It's not as though it's a mystery - it is easily explained by following the incentives.
In a free market, an organization thrives by producing goods and services that individuals want, and must compete for that business. Their incentives then, typically lead them to provide value - as long as they have no way to block competition.
Bureaucracies, by contrast, don't tend to charge directly for what they provide. They are funded by other means, such as taxes or donations, and must simply satisfy their funders that what they do is important, while often concealing details, to prevent real accountability.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Again, you can see how that makes sense, given the incentives. The people most adept at extracting budgets are critical to the organization, and when delivering quality isn't required to get that money, it gets deemphasized.
And this is pretty much what happened with various priests in the US Catholic Church. They were found to have abused children, sent to some kind of ineffective training, and then reassigned to other parishes, who had not been warned of their history.
It seems to be a basic problem with bureaucracies.
I was recently teaching settlement agreements entered between mining corporations and individuals who have suffered harm in PNG and Tanzania. These agreements were revealed through the hard work of local NGOs. One of the agreements was kept confidential and states the same on the top of the deed. The amount of compensation given is less than $5000 for having suffered sexual assault or beatings by mine company security. It made me think how in law school we are hell bent on teaching case laws but majority cases are settled behind closed doors with these settlement agreements. In saying that, regulation of NDAs will be tricky if not impossible!
Echoing the discussion about the church I am going to go out on a very unusual limb here and say that I don't think universities are in fact particularly badly affected.
Rather, they just happen to be particularly large bureaucracies with a particularly severe lack of accountability, the lot compounded by a sense of mission (heaven save us from those who would save us!).
The rest is largely what I think one would expect and what I think one pretty close to always gets.
It's not as though it's a mystery - it is easily explained by following the incentives.
In a free market, an organization thrives by producing goods and services that individuals want, and must compete for that business. Their incentives then, typically lead them to provide value - as long as they have no way to block competition.
Bureaucracies, by contrast, don't tend to charge directly for what they provide. They are funded by other means, such as taxes or donations, and must simply satisfy their funders that what they do is important, while often concealing details, to prevent real accountability.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Again, you can see how that makes sense, given the incentives. The people most adept at extracting budgets are critical to the organization, and when delivering quality isn't required to get that money, it gets deemphasized.
And this is pretty much what happened with various priests in the US Catholic Church. They were found to have abused children, sent to some kind of ineffective training, and then reassigned to other parishes, who had not been warned of their history.
It seems to be a basic problem with bureaucracies.
I was recently teaching settlement agreements entered between mining corporations and individuals who have suffered harm in PNG and Tanzania. These agreements were revealed through the hard work of local NGOs. One of the agreements was kept confidential and states the same on the top of the deed. The amount of compensation given is less than $5000 for having suffered sexual assault or beatings by mine company security. It made me think how in law school we are hell bent on teaching case laws but majority cases are settled behind closed doors with these settlement agreements. In saying that, regulation of NDAs will be tricky if not impossible!
Echoing the discussion about the church I am going to go out on a very unusual limb here and say that I don't think universities are in fact particularly badly affected.
Rather, they just happen to be particularly large bureaucracies with a particularly severe lack of accountability, the lot compounded by a sense of mission (heaven save us from those who would save us!).
The rest is largely what I think one would expect and what I think one pretty close to always gets.