So then let's cut administrators. We'll start with one of the most expensive departments on campus: IT. Let's just zero their budget, it will save a ton of money, and we will get to fire a ton of administrators.

Now I bet you and everyone else on HN will tell me 100 reasons why getting rid of the IT department on campus will be a massive detriment to campus life, and make it a terrible place for people to live and work in the 21st century.

But will the HN community be able to do the same for the DEI office? No, HN is very quick to say that DEI should be axed, the administrators do nothing, and they are just a drain on university resources.

Except that a lot of people on our campus find that the efforts of the DEI office actually do serve the goals of the larger community. Some of the brightest young leaders among our student body wouldn't be here but for the efforts and support of the administrators in the DEI office. But HN doesn't know these stories. I can't say we'd be better off without them.

Then you can go down the list of things to cut. Do we cut health services? Well, that would be nice, but the local community doesn't have the necessary health infrastructure to support the student population, and the USA doesn't have socialized medicine. Therefore, parents would rather send their darling precious to a school that does have a health center, so we can't cut that.

Do we cut the sports program? HN crowd sure likes to gripe about the athletics department, but the HN crowd also can be found in the Linux Lab at their respective schools, so of course they would be fine with this. But as it turns out that young people really like to exercise and play sports, so cutting the athletics department will seriously deter brilliant young people who are also physically active. So we can't cut that.

Do we cut the police department? I mean, why does a school need a police department anyway? Well as it turns out, parents prefer to send their precious darlings to a padded environment, where the blast radius of youthful indiscretions are contained, and don't leak into the unforgiving federal and state criminal justice systems.

These days, large universities like Stanford aren't just schools. They are actually small cities, and they provide services you'd expect of a city. It turns out faculty aren't the only people on campus who keep things running smoothly, or who serve to implement the educational goals of the university. There are plenty of administrators who work to do the same. We can't just axe them arbitrarily and expect things will automatically improve because they were administrators, and who needs administrators? I think you'll find a lot of pushback when you start suggesting cuts you think are obvious, and not just from the administrators themselves, but from the people they serve.