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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

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 academics. The idea was the academics do all the needed administrative tasks, and since nobody's job would depend on doing administrative tasks, that we would only be doing the bare minimum needed to keep the university running. Also everyone would be aware of what the consequences of some new administrate task would be on teaching and research. The look on the vice chancellor's (university president) face was priceless - I don't need to tell anyone here that the proposal was immediately dismissed without discussion.

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It's an interesting idea, but it misses the substantial increase in administrative load that public schools have seen over the past 30 years. 30 years ago there were non-existent services for disabled students, socionomically-disadvantaged students, international students and scholars, etc.

There was also substantially fewer federal research grants and the associated paperwork required to receive those grants. You'd be surprised how much administrative work is required to receive federal grants and to employ the domestic and international researchers that do said research. (Effort reporting, Visa applications and processing, expenditure justification, backup and reconciliation, etc.)

I am not surprised with how much work is involved in administering grants as I had to spend a significant amount of my time doing this. Unfortunately almost all the time spent was pointless and not really needed.

All the support activities can be provided by academics. Actually it is far better that academics teaching to the students provide this support since they actually know what the students will face, not some admin flunky who has no real idea of what happens in the classroom.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

That's a different topic and is frankly even worse in the private sector.

Not really. Gotta keep expanding the admin jobs for the spouses.

That happens far more often in the hiring of faculty.

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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

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?

My idea is not to dismiss anyone, but make sure that everyone is involved in teaching and research. The network people have a lot to give students and this should be made part of their job. When you have better things to spend your time on other than make work activities you avoid all of these pointless activities.

Well, you did write you would get rid of all administrative staff and replace with academics.

I cannot see how very many, if any, academics will be interested in 24x7 on call duties to maintain a campus network. Are a handful of faculty assigned this responsibility? Do they leave class to deal with a down router? Do they spend their sabbatical replacing end of life wireless access points? Do they run fiber to new buildings? Or does this responsibility rotate: this week, the history department looks after the network, and next week the English department handles it?

As much as I think you under-estimate the work required in this network example, if the proposal is to ask the network engineer to also teach in some capacity, then I also think you under-estimate what is required to be an effective teacher.

Running a production network and doing cutting edge research in even networking do not overlap. Expertise in one of these says nothing about one's proficiency in the other.

I don't at all disagree with the suggestion that there are some administrative staff who just add overhead. If we were able to reliably identify which these are, then sure, elimination of these positions and turn-over of what few real responsibilities they had to those who remain (perhaps academics) would be a fine way to ensure things stay lean.

But what you propose seems to imply most staff positions are fluff, and have responsibilities that could be picked up without radically changing the focus of faculty. I think such a claim is really divorced from a real understanding of what makes the infrastructure and resources at a top tier (or perhaps even any tier) University possible.

I should have been more precise in my language - my original post was just a short response to the article. In reality any change like I was proposing would require the current staff are retained and their job description changed. You are not going to be able to turn over the network to the English department and expect it to stay online for long :)

I actually don't underestimate what is required by the network engineers, but I do think it would be great if they were also teaching and doing research. If we moved to an all academic model then it would be possible to employee more network engineers and spread the load across more people. The skilled staff would be able to share their experience with the students. I actually value the contribution of the support staff very highly and want them involved in the core activities of the university. I have no time for the usual academic dismissal of administration as being full of worthless people, what I have an issue with is letting people work as full time admistrators.

Many administrative activities are fluff. What I would like to see is only the essential activities done and people spend their time on the important activities.

I'll be honest, it never even occured to me that IT support would be considered admin overhead. Of course, I was shocked to find out laborers considered me management, given I'm an engineer. To me, complaining about IT overhead is like complaining about maintenance, or housekeeping: this is vital infrastructure that should work seamlessly and hidden in the background. (I'm a behind-the-stage kind of person, though.)

But, given how I've seen some bureaucrats complain about the cost of housekeeping, I guess anything's fair game. And don't even get me started on the unavoidable cost of maintenance...

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.

> a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with academics

This is similar to how Colleges in Oxbridge are administered. They do have full time administrative staff but only the bare minimum and the academic staff has more administrative responsibilities. This arrangement is very effective at keeping red tape under control. Example: at a German university if you need a new printer, you have to fill endless forms (finding out which can be non-trivial) and you have to wait weeks for the approval. I you want to order a printer in November or December, that's simply impossible because of end-of-year accounting. At the college in Oxford where I worked, I went to the IT person and said that I need a printer. He gave me a new printer right away and I was good to go. Not even a signature was required. I have many more such examples. It's not clear though to what extend this common-sense-driven approach to administration can be scaled up to bigger institutions like universities.

> As a former tenured professor

Key word "former"

Leaving Higher Education was the best decision I have made in the last 10 years.

Seriously, the more I experience the outside (vis-a-vis grant applications, requirements imposed on extramural partners, etc), the happier I'm actually in the military, salary paid, and all I have to deal with is Catch-22 level paperwork stupidity. I have to input my work hours in 3 different databases (hello, SQL anyone?), but at least we still have per diem meals. Although that's irrelevant since we rarely get conference funding.

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

I actually miss being an academic. I loved teaching and research, but I hated all the administration. I was lucky in that I had the ability to leave, but if I could spend 80% of my time on research and teaching and 20% on administration instead of vice versa I would probably still be an academic - what I was not willing to do is waste my life on pointless paperwork.

My interview and job description was very different from what my day to day activities. I would get in trouble for being with students (In my job description) to do paper work (not in my job description unless the catch all "whatever is required by your supervisor). Loved working with students and teaching in the classroom, and even supporting others in their classroom. The other high stress because someone decided I can do 12 small items every week which equals two days of paper work was extremely frustrating.

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.

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

... 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 about nine tenths of a machining certificate.

machining teaches skills to the mind, body and soul.

I think you need to check your dictionary for a proper definition of "administrative". Nobody has been bemoaning the exponential expansion of janitors and cafeteria ladies on university campuses.

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