[notacop31337]

I experienced this in the form of a conversation with a member of University PMC not too long ago, they bragged about how they'd recently eliminated the function of bin emptying from the cleaning staff, and were now forcing all faculty to empty their own bins, they bragged about the cost savings whilst all I could think of was the absolute joke that is asking a highly credentialed person to spend their, quite expensive time, emptying bins. Even funnier when you consider that this just take even more time off the very likely zero hour contracted cleaner that was previously doing the bins. They even told me some faculty members in pretty well respected positions got mad (the fucking audacity) about the changes and how they so quickly put them in their place.

"Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors—sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one’s discipline, even reading books."

In amongst all of this, I have a neighbour who is a member of teaching staff at a local University, and the stories I'm told about digitisation, low salaries, bullshit job requirements and unpaid overtime, have all contributed to me deciding that University in my country is all in all, a massive ponzi scheme, and when it all goes to shit, the Universities themselves will be the only ones to blame.

[gnicholas]

I used to be an associate at an international law firm. One of the partners told me that the firm was structured to maximize the percent of time that lawyers spent on billable matters. There was substantial support staff to take care of scheduling, handling mail, reimbursements, and other non-billable matters.

I've been shocked to see how this mentality is not duplicated in university environments. I know tenured professors at Stanford who spend countless hours arranging travel with visiting scholars, dealing with reimbursements, and other office minutiae. It boggles my mind that these people — who are supposed to be focusing on teaching and research — spend to much time on menial tasks.

It isn't that these tasks are 'below them'. Rather, it's that there are a limited number of hours in the day, and every hour they spend handling reimbursement paperwork is an hour they're not spending doing award-winning research or writing an award-winning book.

[alisonatwork]

Annoyingly, this exact same thing happens in tech companies too.

In my current company, one of the employee perks is a lunch allowance. But to get the lunch allowance, you need to get a tax receipt from the place you bought lunch, and then scan it, submit the scan to a woefully slow and painful expense system, then also physically glue it to another claim sheet, and annotate it with some more details, etc etc. From my perspective it's essentially rewarding employees who waste the company time not doing the work they were hired to do. To me it's utterly absurd that any software developer spend their day doing expense claims when a professional administrator could do the job much faster and (probably) more cost-effectively.

And this isn't the first place I've worked like this either. I miss my job 20+ years ago when we had a secretary who not only took care of these things but also did stuff like take meeting minutes too. The loss of administrative staff has made the workplace far less efficient, in my opinion.

[shandor]

I've been wondering this exact same thing, with added bewilderment from the fact that after all this non-core work pushed onto the academic staff the administration is still the one function growing, and growing fast.

We used to joke at my alma mater that the administrators were just trying to fill up their building to get a new one. The joke turned more than a little sour when it actually happened. And no, the university hadn't seen anything resembling necessary growth for such an explosion in administrative staff. If anything the faculties had been under cost-cutting for some years when it happened.

I think the phrase "you can't make this shit up" was coined for these situations...

[lkrubner]

Since the 1990s there's been a massive effort to get rid of all the secretaries, and this was coupled by the idea that the secretaries were not doing crucial organizational work. The end result is that secretarial responsibilities have been given to other people in the organization, and therefore many organizations are worse run, compared to 30 years ago. This has also been the rare case where labor specialization went in reverse, with secretarial work being given to doctors, professors, computer programmers, police, etc. If you know what Adam Smith said about specialization, you should understand how much worse things have gotten as specialization went into reverse.

[MontyCarloHall]

>I've been shocked to see how this mentality is not duplicated in university environments

Why? Maximizing billable hours maximizes the amount of money the law firm as a whole makes, and thus the amount of money law firm leadership makes. Maximizing research output does not maximize revenue for the leadership of the university as much as further bloating the administration does.

[fxtentacle]

The difference is that scholars don't generate revenue for the university. Also, hiring PhDs in academia is surprisingly cheap.

[dontbenebby]

>There was substantial support staff to take care of scheduling, handling mail, reimbursements, and other non-billable matters.

I know many a phd student or professor who use freemium apps to handle that, at the expense your travel itinerary is now marketing data.

Not a great thing, especially when agents of foreign power will do things like show up in your hostel to pump you for “business intelligence”.

Americans don’t get much vacation, if you bother us in the hostel common room it makes us want to do a”social experiment” where since the EU has no death penalty we drown you in a Dutch canal and see if they give us a 1 bedroom with a PlayStation like they did Anders Brevik, not tell you the inner working of our NGO.

(For context, it’s my understanding since there’s no death penalty for espionage anymore, paired with no EU wide intel agency, many EU folks sell secrets back to the “motherland” - usually France or Israel - for money… to the point it’s basically decriminalized.)

[maegul]

All of this yes. Additionally I’ve been wondering what blame falls on the academics themselves. They’re the “credentialed” ones in this and allegedly hold and are committed to high values, and are, in the end, the final guardians of the virtues of the University and academic system.

Where is their guardianship? Their collective action at a global scale to uphold and ensure what really matters here? That the publication system evolved into what it did was probably a big red flag that modern academics were not capable or even willing. My own experience is that academics, especially collectively are sadly pretty spineless when it comes to big issues like this. So preoccupied are they with their own prestige, papers and grants they seem like broken-in domestic animals.

But as a class of professional how well do they serve society at large? I’ve brought this up with Academics before and they don’t like the topic. I feel like lawyers and doctors and even accountants do better.

[lmm]

Academics have very little power because the supply vastly outstrips the demand. So they're all caught in a race to the bottom, and there's a ready supply of scabs to undermine any collective action. Doctors have prevented this by setting strict limits on how many new doctors can be qualified at the national level; academics should probably have done the same, but it's a bit late for that now.

[antiatheist]

The guardianship should be built into the the societal systems, universities and technical colleges.

i.e. in the old days professors/students would leave the decaying institutions and start their own, seek some funding elsewhere.

The Institutionalization of Accreditation into the fact of modern capital requirements and regulatory capture at all social levels make this seem not so feasible though.

However there could soon be more of such social changes, perhaps someone could create some digital technology to facilitate analog socioeconomic action, instead of billion$ in silly valley vapourware like zuckverse or alphabets adworld.

[taylorius]

"So preoccupied are they with their own prestige, papers and grants they seem like broken-in domestic animals."

Absolutely this. It's their predisposition to be preoccupied with unworldly things, that's why they became academics. They want to be left alone to do their research, and hopefully they make some new discoveries now and again. That doesn't really fly these days though - because being left alone is incompatible with being measured and recorded every waking second, which is the fetish of our age. But if you want to be left alone, you probably don't like confrontation, and sooner or later you will be doing the bidding of those that do.

[scythe]

Historically, universities weren't organized by the faculty. They were organized by the students:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna#History

>The university arose around mutual aid societies (known as universitates scholarium) of foreign students called "nations" (as they were grouped by nationality) for protection against city laws which imposed collective punishment on foreigners for the crimes and debts of their countrymen. These students then hired scholars from the city's pre-existing lay and ecclesiastical schools to teach them subjects such as liberal arts, notarial law, theology, and ars dictaminis (scrivenery). The lectures were given in informal schools called scholae. In time the various universitates scholarium decided to form a larger association, or Studium—thus, the university. The Studium grew to have a strong position of collective bargaining with the city, since by then it derived significant revenue through visiting foreign students, who would depart if they were not well treated. The foreign students in Bologna received greater rights, and collective punishment was ended. There was also collective bargaining with the scholars who served as professors at the university. By the initiation or threat of a student strike, the students could enforce their demands as to the content of courses and the pay professors would receive. University professors were hired, fired, and had their pay determined by an elected council of two representatives from every student "nation" which governed the institution, with the most important decisions requiring a majority vote from all the students to ratify. The professors could also be fined if they failed to finish classes on time, or complete course material by the end of the semester. A student committee, the "Denouncers of Professors", kept tabs on them and reported any misbehavior. Professors themselves were not powerless, however, forming collegia doctorum (professors’ committees) in each faculty, and securing the rights to set examination fees and degree requirements. Eventually, the city ended this arrangement, paying professors from tax revenues and making it a chartered public university.

[bnralt]

I agree. We should go further, and think about what we, as a society, are actually trying to accomplish with higher education and how good universities are at achieving those goals. Not just some vague "it teaches you how to think"/"it teaches you how to be a good citizen" goals with no attempt made to actually see if we're achieving it. Real, concrete goals, with actual effort put into determining of the system is actually furthering those goals.

From what I've seen, the current university system is a very inefficient way of achieving what we're trying to accomplish.

[melagonster]

like doctor focus to save people in front of him, scientists focus on resolve their problems. in another way, works on journal system is existing. many region had required open access journal and add preprint to internet.

[willis936]

Professors are stewards of nothing except their feud. Academics are nothing but serfs to their lord. Professors cannot be thought leaders because their position is always on trial. They go along to get along so they can do what they devoted their life to: some research, living a cushy life, and an inflated ego.

Administrators hold real power in academia.

[jojobas]

It is indeed a Ponzi scheme backed by government education loans. Pretty much the only way for an Egyptologist to make money is to teach more Egyptologists. Guess what, one day even the option to learn interesting stuff on the "future me"'s dime will not be attractive enough.

[jmopp]

There was a post a few days ago about Roman Egypt that mentioned how there are so many papyri that are just sitting there and not enough trained Egyptologists to read, translate, and contextualise them. There is clear value in training Egyptologists, since by learning more about Egypt's place in the Roman empire, we can learn more about Western society (as we are in some sense descendents of the Roman Empire) as well as Middle-Eastern society (as Egypt was one of the first huge conquests from the Romans by the Rashidun Caliphate, and thus an early example of how the Middle East became Islamic)

[skissane]

I have no doubt that there are some completely out-of-touch administrators. On the other hand, I have also seen the opposite – administrators having to deal with out-of-touch academic staff.

20 years ago, I was enrolled in my computer science degree, and working part-time as a programmer on a project to improve the university's "course handbook" website, and the automation of the publication of the printed edition. As part of that project, the administration ran focus groups with students and staff, to find out what their experience was with the current handbook, and how it could be improved.

In the student focus groups, the students all complained about how complex and confusing the rules around prerequisites/etc were. My own experience as a student supported that; it became even more clear to me when I tried to build a data model to capture that complexity. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything the administrative staff could actually do about it–the prerequisite rules were under the control of committees of academics, all of whom were quite convinced that this complexity was absolutely necessary.

The academic staff focus groups reported a very different concern. You see, the university handbook was actually printed in two volumes – the volume containing the degree/unit listing, which many students bought; but there was another volume, which few students ever bothered with, containing such fascinating information as a full copy of the Act of Parliament which established the university, and all the rules and regulations made under said Act. It also contained a list of all the university staff (both academics and non-academics), their job titles and qualifications.

Now, it turned out, that the publication deadline for this list each year happened before the annual academic promotions were announced. So, suppose you were an associate professor, and you just got promoted to full professor – you'd have to wait a whole year before your new title was printed in the university handbook – a situation about which a number of recently promoted academics were rather upset. The fact that just about nobody ever bought that volume, or read that section, didn't seem to register with them. The administrators involved couldn't do anything about that either – the university printer said the publication deadline couldn't possibly be moved, and no way was the university going to change the timeline of the academic staff promotion process. But I remember one administrator opining "if only some of these academics would spend as much time talking and thinking about the experience of students, as they do about their own job titles". I don't think she was wrong.

[VoodooJuJu]

Although admins have gotten out of hand, I think the classism "only the untouchables should handle bins" to be absolutely abhorrent. In my culture, we don't take kindly to that old world caste mentality.

[thwayunion]

> Apparently teaching, even at the college level, is now considered work.

You must've just woken up from a really long nap. Teaching as paid labor has existing for at least 1500 years.

[Godel_unicode]

I don’t understand the hard-left into fitness watches. I track my running because it’s more difficult to train effectively (especially with regard to avoiding injury) without data. Most people don’t push quite that hard when they’re chopping wood.

I track my hikes so I have a background image (the map) for collages of pictures I took. Most people don’t have a similar tracking need for their raking.

[pjerem]

I understand the concept of maximizing the output of every employee. It’s something logical as a company.

But otoh, as a human, when I hear people complaining about what is basically cleaning after themselves, I cannot feel any empathy.

I really cannot acknowledge that there exist one person in the world who is so productive every minute of the day that they don’t have the single minute required to clean after themselves.

It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo. It’s just not true.

I’m not advocating against paying someone to do all those tasks : it’s practical. But any decent human being should see this as a perk rather than some sort of human right they deserve because they are worth more than garbage mens.

[bryanrasmussen]

>But otoh, as a human, when I hear people complaining about what is basically cleaning after themselves, I cannot feel any empathy.

Cleaning up after yourself is taking the stuff off the top of your desk and putting it in the trash can. Also taking some things like cans and bottles down the hall to the recycling bin.

I could also of course take the bag out of the bin, walk down the hall, walk down two flights of stairs, go out to the garbage area and garbage things myself. There's a difference between the two things.

If everyone is going to the garbage down stairs to throw things out yes it starts to be somewhat inefficient.

>It’s like thinking that Apple loses tons of money every single time Tim Cook needs to clean its desk or needs to do the poo poo

sure, but if Tim Cook needs to take the bag out of the garbage in his office, walk out the office, take elevator downstairs to basement and throw it into the big bins there it might be that his time at that point is worth more to the company. It's really a question as what fragment of time is monetizable, a minute saved here or there is probably unmonetizable waste-time but saving greater than 5 minute increments together starts to be significant.

[mjburgess]

Right.. but the example is a cleaner, who is already hired to clean, emptying a bin.

And the point of the example is the malicious joy of the admin staff at humiliating the academics by adding "cleaner" to their CV for wholey pointless reasons.