Alice in Wonderland Goes to College...

So, New Zealand universities collectively are facing half a billion New Zealand dollars in losses thanks, in part, to a decline in its foreign student body due to the coronavirus. If NZ universities are anything like those in the US they are top heavy with administrators who practise the retail model of education, one in which colleges and universities are akin to Walmart's and McDonald's. One study of a college in the US found an over 20% increase in upper level bureaucrats and an over 100% increase in mid-level bureaucrats between 1975 and 2008. Unless the mission of colleges and universities is to hire bureaucrats, some of whom are doing what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" and many of whom are siphoning monies away from education, there is some pork that can and should be cut there.

In the upside down world of the upper level corporate educational bureaucrat whose ideology is that only we are essential and whose god is Mammon, just like that of other corporate elite, the decline in student enrollment, for instance, is not their fault or the fault of those corporate managers trained in mush like student personnel who man student recruitment and student retention offices in the corporation. It is instead, in their faultless illogical corporate logic, the fault of those who care for the grounds, who serve students meals, and who teach the classes that were once regarded as central and essential to the mission of colleges and universities. Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Voinovich are smiling somewhere.