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The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#51

Post by niels_olson »

fluidcruft wrote: post #47
tensor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an external compliance issue, it is entirely the university management that is responsible. Plus, it is only one example out of many. I was never in the system deep enough to be able to recount the other examples, but I certainly remember lots of drama around forced classroom aids and other nonsense. Excessive bureaucracy is not some inevitable thing that you cannot help. It's driven by people who directl…

How does it makes sense for administration to take their overhead and then spend it hiring unnecessary beurocrats (rather than shuffling funds to give themselves raises)? The ever-growing regulatory burden that the private sector always cries about? This is the same thing.

I can tell you I have seen new directors whose not-so-qualified spouses magically find jobs in other departments. Nepotism, pure and simple.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#52

Post by niels_olson »

beloch wrote: post #50
bruceb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be using http://expensebot.com/

You should be aware that any kind of expense software used by a university would have to scale up to thousands of users and would, of course, need to be totally and utterly obfuscated. If any old category theorist or quantum physicist can figure it out it would result in pandemonium! Peoplesoft... Now there's a real university expense reporting platform. Whatever you do, don't go into expense reports under the main m…

You should try the Defense Travel System. After submitting my itinerary once, probably the 5th time I'd taken the exact same quarterly trip, using the exact same system, my ticketing never came through. I finally realized it and called one of the travel people. He said "Once you hit submit, you have to go back and check on this other page, in about an hour, to make sure it actually went through, otherwise you have to resubmit."

Wat? This is in production? On a financial system?

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#53

Post by srevir »

danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

I am currently a staff member at a well-known U.S. research University. I have been so for around 10 years.

I have noticed a rise in the view that administrative staff are an inevitable and unnecessary accretion within higher ed.

I find it hard to imagine the Campus network being built and maintained in the manner you propose. My area is information security. I equally cannot fathom faculty taking an interest in incident response duties, or dealing with network intrusion detection, or that kind of thing. We have seen what life is like without these functions. Quickly the Campus network is overrun with compromised devices, the rest of the world begins shunning the Campus address space, and the network becomes more and more unusable. This is, contrary to what we might hope, a full time responsibility. I cannot imagine any faculty who would be interested in dealing with PCI or HIPAA compliance in order to use credit cards, or run a health clinic or hospital.

Is there really no place for any kind of administrative staff? Once you let in and feed a few rats, they just breed, multiply and overrun the place?

I do find it troubling that I earn more than graduate student instructor or indeed many junior faculty. It is less than what I would make in private enterprise. I don't know how to justify this, or indeed what the way to address it if indeed many staff positions are (as I believe) essential.

In the end, I am no longer interested in trying to answer this question. However much I might have believed in the mission of higher education has been eroded by my dislike of being increasingly considered vermin. I will be leaving higher ed, and take that even higher salary. This has, as I have observed at least at my University, increasingly been the path of the more skilled tech folks.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#54

Post by jurassic »

srevir wrote: post #53
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

I am currently a staff member at a well-known U.S. research University. I have been so for around 10 years. I have noticed a rise in the view that administrative staff are an inevitable and unnecessary accretion within higher ed. I find it hard to imagine the Campus network being built and maintained in the manner you propose. My area is information security. I equally cannot fathom faculty taking an interest in inci…

IT, like the library system, provides infrastructure in support of the university's core mission. I've never heard anybody say, "Damn, the network here just works too well... let's sack the IT folks so we can focus on our research like we used to!" Likewise, no professor or student is likely to say "Do we really need all these reference books?" about the library. The value and need for these complex services is almost universally acknowledged among professors and students.

When I think of administrative excesses I think about how we now have MBAs pulling down high six figures for nonsense like Assistant Vice Dean of Student Life. Each of these superfluous executives is supported by their own mini-fiefdom, with assistants and reports who cost a lot of money and make a lot of busywork for professors/students while performing their functions. Having these corporate-minded people who care little for the original mission and purpose of the university leads to perverse decision making as they work to fatten their own bottom lines, advance their agendas, or increase the size of their influence.

This is how universities have come around to the view that academic labor is a cost to be minimized, forcing a generation of young academics into exploitative and unsustainable adjuctships.

I think a big problem with the corporatization of the university is that administrative incentives are not aligned with it's traditional mission. In a business corporation, highly-paid executives are accountable to shareholders. If their work doesn't advance the core mission of the company (making money) then you can be sure there will be repercussions. Until the compensation of high-ranking university administrators is somehow tied to the university's performance on research and teaching, we'll continue to see growth of administration for administration's sake at the expense of other areas.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#55

Post by srevir »

jurassic wrote: post #54
srevir wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently a staff member at a well-known U.S. research University. I have been so for around 10 years. I have noticed a rise in the view that administrative staff are an inevitable and unnecessary accretion within higher ed. I find it hard to imagine the Campus network being built and maintained in the manner you propose. My area is information security. I equally cannot fathom faculty taking an interest in inci…

IT, like the library system, provides infrastructure in support of the university's core mission. I've never heard anybody say, "Damn, the network here just works too well... let's sack the IT folks so we can focus on our research like we used to!" Likewise, no professor or student is likely to say "Do we really need all these reference books?" about the library. The value and need for these complex services is almos…

I rarely see any nuance given to the rants against admin staff. My response above yours here was to a former professor's supposedly serious past suggestion to dismiss all admin staff. It is not the first time I have heard this idea. All staff are so frequently painted with the same broad brush, with no effort to distinguish as you have done here.

These folks running the Campus network command rather good salaries by EDU standards, though less than their commercial peers. Is it ok a network engineer who maintains a world class 10Gb or faster research network serving 100,000+ nodes with a dizzying variety of uses be compensated more than junior professors?

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#56

Post by sitkack »

spiritplumber wrote: post #13
gaius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... And the tenured professors could sweep their classrooms at the end of the day, and serve in the canteen at lunchtime, and save even more money?

I went to a small uni, and about half those jobs were held by students. There was an ancient mailing list server some kind soul set up in 1994 or so, where you could go to swap cleaning duties in case you wanted to stay in a particular department, to get a chance to "tackle" a prof and ask them stuff. School is STMU in San Antonio, TX by the way. I ended up a workstudy in the proto lab, and left with my degree AND ab…

machining teaches skills to the mind, body and soul.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#57

Post by jackmaney »

baldfat wrote: post #6
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

> As a former tenured professor Key word "former" Leaving Higher Education was the best decision I have made in the last 10 years.

As a former academic, myself, all I can say is: Amen.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#58

Post by sitkack »

narrator wrote: post #3

This sounds like more evidence the new and growing phenomenon of "bullshit jobs" http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ .

The shipping on my strikemag order is 30 pounds on a 20 pound order, for paper. This is ridiculous. protest.

Edit the funny thing is, I can get "product" from China due to a bilateral shipping agreement, but knowledge from the UK, well that is expensive. If only Strikemag had their shit printed in China and shipped to the states. Then it would cost zero.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#59

Post by danieltillett »

Someone1234 wrote: post #17
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

It is a little off-topic but why did you give up a tenured position? Don't those take literally years and a great deal of work to earn? Or did you mean to say tenure track professor (which is still an achievement, but most people drop off of tenure track than out of tenure).

Wow I am surprised the attention this post got. Yes I had full tenure and yes they take many years to get. I actually don't know of any other relatively young academic that has given up tenure.

I left because I had the opportunity to do so. I was always a bit of an unusual academic as I had founded a company after my phd rather than do a post doc. When I became an academic I kept my company and ultimately went back to it.

I do miss science and in an ideal world I would still be an academic scientist. Unfortunately science is far from ideal.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#60

Post by danieltillett »

srevir wrote: post #53
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

I am currently a staff member at a well-known U.S. research University. I have been so for around 10 years. I have noticed a rise in the view that administrative staff are an inevitable and unnecessary accretion within higher ed. I find it hard to imagine the Campus network being built and maintained in the manner you propose. My area is information security. I equally cannot fathom faculty taking an interest in inci…

The idea is not that university don't employee experts for specific areas, but that everyone has to teach and do research. The experts who are maintaining the network should be teaching students and doing research so that everyone is involved in the core activities of the university. When people have something to do with their time other than make administrative work for others then the mission of the university can be pursued by all.
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