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Trouble from top to bottom: it can be a tough life for an academic
Administration is more centralised and teaching staff are more casualised; the modern university can be a tough place for an academic.
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Your description is accurate and it is essentially silly that there are now more administrators – who do not teach or research, in universities than there are academics. However, most of these administrators are graduates of our universities and who otherwise might not find employment these days. Are universities now providing middle-class welfare?
A sad but very accurate description of university life today. As the weighty bureaucracy grows ever larger, remote from the realities of teaching, with ever-larger classes, and tutorials now almost extinct due to budgetary considerations, students are being sold a product of ever-diminishing value, and staff morale, particularly among casual staff, sinks lower and lower. I can only consider myself fortunate to have studied in the time when a university was a place which prided itself on the quality of its teaching and the bureaucracy made little observable impact on high-standard teaching.
This article is only 95% accurate! It is interesting to investigate the forces that resulted in the current state of affairs. One of the most destructive forces is due to the various academic ranking metrics. At the individual scale the h-index maximisation drives destructive behaviours. At the institutional scale, university rankings are very destructive. The problem with metrics is that they only measure what can be measured, but this is only one component of an academic’s life. How do we measure the quality of teaching or inspiration of young people to become the best they can be? The fundamental problem arises from the usage of one-dimensional metrics that allow for ranking to take place. The ATAR is another example of mapping the multidimensional educational experience of a student onto a single dimension, because only then can a ranking take place. Quality is what is most important, yet to measure quality is not a quality thing to do.
Maybe if you guys were better at the core skills modern organisations need – like being organised, getting things done on time and using modern technology – there wouldn’t need to be so much oversight.
But you book yourselves holidays when you go to conferences and claim it as work, you delegate your lectures to underpaid PhD students and generally mess the joint up.
So oversight is the price you pay.