Quick Hits: Academic Administration and the Super Bowl
Mostly lukewarm takes on matters of little import
I’ve been very busy with work, which has made finding writing time difficult, a problem which is compounded by not having a really big idea of something that I really have to write about. Instead, there are a lot of little things that don’t quite seem important enough to be the topic of an entire post, especially if that’s the only thing I’ll have time to post.
So I’m going to try sticking a bunch of these together into a kind of grab-bag of topics. Which won’t be all that coherent, probably, but maybe some kind of theme will emerge; we’ll see.
— On the more serious end, I’ve been in multiple meetings recently with a general goal of reforming administrative processes of one sort or another that are currently seen as unduly burdensome. That is, there’s a list of tasks and responsibilities that’s a bit overwhelming for the person or people charged with doing them, and the goal is to find a way to re-arrange things that will make it less hassle to get everything done. Yes, at some level, these were meetings to discuss the problem of having too many meetings; that irony was not lost.
Generally speaking, I tend to be an incrementalist when it comes to reforming things— I think it’s better to make a small change that improves things slightly than to hold out for a sweeping change that’s much harder to accomplish. You can make things substantially better if you add up a lot of small changes, ending up in a place that you could just never get to in one single step.
After twenty-odd years in academic meetings, though, I’m coming around to the idea that this specific category of proposed improvements is an exception, though. That is, if the goal is to reduce the work associated with a particular system or position, I think it’s a mistake to start with the list of what’s currently being done and look for things to eliminate or reassign. Instead, you should start from a blank piece of paper and list out the things that are absolutely essential for the functioning of whatever system you’re looking at, and create a new system that does just those things.
The problem is, when you look at an existing list of tasks that are already being done, for every one of them, somebody can come up with a seemingly compelling case for why it’s really important to continue doing that exactly as you have been. This is particularly true when you’re dealing with academics, who excel at finding retcons to justify odd practices. But if you sat down and said “What are the essential duties of a position that fills this role in the operation of the institution?”, many of those tasks wouldn’t come up. They’re things that were essential tasks at one time, or passion projects of some past occupant of that position, and they’ve stuck around because, well, “that’s what we’ve always done…”
If you accept what you’re already doing as the starting point, you’ll almost always end up making the list longer, because when you go down it one task at a time, you’ll struggle find anything that everybody agrees could be dropped. Starting from zero gives you at least a chance of coming up with a list of essential tasks that makes sense, and will likely be shorter than the current list.
—In the area of academic organization and administration, the one scorching hot Take that I find tempting is that faculty should move to a billable hours model. I say that because I feel like there’s been a consistent trend over the last few decades of pushing tasks away from administrative staff who do bill hours and onto people who are salaried, who have to shift other responsibilities around to make room for processing paperwork that used to be handled by somebody else.
This give the illusion of progress from a narrow accounting perspective, since you need fewer hours from the staff who used to handle these things, and that’s its own line on the balance sheet, which goes down. Those tasks are offloaded onto people who don’t get any extra pay for taking them on, so their line doesn’t go up, so it looks like a win. Except, it’s not, because when those tasks were done by specialized staff, it was their whole job to wrangle the relevant systems, where the faculty and other exempt salaried folks who have had to pick them up only occasionally have to do these things a couple of times a year, and as a result find it laborious and frustrating, and need more time to get it done. Those additional hours come out of their other activities, like teaching and research. Meaning that you’re actually shifting resources away from core functions of the institution and toward petty bullshit.
Of course, the biggest obstacle to this idea is that it would require setting some sort of hourly rate for faculty, and we’d probably end up finding that depressing…
— There’s also a sort of conceptual problem with that approach, in that it would worsen a trend that I think we’ve already seen, which is faculty getting much more mercenary about their time. In the twenty-odd years I’ve been here, there’s been a marked increase in the number of people demanding explicit compensation for doing things that used to be seen as just part of the job. But that’s probably too heavy a topic for a quick-hit list like this.
— On the lighter side, my father came up here Sunday to watch the Super Bowl with us (my mother’s in California helping my sister prepare for a move), so we ended up watching the whole game. Or nearly the whole game— The Pip gave up midway through the fourth quarter and asked to go to bed. It was a pretty good game, and a very impressive performance by Patrick Mahomes in the second half.
The big debate after the game was about a defensive holding call in the closing minutes that gave Kansas City a key first down. The defensive back responsible admitted to the hold, but that hasn’t stopped any number of people declaring that “You can’t call that in that spot,” an evergreen bit of sports punditry.
Like most evergreen punditry, in sports or elsewhere, it’s also a fundamentally incoherent position. If the rules mean anything, they have to mean the same thing in the last minute of a tight championship game that they do in the first quarter of an early-season blowout. If you want to argue that it was a weak call and should never be a penalty, that’s a sensible position to take, but the notion that the rules should be different at the end of an important game is just bullshit. It’s not “The refs deciding the game,” it’s the player who decided the game, by gambling that he could get away with the sort of jersey grab that routinely gets called defensive holding.
Of course, a lot of the people making the “You can’t call that there” argument are also big supporters of the differential treatment given to star players in the NBA, which is the biggest bullshit position in all of sports, so…
— The Super Bowl halftime show with Rihanna was… fine. The Super Smash Bros platform staging was kind of cool, but the need for safety harnesses on those dancers made the performances a little inert. I was also expecting some sort of big costume change or something, especially since as the kids noted, the dancers were all dressed like snowboarders. I expected the bulky white parkas to be ripped off at some point to reveal something sparkly or colorful, but it was Rihanna vs. Shaun White to the very end.
Fundamentally, this sort of show is just Not My Thing, and not just because I have no particular attachment to Rihanna’s music. I recognize that there’s a ton of planning and skill involved in coordinating that number of people to do the same moves in approximate unison, but the result just isn’t something I find all that moving. Predictably, a lot of people found fodder in this for impassioned arguments online, but I just can’t work up any significant interest in it.
— If there was a theme to the Super Bowl ad slate it was Making Me Feel Old. Largely because I was watching with the kids, and had to keep explaining ads that were deliberately pandering to my very specific demographic: “Yeah, that’s a reference to a movie that came out years before you were born.”
If you need me, I’ll be over in the corner crumbling into dust.
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