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About a side point that the author makes: “We’re not going to talk much about staff, but briefly we can divide them quickly into four big groups: leadership (c

About a side point that the author makes: “We’re not going to talk much about staff, but briefly we can divide them quickly into four big groups: leadership (chancellors, deans, and assistant deans of various kinds; of old these used to be professors pulled into leadership temporarily but these days these are professional managers)....” I retired a month ago from a tenured faculty position at a public university in Japan, and I was often struck by the difference between how that university is run and the above characteristic of leadership at North American universities. At my university, and I believe at most Japanese universities, nearly everyone from the assistant deans all the way up to the university president is a professor with decades of experience in the classroom and doing research. All of the important posts, including department chairs, deans, and the university president, are elected by and from among the tenured faculty—“professors pulled into leadership,” as the author says. I became aware of that difference in leadership structure when I met people at American universities to discuss education programs. While all of the important decisions about our education programs were made by faculty, the Americans I met who were serving in similar roles were usually professional administrators. They were probably more competent as administrators than I and my colleagues were (“amateur professors who’d rather not have been asked,” as the author says in a footnote), but I think our experience as teachers and researchers gave us an advantage when planning and running education programs.

namdnay 4y ago
That is also the case in France for public universities - the "VPs" and above are all elected by the teaching staff. To give a disadvantage, it makes it very hard to push through any big changes. Neither the leaders nor the electorate have ever worked in large private orgs, meaning you end up with bizarre situations like an entire university that does not use the Calendar feature in Outlook ("so microsoft knows what i'm doing? that sounds like big brother!"), instead relying on online event-organising tools to ask people to give availability for every single meeting , or a block refusal of opening paid professional courses or opening to foreign students (due to a very hard "teaching must always be free" stance from their voters) , which could bring in much-needed cash to subsidise the "real" students
- tough 4y ago
  You could tell them to use cal.com for their calendar needs, open core/ source
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    cal.com looks interesting, but doesn't it mean that it will have access to all the information in ALL my calenders? So not only does microsoft know about my embarrassing condition doctors appointment, but so does cal.com?
    - tough 4y ago
      You can self-host it. I worked there briefly. Their market is big enterprises and govt that won't fly a hosted solution, they offer both a SaaS and self-hosted licenses Then it's up to you how you sync with calendars, if a self-host caldav instance is enough no microsoft there
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  That calendar system sounds ideal for the way I work. I'd probably write some tooling to make it a little easier, but sending around little iCal files and reviewing my schedule often means I have a good intuition for what I'm doing, and when. When I start to get annoyed by the amount of stuff I've got scheduled, and the consequential overhead of managing it, it means I'm trying to do too much, and I need to reduce it. Outlook considers every moment not spent in a meeting as "free time", unless you specifically block off "reserved time", and that's just not how I work.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    As with the travel business, the main complexity is rescheduling. A sudden big sales opportunity at the same time as an important internal meeting you’re hosting with 10 people? What could be done in a few clicks with outlook or equivalent is going to take you half a day of panic
  - esafak 4y ago
lordnacho 4y ago
I wonder whether this is actually limited to academia. When I was at business school it was mentioned that US firms are more likely to have special managers (MBAs) whereas somewhere like Europe tended to promote technical staff like engineers. Someone out there must know whether this is generally true.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Not really. A lot of MBAs go into things like management consulting, finance, certain types of marketing roles, but even things like product management/program management. I'm not sure it's really that common to hop straight from an MBA to a management role (unless it's a case of someone already in management or being groomed for management who goes back to school to get a degree). It's also the case that, at the better business schools, most of the students have at least some experience in any case. What is true is that generally speaking (though not in all cases) once someone goes into management--and certainly executive management--they tend to not go back into individual contributor roles although it does happen. And, in general, MBA degrees are probably more common in the US than in Europe.
fullsend 4y ago
This reminds of how the politburo of China is often made up of engineers, chemists, and people with similar backgrounds. Whereas American politicians are all lawyers.
- tyoma 4y ago
  This used to be true only in the most technical sense, partly because sciences/engineering degrees were still permitted during the cultural revolution —- it was the only option. The newer generation of leaders is mostly lawyers and economics degrees. Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-techno...
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  this reminds me of how the politburo of china is 99.9% male, the sons of the party elite get favorable positions, and you keep your position by telling the dictator what they want to hear instead of what is actually going on.
- dxdm 4y ago
  I'm assuming people become members of the politburo after a substantial career in the political party apparatus, maybe even longer than it takes to become a member of congress. Of course, there will be differences between coming up in the one system or the other, but essentially I'd say they are career politicians just the same. Presumably, there's also a very strong selection process to make it into the top ranks of this political system, that will have a very strong effect on who gets there and how they get shaped on the way - not mentioning the forces within, once you're in place. So while it would be wrong to say the initial background makes no difference, I wonder how much influence it still holds once you make it into the politburo.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  That used to be true, but the cultural revolution put a dent in that. While it is still likely they’ll have a degree in engineering, the leadership is now a lot like Xi Jinping in being career politicians (he has a 2 year correspondence chemical engineering degree from qinghua, but never worked as an engineer).
hgsgm 4y ago
The formal name for the school part of Harvard, where students learn, is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. https://www.fas.harvard.edu/ https://www.fas.harvard.edu/ Traditionally, professors ran universities, merely overseen by a small board of overseers, until a quiet coup in the 20th Century created the administrative state.
etempleton 4y ago
In my experience, someone with some teaching experience in a field should run operations for academic department—an NTT that teaches a course or two a semester, for example. And a tenure track chair should be the decision maker on the department’s direction. However, I also find that academics make poor administrators and leaders more often than not. I think this comes down to experience. Academics often go from no or minimum leadership and management responsibilities to many and some are just not equipped to handle it. Being a chair is poor experience to becoming an academic Dean and even poorer experience to becoming a non-academic leader. Additionally, many have to learn the hard way that most challenges within a large organization require a ton of coordination and alignment and that there are very few instances where there is a silver bullet to solve business challenges.
blululu 4y ago
There is a common refrain that anyone who wants to be in elected office should not be elected. There is a profound truth that people who want power should be kept in check. Having a bunch of people who really want to teach be shackled with community service is probably better than having people who want to be in charge independent of what they are in charge of.
vessenes 4y ago
It also protects from the sort of operational capture we are seeing at wealthy American Universities (more 'professional managers' than students at, e.g. Yale and Stanford). The American system is undergoing radical upheaval in the last ten years.
- meetingthrower 4y ago
  100% this! My son is touring colleges now in US and UK. It is totally clear that the US academic faculty have totally lost the war to the administrative class! In the Oxbridge system, for example, academic faculty are responsible for admissions within their major. This means that majors are non-fungible - you apply to a major and are stuck to it for the duration of your degree. But this also means the professors can protect their turf, e.g., they are not subject the vagaries of "market demand" for majors by the students. They have a certain number of seats to fill, and they conduct the work to get the best class for this. This is why Oxford still graduates 100 classics majors a year (more than the entire ivy league combined.) And they get to staff their department accordingly. In the US system, we have the insane "holistic admissions" process run by a giant admissions bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is doing everything in its power to eliminate any trackable metrics so they can preserve their secret sauce and source of power (see 80% of universities are now test optional admissions.) The admissions bureaucracy is also in cahoots with other major bureaucracies - sports, diversity, development ($$), etc. The fencing coach has WAY more power to drive admissions decisions than does the professor of classics. US academics were lulled into complacency by the dulcet tones of managers saying "let me take this boring administrative task off your plate." But in doing so, they have become the working class of the university system.
  - stanford_labrat 4y ago
    I have mixed feelings about the whole stuck with your major from day 1 scenario. It is simultaneously appealing and frightening to have to make such a major decision that early in your life (which will have a strong impact on the other 70 or so years to come). I didn't find my major (chemistry) until about a year in, and then I didn't even add my second major (biochemistry) until I was in my third year. Who knows what I would've picked if I were forced to choose from the get go. I was a "pre-engineering" major before I had to pick one. Whatever that means...
jldugger 4y ago
> I became aware of that difference in leadership structure when I met people at American universities to discuss education programs. While all of the important decisions about our education programs were made by faculty, the Americans I met who were serving in similar roles were usually professional administrators. Leadership is still often pulled from tenured faculty but they staff their offices with cheaper professional staff. The dirty little secret is that some of this professional staffing is funded by "spousal appointment", which I can most charitably describe as a jobs program for universities settled in low economic intensity zones. When you hire a professor, you also hire her husband into IT or something, because if you don't dual earning households will look at more urban campuses.

namdnay 4y ago

That is also the case in France for public universities - the "VPs" and above are all elected by the teaching staff. To give a disadvantage, it makes it very hard to push through any big changes. Neither the leaders nor the electorate have ever worked in large private orgs, meaning you end up with bizarre situations like an entire university that does not use the Calendar feature in Outlook ("so microsoft knows what i'm doing? that sounds like big brother!"), instead relying on online event-organising tools to ask people to give availability for every single meeting , or a block refusal of opening paid professional courses or opening to foreign students (due to a very hard "teaching must always be free" stance from their voters) , which could bring in much-needed cash to subsidise the "real" students

tough 4y ago
You could tell them to use cal.com for their calendar needs, open core/ source
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  cal.com looks interesting, but doesn't it mean that it will have access to all the information in ALL my calenders? So not only does microsoft know about my embarrassing condition doctors appointment, but so does cal.com?
  - tough 4y ago
    You can self-host it. I worked there briefly. Their market is big enterprises and govt that won't fly a hosted solution, they offer both a SaaS and self-hosted licenses Then it's up to you how you sync with calendars, if a self-host caldav instance is enough no microsoft there
wizzwizz4 4y ago
That calendar system sounds ideal for the way I work. I'd probably write some tooling to make it a little easier, but sending around little iCal files and reviewing my schedule often means I have a good intuition for what I'm doing, and when. When I start to get annoyed by the amount of stuff I've got scheduled, and the consequential overhead of managing it, it means I'm trying to do too much, and I need to reduce it. Outlook considers every moment not spent in a meeting as "free time", unless you specifically block off "reserved time", and that's just not how I work.
- namdnay 4y ago
  As with the travel business, the main complexity is rescheduling. A sudden big sales opportunity at the same time as an important internal meeting you’re hosting with 10 people? What could be done in a few clicks with outlook or equivalent is going to take you half a day of panic
- esafak 4y ago

lordnacho 4y ago

I wonder whether this is actually limited to academia. When I was at business school it was mentioned that US firms are more likely to have special managers (MBAs) whereas somewhere like Europe tended to promote technical staff like engineers. Someone out there must know whether this is generally true.

ghaff 4y ago
Not really. A lot of MBAs go into things like management consulting, finance, certain types of marketing roles, but even things like product management/program management. I'm not sure it's really that common to hop straight from an MBA to a management role (unless it's a case of someone already in management or being groomed for management who goes back to school to get a degree). It's also the case that, at the better business schools, most of the students have at least some experience in any case. What is true is that generally speaking (though not in all cases) once someone goes into management--and certainly executive management--they tend to not go back into individual contributor roles although it does happen. And, in general, MBA degrees are probably more common in the US than in Europe.

fullsend 4y ago

This reminds of how the politburo of China is often made up of engineers, chemists, and people with similar backgrounds. Whereas American politicians are all lawyers.

tyoma 4y ago
This used to be true only in the most technical sense, partly because sciences/engineering degrees were still permitted during the cultural revolution —- it was the only option. The newer generation of leaders is mostly lawyers and economics degrees. Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-techno...
fatneckbeard 4y ago
this reminds me of how the politburo of china is 99.9% male, the sons of the party elite get favorable positions, and you keep your position by telling the dictator what they want to hear instead of what is actually going on.
dxdm 4y ago
I'm assuming people become members of the politburo after a substantial career in the political party apparatus, maybe even longer than it takes to become a member of congress. Of course, there will be differences between coming up in the one system or the other, but essentially I'd say they are career politicians just the same. Presumably, there's also a very strong selection process to make it into the top ranks of this political system, that will have a very strong effect on who gets there and how they get shaped on the way - not mentioning the forces within, once you're in place. So while it would be wrong to say the initial background makes no difference, I wonder how much influence it still holds once you make it into the politburo.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
That used to be true, but the cultural revolution put a dent in that. While it is still likely they’ll have a degree in engineering, the leadership is now a lot like Xi Jinping in being career politicians (he has a 2 year correspondence chemical engineering degree from qinghua, but never worked as an engineer).

hgsgm 4y ago

The formal name for the school part of Harvard, where students learn, is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. https://www.fas.harvard.edu/ https://www.fas.harvard.edu/ Traditionally, professors ran universities, merely overseen by a small board of overseers, until a quiet coup in the 20th Century created the administrative state.

etempleton 4y ago

In my experience, someone with some teaching experience in a field should run operations for academic department—an NTT that teaches a course or two a semester, for example. And a tenure track chair should be the decision maker on the department’s direction. However, I also find that academics make poor administrators and leaders more often than not. I think this comes down to experience. Academics often go from no or minimum leadership and management responsibilities to many and some are just not equipped to handle it. Being a chair is poor experience to becoming an academic Dean and even poorer experience to becoming a non-academic leader. Additionally, many have to learn the hard way that most challenges within a large organization require a ton of coordination and alignment and that there are very few instances where there is a silver bullet to solve business challenges.

blululu 4y ago

There is a common refrain that anyone who wants to be in elected office should not be elected. There is a profound truth that people who want power should be kept in check. Having a bunch of people who really want to teach be shackled with community service is probably better than having people who want to be in charge independent of what they are in charge of.

vessenes 4y ago

It also protects from the sort of operational capture we are seeing at wealthy American Universities (more 'professional managers' than students at, e.g. Yale and Stanford). The American system is undergoing radical upheaval in the last ten years.

meetingthrower 4y ago
100% this! My son is touring colleges now in US and UK. It is totally clear that the US academic faculty have totally lost the war to the administrative class! In the Oxbridge system, for example, academic faculty are responsible for admissions within their major. This means that majors are non-fungible - you apply to a major and are stuck to it for the duration of your degree. But this also means the professors can protect their turf, e.g., they are not subject the vagaries of "market demand" for majors by the students. They have a certain number of seats to fill, and they conduct the work to get the best class for this. This is why Oxford still graduates 100 classics majors a year (more than the entire ivy league combined.) And they get to staff their department accordingly. In the US system, we have the insane "holistic admissions" process run by a giant admissions bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is doing everything in its power to eliminate any trackable metrics so they can preserve their secret sauce and source of power (see 80% of universities are now test optional admissions.) The admissions bureaucracy is also in cahoots with other major bureaucracies - sports, diversity, development ($$), etc. The fencing coach has WAY more power to drive admissions decisions than does the professor of classics. US academics were lulled into complacency by the dulcet tones of managers saying "let me take this boring administrative task off your plate." But in doing so, they have become the working class of the university system.
- stanford_labrat 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings about the whole stuck with your major from day 1 scenario. It is simultaneously appealing and frightening to have to make such a major decision that early in your life (which will have a strong impact on the other 70 or so years to come). I didn't find my major (chemistry) until about a year in, and then I didn't even add my second major (biochemistry) until I was in my third year. Who knows what I would've picked if I were forced to choose from the get go. I was a "pre-engineering" major before I had to pick one. Whatever that means...

jldugger 4y ago

> I became aware of that difference in leadership structure when I met people at American universities to discuss education programs. While all of the important decisions about our education programs were made by faculty, the Americans I met who were serving in similar roles were usually professional administrators. Leadership is still often pulled from tenured faculty but they staff their offices with cheaper professional staff. The dirty little secret is that some of this professional staffing is funded by "spousal appointment", which I can most charitably describe as a jobs program for universities settled in low economic intensity zones. When you hire a professor, you also hire her husband into IT or something, because if you don't dual earning households will look at more urban campuses.