Harvard was founded in 1636 to educate clergymen for the burgeoning Puritan population. Over the centuries, its antiquity gave it status, especially given that some of its graduates had a profound impact on America. In the old days, most of that impact was good. The same cannot be said for too many of its recent graduates, who are mush-brained leftists who support mass murderers. A College Fix analysis of what’s going on at Harvard may help explain its decline: It’s a bureaucrats’ paradise.

Years ago—and I can’t find the reference now—I read that, while the faculty-student ratio at most American colleges had remained stagnant since the 1960s, the number of administrators compared to students had grown by almost 400%. In other words, all the free and subsidized government money that was causing tuition to skyrocket wasn’t being used to improve the classroom experience and increase the number of students with access to that experience. Instead, it was going to improve the bureaucracy.

Nothing more clearly exemplifies that reality than this data from Harvard:

Harvard University employs about 1,352 full-time administrators for every 1,000 undergraduate students enrolled at the university, an analysis conducted by The College Fix found.

This is more than a nine percent increase from the 2013-14 school year, when there were 1,240 administrators per 1,000 students, according to the analysis, which used data provided by Harvard to the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

During the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year for which data are available, Harvard had 10,120 full-time administrators and support staff on its payroll; in contrast, it had 3,899 full-time teaching and instructional staffers. The total number of undergrads that year was 7,483.

[snip]

The growth in personnel at Harvard is almost entirely for non-teaching positions, including many jobs focused on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion at the Ivy League institution, according to the analysis.

Apparently, it takes a lot of people to keep the wheels churning on LGBTQ, CRT, DEI, SEL, and all the other acronym ideas leftists keep introducing on college campuses. This has nothing to do with education and everything to do with indoctrination. Harvard’s founders, the ones whose worldview was defined by Biblical faith, along with some very famous Americans, must be spinning like tops in their graves.

Image: Harvard Yard by Mancala. Public domain.