ASU responds to Goldwater charges

by David Safier

Earlier today I criticized the media for covering the Goldwater Institute's report about the growth of administration at universities before anyone had a chance to read the report thoroughly, since it was just released today. Maybe, I said, based on G.I.'s history, some of the facts and figures in the report were distorted and misrepresented, and someone who knows how to critique research reports would discover problems.

Remember that G.I. still maintains that Bus Drivers are Bureaucrats, I reminded the press. Based on G.I.'s past history, maybe a bit of academic review of this report is in order.

Well, ASU has come out with a scathing response to the G.I. report. I don't know if ASU's analysis is completely accurate, but I know that it would give the Star and other papers some reasons to be skeptical about G.I.'s conclusions.

The ASU critique is long and involved. Here's a thumbnail summary of a few points.

• The G.I. report takes two employee categories listed separately by the database it relies on, Executive/administrative/managerial and Other professional (support/service), and lumps them together as "administration." The second category includes "academic advisors, financial aid counselors, career counselors, reference librarians, laboratory staff and literally hundreds of people who have nothing to do with the management of the institution." Those positions are rarely referred to as "administrators."
• The starting point of the G.I. report is before the computers and the internet became such a powerful force. Since then, a number of secretarial and technical jobs were eliminated since, for example, routine typing and general office work were less needed. The G.I. report doesn't include those job cuts in its figures.
• In the case of ASU, the report's starting date was 1993, when the support spending was "significantly lower than in either the preceding or following years." The ending date is 2007 when the "institutional support spending was significantly higher than the years preceding or following." This exaggerated the differences in spending.

There are other points, but I'll stop there.

Is ASU right on all counts and G.I. wrong? Honestly, I don't know. But this is exactly the kind of careful response that was sorely lacking in today's stories.

When I wrote earlier, I suggested the papers wait a few days. It turns out, all they had to do was wait a few hours.