Naive response: Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. Tell them to do their work to the best of their ability? Stop measuring things. Talk to them once in a while.
Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge.
My wife works in academia and all the 'managers' in her research department are experienced researchers that often split their time between management and research. And it just does not work according to her. They don't understand the job of a manager, deem it less important than their research duties and basically see dealing with 'minor' personnel issues as a waste of their time. To run any organization of a non-trivial size requires some structure and bureaucracy. And you need people to understand, set up and own those structures.
Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? One person in power (say, the dean) is enough to make sure grants are coming on time, and negotiate those beforehand. They need one accountant to make sure salaries, taxes etc. are in the legal bounds and people receive what they were promised. Honest question: what else is needed?
Most of the managerial work I've witnessed in an university is easily doable by several slightly complex Excel spreadsheets. It just requires people to be diligent and not overlook the unquestionable need for accountability and visibility.
As an additional question -- what exactly is there to "run" in an university?
Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers?
The same thing there is in any company with several thousand employees (let's not even start to consider the administrative hassle of dealing with several thousand students). Probably a lot more actually, since very few companies are doing research in oriental languages, nano technology, abstract algebra and contemporary music at the same time.
You might be right, but my girlfriend currently is a "leader" of her group in the university -- she's responsible to bring the student's "grade books" (sorry, my English fails me here) to the proper administration, she creates polls for the freely choosable disciplines, makes calendar events for the occasional meets etc.
Takes her 2-3 hours a week and is FAR more efficient than the awfully rigid systems I come from, 15 years ago.
Self-organization is a powerful phenomena. It can't solve everything for sure, but a good balance between it plus a smaller bureaucracy has in my eyes shown a strong promise for the future.
Given I know someone who works rather hard, full time, on negotiating grants and other contracts and they're far from the Dean level, I'd suggest you're off from the amount of work required to run and administer a university by a pretty hefty margin.
It's more likely that the dean is just not the person who should be writing the grant proposal. Professors whose groups are actively working in the area the grant is for will write a much better proposal. It's also expected that as a professor you are -- to a significant degree -- capable of funding your group.
I'm not even talking about grant writing. I'm talking about things like negotiating licensing agreements for private industry, contract negotiation to make sure publication and graduate students are protected, etc.
More that's a full time job all it's own, and is only one aspect of grant administration. Unless the Dean is some sort of omniscient AI, that's not going to work out well.
Minor stuff like spending 3 weeks "unemployed" and without a salary because her boss couldn't be arsed/was too busy to sort out the paperwork, grant money almost getting lost in the shuffle, stuff like that.
And even if you perceive a personnel issue as genuinely minor and you genuinely do consider it a waste of time, telling someone that problems they perceive as genuine are so insignificant to you that you don't even want to consider them, despite that being part of your job, is a great way to build resentment and destroy teams. A good manager should be able to quickly and efficiently handle minor issues without making people feel ignored and insignificant.
you're making the case for an administrative assistant, which is a very different role and set of responsibilities than a team of executives or managers.
No, this is not the solution; I've seen this sort of thing happen in academia even with professors with assistants (thankfully my own professors have never been like this). For example, the administrative assistant presents the professor with an employee timesheet that needs to be signed in order for some employee to be paid, and the professor says, "thanks, I'm busy now, just leave that here and don't bother me again" and then doesn't sign it, causing the employee not to be paid on time. The administrative assistant does not have the authority to sign it himself and does not have the authority to tell the professor what to do (and may be fired by the professor if they make themselves a bother by trying to nudge the professor into doing the paperwork).
The problem here is not that the professor is too disorganized, the problem is that some professors either don't perceive managerial tasks as important, or they view their managerial duties as impositions.
well, the problem is professors lack the motivation or ability to properly to administrative tasks so somebody else needs to do them instead.
however, installing a massive and expensive and authoritarian bureaucracy seems like an extremely bad solution as well and yet that is what we've got.
I'm suggesting that that bureaucracy ought to be dismantled and be replaced by a smaller number of more focused administrators who have the authority to do administrative work (i.e. are allowed to sign the payroll) but are not members of the managerial class that is strangling the life out of the academy.
I like your suggestion. Yes, separate the job of professor from that of administrator; enhance research independence at all levels by reducing administrative power over the professor from above, and reducing the administrative role of the professor on those below them.
I note that, if they have the authority to supervise employees and allocate budgets, then under many systems this administrator would be called a manager rather than an assistant (which is appropriate b/c this person would be a peer, rather than a subordinate, of the professor). I imagine that the admin would administer the budgets that were formerly administered by the professor, and other researchers who work in the lab would report to the admin rather than to the professor (the admin would consult with the professor over hiring/firing but would not be required to take their advice). The independence of the individual professor is enhanced but, due to the loss of full control of the budget and hiring/firing, their power over other non-professor-level researchers in the lab is decreased.
Your question contains a good chunk of our entire world's economic and bureaucratic problems -- namely people in power with the emotional intelligence and experience of a chihuahua.
