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Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

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Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#71

Post by trentnix »

wycx wrote: post #32
pmilot wrote: post #28

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system. Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are…

An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity.

On the contrary, consider team sports as a perfect example of a meritocracy which often also promotes solidarity. A good team, led by a good coach, recognizes merit is earned by the performance of the whole. The whole wins and the whole loses together.

The best of sport very clearly defines success and failure. It uses competition to spur innovation and the pursuit of excellence. Solidarity is often the consequence of that pursuit.

Very little about education, from how teachers are managed to how schools are run, does the same.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#72

Post by LanceH »

merpnderp wrote: post #63
Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

Seems like in IT the spread of different process systems is exactly this. To reduce each job to a set of functions that people with similar levels of training can do the job at the same level of output, interchangeably. So we're left with jobs that are 90% following inane process and 10% producing something useful. All to make sure if we quit, we can be replaced in a few days.

Where do you sit? Let's go to lunch today.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#73

Post by dagw »

pdimitar wrote: post #38
dagw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. My wife works in academia and all the 'managers' in her research department are experienced researchers that often split their time between management and research. And it just does not work according to her. They don't understand the job of a manager, deem it less important than their research duties and basically see dealing with 'minor' personnel issue…

Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? One person in power (say, the dean) is enough to make sure grants are coming on time, and negotiate those beforehand. They need one accountant to make sure salaries, taxes etc. are in the legal bounds and people receive what they were promised. Honest question: what else is needed? Most of the managerial work I've witnessed in…

Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers?

The same thing there is in any company with several thousand employees (let's not even start to consider the administrative hassle of dealing with several thousand students). Probably a lot more actually, since very few companies are doing research in oriental languages, nano technology, abstract algebra and contemporary music at the same time.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#74

Post by BaronSamedi »

n4r9 wrote: post #8

I'm sure this resonates with university lecturers all over the Western world. The late writer and university academic Mark Fisher has some interesting points about this effect in his 2009 book "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?"[0]. He saw it as an inevitable byproduct of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into the academic sphere. Setting targets and measuring performance indicators are justified wi…

Setting targets won't solve anything since this is a structural problem. You cannot leave those structures in place and expect a different outcome. That is just treating the symptoms.

In my view the solution is simple: instead of letting bureaucrats and administrators decide, let parents and students choose the classes and teachers they want. Those teachers that offer classes and a teaching style that students actually want will do fine, those that don't will have to find other jobs. Problem solved without artificial metrics that never work anyway.

Besides, it's the students money. Why shouldn't they be able to choose what they want to learn and who they want to learn from? I suppose you could make the authoritarian argument that the experts know better than you and should be allowed to force you take the classes they think best. But that kind of thinking is the root cause of the current problem.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#75

Post by maxforce »

The system is managed perfectly to minimise agendas being undermined. Those in power have worked their entire lives to gain it and will have no issue papering over any accusation that veracity is not their sole priority, let alone a complete farce. "In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise, artefacts, and other extraneous data. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, they can expect to get away with it – or at least claim innocence if their results conflict with others in the same field. There are no "scientific police" who are trained to fight scientific crimes; all investigations are made by experts in science but amateurs in dealing with criminals. It is relatively easy to cheat although difficult to know exactly how many scientists fabricate data" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#76

Post by colechristensen »

sjg007 wrote: post #70
Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

Agree but checklists have been shown to reduce error all around.

The target of the checklists is the problem.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The measure has to be concrete enough to not be manipulatable.

For example, aircraft mechanical failures or hospital infections are very clear and obvious metrics. And besides outright lying and manipulation, the metrics speak for themselves and can't be corrupted.

You can't, however, measure "education" or "intelligence". You can approximate it and the more you make depend on the results the worse the already bad metrics become.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#77

Post by unfamiliar »

worldsayshi wrote: post #15
jrs95 wrote: post #6

While I think there is a lot of truth to this, I don't see how it can effectively be applied to our existing educational institutions. They've sort of become a self-serving bureaucracy at this point, so even without misguided policy pushing them in the wrong direction, I don't think doing the best work they can is actually their primary focus.

Naive response: Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. Tell them to do their work to the best of their ability? Stop measuring things. Talk to them once in a while.

Who's going to do this whole "throw out the bureaucrats" thing? Because as far as I can tell, bureaucrats are in charge of those decisions.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#78

Post by colechristensen »

merpnderp wrote: post #63
Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

Seems like in IT the spread of different process systems is exactly this. To reduce each job to a set of functions that people with similar levels of training can do the job at the same level of output, interchangeably. So we're left with jobs that are 90% following inane process and 10% producing something useful. All to make sure if we quit, we can be replaced in a few days.

Seems like if the tedious portion of the job reaches such a high proportion it's significant lack of automation.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#79

Post by digi_owl »

Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

Its not a trend, it is how MBAs are trained to see the world.

MBAs effectively look at any organization as if it is a pin factory.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#80

Post by alphonsegaston »

Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

What people misunderstand about these metric-based systems in the US is that their purpose is not to reform systems or improve performance. It's to create a layer of interference that either channels control into a new managerial class or to wrest it back into the hands of higher-level administrator from whom it was somehow ceded.

The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing for standardized testing regimes is to pursue political goals and profit (for-profit charters, low-quality online education, re-segregation of schools). It's the same in academia. The question is always, "cui bono?"

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