As a faculty member I find it more and more difficult to use my own grant funding (some of which is from organizations like NSF and some of which is "unrestricted gift" funding, which is supposed to be used at my sole discretion.) Mostly this is due to new rules and reporting requirements that rule out certain expenses, and some of it is new procedures that make reimbursement harder.
For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.
I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.
I've made this kind of post many times, so apologies if you've seen it before.
My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field.
Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less.
Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need.
You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.
Thank you for asking this. I stated something to the same effect here too and think the same way as you.
From what I have seen, the answer is that academics are more or less like teachers’ pets that kept going all the way into tenure. Their whole professional being is directed at pleasing their peers at large or their superiors. They’ve been broken into a relatively harsh hierarchical way of relating to their profession. All of their intelligence has been well domesticated and easily controlled for a while now. And it’s not like they’re starving. They’re doing well, but not too well, and scarcely have any incentive to rock the boat while they’re family rely on them and become increasingly reliant on the academic career with their age making it harder and harder to fathom surviving in the real world.
Just think about the amount of time and energy they have to spend on grants to get permission to do their job through sales pitches and papers to promote themselves.
They’re like an influencer that has to re-apply for their job every three years, with the real risk of falling out of fashion every time all the while acquiring few real world skills, which looms hauntingly should the fate, that’s inevitable for most, of being cast out into it befall them.
The is needlessly condescending and an over generalization.
The answer is that, like pretty much everything in society, collective action is hard for a variety of reasons. It’s a simple problem, but with no simple solutions.
But I suppose academics should have just asked you what to do, since you’ve got it figured out.
> The is needlessly condescending and an over generalization.
I take your point, and clearly my tone was intended to be somewhat strident. I'm not sure it is needless, though. The university and academic systems, IMO, are problematic but enjoy a special monopolistic prestige branding. Assaulting this and letting those that enjoy the privilege of working in the University system know that their positions, roles and actions and even values are more problematic than the "oh wow, that most be so interesting and you must be so smart" reactions they can get in social settings ... can, IMO, be helpful to the general situation.
> The answer is that, like pretty much everything in society, collective action is hard for a variety of reasons. It’s a simple problem, but with no simple solutions.
I agree. But part of my point, and perhaps too implicitly, was that it seems that it is harder in academia than other areas for the reasons I touched on. From my experience, senior academics (who have had some idealism knocked out of them) would consider anything collective or for the greater good of academia and research less than those in other fields.
> They’re doing well, but not too well, and scarcely have any incentive to rock the boat... Just think about the amount of time and energy they have to spend on grants to get permission to do their job through sales pitches and papers to promote themselves.
We shouldn't be afraid to reach out to local laboratory research groups who produce interesting papers. Even if they don't have immediate need of your time, money, or expertise, they probably know many groups where you would be gratefully welcome to pitch in and recognized appropriately.
> They’re like an influencer that has to re-apply for their job every three years, with the real risk of falling out of fashion every time
I don't really understand the message of this comparison. An influencer must do this every day. Are you saying professors have really cushy jobs? That's a common message, but it doesn't seem to fit the rest of your comment.
Well it may be a poor metaphor! The idea was that an influencer doesn't (AFAIK) have to really apply for their job. They have a profile and platform and are their own brand (again, AFAIK), and apart from whatever advertising contracts they have, I imagine they're not beholden to any one employer. Their work, seems to me to be in keeping up their profile with constant activity and promotion.
As an academic who does research that requires funding, you need grants. These grants are often referred to as the lottery because it's not always clear why some get accepted and others don't. If an academic doesn't get a grant one year, especially for two years in a row, they'll fall behind in their ability to do research and publish and risk being kicked out of the industry. Sure, an academic could try to move country for a new funding agency, but that's getting prohibitively disruptive and unlikely. This is the bit that I don't think influencers have to go through.
All of this, if you want the best people doing research, sounds good, right. Except, remember the "lottery" part above, and also that making good/interesting/exciting discoveries involves a good amount of luck that often doesn't translate to a greater likelihood of making discoveries in the future (senior academics have admitted this to me in private). And so researchers have to influencer-like work in promoting themselves by finding ways to be constantly publishing papers.
Yep. Academics like Jordan Peterson who raise a middle finger to the world are outliers, not the norm. And his success isn't really to do with ground-level institution building but leveraging social media to spread a message (he is more like a preacher than an academic in most ways).
This is such a ridiculous post. Thanks for the laugh.
Academia in the US has been productized and the need for academic talent abstracted away. Students don't attend a given school because of specific star professors. They attend because of the things that admin does. Maintain the brand and messaging- a management and marketing exercise, not intellectual. Set up competitive housing, food, entertainment, job search and other amenities- also administrative, not intellectual. Operate the real estate and digital portfolios- also management. etc. For the lucky, manage the endowment.
I say this as a parent with 2, soon 3, college age kids. Universities in the US are hotels that provide a particular flavor of entertainment to their attendees. Particularly in undergrad.
Yes, students learn some subject domain material while there, usually, because that's what humans do in every situation they're in. But curricula are a dime a dozen. The open curriculum movements from the early 2000s, like open source, benefit those academics who are able to produce new material, harm those who cannot (but who may be good at teaching) but mostly they make it easy to commodify the actual academic talent in any given university.
And student success? Not an academic issue. It's an administrative concern. Good thing, too.
There is no action academics can take to "take back" their university. To think that something like that even makes sense is to live in fantasyland. It is neither how the university machine works (any more, if ever it did) nor is it what the payers in the market value.
No students would attend a university run by academics, rather than run by managers. Without competitive amenities and messaging, the venture would be a failure. Any that succeeded would do so because of the academics took over ran the place like managers.
Apologies for the strong language. There is no cynicism here. Just humor at the disconnect. Though expensive I find the university offerings in the US appropriate for my kids. As human beings first they need all of the things the administrative state provides. The actual intellectual/academic parts of the journey- even given the fact that they are all academically strong, 1500 SATs, etc- are relatively minor and incidental.
> No students would attend a university run by academics, rather than run by managers.
I'm not sure what you're basing this claim on, since AFAIK there aren't any universities run by academics. But the reason for that has nothing to do with free competition in university education, and everything to do with government putting its thumb on the scale, both in the way it funds research and in the way it makes various forms of financial aid available so universities face zero cost pressure.
With respect, I know the student loan regime in the US is a hobbyhorse for some but saying "unis face zero cost pressure" is simply not reflective of the dynamics.
State and federal direct funding of unis in general fell off a cliff starting in the 1970s. Direct costs to students started to rise as a result. Students not being able to afford direct costs led to the government creation of the credit money regime- student loans. It wasn't govt putting some thumb on some scale- it was because direct dollars became scarce and credit dollars in all areas are cheap- and in most cases actually beneficial, because public interest credit dollars reflect actual public benefits.
Schools still have to compete for students, and tangible non-academic features always win the day. So there are constant cost and investment pressures on schools to produce a better product in tangible non-academic terms. Spending money actually brings in more students. So tuition goes up AND development outreach goes up, and wealthy donors get names on buildings etc. And because the actual academics- the individuals teaching- do not in practice make any difference whatsoever (eg US News rankings depend on student SATs, not staff PhDs), they are increasingly devalued in the equation.
My point about a uni run by academics is that were purely academic elements prioritized above all else- dorms, food, support, athletics, whatever- the school would simply not have a competitive offering.
This doesn't have anything to do with student loans being available. The same competition dynamics- which really do impose capital/expense pressures- they exist and are independent of the level of consumption funding.
Of course, Harvard is in an n of maybe 5 group, the freedom it has to manage its accounting is nearly unique and not reflective of the broader swath of thousands of US unis. In fact what is happening now is a huge consolidation and closure of enormous numbers of small colleges that cannot invest enough with a small base to compete with larger ones. A business story, like any other.
It's not because they have too many administrators. It's because they cannot afford to have more.
Is a big part of government putting its thumb on the scale. The only way to have truly free competition in university education is for universities to have to fund themselves entirely from payments for services rendered. Tuition is such a payment. But most State and federal direct funding is not.
> Students not being able to afford direct costs led to the government creation of the credit money regime
In other words, the government switched the way it was putting its thumb on the scale.
> Schools still have to compete for students, and tangible non-academic features always win the day.
Why? In a true competitive environment, I can't see why this would be the case, since the reason the students are there is academics, so competition would be expected to be on the basis of academics.
Personally I’d choose the school with mediocre academics but is well known when I enter the job market over the school that has great academics that nobody has heard of.
Which schools are these that have great academics but nobody has ever heard of them? (I'll agree that there are schools with mediocre academics that are well known.)
I can think of a few that I had never heard of in high school and people outside my field wouldn't know of but which do phenomenal work. One actually wonders how their students even know to look for them.
In any case, I would say the Colorado School of Mines is a prime example. I am a materials scientist and first really ran into them while doing some work with NREL which happened to be near their campus.
Perhaps it is a side effect of being undergrad only. Or perhaps a side effect of being populated with students who, at like 18 years old, knew they wanted to enter this extremely specific field.
Emory Riddle for aerospace engineering being another one of them.
But the relatively mainstream obscurity of these institutions is heavily offset by the weight they hold in their field and the near guarnatee job security it offers in niche fields...which might result in you making quite the pretty penny.
Oh, sorry, you're right. I've been corrected about that before, by coincidence the extremely impressive materials scientists I interacted with happened to be undergrads. They were just doing grad level research as part of the curriculum.
Maybe it's just an effect of being in a very niche area so that no one would notice them unless they were passionate about it already.
I know I'm late to replying to this, and I don't want to comment on the rest of the post, but this is blatantly false:
> And because the actual academics- the individuals teaching- do not in practice make any difference whatsoever (eg US News rankings depend on student SATs, not staff PhDs), they are increasingly devalued in the equation.
Many of those components directly depend on academic merits, e.g. the peer reputation.
Many other rankings (especially international ones) have a large portion of the index based on research, for example having a nobel prize winner increases your score quite dramatically. There are reasons why the ivy league schools + MIT, Cambridge, Oxford ... are at the top of international rankings, and it's not the quality of the housing.
No apology needed, it's an interesting alternative perspective. I agree that a lot of students (& their parents) pick colleges for the brand and networking advantages which the administrators seek to maximize. I also agree that a bunch of professors and deans would do a mediocre job of running a university by themselves, since a lot of the work involved is quite boring. I certainly don't see any sort of post-administrative utopia waiting to emerge.
But having said that, if academic professionals are in the constant state of economic and psychological anxiety that they describe (and I think a lot of them genuinely are, and not solely due to some lack of worldly wisdom or autistic confusion), they do have some capacity to shape their situation.
Leading with "this is such a ridiculous post. thanks for the laugh" is not needed. The rest of your content is good, but insults are beneath us!
All you are doing by leading with a caustic statement is putting some people - who you otherwise might be able to convince - off reading the rest of your content. The others who read because of the opening salvo didn't need convincing anyway.
"Universities in the US are hotels that provide a particular flavor of entertainment to their attendees. Particularly in undergrad."
Then why bother with having any academics at all? If all it is to you (and your kids) is a nice hotel, I'm sure you can actually find better accommodations and amenities for far cheaper. And children can 'network' with others also staying at the "good" hotel.
"The actual intellectual/academic parts of the journey- even given the fact that they are all academically strong, 1500 SATs, etc- are relatively minor and incidental."
And that is very much a reason for why such a situation has come to pass today - parents valuing branding far more, if not exclusively, over academics.
> I'm sure you can actually find better accommodations and amenities for far cheaper. And children can 'network' with others also staying at the "good" hotel.
I think a lot of the value of being a top, exclusive university comes from being a top, exclusive university. I went to one of the best universities in the world, and I learnt a hell of a lot - but a lot of that came from the students I was surrounded with, to the point that if you took away the university and just had that academically-top student population mingle in a conference center for 3 years, I'm not sure the results would be much different. But how would you get everyone to agree on which conference center?
>No students would attend a university run by academics, rather than run by managers. Without competitive amenities and messaging, the venture would be a failure. Any that succeeded would do so because of the academics took over ran the place like managers.
I’m sorry to hear you say this. Clearly you didn’t experience the difference it makes to have truly phenomenal teachers, particularly in advanced topics. The excellent CS professors I had as an undergrad are entirely responsible for my success, not the administration or the dorms. I do agree with you that for many applications of academia (getting a good office job using a credential) the “product” itself can be watered down into something mediocre.
I don't think the person you're replying to denies the importance of teachers. Rather, it's that students don't know about the quality of teaching before they get to the school and generally have little way of finding out even if they wanted to, and so other factors actually determine their decisions.
Even broad measures and reviews of "teaching quality" one can consult beforehand are at best statistical and simply not predictive for the experience of any given kid.
Thanks for engaging- agree with your point about the link between the individual's perception of their own success and important academic/intellectual/mentoring relationships (as opposed to administrative).
I did have that personally in some cases (and not in others) but am a consultant now who very much recognizes the importance of relationships. I have also done as much as I can to explicitly and implicitly train/encourage that sort of relationship thinking in my kids.
Neverthless! I would say:
a) one cannot solve for relationships as a basis for picking a specific university. They don't happen overnight, and have to be allowed to develop. And the instincts one has as to which university will be most encouraging of relationships for one's own kid- are only that. They are not reliably predictive.
b) Feelings of safety for the student are super important to getting to a place where relationships can develop
c) Admins in unis have much much more impact on feelings of safety than faculty. They are in effect the reason people choose a specific uni, and provide their tuition dollars. Whether kids develop relationships with faculty as a result is a downstream effect and to first approximation irrelevant to the business model
d) There is an overabundance of excellent, relationship oriented faculty. They are everywhere- from community colleges up to the Stanfords and Harvards. In fact many are out there who cannot get jobs! There are also tons of assholes of course. No university has come anywhere close to solving the "no assholes" problem as it exists in the diverse and disparate minds present in their student bodies, because there are assholes in their student bodies as well!
e) The most successful outcome for any given student in any given uni environment- the one you describe- is not deterministic, and complex enough to be difficult to model and guide. University management and administration exists to deliberately provide the safety and comfort contexts for those outcomes to emerge. The importance of any given faculty member in contributing to those outcomes in general is in the noise.
f) This productization is not necessarily bad- in fact it is likely the case that uni experience across the whole cohort is broadly more positive than it was decades ago.
Is it (much) more expensive? Sure. Could it yet be further cost optimized? Of course. Does it maybe emphasize the mean and reduce higher end outcomes at the margin? Maybe. Even if so, to my eyes, fwiw, that's more democratic. There will always be superstars. They should not be the only success cases.
Academics can't effectively organize because the pool of people who want to be professors but can't find a position is huge, and consequently the demands to simply stay afloat are so large that it doesn't leave a lot of time for much else.
I think it's as simple as there is a glut of potential professors and instructors to act as scabs if the current faculty act up. Organizing is always undermined by an oversupply of labor.
> veryone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators?
Barbarians at the gate. These organizations are already captured. Unfortunately, according to history, this will go only one way: Down.
almost all academic staff are on temporary contracts and many of them have visas attached to those contracts. almost all administrative staff have permanent contracts and are local people. collective action by the academic staff would result in most of them losing their jobs and being deported. The administrative staff need only wait a year for this to happen and the thorns to be sent away.
We've been seeing "administrators" start asking for detailed reports on unrestricted funding, plans for expenditure, etc. I am starting to wonder when they'll start to ask for "gifts" from faculty discretionary accounts to support general scholarship funds or anything else that basically just pushes it back into the top line.
Unrelated tangent because I recognize your name: thanks for making your course materials openly available!
Funny. One would naively assume that administrators are there to make the faculty's job easier. To take care of administrative work so that you can focus on teaching and research.
Instead they think their role is to create administrative work.
@matthewdgreen theoretically profs chafe at the admin substate in academia ... So with the situation as stated in the article how should we weight the explanatory reasons:
* Profs lost institutional control imposed on them, and can't get it back
* Profs lost institutional control they initiated which grew bigger than them
* Profs are surrounded (by paperwork) and don't see a way out; they've become cynical as it's become a way of life
* Increased tuition to pay for increasingly expensive admin means the uni's customer is more themselves then it should be
At the macro scale the complaint here is analogous to the frustration American doctors have about patients (to much paperwork too little time with people) or Brexit. The question is why can't incentives be aligned; why aren't the purported customers (students, patients, voters resp) able to have more power? For this level of institutional failure if we see it as that, the profs, doctors, reps (resp) have got to be part of the problem sad to day.
Yeah I’m in a good PhD program and for “department internal” event stuff we run roughshod over stupid university rules and the admin staff figures out ways to make it happen.
Yes! Concur is one of the new procedures we've been handed recently. Aside from being garbage software, it also requires us to use SAP's travel agency for booking (which means higher prices sometimes, plus fees.) This comes out of our grants too.
This really resonates with me. I recently traveled to an international conference and I am almost certain I spent more time jumping through the hoops of Concur and our university’s bizarre policies than I did presenting and attending the conference.
The worst part is the trip was significantly more expensive than it needed to be because of the constraints imposed by the system.
For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.
I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.