Laurie Taylor on academics v administrators

I am a university administrator and respect academics immensely – indeed, I am married to one. I never say ‘must’, I always offer support, and always try to see things from their point of view. However, I have come to believe that the issue arises from the dislike by academics of administration itself. Unfortunately, administrators bear the brunt. For many (not all) academics, administration is so far beyond where their skills sets lie that they struggle to engage in it. If you asked administrators to carry out teaching activities, they too would struggle, because their skills are elsewhere. Ultimately, each has to learn to respect and support each other in their roles, understand each’s value to the institution and admit their own weaknesses. I am fascinated by the expertise of the academics in my institution, and on the occasions where they have been open to engaging and building up a relationship with me, over time they have learnt to be mutually interested and appreciative.

Laurie Taylor and Simon Underwood offer some helpful insights into the current antipathy between large numbers of academics and university managers. Underwood is right to point out the need for specialized administrators. I and most of my colleagues recognize we are privileged to work with some of the very best in student support and academic support. This regard, though, does not always attach itself to those bearing the designation 'manager'. It may be helpful to distinguish between the two, if we are to build bridges in universities. Unlike the administrators who support academics in teaching, assessment and research, it can appear that managers are less ready to facilitate academics' contribution to these areas. Formerly, a Head of Department would be a rotating position, and occupied by a senior academic who could be counted upon to defend their subject and support other academics. The importance of this role was never questioned. In recent years, however, a new kind of manager has emerged, who bears allegiance to the university senior management team. Rather then being subject-facing, they are management-facing. The university provides training courses to ensure this conversion from academic to manager. In some cases, it can appear that managers have joined an exclusionary cult. The significance of the role is diminished as it has become associated with tedious formalities such as appraisal, quality processes, audit and constant requests to justify our work. When all the essential support is supplied by administrators, and nobody really notices the absence of managers, we might question whether some of these roles fulfil the criterion of David Graebers' 'bullshit jobs' http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/. So my recommendation for managers would be to show your subject colours a bit more often, and act like a leader, not a manager. Liz Morrish

I am an academic and get on quite well with my admin colleagues- hell I have no choice as they outnumber us- but have got a bit tired of regular comments and jibes about how difficult and recalcitrant academics are in their eyes. I put it down to a lack of understanding of our role and quite a bit of envy. While the professional managers spend a lot of time dreaming up KPIs and implementing quality assurance measures for academics, I've yet to see a system of evaluating administrators' competence. By contrast, our teaching, research, course design and impact of our work is constantly put under scrutiny and the institute's reputation is founded quintessentially on our success in meeting these targets. Hence, the continuation of the binary workforce, and a combination of suspicion and contempt towards over-zealous administrators who

Both Laurie Taylor and Simeon Underwood exhibit the one major flaw in the ascendance of admin today. There are many, many novels, stories, films, and poems -- many of them quite good and well-known, some of them great (Auden's "Under Which Lyre") -- which chronicle the difference between academics and admin. Neither Taylor nor Underwood quote any of these. What has happened in recent decades is the collapse of academics into the black holes a.k.a. departments. There, all distinguish themselves by shearing themselves of any references outside those limited sets of tropes needed for their respective departmental careerisms. All become more and more depersonalized. All become more and more like admin -- as that's obviously where the power is, the charm, the epitome of safety, careerism. Taylor and Underwood both write well, with lovely wit. Taylor has her anecdote about the foreigner wishing to see "the university." Underwood has his Salieri story. But that's it. Why can't academics reference the humanities anymore? Is there a massive taboo now at work? Are all so shearing themselves of inclination to see or reference the human, the humanities, that all follow the trend for all to speak but wonk speak?

As someone who is both an active academic and administrator, I feel I can say this: There is a misconception about administrative roles. Funnily enough administrators don't sit about all day dreaming up the next evil scheme deliberately designed to annoy their academically engaged colleagues. Now THAT would be a waste of resource. They are there to help implement government and funder polices, procedures, Concordats etc. Thank you Hefce, RCUK etc. Many administrators, myself included, are very sympathetic to the pressures under which academically employed staff labour. It would be nice if academically employed staff could use their reflexive skills and academic acumen to understand that unfortunately administrators also are a victim of what is essentially a HEI system creaking at its seams. Government and funder scrutiny is increasing, reporting, monitoring and Big Data rule supreme, Research grant income and success rates are decreasing, the number of attachments per research grant application increasing. Academic jobs for early career researchers are in decline; zero hours contracts proliferate, salary increases do not match inflation. Meanwhile new government initiatives are being designed prior to there being a cost-assessment of what this implementation would actually cost individual universities and whether there is any capacity to further absorb these within a system that has been under-funded for years. Meanwhile University employees of every ilk, be they administrative or academically employed are at each other's throats due to the pressures they face in their particular roles. The problem is a much larger and endemic one, not to be resolved by bickering about job descriptions and roles.It goes to the heart of both academic and administrative values. As an academic and administrator I do not work in the HEI sector for its wonderful remuneration and bonuses. I work there because I believe in free speech, academic freedom, great research of every kind and good educational systems. I want it to succeed and carry on. I do not wish to work in the private sector. Under the current circumstances however, and the increased infighting and short-sighted, petty acrimony about job roles and the every day, the bigger picture is not seen. Perhaps it's time we used our administrative and academic acumen en masse to address this in some form or shape instead.

This is an interesting read but pitting academics and administrators against each other is unhelpful and counter productive. I am head of the administration of the Law School at King’s College London, and while there are occasional misunderstandings and disagreements, on the whole, administrators and academics enjoy a strong working relationship of mutual trust, respect and appreciation. The key to this is empathy and understanding of the value of each set of roles. As faculty administrative roles have evolved beyond the basic secretarial and administrative support positions of past years, the affiliation between academics and administrators has also evolved. It is no longer a straightforward, transactional relationship, but a partnership in which academics and administrator are working together (often on the same piece of work) towards faculty and university ambitions. There are some general personality stereotypes between academics and administrators that are drawn. The perceptions are that academics are difficult, anti-social and non-conformist. Administrators are inflexible, bureaucratic and officious. These stereotypes tend to be drawn by those academics and administrators that have the least interaction with each other. And there is little point in attaching labels so rigidly to particular staffing groups anyway. I’ve come across many non-conformist administrators in my time… As Simeon Underwood writes above, there are some ways in which the path can be more easily smoothed to a good working relationship. Academics will generally tune out as soon as you turn on the management speak. Try and avoid asking an academic to ‘touch base offline’ for example. They aren’t in this to meet a set of KPIs or to create surplus, they are here because they want to do great education and research. On the other hand, it is easy to critique the growth of managers and their perceived intrusion into academic business but do academics really want to spend their time doing budgets, student numbers planning, estates negotiations, facilities management, committee servicing, event management, marketing etc? Or would they rather just have a university that works? Administrators tend to be drawn to working for a university because they understand the incredible work that universities do and wish to be a part of that. At King’s our mission is a dedication to “the advancement of knowledge, learning and understanding in the service of society. “ There are many different roles that enable that to happen. Let’s not under-value any of them. Anna Wood

It seems like the first thing would be for administrators to indicate they might respect what academics do? I know that plenty do, of course, but all of those seem to work at other universities than mine, so I've yet to see it in action. The adversarial relationship, at least where I am a doctoral student, definitely seems to originate from upper management. The academics would rather (as King's mentioned above) not have to deal with it, but would like an organisational structure which runs smoothly. What they don't want is a constant barrage of arbitrary requirements meant to determine whether they have the right to exist. (This is true of small humanities departments especially--no matter how good your scholarship is, if it isn't making money for 'stakeholders' hand over fist, it isn't worth doing, apparently. Science has it both easier and harder, since they have results that are easier to quantify, but also the problem that it generally takes more than one REF cycle for really groundbreaking things to happen. Scholarship is small things building on smaller things till you have a big thing.) An administrator who appeared to be on the side of faculty, or at the very least students, would be a wonderful improvement. The ones (who definitely exist) who visibly treat students as disposable walking bags of money to be discarded when bled dry, and faculty as an inconvenient necessity of being able to take students' money, aren't doing anyone any favors. A bit of indication that the whole place could work together and be on the same side would clear things up. If the administrators said to the academics, 'Look, we'll take care of the paperwork as much as we can, you carry on doing awesome research and teaching students to be brilliant' a university would be unstoppable. What we have is more like the Hunger Games, with the VC as President Snow. (Again, I know it's not the case everywhere, and bless all the administrators who aren't like this.) Also, try to quit with the jargon. No, nobody wants to action a strategic plan for key performance indicators. Academics use words very carefully to say careful things. (My favorite, by which I mean not favorite at all, was 'bibliographic data of research output,' or what normal people call, 'a list of publications.)

I am Honorary Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The University of Hong Kong. My academic interests are philanthropic studies, fundraising trends, NGO and civil society. My full time job is head of the university's development and alumni affairs office. It is high time that university administration be taken seriously as both academic and contributing to the world of knowledge and wisdom. no less.

The main problem about academics vs. administrators is that the latter have the nasty duty to make the former to comply to rules and often the administrative system does not help them in being sufficiently flexibility. But the only way to flexibility is that the rationale of rules was fully understood, which rarely happens, at least in Italy. So, while traveling through different campuses, you may find that exactly the same law is asked to be applied by a totally different formalism, just because the poor administrators of that site had seen things working (by chance) once in a given way and would prefer to die rather than attempting a change. The most puzzling example is that of the formalism for public competition. You arriver there, try to understand who si the administrator entitled to watch the procedure, and eventually you do exactly what he/she is asking you, switching off your brain the better you can. That's the only way if you want to finish your job and come back home and to your research, soon or later. However, after doing more and more often this exercise, the reverse of switching on your brain back becomes more and more difficult. Anyway, I never found an administration considering this a real issue. Thanks for the wonderful article in a sound language. Sorry for the poorness of mine. Beppe

I guess those of a certain age look back with fondness when there were fewer administrators but then HE was a much simpler place then - 5 year funding agreements anyone? However, recent governments of both persuasions have decided that universities can't be trusted (new pubic management crept in) and that there much be oversight and accountability and value for money, and of course there has been the massification of the sector - so of course there are more administrators. As an ex-administrator and now working as an academic, in my experience, it's individuals that make life difficult. In the main the administrators and academics I have worked with for 16 years are committed, passionate and respectful of each others' duties. However, I have worked with some academics and some administrators that are just dreadful - passive aggressive, inflexible, pedantic and patronising. The sooner we stop thinking about 'tribes' (what would the late, great David Watson say?) or what one set of staff are or aren't the better off we will be. Most people work in HE because they care, they want to do a good job, and help students and colleagues.