Every now and again, you read something and feel like screaming out: "Oh my God, yes!". That was my reaction to this article in The Conversation a few weeks ago, by Meg Elkins (RMIT University), Ananta Neelim, and Robert Hoffman (both University of Tasmania). They open the article with:
Are you spending more and more time at work doing paperwork and filling in forms rather than the thing you were trained and hired for? Does this busy work often seem to resist rational purpose or questioning? Does it kill your productivity, initiative, motivation and, frankly, your self-worth and sanity?
At that point, I am thinking, you should talk about academia. In fact, that was their go-to example:
Although stories of creeping bureaucracy abound in many industries, evidence – and our own experience – suggests nowhere has the problem of red tape exploded as much as it has in universities.
Staff complain the time they have for teaching and research is being eaten up by filling in forms and writing reports of questionable value. But this gripe goes beyond the inefficiency of bureaucratic excess. Some rules demotivate because they are interpreted as patronising.
I encourage you to read the entire article, especially if you are a current student and you're wondering why academic staff aren't always as fully prepared for lectures or assessments as you would like, aren't always available, or don't always spend the time to have the time to give you all the one-on-one attention that you need. It's not because they don't care. It's literally because there are so many bureaucratic roadblocks, and so much bullshit work that gets in the way (and I loved that Elkins et al. referenced David Graeber's excellent book Bullshit Jobs, or rather the article that led to the book [*]). Time and energy are limited resources, after all.
As for me, I don't find it all that demotivating, dealing with all the bullshit work, just frustrating. I would much rather spend my time on teaching and research activities, than filling in forms, attending meetings (especially meetings about meetings), and completing formative research evaluations (as practice for real research evaluations).
The problem here is one of negative externalities. The bureaucrats and academic managers who devise the systems and processes that academics must follow only face a small proportion of the total cost of their systems and processes. Those systems and processes instead impose most of the costs on academic staff (and academic administration staff). The total cost of the systems and processes (the marginal social cost) far exceeds the small costs that the bureaucrats and academic managers face themselves (the marginal private cost). And so, we end up with more complicated, onerous, and unnecessary systems and processes than would be optimal. The optimal quantity of form-filling is much less than the unrestrained quantity - notice the similarity to the negative externalities I wrote about last week.
Is it time for academics to fight back against bullshit work? Sadly, Elkins et al. don't have much to offer on that. Their main hope appears to be that academic leaders will learn from the experience of others in cutting red tape. Unfortunately, that would mean that someone would have to lead the way. I don't see too many exemplars of that in practice.
As a group, academics are not powerless. However, the staff unions seem unconcerned with the unending rise of bullshit work, at the expense of teaching and research. They are more focused on fighting continuing below-inflation increases in salaries, and increasingly precarious work conditions. The irony is that there might be more funds for paying higher salaries, and more job security, if so many of us weren't spending so much time on bullshit work.
Individually, some academics are able to negotiate around a small proportion (but definitely not all) of the red tape, perhaps by having academic administrators or junior academic staff complete some of the tasks that would otherwise fall to them. Unfortunately, that has the effect of increasing the inequality between senior staff and top researchers (who can negotiate those deals) and junior and emerging staff (who cannot, and may end up carrying some of the burden for senior staff). Those senior staff really need to stand up for the junior staff who are being burdened with bullshit work, but the individual incentives to do so are all wrong. The principle is sort of like this:
Except, senior academic staff are forgetting the part about helping others. It is time to start.
*****
[*] I reviewed David Graeber's book here.
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