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Why universities shouldn’t simply return to the ‘old normal’ post pandemic
A few months ago, I got sent a satirical article about how to sabotage the productivity of your university by using a CIA manual from 1944.
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“As far as I have observed to date at my own university and elsewhere, we have made sensible and defensible positions and enacted them, with broad acceptance and little or no negative ripple”.
The key part of that sentence is “…to date…” Ummm it’s been like a couple of weeks since Unis went into fully online teaching. Do we really think that “negative ripples” are all transparent and visible in that little amount of time?
And the reason everyone and their parent is/was involved is because so many Uni people specialise (for valid reason) and don’t know the ramifications of what they decide, ergo Uni’s include people in the meeting who know the ramifications (in their field) before action is taken e.g. what is the impact of an ‘academic’ decision on HR or finance or regulatory compliance?
And if you are a person who doesn’t think there are any such ramifications or that they are irrelevant to your decision making or that admin staff can just know what you decided through some magical osmosis process then you are precisely the kind of person who probably does need those extra person/people in your meetings!
Having said all that, yes I truly do wish it could all be simpler going forward.
I have experienced the opposite to this at some Australian unis – decisions made by small groups of senior managers with no consultation and no transparency, based on limited information, with those impacted having no recourse to redress this.
This can lead to massive wastes of time and resources in other ways – talented and experienced staff leave, other key staff are not able to work efficiently, working relationships can have a breakdown in trust and official complaints are raised.
I think its too soon to know exactly what the impacts are of the fast decisions that are being made right now by small groups of managers. It may take months or years for us to understand the fallout of this complex situation.
I similarly have some concerns about this article. My worry is that it seems much too easy once people move into senior management positions in the sector to forget the amazing talent of academics and teaching staff generally to think on their feet in instruction/assessment situations. In ways that to quote the great knowledge writers are almost entirely impossible to adequately communicate ie implicit knowledge or practice based knowledge. In this context I would just like to call out my academic staff colleagues across the sector for the amazing work they have done to adjust (in often incredibly trying circumstances and technology) to cope with the move to online delivery. It’s quite remarkable how the vast majority of academic staff have dealt with these changes which university management appear to see as a baseline expectation! Often this relatively seemless switch has been accomplished only with a great deal of additional effort and stress.
We were able to transition to online and maintain the majority of our internships. We were flexible, agile and solutions focused. Now the university bureaucracy has gotten involved trying to save money, I spend my time justifying every staff position and expenditure. I am diverted from the priority of creating WIL opportunities for students. Get out of the way and let me do my job.
Trying to save money?
What do you think will keep you in your job?! Everyone in a University should be thinking about better use of resources, stopping things which aren’t needed, etc. Sometimes Academics need to think like a business, now is one of those times.