How Human Resources Took Over Higher Education

I spent a long executive career in the charitable nonprofit and academic worlds before leaving academia to contract independently about 15 years ago. Over time, I watched human resources shift from a clerical and administrative function — handling insurance, benefits, and payroll — into something far more intrusive and troubling.

Human resources has gained power in universities and colleges not because it understands education or scholarship, but because it stands at the intersection of compliance, liability and institutional reputation. Higher education must navigate civil rights and labor regulations, equal-employment requirements, and diversity initiatives, all of which can carry the threat of lawsuits, investigations, or reputational damage. In this climate, HR staff and their expanding credentials can become guardians of “proper procedure” and “inclusive practice.” Administrators seeking to avoid risk may allow HR to dictate policy, training, and personnel processes far beyond its original administrative remit.

HR did not seize authority in a vacuum; academic leaders ceded it.

In my own career, I watched this shift unfold in a particularly revealing way. I held an executive position responsible for program design and fundraising, not personnel management. Into this environment stepped an ambitious HR staff member with an online human resources degree and an eye on my job. The institution began treating her HR credential as a general qualification for leadership, as if expertise in procedure and compliance were interchangeable with expertise in mission and program.

Gradually, her role expanded from benefits and personnel paperwork into areas that had always belonged to my office. Staff evaluations I once conducted directly were rerouted through HR. Program meetings and strategic fundraising discussions began to include HR “input,” even when no personnel decision was at issue. My job shifted from leading work I knew well to defending that work against procedural interventions from someone whose expertise lay in forms and trainings, not in the mission we were trying to serve.

Since then, HR’s reach into nonprofit executive and program functions has continued to expand. The problem is not that HR staff seek appropriate training or professional standing. The problem comes when titles, certificates, and postnominal initials create an appearance of broad authority. An HR credential may qualify someone for personnel work; it does not automatically prepare that person to direct academic programs, assess scholarship, lead fundraising or make institutional decisions outside HR’s proper sphere. The question is not how many letters follow a name, but whether the person has the experience, judgment, and subject-matter knowledge required for the role.

Peter Drucker warned against treating organizations as machines designed for efficiency and control while reducing people to variables in a system. Yet some universities embrace HR “professionals” as though credentials alone make them moral stewards of health insurance, security, hiring and firing, personnel evaluations, institutional planning and strategic fund development. What has not kept pace is a clear sense of the limits of HR’s role and the moral responsibilities appropriate to it.

One of the joys of my own career was the freedom to work in my areas of strength: researching, writing, and mentoring staff in service to others. As HR gained power, that independence shrank. HR staff increasingly appeared to “rescue” employees from responsibilities for which they were trained and qualified, adding layers of evaluation, counseling, and review. They also entered program-specific and strategic-planning meetings where they had little relevant expertise.

By the 1990s, the HR “fix” was already in place, and it has only intensified. We now “engineer” organizations, “optimize” talent, and refer to people as “human resources,” while algorithms increasingly shape hiring, performance ratings, and strategic forecasts. The logic of efficiency eclipses the logic of relationship. Machines and procedures, however, cannot sustain legitimacy or shared purpose. Only human communities can.

The danger is not administration itself. Universities and colleges need competent administrators, legal counsel, and human-resources professionals. The danger begins when administrative imperatives — risk avoidance, documentation, institutional image and procedural control — override the judgment of those responsible for teaching, scholarship, and program quality. Universities must distinguish administrative authority from academic leadership: HR may advise on law, personnel policy, and procedure, but it should not define curriculum, scholarly standards, program priorities or institutional mission.

The remedy begins with academic leaders themselves. Deans, presidents, and program directors are entrusted with protecting standards, directing curricula, supporting teaching, defending sound scholarship, and exercising judgment about their institutions’ purposes. They cannot delegate those responsibilities to personnel offices, compliance systems, or consultants merely because doing so appears safer or easier.

This is not just about HR. Whenever personal ambition outruns actual qualification, reason yields to gamesmanship. Academia already has enough to sort out without adding a new layer of bureaucratic arrogance. HR did not seize authority in a vacuum; academic leaders ceded it.

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