The Rise of Bullshit Jobs in Universities

It's in the refereed academic literature, hence it's a thing, sayeth Team Science™ while omitting, perhaps out of ignorance, everything that's not anarchist-revolutionary or counter to their believes

Today I have a veritable gem for you, dear readers—written proof that universities harbour many useless positions. As anyone employed in contemporary academia knows, the universities are (in) trouble, but now, courtesy of Masud Husain, there’s plenty spicy to note.

Thus, we’ll go through segments of the paper ‘On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities’ by Masud Husain, which was published in Brain, vol. 148, no. 3 (March 2025): 687–688, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awaf045.

I have no problem accessing it on my university-supplied and credentials-heavy computer, but if you cannot access it, please send me an email (simply reply to the message if you’re a subscriber; if you’re not, DM me).

References omitted; emphases and [snark] mine.

---

From the Paper’s Introduction

If you’re a person who takes time to reflect upon the state of the world, consider, perhaps question or even conduct research, then there can be no doubt. You are an intellectual [what a definition™—it’s so elastic it’s possible to drive a tank through it without technically breaking it]. With that mantle though comes an important obligation…

Intellectuals are in the privileged position to expose lies and to analyse actions according to their (often hidden) motives and intentions. In our everyday academic lives, we might not consider that we have a sufficiently noble cause to pursue with such rigour, but perhaps we do [that is, as long as you avoid certain topics, right?].

Well, that’s all fine and nice; note the sleight of hand of the author defining his object and claiming the high ground of academic enquiry—only to note that being an intellectual comes down to individuals determining, on their own, if they have ‘a sufficiently noble cause’ to say something.

Put differently, this argument™ actually reinforces the exclusionary nature of Team Science™ (and you and I, stupid loons, should be quiet because you and I cannot, by definition, do as these academics).

We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of societal improvement. There are many reasons why this has occurred over just a quarter of century but a key contributor has been the corporatization of academic institutions. In principle, there is nothing wrong with making universities strong businesses, incorporating within them systems that make them financially secure and endowing them with strong governance. However, a key problem has been that instead of facilitating academic work, these systems have created obstacles to performing the core mission. Corporate academia is subverting academic life. It’s destroying academia from within.

There is so much that I find utterly wrong (and stupid) in this paragraph, it boggles the mind. Where to begin?

Well, we note that ‘the academic mission’ is different—when the ‘modern’ university was cobbled together some 200 years ago by Wilhelm von Humboldt, its core mission was to train competent yet obedient people for state service. Forget the Wikipedia entry, here’s a few lines from Humboldt’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In the short period from 1809 to 1810 he was able to institute a radical reform of the entire Prussian educational system from elementary and secondary school to the University which was based on the principle of free and universal education. His idea of combining both teaching and research in one institution that guided him in establishing the University of Berlin in 1810 (today’s Humboldt University) and the structures he created for this institution would become the model not only throughout Germany but also for the modern university in most Western countries. Predictably, Humboldt soon ran into difficulties with the established landed aristocracy in Prussia when he insisted that the University be endowed with landed property in order to insure its independence from the state and the changing winds of politics.

The money part is that last sentence. As to its importance, replace the term ‘established landed aristocracy’ with ‘mega-corporations’ to understand the core fallacy of Masud Husain: in order to be a good university, academia had to corporatise, but doing so is ‘destroying academia from within’.

Humboldt and the Modern University

The same argument was put forth by Humboldt: to safeguard ‘the university’ 200 years ago, it should be ‘endowed with landed property’ to ‘insure its independence from the state’.

Let that sink in.

Basically, for two centuries, universities fought against landed proprietors by becoming landed proprietors in the 19th century; these days, universities are fighting the corporatisation by taking a page or two out of the corporate playbooks and becoming corporate institutions in their own right.

To paraphrase Nietzsche’s famous dictum from Beyond Good and Evil, academia has long gazed into the abyss, which merely led to the university becoming the likeness of the very monsters that they were fighting.

Back to Mr. Husain’s piece:

To undertake corporatization, universities have borrowed principles that they think work in the private sector [shouldn’t academics know if these work or not? I mean, they’re in the business of thinking and ascertaining…]. These involve creating layers of administration to run different sectors of our institutions. In the UK, for example, between 1995 and 2019 while spending on university departments roughly doubled, the amount allocated to administration and central services more than quadrupled.

Funny enough, before the advent of what’s invariably called New Public Management—incidentally, since the 1980s (go figure)—universities were actually almost like the ideal corporation of NMP’s acolytes: very little administration (overhead), many creative individuals (entrepreneurs), and lots of self-determination by those who work there (that is, if you’re a faculty member).

In the event, the trajectory has now come full circle: we took something that kinda worked o.k.-ish (the university pre-1980s), turned it over to MBAs and outside consultants to run it more ‘like a business’, and the end result is— not what we expected it to be:

Administrations have also felt it necessary to outsource work [grift par excellence as, per definition, the best and the brightest in all fields work at universities, isn’t it?] to companies outside of universities. These range all the way from IT systems and platforms (for grant applications, human resources, purchase orders, reimbursements, examination marking and many others) [this is called ‘overhead’ in academese, and it means that a certain share of grant money—in the EU Higher Research Area, it’s 25%—is always going to the ‘host institution’ for administration etc.], through to legal contracts, travel agencies, security, catering and cleaning firms. All of these come at a cost. A recent enquiry I made to my own university revealed, quite shockingly, that last year the University of Oxford gave £3m of the £15m we spent on travel to the travel agency we had contracted with. Although this sum raises many questions and concerns about why such a policy is being pursued (I’ll return to that later), it is an underestimate of the real cost.

Let that sink in.

Grift, BS Jobs, and their Implications

The university has been ‘corporatised’—and it has become a veritable sinkhole of grift, waste, and questionable business practices (sic) that are impossible to imagine in the private sector (where an economic downturn typically leads to tightening of budgets and/or layoffs, which is to say, stuff that never happens at public universities).

I’ll spare us the problem with the example of the travel agency (it’s all in the piece) and jump to the implications:

Once a company and its system is installed, the complexities unravel and it becomes clear why universities have had to employ more people to deal with these…

It is not just £3m that the University of Oxford gave away to its travel agency of choice. It also incurred a cost of the extra time spent by its staff, when both administrators and academics could have been doing something far more useful for the core mission of the university. Consider the financial implications of this at scale in an organization the size of a large university [my university is pretty small, about 30K people—a bit like, say, Columbia; the U of Vienna, by contrast, has in excess of 100K people]. How much does it really cost if we were to put a price tag on the hours lost…[that’s why ‘education reforms’ never look at the system from pre-K through postgraduate training: the amounts of money, hours lost, waste, etc. is way beyond anything we’d be able to imagine]

It isn’t just universities which have gone down this track. Even our funders have succumbed to the contagious madness [had Mr. Husain read his Max Weber, he’d know this from the get-go, but, Alas, no-one really does, hence we’re doomed to repeat these mistakes (see also below for more on this point)]. They too have created their own analogous systems (for travel and everything else). They have also made audit demands on universities which have, in turn, led to more administratively onerous initiatives being adopted by academic institutions. The fact that these processes effectively mean that there is less time to do the work that we are really here to do—and that a funder is investing in us to perform—is never discussed.

And thus continues the vicious cycle of stupidity bureaucracy: we’ll always create more of it, in both public and private institutions, hence the consequences are obvious—more complexity, more costs, and at some point we’ll exceed the marginal utility of any further investment.

Initiatives like this are plainly bonkers. Why have they happened? The late David Graeber, anthropologist and unflinching observer of humankind, argued that modern Western societies have developed classes of work that have no value. In his book Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About it, Graeber considers why there are so many people employed to perform unnecessary work. These include individuals whose primary function may even be to find unnecessary jobs for other people.

I’ll interrupt the flow for a moment: Mr. Graeber was a self-declared anarchist striving for a revolution (his advisor was Marshal Sahlins), and even though his BS Jobs was a fun read, it’s far, far from original.

I shall merely cite from a 1771 treatise written by Joseph von Sonnenfels to make that point. Entitled ‘On the Disadvantages of More Universities’ (orig. Ueber den Nachtheil der vermehrten Universitäten), he discussed the excess numbers of graduates who would, naturally, gravitate towards state employment (this is my translation):

Instead of the schools providing the offices with the required number of useful candidates, new magistrates [Ämter] were created to absorb the sheer masses of students and provide them with something…Offices were multiplied to get rid of the impetus of the fathers and their families who treat their official title as necessary accoutrement [Verzierung] without which one may not appear in public. One must be something, sayeth those who, irrespective of their official title, will never be someone.

Sonnenfels’ words were prescient back then, they ring eerily relevant in the early twenty-first century, and they show, quite clearly, how un-original the paper by Mr. Husain—or David Graeber’s book—actually is.

The problem, as has been obvious and clearly stated 250 years ago, is—how to address these issues?

Back then (this is the subject of, say, Ernst Wangermann’s many writings about the Enlightenment in Central Europe), the idea was to reduce the number of universities, mandate stringent qualification requirements, and increasingly strive to micromanage everyday work.

We can see a lot of these aspects in the present, but it’s also relevant to consider the differences: yes, the institutions—both public and private—are bloated beyond anything we’ve ever seen—can we downsize anything at this point?

I mean, the moment anything like this beckons in the public sector, everybody shrieks with trepidation; if this happens in the private sector, well, the consequences (costs) aren’t borne by those affected (laid off) or those who fired workers; instead, the public sector, via unemployment insurance, picks up a huge part of the tab. In other words: there’s precious little accountability as CEOs of failed corporations often move to other such positions. And thus (business) cycle begins anew, with the only difference being higher debts and liabilities on part of the public.

The question isn’t what can go wrong but how much longer can we keep this up?

What, Then, is to be Done?

This is quite explicitly admitted by Mr. Husain, by the way, in his two concluding paragraphs:

Amusing asides apart, the responsibilities of intellectuals lie in pointing out the disastrous course we seem to have set ourselves on since the beginning of the millennium [this is patently wrong: the problem came to the fore in the 1980s, but it’s much, much older]. In a very short time, we have created not only silly systems of governance and regulation, but are also manging to subvert academic life through the creation of bullshit jobs and, I would argue, bullshit practices [also applies, as a second major fallacy, to both the private sector and government-at-large]. Each of the administrative burdens that we are confronted with on a daily basis might seem small on their own but cumulatively they amount to a ‘mountain of small things’ that is killing academia.

Was research, teaching and innovation really performed worse previously when we didn't have so many administrative burdens? Have we become more or less efficient at doing what we are really supposed to do—our core mission—in modern universities? Are we creating burnout and need for wellbeing in staff simply because of the new bullshit tasks we impose upon them [well…]. I’ll let you answer these questions and end simply by saying that we don’t have to accept all this. We can use our training and skills—the abilities we have honed over years—to direct our critical thinking inwards and consider how we can push back on the calamitous corporatization of our universities. It is a fundamental responsibility of intellectuals.

So, here’s the rub: talent and competence isn’t normally distributed (as in a Gaussian, bell-shaped curve); more often than not, it follows a Pareto Distribution, named after

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), who developed the distribution in the 1890s as a way to describe the allocation of wealth in society. He famously observed that 80% of society’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population, a concept now known as the “Pareto Principle” or the “80-20 Rule”.

Converted to academia, 20% of academics are doing 80% of the work.

You can clearly see, more than before, I’d argue, the absurdity of Mr. Husain’s BS Jobs argument™: it’s not so much the multiplication of BS Jobs (although that’s a huge part of the problem), but the mere fact that institutions are growing beyond that which is reasonable.

Once any university blows through the pool of employees from among the 20% of top-performers, any additional hire will make matters worse over time. Yes, Mr. Husain said this:

Each of the administrative burdens that we are confronted with on a daily basis might seem small on their own but cumulatively they amount to a ‘mountain of small things’ that is killing academia.

Yet, while it’s legion to bash ‘administration’ among the educated and thinking classes, it’s far from certain that it’s the one, big issue at-hand.

In my experience, it’s rather the profusion of under-performing people—academics and administrators alike (as well as a sizeable contingent of students)—that amounts to the above-related ‘“mountain of small things”’ that is killing academia’.

And the overarching point being—it’s not ‘merely’ killing academia; this problem applies to essentially all walks of life, from politics to journalism, from private-sector businesses to NGOs, incl. any kind of other human organisation, such as your church, your sports club, and your retirement community.

None of this is ‘new’, none of this is worthy of writing a few pages in an academic journal, such as Brain (sic).

Tellingly, the oldest reference in Mr. Husain’s piece is Noam Chomsky’s 1967 essay on ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’.

Bottom Lines: The Laziness of Intellectuals

Any kind of criticism offered by academics about ‘the university’ is bound to have two major, rather implicit biases: on the one hand, those who voice such a critique consider themselves not part of the problem (whatever it may be) while the arguments mustered are typically excessively shallow, on the other hand (see below for a case in point).

Decrying the excess of this (publish or perish) and that (obtain grant funding) in academia is part of the behavioural sine-qua-non these days, as is the contempt most academics bear towards administration.

Discussion of these rather worldly—if not materialistic—concerns should depart from the acknowledgement, in Max Weber’s memorable words, that ‘we [meant are: academics] are of course part of this development’.

Weber discussed the implications at a conference organised by the Verein für Sozialpolitik, noting that ‘the central question is therefore not how we can further promote and accelerate it, but what we can do to counter this machinery in order to keep a remnant of humanity free from this parcelling out of the soul, from this autocracy of bureaucratic ideals of life.’

The above lines are found in his ‘Debate contribution at the convention of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Vienna 1909 on “The Economic Activities of Municipalities” [Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der Gemeinden], p. 414.

A few years earlier, Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (orig. 1930; repr. London, 1992 [the original version appeared in 1904/05]), wrote the below lines about the future of the West (the quote is on p. 124):

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance [think: woke-ism]. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

And thus concludes today’s foray into the self-righteousness of academia. I have plenty of ‘anecdotes’, if you like.

Also, if you read German, the best treatment of the subject of Max Weber and Freedom is—by Christian Marty whose Max Weber: Ein Denker der Freiheit [Theorist of Liberty] (3rd ed., Weinheim, 2023)—is a thoroughly revisionist, if not iconoclastic, treatment.