The Report on Size and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale was produced by the duly appointed FAS Senate Committee on Governance for 2021-2022, which was charged with preparing it. The Report itself, based on an analysis of the Yale organizational chart listing 33,000 employees, the university’s Form 990 IRS tax filings from over a decade (through 2019), and other publicly available archival information, was nonetheless constrained by the reluctance of the Yale administration to make information about Yale’s staffing available to the Committee for analysis.
This Report (approved by the majority of Governance Committee members) argued for greater transparency and for faculty governance where such administrative matters are concerned, and was submitted to the Senate as a whole in January 2022. Some senators not on the Governance Committee questioned the Committee’s calculations but did not falsify them at an initial discussion of the Report held that month. The Senate decided to further discuss the Report at some future date, possibly after further revision by other senators (who hoped to incorporate additional information from other statistical sources). The Report was not then (nor subsequently) rejected by any vote of the Faculty Senate. Thereafter, this Report was displaced by other business and was not taken up again by the Senate in the spring of 2022. A revised version of a report, with unknown changes and not authored by the Governance Committee, was apparently rejected by the Senate in a closed-door meeting in May of 2022. A newly constituted Governance Committee also declared its intention to revise the Report during the following academic year (2022-23), but it did not succeed in doing so.
The members of the Governance Committee who produced the original 2022 Report to whom we have spoken stand by the accuracy of its findings and the wisdom of its recommendations.
At the time of its completion, the Report was circulated to perhaps 80 people, including all members of the FAS Senate who had served during the time of its commissioning or preparation, all the faculty from whom the Governance Committee had collected information as it prepared the Report and its appendix, and various Chairs of FAS departments and other faculty who had expressed interest in the findings of the Report. These individuals may possibly have shared the Report with other colleagues at FAS as well.
In September 2022, the Report, which had since been leaked, was covered in the press (by the Yale Daily News and The Chronicle of Higher Education), and it ultimately came to be hosted on an external website, unconnected to Faculty for Yale, where it has been publicly available since then. It can be found here:
At that link, interested individuals may read the Report and form their own opinions about its content. Insofar as the primary thrust of the Report is to recommend greater faculty oversight and participation, and more administrative transparency, the Report is consistent with the objectives of Faculty for Yale.