Dartblog

It seems that the problem of administrative bloat is not limited to the College on the Hill. Yale faces that same challenge as we do in streamlining a plump bureaucracy. Excerpts from the current Yale Alumni Magazine:

Managerial Yale

The 1,100 Yale managers who had filled Battell Chapel were utterly silent when President Richard Levin ‘74PhD told them, toward the end of a December 1 speech, “We have more people working” in business and administrative staff at Yale “than best practices suggest we need.” …

Do Yale’s business operations need improvement? Anecdotal evidence is mixed. … people on campus complain about confusing forms, slow response, and byzantine systems, and I’ve heard some eyebrow-raising accounts. One new employee signed up for direct deposit but was paid by check instead. She called employee services, but got misinformation. She straightened it out, but when the first deposit came in, it was somebody else’s pay, and she got an urgent e-mail directing her to refund it immediately. Then a second deposit came in, also for the other employee. She got an e-mail that said Jane Doe could take care of the mix-up, but it gave the wrong number. Then she got the right number. But Jane Doe hadn’t heard of the problem and didn’t know what to say.

Yale seems to think a problem exists. In 2004, Levin brought in the first of a string of executives from major corporations—Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, General Mills—to reform university finance and administration. They’ve achieved one truly astounding change: Yale, once infamous for its strikes, now has functioning union-management cooperation. They’ve also put in many slap-your-forehead changes, like a central number for employee questions and timesheets submitted online instead of by fax. [Sound familiar?]

They’re applying metrics, too. Yale has done a benchmarking study on how many people it takes to accomplish a single task in functions like HR, finance, and procurement. Yale did well vis-à-vis other universities, but poorly vis-à-vis comparable business organizations. These were the data behind Levin’s “best practices” remark. Large businesses have departments of specialists who handle these functions, but universities are balkanized: there are probably dozens of departments around campus that each buy their own pencils…

Observe how the little school in New Havern is confident enough in itself to acknowledge its in-house problems of managerial inefficiency. Dartmouth should take that first step, too, in its own twleve-step program of recovery from a decade-long bender.

Note: In an interview with President Richard Levin in the same issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine (the YAM?), Levin notes that Yale has already cut its budget by $200M (“nearly 10 percent”), and it envisages a further $150M of cuts in the coming budget year. These cuts seem deeper than the cuts foreseen for Dartmouth by President Kim, and Yale is about a year ahead of us in making them.