Why are we seeing the craziness on college campuses, with speakers shouted down, professors afraid of students, and certain subjects off-limits from public discussion? Is there a generational change, with Gen Z just that much more radical even than millennials?

Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in college 25 years ago isn’t so much that faculties, or students, have shifted Left . This is not the decades-old conservative complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, it’s that the illiberal Left now drives campus culture. University officials placate, facilitate, and even foment social justice mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down so as not to be caught in the cancellation crossfire. And this is largely the result of growing higher education bureaucracies.

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The statistics on the growth of these Left-skewed non-teaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at four-year public colleges more than tripled. Curiously, uniform statistics for the decade-plus since then are hard to come by, as the big surveyors stopped separating administrators and faculty or stopped collecting information entirely. The Department of Education has contributed to this obfuscation, changing methodologies year-to-year if not failing to collect or disclose the relevant data.

In effect, students and families are paying a lot more to subsidize a class of well-paid bureaucrats — without much educational benefit. And it’s not just finances that are hurt by the bureaucratic encroachment. Administrators are more radical than professors, which poisons the intellectual environment. A 2018 survey found that faculty have a liberal-to-conservative ratio of about six to one, with 13% of our nation’s professors self-identifying on the Right. Students were more balanced: 42% of freshmen called themselves centrist, while 36% said they were liberal and 22% conservative. In contrast, two-thirds of higher-ed administrators self-identify as liberal, with 40% calling themselves far-left, and only 5% saying they’re on the Right. That makes for a liberal-to-conservative ratio of 12 to one.

What once were technocratic paper-pushers ensuring compliance with federal financial aid and anti-discrimination regulations, Title IX was of course a big deal for women’s opportunities, have morphed into enforcers of racialism and radical gender ideology. As in the government, bureaucrats’ incentive is to expand empires and grow budgets.

The great political economist Mancur Olson detailed how the growth of bureaucracies ultimately causes the decline of nations. And that’s precisely what’s happened in academia, as well-paid apparatchiks with no connection to universities’ teaching and research missions create and enforce codes that chill speech and eviscerate due process.

Modern Trends

In recent decades, the growth in university bureaucracies has far outpaced the growth in faculties and student bodies. From 1985 to 2005 the number of professors grew about 50% nationwide, while administrators increased by 85% and their attendant staff by 240% — with particularly pronounced growth at private schools. According to Department of Education data, between 1993 and 2009, administrative positions at colleges swelled by 60%, a rate of growth ten times that of the growth in tenured faculty positions at the same colleges.

Some schools were extreme in this regard: Arizona State University increased the number of administrators during this period by 94%, while reducing faculty by 2%. Moreover, between 1987 and 2012 the number of administrators at private universities doubled , while their numbers in central offices of public university systems rose by a factor of 34. Overall, colleges added more than half a million administrators, and then even more in the decade after that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects their number to grow at 7% a year between 2021 and 2031.

Around 2010, schools started having more administrators than full-time instructors. Through the following decade, some even started having more administrators than students, especially elite places such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT, and Stanford. Yale’s administration ballooned by 45% from 2003 to 2021, expanding at a rate nearly three times faster than that of the undergraduate student body. At Stanford, the number of administrators grew by 30% in 2017-22 alone, with the most significant growth coming in the first full pandemic year of 2020-21. Stanford now has nearly twice as many non-teaching staff as undergrads — perhaps each student should get a butler — and nearly six times the number of administrators as faculty. MIT likewise has six times the number of staff as faculty. The overall ratios tend to be lower at public schools, but still, admin growth at UCLA has outpaced growth in other sectors, such that there are now four times more staff than faculty.

The DEI Angle

Having gained a sense of the overall academic-bureaucrat trends, let’s focus on DEI. Diversity officers are a fairly recent phenomenon, emerging in the late 20th century out of “minority affairs” roles that began popping up in the 1970s. It wasn’t until after the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which affirmed the constitutionality of using race in admissions to advance diversity in education, that universities fully leaned into integrating diversity officers into higher, student-facing administration. This led to the creation of a plethora of new jobs specifically focused on these issues, culminating in chief diversity officers.

Some of these administrators serve as special advisors to university presidents and deans, playing a direct role in executive decision-making while other administrators of ostensibly equal or higher rank must report through the traditional hierarchy.

A 2021 survey of 65 large universities , comprising the “power five” football conferences, which represent 16% of all students at four-year institutions found that the average school has more than 45 people devoted to DEI, which is more than the average number of professors they have teaching history. Indeed, DEI is the fastest-growing segment of the educational bureaucracy, with staffs on average four times larger than those that provide legally mandated accommodations to students with disabilities. (The study was careful to exclude people whose primary responsibility was in Title IX, equal employment opportunity, or other legal obligations to comply with federal or state civil rights laws.)

The average university had 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, but certain universities had strikingly large numbers of people with official DEI responsibilities. At the University of Michigan, for example, 163 people had formal authority over DEI programs. Syracuse University was the worst when compared to faculty as a whole, with 7.4 DEI staff for every 100 professors.

Most universities have DEI units that cover the entire university with general responsibility for developing policies, programs, and services. At larger universities, these structures are replicated on a smaller scale across colleges and departments, as well as at centers focused on providing services to particular races, genders, and ethnic identities. Accordingly, the total staff and faculty devoted to DEI initiatives is much higher than what the 2021 study showed. One interesting thing to note is that an inordinate number of DEI offices have either been created or filled in the last decade, especially since the “racial reckoning” set off by the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.

That dramatic increase in noninstructional staff has driven tuition higher for decades, without benefiting students. Campus climate surveys show that student satisfaction with their college experience generally, or with campus diversity specifically, doesn’t correlate with the number of administrators, let alone the size of DEI offices.

But the real danger of hiring so many staff who don’t engage in teaching or research isn’t the expense, but how it corrupts the core mission of higher education. Universities are no longer focused on free academic inquiry in pursuit of the truth. Instead, they employ an army of educrats who either distract from that mission by providing therapeutic coddling to students or actively prevent truth-seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy.

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Providing students with staff to organize their social lives and hold their hands while “processing” the traumas of unwelcome ideas infantilizes the young adults who should be training for the workplace and public square. Having DEI staff organize trainings, rallies, and struggle sessions to enforce narrow ideological perspectives on race, sex, and class restricts the open intellectual inquiry that students need to become well-adjusted professionals. It also shifts power away from faculty, who can foster academic freedom and independence, giving it to political commissars whose goals diverge from long-held higher-ed values.

Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack. This essay is based on his new book, Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education, due out from HarperCollins next year.