One of the things UK academics can probably all agree on – apart from that they are not yet entirely convinced by NN’s new MT4 blogging platform – is that meaningless oversight, audit, form-filling and box-ticking has risen inexorably in the last decade.
It seems that the Times Higher Education agrees as well: read one of the best leader articles I have seen in the THE for a while and you will get what I mean.
Red Tape: A Form of Distrust
Academics are vociferous in their condemnation of bureaucracy, especially when it tries to measure the unmeasurable. Obviously, higher education must be accountable to its public paymasters, but if the audit becomes the goal, human nature is such that people will put more effort into the things that can be audited – never mind the quality, feel the paperwork….
But banal and mind-numbing though it is, bureaucracy isn’t neutral. It is insidious, changing the nature of both teaching and research; it also, of course, has been used to push academics in uncomfortable directions.
The comments after the article make interesting reading. It appears that University administrators think the academics should stop bloody whingeing and do what the administrators tell them. For their own good, you understand. And because administrators know best.
The academics, as you would expect, are not impressed by what the administrators say.
A senior academic commenting as “Mark” sums it up nicely:
“In so many cases, the main justification for the paper work is that “we have to be seen to be doing”. In other words, it doesn’t actually matter if the monitoring is working, it just matters that we have a sufficient paper trail to prove to others that we are doing it.”
To which I suspect many UK lecturers – in science and other subjects – will be shouting:
“Yes!”
Not, sadly, that that seems likely to change any of this rubbish anytime soon.
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PS If you didn’t spot the rather feeble pun in the title, read the definition here.
Good find Austin – a rather depressing comment thread there. Though good to see Cardinal Newman back in action.
Yes, it is, isn’t it? The pomposity and lack of insight displayed by the two commenters “Juniper” and “Fergus”, who say they are administrators, rather reminds me of the kind of Alt.Reality, sorry, Alt.Medicine commenters you get at David Colquhoun’s blog – see for instance, “Dangerous Conventional” here.
I feel sorry for the exasperated academic “Mark” on the THE thread, though he is doing a sterling job. I thought his last comment was particularly pertinent:
I’m quite amused by the “I insist we have it” and once it arrives, “yikes we aren’t convinced” response to MT4. (not a nature.com product, but SixApart, btw).
Being extremely old indeed, i see this quite a bit – living through something, young whippersnappers wanting a clean sweep, and then wishing it was all back under the carpet (such as when a Tory Education Minister finally unveils a secret weapon – back to the 1950s!).
Yes, I have lived through multiple cycles of it in Universities, Maxine – though there the change to “something brand new” more often seems to be top-down driven rather than resulting from clamour from the masses. The typical scenario is that a new “Head of Something” is appointed, usually with no idea how the system works.
– is the usual line we are given.
Of course, the person is typically only given the job for 3 yrs, and is desperate to put their own “stamp” on it, so ushers in some major change in a tremendous hurry, typically to underwhelming results (to put it mildly).
If that sounds too cynical, I have seen it work on occasion, but in my experience the words one most wants to hear from a new boss who does not know the system is:
I remember reading somewhere that the typical tenure of a Chief Exec in the NHS was only about 3 yrs, so they have the same problem of incessant change, all rather undercooked.
Re. software, I would never adopt a freshly released brand-new Operating System, and am amazed people do. The standard line is to wait for the second release. And I’m still running Windows XP, though the speed of my rather elderly computer also has something to do with that.