College Costs Too Much Because Faculty Lack Power
A common theme among higher education’s critics is that shared governance is to blame for colleges’ profligate ways, because faculty have too much influence over how money is spent. And the critics are right: Shared governance does play a role. But it is not the “shared” part of “shared governance” that has failed; quite the opposite. The fault lies in the withering away of the shared part. Reason and data alike suggest that the largest part of the problem is that it is administrators and members of governing boards who have too much influence over how resources are used… if it were true that faculty members have too much influence, then all full-time-faculty increases would have been in tenure-track positions, and academic costs would have risen faster than overhead costs. In fact, overhead costs grew faster than academic costs, and institutions economized on the use of tenure-track faculty and spent heavily on overhead staffing.
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by Robert E. Martin, The Chronicle of Higher Education.