What Does An "Associate Director Of Sustainability" Do?

There is a whole lot of sex scandals in North Dakota’s headlines of late. Heck, there is a whole lot of sex scandal news coming out of the University of North Dakota.

Last month Robert William Beattie, a department chairman at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences, was arrested for allegedly possessing child porngraphy.

Yesterday news broke that another UND employee, this time Randall Scott Bohlman, was arrested for engaging in prostitution in a public place. He apparently solicited what he thought was a hooker via a website only to find out that the hooker was really a Minnesota sheriff’s deputy.

Whoops.

But get a load of Bohlman’s job title at UND:

Bohlman, UND’s associate director of sustainability, allegedly responded to a Backpage or Craigslist online advertisement posted by an undercover Pope County Sheriff’s deputy on Aug. 20.

Associate director of sustainability? What, exactly, does that job entail I wonder? And he’s not even the director of sustainability. He’s the associate director of sustainability.

It shines a light on the administrative bloat problem in our state’s universities.

“About 91 people per 10,000 residents, more than twice the national average, work in non-instructional jobs in public higher education in North Dakota,” the Grand Forks Herald reported back in March. “That’s almost twice the rate of instructional staff on the state’s public campuses.”

This graph showing instructional versus non-instructional employment at the state’s universities puts that statement into context: