5 ms·

It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overw

It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overworked or reduced to part-time status (even as the number of administrative personnel elsewhere in the uni is ballooning), and printing is limited by quotas after which soon one has to start paying out of pocket for printouts. Even grayhaired tenured faculty are feeling the pinch.

passerby1 6y ago
What does cause it, some green-eco-pressure or a bare underbudget reason?
- martin_a 6y ago
  Mixture of all of it. On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies. Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again. Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it. At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
- notmyname9173 6y ago
  I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.
dhosek 6y ago
I used to teach the TeX User Group LaTeX classes around 1989–93. The students were almost entirely math department secretaries who were charged with typing up professors' handwritten manuscripts. When I did a couple rounds of grad school in 2002–6, both unis had a department secretary but they worked strictly administrative tasks for the department as a whole (and to a lesser extent for the department chair). There wasn't a prof who didn't do their own typing.

passerby1 6y ago

What does cause it, some green-eco-pressure or a bare underbudget reason?

martin_a 6y ago
Mixture of all of it. On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies. Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again. Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it. At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
notmyname9173 6y ago
I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.

dhosek 6y ago

I used to teach the TeX User Group LaTeX classes around 1989–93. The students were almost entirely math department secretaries who were charged with typing up professors' handwritten manuscripts. When I did a couple rounds of grad school in 2002–6, both unis had a department secretary but they worked strictly administrative tasks for the department as a whole (and to a lesser extent for the department chair). There wasn't a prof who didn't do their own typing.