The first universities didn’t own a single building. No campus, no endowment, no Office of Strategic Initiatives. The word universitas didn’t mean a place. It meant the people: a guild of teachers and students, recognized by somebody official, organized around the faintly radical idea that some of them knew things the others wanted to learn.
That was the whole institution. A relationship, incorporated.
Everything you picture when you hear the word now came later: the quad, the library, the climbing wall, the strategic plan, me. All of it grew up around that one relationship to protect it, fund it, scale it, and eventually to schedule it. We are the scaffolding. And scaffolding has exactly one rule it can’t afford to forget.
It is there to serve the relationship.
I’ve spent more than thirty years inside higher ed, from a residence hall to a registrar’s office to the C-suite, and I’ve come to think most of our arguments are really one argument we’re too polite to name. We fight about budgets, rankings, AI policy, gen-ed requirements, parking. Underneath all of it is a single question we rarely ask out loud: what is the irreducible thing this place exists to do?
Strip away everything that could be cut without ending the institution, and you’re left with something small and stubborn. A learner, someone who knows something, and a relationship between the two, with the learning happening inside it. That relationship is the primitive: not the learner alone, not the teacher alone, but the connection that holds the learning. Everything else is built on top of it.
And the scaffolding goes up in layers, built outward from that relationship at the center. The layer closest to it does the actual work: faculty who know the material, and the tools and time and space to teach it. The layer outside that is the institution: the systems and budgets and, yes, the committees that let the first layer happen at scale, year after year, for thousands of students at once. Each layer exists to hold up the one closer in. Which means the further out you stand, the more you’re holding up other scaffolding, and the easier it is to forget there’s a relationship buried in there at all.
At least, that’s the design.
I want to be careful here, because there’s a lazy version of this essay and that’s not what I’m writing. The lazy version romanticizes a barefoot Socrates under an olive tree and sneers at everyone holding a clipboard. That essay is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that’s expensive.
The scaffolding is not the enemy. We built it for real reasons. A guild of two doesn’t need a financial aid office; a university of twenty thousand does, or most of those twenty thousand never make it through the door. Accreditation is tedious and it also keeps people from selling fake degrees. The student-services apparatus that gets mocked as “bloat” exists, in large part, because students kept arriving with needs the olive tree never had to handle: mental health, food insecurity, disability access, the full weight of being eighteen and on your own for the first time. We added layers because the center was real and we wanted to protect it. That’s the honorable version, and it’s mostly true.
So this isn’t a story about villains. It’s a story about recalibrating to meaning and purpose.
Scaffolding has a way of forgetting what it’s for. It starts as a means and slowly promotes itself to an end. The committee that existed to make a decision becomes a thing you attend instead of deciding. The metric that stood in for learning becomes the thing you optimize instead of teaching. The institution that grew up to protect the relationship starts, without anyone deciding this on purpose, to protect itself. And a structure busy protecting itself crowds inward, until the relationship at the center has less room than anything built to serve it.
You can watch it in the numbers, if you squint at them fairly. Instruction’s share of university spending has been sliding for decades; by one accounting, from around 41 percent of the budget in 1980 to 29 percent by 2021, while the layers around it grew. Now, the serious people who study this don’t all agree it’s the cartoon-villain version, the vice-provost-for-vice-provosts. A lot of the growth is in professional and student-services staff, and a lot of that is services students really needed and asked for. Fair. But notice that even the generous reading lands on the same uncomfortable place: the apparatus around learning has grown faster than the share we spend on learning itself. We can argue about why. We can’t really argue about the direction.
Here’s where I’m supposed to lose my standing to complain, so let me give it away first: I’m the data guy. Chief Data Officer. My entire job is the metrics. I build the dashboards. If there’s a number quietly eating a mission somewhere on campus, the odds are decent I helped install it.
Which is exactly why I trust myself on this one.
There’s an old rule from a researcher named Donald T. Campbell, and every person in higher ed should have it tattooed somewhere visible: the more you use a quantitative measure to make high-stakes decisions, the more it will distort and corrupt the very thing it was meant to measure. We did not heed this. We took “is a student learning” (hard to see, slow to show up, deeply human) and replaced it with proxies we could put on a slide. Retention. Completion. Time-to-degree. Ranking. Each one started as a fair stand-in for learning. Each one, given enough budget meetings, became the target itself.
And the thing about a target is that you can hit it without ever touching the thing it was pointing at. You can retain a student through a year in which they learned almost nothing. The dashboard will still go green. The dashboard is always a little proud of itself.
So how do you know, on a given Tuesday, whether your institution still remembers what it’s for? I don’t have a framework for this, which pains me, because I tend to have a framework for everything. But I have a question, and it’s irritatingly useful in meetings:
Does this serve a student learning, or does it serve the apparatus?
Run almost any decision through it. The new requirement, the new policy, the new system, the new committee. Sometimes the answer is “the apparatus, and that’s fine”: payroll has to run, the lights have to stay on, somebody has to file the report. Scaffolding needs maintenance and nobody’s ashamed of that. But you’d be surprised how often you ask the question and the truthful answer is: this serves the way we’ve always done it. This serves the org chart. This serves the comfort of not changing. And nowhere in the answer is there a student, learning anything.
That’s the tell. Not malice. Just a slow forgetting.
None of this is an argument to tear it all down. I like this place. I’ve spent my career inside it and I intend to spend the rest of it there. The scaffolding is how a fragile, one-on-one thing survives contact with thousands of people and a fiscal year. We need it.
We just need it to remember it’s scaffolding.
A university was never the quad or the endowment or the dashboard or, for that matter, the Chief Data Officer. It was a few people and a hard idea, and then forty, and then forty thousand, and somewhere in the scaling we started mistaking the scaffolding for the thing it holds up. The scaffolding is not the point. A student learning something from someone who knows it. That’s the point. It always was. Universitas. The people, not the place. The word has been telling us the whole time.
Everything else, including me, is just here to hold it up.
Notes and sources
- Instruction’s share of total spending fell from roughly 41% (1980–81) to 29% (2021): NCES, Digest of Education Statistics, tables on total/current-fund expenditures by function (instruction vs. academic support, student services, and institutional support), as summarized in coverage of administrative-spending trends. The counterpoint, that much of the growth is professional and student-services staff and much of that is demand-driven, comes from Robert Kelchen’s analysis of IPEDS staffing.
- The measurement rule is Campbell’s Law (Donald T. Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” 1976), the education-native cousin of Goodhart’s Law.
- Universitas magistrorum et scholarium: a community of masters and scholars. The early guilds owned no buildings and held no permanent endowments.