7 ms·

As a faculty member I find it more and more difficult to use my own grant funding (some of which is from organizations like NSF and some of which is "unrestrict

As a faculty member I find it more and more difficult to use my own grant funding (some of which is from organizations like NSF and some of which is "unrestricted gift" funding, which is supposed to be used at my sole discretion.) Mostly this is due to new rules and reporting requirements that rule out certain expenses, and some of it is new procedures that make reimbursement harder. For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now. I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
We've been seeing "administrators" start asking for detailed reports on unrestricted funding, plans for expenditure, etc. I am starting to wonder when they'll start to ask for "gifts" from faculty discretionary accounts to support general scholarship funds or anything else that basically just pushes it back into the top line. Unrelated tangent because I recognize your name: thanks for making your course materials openly available!
pannSun 4y ago
Funny. One would naively assume that administrators are there to make the faculty's job easier. To take care of administrative work so that you can focus on teaching and research. Instead they think their role is to create administrative work.
malshe 4y ago
By any chance are you required to use Concur for flight booking?
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Yes! Concur is one of the new procedures we've been handed recently. Aside from being garbage software, it also requires us to use SAP's travel agency for booking (which means higher prices sometimes, plus fees.) This comes out of our grants too.
  - malshe 4y ago
    Far too familiar story unfortunately!
- cs2818 4y ago
  This really resonates with me. I recently traveled to an international conference and I am almost certain I spent more time jumping through the hoops of Concur and our university’s bizarre policies than I did presenting and attending the conference. The worst part is the trip was significantly more expensive than it needed to be because of the constraints imposed by the system.
  - malshe 4y ago
    That's my experience as well. I feel guilty while booking through Concur because I know I am wasting taxpayers' money.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I've made this kind of post many times, so apologies if you've seen it before. My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field. Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less. Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need. You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  > You're among the smartest people in society Being an expert in one specific field does not necessarily mean that you are also an expert in labor activism.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Uneducated blue collar workers around the world are able to organize and resist their overlords I'm sure that a motivated group of academics could muster up the resources to learn how to solve the problem they find themselves in. The fact that they could but don't seems to indicate to me that academics as a whole don't consider the situation as precarious as we think.
csa 4y ago
> we couldn't buy pizza for research lab meetings It’s probably not worth the time, but there are usually ways to use the rules to get your way with the business office. “Team building”, or whatever category that falls under, might be a way to get pizza. (Note that they seem to be treating the pizza as a reimbursed meal for travel or something like that — probably an incorrect categorization). I have a friend who knows this kind of stuff inside and out. I will ask her and post back here. It might take a day or two.
- ls612 4y ago
  Yeah I’m in a good PhD program and for “department internal” event stuff we run roughshod over stupid university rules and the admin staff figures out ways to make it happen.
scrubs 4y ago
@matthewdgreen theoretically profs chafe at the admin substate in academia ... So with the situation as stated in the article how should we weight the explanatory reasons: * Profs lost institutional control imposed on them, and can't get it back * Profs lost institutional control they initiated which grew bigger than them * Profs are surrounded (by paperwork) and don't see a way out; they've become cynical as it's become a way of life * Increased tuition to pay for increasingly expensive admin means the uni's customer is more themselves then it should be At the macro scale the complaint here is analogous to the frustration American doctors have about patients (to much paperwork too little time with people) or Brexit. The question is why can't incentives be aligned; why aren't the purported customers (students, patients, voters resp) able to have more power? For this level of institutional failure if we see it as that, the profs, doctors, reps (resp) have got to be part of the problem sad to day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

i_am_proteus 4y ago

We've been seeing "administrators" start asking for detailed reports on unrestricted funding, plans for expenditure, etc. I am starting to wonder when they'll start to ask for "gifts" from faculty discretionary accounts to support general scholarship funds or anything else that basically just pushes it back into the top line. Unrelated tangent because I recognize your name: thanks for making your course materials openly available!

pannSun 4y ago

Funny. One would naively assume that administrators are there to make the faculty's job easier. To take care of administrative work so that you can focus on teaching and research. Instead they think their role is to create administrative work.

malshe 4y ago

By any chance are you required to use Concur for flight booking?

matthewdgreen 4y ago
Yes! Concur is one of the new procedures we've been handed recently. Aside from being garbage software, it also requires us to use SAP's travel agency for booking (which means higher prices sometimes, plus fees.) This comes out of our grants too.
- malshe 4y ago
  Far too familiar story unfortunately!
cs2818 4y ago
This really resonates with me. I recently traveled to an international conference and I am almost certain I spent more time jumping through the hoops of Concur and our university’s bizarre policies than I did presenting and attending the conference. The worst part is the trip was significantly more expensive than it needed to be because of the constraints imposed by the system.
- malshe 4y ago
  That's my experience as well. I feel guilty while booking through Concur because I know I am wasting taxpayers' money.

anigbrowl 4y ago

I've made this kind of post many times, so apologies if you've seen it before. My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field. Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less. Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need. You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.

fknorangesite 4y ago
> You're among the smartest people in society Being an expert in one specific field does not necessarily mean that you are also an expert in labor activism.
- Teever 4y ago
  Uneducated blue collar workers around the world are able to organize and resist their overlords I'm sure that a motivated group of academics could muster up the resources to learn how to solve the problem they find themselves in. The fact that they could but don't seems to indicate to me that academics as a whole don't consider the situation as precarious as we think.

csa 4y ago

> we couldn't buy pizza for research lab meetings It’s probably not worth the time, but there are usually ways to use the rules to get your way with the business office. “Team building”, or whatever category that falls under, might be a way to get pizza. (Note that they seem to be treating the pizza as a reimbursed meal for travel or something like that — probably an incorrect categorization). I have a friend who knows this kind of stuff inside and out. I will ask her and post back here. It might take a day or two.

ls612 4y ago
Yeah I’m in a good PhD program and for “department internal” event stuff we run roughshod over stupid university rules and the admin staff figures out ways to make it happen.

scrubs 4y ago

@matthewdgreen theoretically profs chafe at the admin substate in academia ... So with the situation as stated in the article how should we weight the explanatory reasons: * Profs lost institutional control imposed on them, and can't get it back * Profs lost institutional control they initiated which grew bigger than them * Profs are surrounded (by paperwork) and don't see a way out; they've become cynical as it's become a way of life * Increased tuition to pay for increasingly expensive admin means the uni's customer is more themselves then it should be At the macro scale the complaint here is analogous to the frustration American doctors have about patients (to much paperwork too little time with people) or Brexit. The question is why can't incentives be aligned; why aren't the purported customers (students, patients, voters resp) able to have more power? For this level of institutional failure if we see it as that, the profs, doctors, reps (resp) have got to be part of the problem sad to day.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]