My earlier post on administrative bloat has found some echoes. For example, Niklas Blanchard writes,

Bloat, or creep is the organizational manifestation of this phenomenon. Whereas organisms will die, organizations without active management will stagnate, become bloated and inefficient, and (from the perspective of a product) continue adding features that sound good in an echo chamber, because there is too much gridlock everywhere else to get consumer feedback to product design. From an S-curve analysis perspective, this problem is endemic at the top of the S curve, when a market participant is dominant (or in econospeak, maximally monopolistically competitive).

Here is the problem: universities won’t fail. The threat of failure is the single best way to insure against institutional sclerosis.

Read the whole thing. Also, Matt Kuhns writes,

Instead of the centralized, monolithic single-point-of-failure model for colleges, why not a new concept of a college or university as an ecology? Instead of a single organization, e.g. Iowa State University, you could have a living network of independent organizations, within which a student could experience much if not more of the familiar diversity of ideas and opportunities at various geographic clusters of those organizations, e.g. Ames, Iowa. Replace a centrally-run, hermetic Soviet Science City with Silicon Valley, in other words.

I wonder whether the Claremont Colleges or the college community at Amherst have a had start at this.