The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities • Hacker News Board

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#31

Post by batbomb » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 1:46 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#32

Post by scarmig » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 1:57 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #26

calibraxis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you have no idea. Consider how absurd it's gotten ( http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl... ): "My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for…

Providing a diatribe from another professor does little to support your argument that professors have any idea as to the amount of administrative work required to make a university function. Indeed, the quote actually supports my argument that most professors are blissfully or even deliberately ignorant of the time and effort necessary to prepare grant proposals for research funding, student grants for student projec…

This is convincing, and it does manage to explain how universities never functioned prior to the 80s without collapsing into anarchy.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#33

Post by beloch » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

batbomb wrote: post #31

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.

The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference.

The old honor method was to add up what you spent on food and claim it as "per diem". The maximum was far more than you actually needed most places (Note: There's a big difference in food costs between, for example, Geneva and Bangkok). The new method required receipts with your name on them for everything.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#34

Post by ashark » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:09 AM UTC

ashark wrote: post #18

rhino369 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brain can't handle neon yellow background, but I don't think bullshit jobs are a new phenomenon. I think there was a huge bloat in bullshit jobs from the 1980s-2008. A lot of jobs that should have been lost due to productivity gains because of computers and networking were converted into bullshit jobs. We went to so long with a real significant recession, it was like a forest that hasn't had a fire to clear the br…

Revolutionary Road[1] by Richard Yates, published 1961, prominently features passages about how useless most of the jobs in the protagonist's office are, including his. Aside from the specifics of how the office operates (paper versus email) it could have been written today. Whole book's a great, though painful, read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road

Replying to myself now that I have the book in front of me, but my edit abilities have expired.

A taste:

He had to think, and the best way to think was to go through the motions of working. This morning's batch of papers was waiting in his IN basket, on top of last Friday's, and so his first action was to turn the whole stack upside down on his desk and start from the bottom. As he did each day (or rather on the days when he bothered with his IN basked, for there were many days when he left it alone) he tried first to see how many papers he could get rid of without actually reading their contents. Some could be thrown away, others could be almost as rapidly disposed of by scrawling, "What about this?" in their margins, with his initials, and sending them to Bandy, or by writing "Know anything on this?" and sending them to someone like Ed Small, next door; but the danger here was that the same papers might come back in a few days marked "Do" from Bandy and "No" from Small. A safer course was to mark a thing "File" for Mrs. Jorgensen and the girls, after the briefest possible glance had established that it wasn't of urgent importance; if it was, he might mark it "File & Follow 1 Wk.," or he might put it aside and go on to the next one. The gradual accumulation of papers put aside in this way was what he turned to as soon as he was finished with, or tired of, the IN basket. [...] May of the papers in [the resulting pile of "important" work] bore the insignia of Bandy's "Do" or Ed Small's "No," and some had been through the "File & Follow" cycle as many as three or four times; some, bearing notes like "Frank—might look into this," were the gifts of men who used him as he used Small

— from Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, any errors probably mine from transcription.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#35

Post by dthal » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:12 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

Sorry if its a little OT, but I actually have this question: Is it normal for grad students to get reimbursed by their institution for conference travel?

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#36

Post by bruceb » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:29 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

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

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#37

Post by siyer » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:30 AM UTC

dthal wrote: post #35

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

Sorry if its a little OT, but I actually have this question: Is it normal for grad students to get reimbursed by their institution for conference travel?

Polices tend to be lab and department specific. Most everyone I know if reimbursed for flights and hotels (though they are typically required to apply for internal travel grants that exist for this purpose). Food reimbursement varies from lab to lab.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#38

Post by cowsandmilk » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:49 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

they started wanting boarding passes to reimburse flights at my school. Right around the time when you could start going through airports without a paper boarding pass. And people at gates would constantly take the paper boarding pass from you when you boarded.

Or that one time I had to provide the group photo from a conference as proof that I attended so they would reimburse me for registration. I might have flown to San Diego just to have a vacation, not attend the conference...

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#39

Post by cowsandmilk » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 2:52 AM UTC

unabridged wrote: post #27

Combine this with the rise of adjuncts over professors and you find that most of the teaching staff is making much less than their administrative support. I find it insane that as an adjunct you would be lucky to break $25k while seeing job postings at the school for a Benefits and Insurance Coordinator that can make up to $66k.

not to mention the benefits (e.g. retirement and insurance) and longer term employment rather than single semester contracts.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#40

Post by fluidcruft » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 3:01 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #29

gamblor956 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing a diatribe from another professor does little to support your argument that professors have any idea as to the amount of administrative work required to make a university function. Indeed, the quote actually supports my argument that most professors are blissfully or even deliberately ignorant of the time and effort necessary to prepare grant proposals for research funding, student grants for student projec…

How about a first hand example from the secretary at the last university where I worked? The university used to give travelling professors and students a per-diem for food. I think it was around $50 US per day, so pretty reasonable. You had to justify if you spent more than that. However, while I was there the administration decided that they wanted to cut down on some imagined "abuse" that people were not spending t…

You seem to totally not grok compliance at a fundamental level. You're blaming the tail for wagging, but the dog's tail doesn't wag just because it chooses to.