Recently I attended several meetings where we talked about ways to retain students and keep younger faculty members from going elsewhere. It seems higher education has become an industry of meeting-holders whose task it is to “solve” problems—real or imagined. And in my position as a professor at three different colleges, the actual problems in educating our young people and older students have deepened, while the number of people hired—not to teach but to hold meetings—has increased significantly. Every new problem creates a new job for an administrative fixer. Take our Center for Teaching Excellence. Contrary to its title, the center is a clearing house (信息交流中心) for using technology in classrooms and in online courses. It’s an administrative sham (欺诈) of the kind that has multiplied over the last 30 years. 

    I offer a simple proposition in response: Many of our problems-class attendance, educational success, student happiness and well-being-might be improved by cutting down the bureaucratic (官僚的) mechanisms and meetings and instead hiring an army of good teachers. If we replaced half of our administrative staff with classroom teachers, we might actually get a majority of our classes back to 20 or fewer students per teacher. This would be an environment in which teachers and students actually knew each other.

    The teachers must be free to teach in their own way—the curriculum should be flexible enough so that they can use their individual talents to achieve the goals of the course. Additionally, they should be allowed to teach, and be rewarded for doing it well. Teachers are not people who are great at and consumed by research and happen to appear in a classroom. Good teaching and research are not exclusive, but they are also not automatic companions. Teaching is an art and a craft, talent and practice; it is not something that just anyone can be good at. It is utterly confusing to me that people do not recognize this, despite the fact that pretty much anyone who has been a student can tell the difference between their best and worst teachers.

46. C）They are over-burdened with administrative staff.

解析：根据present-day universities定位至文章第一段第二句以及第三句。第二句指出高等教育已经变成了一个会议组织者的行业，第三句中指出组织会议却不讲课的人数急剧增加，这些人就是行政人员，因此作者认为行政人员过多。正确答案为C。而A项中real or imagined problems虽是原文出现的词语，但是组织会议的人并不能解决问题，典型的曲解原意。B项文中未提及。D项出现deepen problems，但是原文并未提到lack talent这个信息。