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Originally posted by: Arnold
" I used to find meetings where Pood talked mind-numbing too . . . isn't this THEIR JOB?"

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Never assemble a group of faculty members late on a Friday afternoon to tell them something that could just as well be said in a memo lest they become irate and restless.

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Originally posted by: Administrivia
"Never assemble a group of faculty members late on a Friday afternoon to tell them something that could just as well be said in a memo lest they become irate and restless."

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Trivia? Seems like common sense. I am in no way qualified to be an administrator--my friends would collapse in hysterical laughter at the thought. So it's pathetic that I think I could give all of them some lessons, from SFT on down.

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Originally posted by: Arnold
"I am in no way qualified to be an administrator--my friends would collapse in hysterical laughter at the thought.

I don't even know you but I'll bet you could do a better job that a dean and a department chair I had.

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Originally posted by: stinky cheese man
"might-be-an-a-dean--agree completely. a few we have here see it that way. they go to conferences trying to learn different and better ways of doing things. have as their goal trying to help students, faculty, and the university. some don't however. they go begrudingly. hate panels and workshops. "

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And that is why academic admin types here and elsewhere tend to be mediocre to poor (or confused) leaders and managers (What? Me need training in leadership, team-building, budgets, accreditation issues, unit planning, legal issues, or mentoring skills? Can't you see my Ph.D. on the wall?). Then we bring in business types who are clueless about our academic culture (some are well-intentioned, some not), and they end up doing goofy things (as you all know). Agh! The best thing I learned in grad school is how little I know in so many important areas. I wish I had time for more admin training, but I'll take it as it comes.  

My two cents. The best training for university administation is to work ones way up through the ranks beginning with an Assistant Professorship. In most cases that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for becoming an effective university administrator.

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Originally posted by: stinky cheese man
"administrivia--you are so right! coming up through the ranks, going through the tenure and promotion process is critical. teaching in the trenches (sp?) is also critical. knowing what students are like--not just those in graduate seminars, but those in those tough-to-teach courses.

Yes, I agree that going through the teaching and promotion process & teaching in the trenches is also essential. Those things have not always been part of the criteriia for presidency here, you know.

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Originally posted by: Might be an A-Dean
"And that is why academic admin types here and elsewhere tend to be mediocre to poor (or confused) leaders and managers (What? Me need training in leadership, team-building, budgets, accreditation issues, unit planning, legal issues, or mentoring skills? Can't you see my Ph.D. on the wall?). Then we bring in business types who are clueless about our academic culture (some are well-intentioned, some not), and they end up doing goofy things (as you all know). Agh! The best thing I learned in grad school is how little I know in so many important areas. I wish I had time for more admin training, but I'll take it as it comes.  "

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Here is the BIG LIE about management that we all are experiencing. In the current political culture in which taxes as a source of revenue have become demonized, the only way for a politician to promise to make things better without raising taxes is to FIND THE WASTE. So virtually every governmental agency, national, state and local, top to bottom for the past twenty years has now been pretty well pruned down to not much left but bone (and in some cases no bone at all). This is where we come in. The reason we have machines that break down, no paper for copiers, no consistent pay increases, and our students are experiencing increasing diffciult getting government money for education without mortgaging the rest of their lives is that we are running on empty -- not generating enough revenue. We have become so traumatized by the phrase NO NEW TAXES (replaced by CUT MORE WASTE) that we have stopped applying common sense. If you run anything from factory to a household you know that the first 50% of the waste you cut is pretty easy, standard stuff that doesn't take much effort it just takes changing habits (turning lights off when you leave the room; shutting down the facotry ari conditioning when the workers aren't there). The next 30% is going to take more time to identify, and will require some real exertion of energy and money. The next 10% will cost you as much to get rid of as to leave it in place. The last 10% you can spend all of the money you saved trying to get. MOst people, from factory owners to homemakers, know by instinct they aren't going to get that last 10-15% -- it isn't worth it. So they learn to live with it.

Is there waste in government? YES

 Is there waste in the univsities? YES.

are we at the point of diminishing returns when continuing to develop new and expensive systems to search out the little waste that is left has begun to imapct on lots of other operations in terms of time, material, and money? I believe the answer is clearly yes.

We are living in a huge cultural lie -- a strange version of "getting something for nothing" in which politicans and managers keep pointing at the millions of little dust mites all over the room and instead of simply patiently brooming them up, knowing that they perpetuate as fast as you broom -- they'd rather call in a bulldozer and knock the building down.

This thinking also applies to accountability -- yet another area where there are continual promises of improvements based on tightening of controls rather than increasing resources. Accountability, too, has it point of diminishing returns. How many chairs are now essentailly full time managers (yet still listed in the bulletin as teaching faculty members) with huge amounts of their time spent on accountability and assessment? How many departments are feeling the pull of administrtative time as it seeps deeper and deeper into the academic system where we spend increasingly more and more of our time preparing documents to explain what we d, how we do it, how well we do it, and then inventing a new system every other year to replace the old and outmoded one? How many of us are less prepared for our classes every year because we spend increasing amounts of time (with increasingly less help) doing all this stuff?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against getting rid of waste nor am I against accountability or assessment. But I also know how bureaucracies work -- they tend to perpetuate themselves. We have fostered a management bureaucracy that is increasingly top heavy and needs something to do to justify its time and the vast (and exhorbitant) salaries it pays its top people. The demand for new and increasingly elaborate systems of accountacy is driven as much by the rise of this managerial class as it is by need for accountability and assessment. Professional workers are increasingly working less for their clients and increasingly for the management that demands both a product and documentation of that product. But with the increasing demands for documentation, the work load does not  decrease to compensate -- oh no. It grows.

For most of us, what gets lost is time we used to have for our students.

I'm fine if we need to educate more students in greater numbers in order to make up for a culture that can't see what it is losing when it shortchanges education. I'm just NOT fine telling students and their parents that these changes are being made to achieve more "student centered" institutions. And I am really not fine when there is no discussion at all of the qualitative impact of these decisions on our daily interaction with our students and with our collegues.

 

 

 

 

Yep -- I'm in agreement with your analysis Bob. It is happening all over and your citing the trends seems correct.

I suppose my concern is really that we are losing the rhetorical war -- the language that has shaped public discourse tends to define and identify the problem as residing within the work force rather than as one shared with management. So the solutions always seem to end up being instituting more mechanisms of control and accountancy rather than more resources and a better distribution of resources. Control mechanisms not only have a limited half life, but they can only be efficient enough to convince the public that the people who invent and use them know what they are doing well enough that as one new method fails the next wave of controls always look promising. The result of all this is a management that always looks "progressive" and "forward leaning" and a work force that looks "resistent to chnage."

Anybody here remember TQM?

 

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Originally posted by: stephen judd
"Anybody here remember TQM?  "

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Since 1995, the Psych Department at Clemson has been part of the Business School (now called College of Business and Behavioral Science).  When we first arrived there, a bunch of our colleagues in Management were doing research on Total Quality Management or promoting it in various ways.  I don't hear nearly so much about it now.

I do remember asking a couple of times how you go about implementing TQM in a state university (or in any other kind of organization that doesn't have a bottom line) and not getting a very satisfactory answer.

Robert Campbell