A lament about administrative failure
Such failures are bad for students, administrative staff and academics
Someone once asked me how I was so prolific on this blog. In fact, I have reams of unpublished posts. Some will never be published, because it would not be politic or wise to do so. I write to sort out for myself what I think about something. Sorry to tantalise you—you’re not going to see the impolitic rants—but this post contains aspects of another post I began to write a while back.
I haven’t been well lately, unfortunately. Things have been very stressful at work. When the children returned to school, the family immediately got gastro and then a nasty cold. You’ll notice I haven’t posted for a few weeks. I am still on sick leave: I’ve had pneumonia too many times to take a risk.
Then, the other week, our roof started to develop holes. We got some people in to fix it. What started as a small job has turned into a huge job. It turns out that the roof was falling apart, and a lot of the wood in our roof was rotting.
The foreman took me out to look at the fascia on the eaves in one corner of the house. We’d asked him to have a look at it—it looked fine—but water ran down that part of the wall when it rained, and so we were worried.
He said, “Get up on this ladder and take a look.” I noted that I can’t really climb ladders, and in fact, shouldn’t climb ladders. So he got up on the ladder instead, put his finger inside the fascia, and poked his finger through and wriggled it at me, as if the wood plank was paper. A pile of wood dust crumbled onto the ground at my feet. The fascia had been eaten away from within by dry rot. The appearance of solidity was deceptive.
I feel like this is a metaphor for academia more generally, and perhaps the state of the world. From the outside it looks perfectly solid. If you come into contact with it, it crumbles under your finger to dust.
Unfortunately, last week my Law School made it into the news, and not in a good way. Students are complaining that the administration is in chaos. I am unsurprised, and I entirely understand why the students are upset. I am also very upset, and all of my colleagues to whom I have spoken are too. There are several points I want to make.
First, the administrative staff work damn hard and I am immensely grateful to them for all that they do. I can honestly say that I could not survive without their assistance. However, there are not enough staff. It’s also a really difficult job—these staff get flak from both students and academic staff—and many staff members are new to their roles. There’s a high turnover of staff. I do not want administrative staff to feel unappreciated. I know how hard they work, and how much they achieve with dysfunctional university systems.
Secondly, students are not the only ones to suffer as a result of processes that don’t work. The academic staff and the administrative staff suffer too. It is immensely frustrating when systems which are supposed to make things easier end up making things so much more difficult. Many of these systems are no longer chosen by the law school, and are imposed by central university (including the exam processes in 2023).
For what it is worth, after I was coordinator of JD Remedies in Semester 1 2023, I wrote a memo expressing concerns about the new exam processes in August 2023, and sent it to senior university figures, along with suggestions for change. I felt dreadful for my students and for the administrative and wellbeing staff who had to juggle the problems which arose. There was a personal cost to me too: I fell and injured myself badly, during this time (caution, horrible picture of my bruised leg in that post). I was rushing from answering distraught student emails—one student’s visa was at risk, another was going to have problems for a job interview, so I was going to swear statutory declarations for them—to a meeting with another student who had to fly in from interstate to take a supplementary exam, and still hadn’t heard from the central administration whether she qualified for special consideration, when in my view, she clearly did.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m throwing breadcrumbs into a black hole.
Thirdly, the problems which the law school are suffering now have been a long time brewing. As I have said in a previous post, ten years ago, administrative support staff at the University of Melbourne were gutted. I am of the strong opinion that the university has never recovered from this. Hence, in March 2023, I wrote in a post on this blog:
Unfortunately, in 2014, my university underwent a so-called “Business Improvement Program,” involving a “spill and fill”. Those who’d held administrative positions at the university had to reapply for their own position anew, often at a lower level of pay. Some positions were made entirely redundant. Along with several other colleagues, I stood against it at the time, and I believe strongly that we were right to do so.
In practice it meant that we lost years of institutional wisdom, that some loyal employees were totally crushed, that others went and found jobs elsewhere, and that those who remained out of loyalty were overworked and burned out. It was so entirely predictable. The echoes still resonate through our administration…years later.
Good administrators are essential: they’re another part of the glue which holds our institution together.
Making academics do their own administration online, with no assistance other than a training video, is exhausting. I’ll confess that, while I’m good at research and teaching, I am a terrible administrator. Despite every effort, I have a tendency to reverse dates, to triple-book myself, or to end up in the wrong place altogether. (There is a reason why stereotypes of the absent-minded academic exist).
In any case, the “business improvement program” was a false economy. I now waste an immense amount of time wrangling with the university’s idiosyncratic and non-intuitive online forms, time which could be more usefully spent preparing for class, or researching, or writing. [emphasis added]
Staff are aware of these problems, and we have been trying our hardest to improve systems. It’s going to take a while to fix them. Sometimes it feels to me like the university is a juggernaut, careering down the hill, and nothing I can do will stop the directions it takes. I am not the kind of person who gives up: I shout Stop! anyway.
University processes—and perhaps many other processes in our society at the moment—are similar to my house fascia. On the surface, they look solid, but if you poke them with your finger, they’re paper thin. This is good for no one: not students, not administrative staff, not academics.
I don’t understand why universities do this, unless it’s good for university leaders and bean-counters somewhere, who can point at more “efficient” processes and pat themselves on the back, then move on to high paying bureaucratic jobs elsewhere, while we all suffer the consequences of their “efficiency”. It struck me in COVID times (thinking about supply chain logistics, as one does) that sometimes “efficiency” creates brittleness, and a tendency for systems to fall apart if one is not careful. It should not be the be-all-and-end-all in gauging the success of a system. Resilience should be factored in as well.
I don’t know how we change the incentives of the academy in the longer term. But I hope that we do change them, and recall what our central purposes are: teaching and research.
I am in furious agreement with all of this.
As I have probably said in response to one of Katy's previous posts, my own experience of working in the university sector is that the formal administrative processes no longer work because sufficient people and resources are not there to enable them to work (and also often because they are badly designed by the decision-makers). What this means is that things only get done because of workarounds, which in turn are only possible because of informal networks of School secretaries and the like who understand the workarounds, know who the "go to" people are in other units to make the workarounds work, and are prepared to go the extra bit of distance to get things done. This is obviously unsustainable.
That all sounds quite ... familiar. Among the key problems are that most top-level admin folks do not understand the opportunity costs of all the admin and compliance bs they impose on lower ranks, that in fact no university I know of keeps systematic track of these costs, and that there is little left of academic governance, as traditionally understood.