The future is upon us. It is time to hyper-monetize professors’ teaching labor—oh wait, I mean open up education to all, for free—and create Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As my colleague Jason Mittell wrote here at The Chronicle,

MOOC mania has gained momentum … because it entails opening up the previously noncommercial realm of teaching, at both public and nonprofit private institutions, to venture capitalists and start-ups looking to build company value.

According to one of many pro-MOOC op-eds by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times,

the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real. …  Today’s traditional university has [much] in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M.

Since Friedman is honest enough to use corporations as the comparison for today’s universities, let’s look where we might really use technologies to cut costs and make the universities leaner, more profit-producing machines: the administration.

Study after study has shown that the people at the top—the deans and vice-presidents and other Grand Poobahs of bureaucratic reproduction—have grown far faster than faculty in the past couple of decades. And their salaries are far higher, over all, than those of professors. As a study from the conservative Goldwater Institute pointed out:

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student grew by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

So if we could find a way to put administration online, to create Massive Online Open Administrations or MOOAs, we could really cut some fat and reap some serious rewards.