I read the article and it’s somewhat true. Drowning in deans and assistant deans (all administration) is putting it lightly. What the article fails to take into context is the number of public institutions a state has to support. Reasons for this vary state by state, but for example, there are 3 public four-year universities in Arizona. There are 14 in Alabama. This exacerbates the “drowning in deans” problem as well as duplicates valuable resources, such as libraries.
One reason for so many in the South is, well, racism. Historically, the second Morrill Act in 1890 was aimed at the former Confederate states. This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for persons of color. Additionally, of course, other public institutions were founded much later than the 2nd Morrill Act for the same reason: racism. I’m thinking here of Mississippi Valley State University (75% African-American), near Itta Bena, and Delta State University (26% African-American) in Cleveland. These two schools are less than 50 miles from one another in an area that is certainly not heavily populated. It would have logically made sense to combine them years ago, but that’s a huge kettle of fish for any two schools, much less two schools operating in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
The South isn’t the only area of the country dealing with this issue. I recently attended a presentation by Wisconsin academic librarians and wow, they have a lot of public institutions as well and are dealing with cuts of gargantuan proportions (one library had its budget cut by 80%). I’m not an expert on Wisconsin politics, so I’ll stop there.
ETA: Not one, but two misspellings “drowning.” If it’s not evident, I really can’t spell.
