many cases, even share information with the faculty. They help
make the administration, in the language of political science,
“relatively autonomous,” marginalizing the faculty.