Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains - whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

The data suggests that institutional inertia is endemic, and costly. Consider:

• Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today

• The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently

• Between 2010 and 2019, US public companies reported more than $550 billion in restructuring charges, which are typically the product of belated or inept attempts at strategic renewal

This is certainly the view of many academics. Rather than freeing them up to spend more time doing research and teaching, they now almost universally report spending a considerably higher proportion of their workweek doing administration than was the case two decades ago. They also note that while many administrative roles are less specialized than academic ones, and considerably less competitive, they often merit much higher salaries. In the UK, for example, four in ten academics in 2016 were reported to be contemplating quitting the jobs they consider to be vocational and that they had worked for years to secure.

5. Addition Sickness: Putting the Subtraction Mindset to Work

“A study of 137 U.S. public universities by economist Robert E. Martin found that, in 1987, there was a one-to-one ratio of administrators to tenure-track faculty. By 2008, there were two administrators for every faculty member. Robert explained, “Those who hold the purse strings have a natural incentive to hire more employees like themselves.” A 2021 study of 117 universities in the United Kingdom by Alison Wolf and Andrew Jenkins found that such administrative bloat keeps getting worse—and growth is especially rampant among the most highly paid managers, professionals, and executives. Recent studies in the United States, Germany, France, and Australia show that their universities suffer from the same disease. Alison Wolf concludes that administrators are added at a higher rate, in part, because there is “far less scrutiny of nonacademic than academic hiring.” All those administrators aren’t just expensive. Like most of us, they feel the need to justify their existence. Many of the organizational changes they understand, value, and implement entail heaping rules, processes, forms, training, and metrics on faculty, fellow administrators, and students. Timothy Devinney, chair of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School, says, as a result, “Universities are basically strangling the capabilities of the people within them.” The road to such hell is paved with good intentions—administrators who add friction believe they are improving universities.

A period of plasticity also commonly occurs when some idea or institution is still new. For example, the US Constitution was written over just four months—a moment of great plasticity—and amended eleven times in its first six years of operation. After that, though, it became more rigid. Between 1804 and 1913, only three amendments were passed, all immediately following the Civil War: they abolished slavery, granted citizenship to African Americans and formerly enslaved people, and prohibited race from influencing the right to vote. Today, the Constitution is again very rigid: it’s only been amended once in the last fifty years, and that amendment—to prevent increases in congressional salaries from taking effect until the next term of office—was first proposed in 1789.