The proposal was immediately dismissed because it was a stupid idea. There is a tremendous amount of administrative work related to academics that most professors never notice because they're not the ones doing the work. If the professors had to do all of the administrative work themselves--even just the bare minimum--they would barely have any time to teach. Moreover, a substantial amount of money would be wasted on highly-paid professors spending hours on tasks that a lowly-paid administrative staffer could complete in minutes.
"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 instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.
"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on."
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 projects and job applications, setting up conferences and workshops for the faculty and students, managing the curriculum, and other tasks necessary for the university to function so that the professors can do their jobs (lecturing and/or research).
None of these burdens was created by the administrative staff--they are external burdens that the administrative staff were hired to address so that the academic faculty didn't have to waste their time on it.
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 the $50 on food, but maybe kept some of it, or used it to buy a beer heaven forbid. So they required receipts for everything, no more per-diem. Even better, they decided that they know how and when you should eat and set limits on breakfast lunch and dinner individually.
This created so much paperwork that they had to hire more full time staff to go through all the receipts. Clearly this cost the university way way more than it potentially saved and also created huge problems for people with special dietary requirements.
All of this was exclusively caused by the administrative staff, not tenured professors who universally hated it. The older secretaries who were around when things were better also hated it and thought it stupid.
But it served exactly the purpose it was supposed to do which was to make more work for administration. You can't expect some administrator to put themselves out of a job by proposing less paperwork. The only way to break this crazy situation is give them something better to do with their time like teaching and research.
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.
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 directly cause it to fester and grow.
Some of my favorite sci-fi authors like Asimov (Foundation) and Harry Harrison (Stainless Steel Rat) might disagree with your last sentence. ;)
Personally, I think both sentences at the end of your comment are correct: it is inevitable that bureaucracy grows, and it is driven by the bureaucrats.
It's almost like a "law" of economics, which, of course, describes human behavior. So they can at once be the cause of something that is inevitable.
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.
>most professors are blissfully or even deliberately ignorant of the time and effort necessary to prepare grant proposals for research funding.
I can assure you that this is not true. Any "deliberate" ignorance is likely an attempt to trim the amount of admin demanded.
I have prepared research proposals for numerous governmental and non-profit funders, and the amount of admin required on each varies enormously, with the EU being the absolute worst. The EU demands more, because others demand more from it; reports have to be made to this and that body, etc, etc. Completely unnecessary. Whereas one non-profit requires only a two page report and copies of any manuscripts in preparation or published (bliss!).
This. As a current grad student at a large research university, I have no interest in what little administrative work I do have to do, and my professors exhibit similar disinclinations.
That being said, at my school, the jobs of many of the admins I interact with seem to be navigating other administrative systems in the university. Its ridiculous and the solution needs to involve less bureaucracy, but not the complete dissolution of it. I've seen an entire grant left unspent because of the red-tape needed to spend it.
You have capture exactly the purpose of my proposal. If you put people in charge of administration who have better things to do with their time so they don't waste time on administration. When you put professional admistrators in charged of administration then all you end up with is the need for more administration.
If you accept the axiom that some administrative tasks are pointless and unnecessary, then there are two ways for academics to avoid doing them.
They can refuse to do them. Eliminate the pointless, unnecessary task, and accept the non-consequence of not doing it.
They can hire a professional administrator to do it. Naturally, the administrator will in turn hire an underling to perform all the unnecessary tasks, and retain all vital tasks for himself. But now that the administrator has an employee, that creates an additional management burden, to ensure that person is doing the pointless unnecessary tasks correctly and before the deadline.
It is clear that professional administrators and academics have different incentives with regard to administrative overhead. One would prefer to see it grow without bound, whereas the other would prefer to see it shrink to its minimum viable size.
The colossal mistake that too many organizations have made in the past is to allow the administrators to control the administrative budget. That is the one thing that absolutely cannot be delegated away from the people doing the core work of the business.
This was my strategy in regards pointless tasks - just don't do them. What I found is nothing happened 95% of the time and for the other 5% someone would visit me in person and tell me that it was really important.
Well I am glad to have such a well thought out critique. You might be surprised to learn that academics are far cheaper to hire than admin staff and will work three times as hard. The whole idea is to get rid of all the pointless admin work. My idea is that you would have three times as many academics teaching and researching, but the university as a whole would be doing 10% of the admin work [1].
1. My personal experience is only about 10% of all administrative work is actually required - all the rest is either make work or nice-but-not-essential activities.
