Our woke top administrator thinks that a secretary (office manager, whatever the term) is an unnecessary job. He wants to get rid of all the departmental secretaries and have professors do their jobs for free. This strategy has already been implemented at the departments of Geography, Mathematics, and Physics, bringing their Chairs to the brink of a nervous collapse.
The administrator who came up with this is keeping his own secretary, though. Some people are always more equal than others.
As you know, I frequently call for the axing of the vast majority of the administration part of the education department. I say this to emphasize my point when I note that, that fellow is utterly nuts. The teachers are there to teach, not to fill out unneeded forms for faceless bureaucrats who’s jobs serve no actual purpose other than to waste time, money, life, everything really.
While I would love to see the paperwork part cut away entirely, in which case then yes the secretaries need to go. Getting rid of the secretaries without getting rid of the paperwork is almost guaranteed to make the quality of the education (already terrible as it is) suffer even further.
Perhaps the college should consider axing him, and his position to boot. Just something to consider. After all it would reduce waste and make the college more efficient too.
We’d love to get rid of him. But he’s the first African-American, blah blah, so any criticism of him is racism. A nifty trick, eh?
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Happily for him, he was snapped up by a more intelligent and less self-defeating university. I still can’t believe we passed on that wonderful candidate.
It gets better. We are now selecting a new Dean of Graduate School, and a candidate with 40 million in funding is being rejected in favor of a no-name, zero funding specialist in kinesiology. The committee’s reasoning?
“How do you think it’s going to make everybody else feel if he has all those publications while they don’t?”
My friend who’s on the committee responded “Inspired” but she was screamed down.
Truth is* stranger than fiction. Sorry you school is so screwed up….
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“not to fill out unneeded forms for faceless bureaucrats who’s jobs serve no actual purpose other than to”
Bureaucracies are nobody’s idea of fun but they serve a necessary purpose: A bureaucracy is keeping an eye on the system and without them things would run much more poorly. Of course part of the bureaucracy is all about watching the other part.
But unless you think a complex modern society can be run with no paper/digital trail you’re just begging for far more corruption than there is now.
A key part of neoliberalism is wanting to free the powerful from accountability and getting rid of bureaucrats (including secretaries) is part of that.
The purpose of getting rid of office staff is to let the guy in charge divert the money to goals of his own choosing without pesky people asking where the money went. Guaranteed.
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Totally. We are already utterly unable to get him to show us the paperwork of the college expenditures. He introduced gigantic budget cuts, a hiring freeze and he says he’s collected more donations last year than ever before. So where does the money go? Why is the budget hole even larger than before all this? He says his methods are working but in what sense? We’ve cut textbooks and went to OER. And none of it is enough. Admissions has collapsed because there’s some new-fangled structure every year that nobody understands and that doesn’t work. We are hiring private firms to redesign the logo and read our grant applications. Nobody is applying for any grants. The pipeline is empty. Yet we are paying a private firm for a service nobody is using while we can’t afford textbooks. Something stinks to high heaven. I don’t know if it’s corruptions or stupidity or what but the moment anybody asks questions they are tarred as a racist and that’s that.
Yea, I’d say that is pretty darn fishy. Also he likely is required to show the paperwork for college expenditures. The fact that he won’t is highly problematic.
I’m not sure what his position is as you just said he is a top administrator, but assuming he is not completely running the show, then. I would suggest getting several department heads to go to the dean or whoever is above that fellow or has authority over him and asking them to look into the situation, or to open an investigation. It sounds quite bad from what you wrote. I mean it could just be he has no idea what he is doing, but it really does sound quite bad.
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Look, I work in finance, we deal with the government’s fricken paperwork constantly. Yes some of it is needed, the vast majority however is a mix of make work, bureaucratic overreach, and lies.
Over the last decade we have been basically told to do more and more of the governments job for them, and more and more forms and paperwork have appeared magically with harsh penalties if we screw it up.
If this was by the various State governments I still wouldn’t be happy about it, but they would at least have a leg to stand on. The Federal government does not. Most of the paperwork is for departments that the Federal Government was not given the power to create. Or to make sure that people are paying taxes, taxes that were created specifically as “temporary taxes” until the debt from said war(s) was/were paid off, which in fact can’t be paid off when none of the tax money is ever applied to it. Thus insuring the taxes stay and they keep their jobs. Forever.
I won’t say its not impossible for corruption to increase if the paperwork is cut down. What I can and do say is that if nothing is done about the way things are going corruption will in fact continue to increase.
I refuse to be part of the well the bureaucracy is here now and forever club. It can be cut back, it can be diminished, it can be curtailed. There is however is no guarantee that it will or won’t end up increasing corruption. As in the end everything eventually does. What does have a guarantees is that corruption is really bad now and the way we are doing things has only been increasing it while doing nothing to slow it down.
So I would rather choose a path with the potential to fail, but with a chance to succeed, rather than the path that we are on that has no potential to succeed and is guaranteed not only to fail, but to go down horribly.
Yeah, my wife and myself ran small businesses for years. That was only possible because of her incredible patience with the seemingly endless municipal, provincial, and federal bureaucracy. And for the feds, there is the additional problem of supposedly having two languages.
For example; when she passed, my lawyer;s clerk advised me to apply for the federal funeral benefit*. Of course, I ended up talking to a bi-lingual** bureaucrat who told me that I had to mail her a copy of our marriage licence. Having no idea where she might have filed it or even kept it for more than 40 years, I asked her what happens if we were common law? She replied then I only had to give her a letter declaring that we had been married. I asked, “Vraiment!” To which she corrected me in Quebecois, “Pour de vrai” ;-D
*a small stipend returning some of your taxes upon the loss of your spouse
**a Quebecois make work hireling capable of speaking broken English
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“Over the last decade we have been basically told to do more and more of the governments job for them”
More neoliberalism…. one thing most people don’t realize in Europe is that border controls for flights have not been lifted, even within Schengen, they just outsourced that job to private airport staff.
Bureaucratic overreach is definitely a problem. I’ve worked in a (small) bureaucracy and the amount of doubled efforts and redundancy was amazing (not to mention wastefulness of having to maintain things because getting rid of them was more trouble than it was worth). Federal government overreach has also been a problem for decades. The big grab came during the Civil Rights movement when the failure of a bunch of states (esp in the South) to join the 20th century meant the federal government had to step in since the states were manifestly incapable of running their own affairs. The downside is that it is yet to step back out.
Charles Hugh Smith gripes about this periodically, calling it “shadow work”– the increase in work that you have no choice but to do yourself, in order to do the same things you did before, but with more leeching of your time and resources. He often cites not just perversely stupid government forms, but also software updates that eff up your computer, that you then have to spend time troubleshooting, because the software “support” never works out all the kinks before it issues the update. Then there are endless telephone trees– where instead of paying real live people to answer phones and run a switchboard so you tell them your problem, and they transfer you to the right department… they did not offload that cost onto an electronic phone menu. They offloaded that cost on *you* because now it takes you 20 minutes to navigate that thing (previously, the switchboard lady could do it in 10 seconds) to get yourself to the right department. You’re doing the switchboard lady’s work, for free.
And this is not stuff like Aldi, where they charge for bags, you bag your own groceries, and they hold your quarter ransom to get you to bring the cart back yourself, so that they don’t have to hire bagboys and cart-fetchers. They actually have lower prices as a result. and they *haven’t* succumbed to the self-check-out mania (swapping labor costs for massive shoplifting costs). We are talking about companies that engage in these work-offloading measures *without* offering the customer any cost savings for it. Scan your own groceries, pay the same price. Spend hours debugging your computer after an update: pay the same price. Spend 20 minutes screaming at the telephone menu: pay the same price. Buy the same service, but without any customer support: pay the same price.
OT: Newest entry in the “That didn’t take long” Department. The UK could start offering cash rewards for killing your (grand)parents….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/six-figure-tax-problem-looming-labour-assisted-dying/
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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