The Battle of Mission Drift
Here is a concise description of the effect on the morale of academic staff at Maynooth University of the current strategy of expanding the number of senior administrators at Maynooth University at the expense of resources for teaching and research.
In the Dark 
August 2, 2023 at 8:11 pm
One of the problems in Cambridge senior management seems to be basic competence.
For example, the HR department seems to be devoid of any common sense.
A problem can start out as being simple to solve. After the involvement of senior HR managers, it normally has become intractable and so very time-consuming for everyone. Hence, more staff are needed, as everyone really is very busy trying to fix the by now massive problem.
In fact, the more incompetent the senior manager, the bigger the mess, the more staff that are needed to clean it all up. It is no surprise that Cambridge University HR have been hiring very enthusiastically.
The other problem is basic honesty. There was a remarkable story in the Financial Times a few weeks ago.
https://www.pressreader.com/ireland/the-irish-mail-on-sunday/20230618/282149295730392
A Cambridge Professor had copied word for word large parts of an undergraduate student essay and published it in an academic Journal under his own name.
Fortunately, senior management considered the matter for two years and decided that this was not deliberate plagiarism (which would of course be a disciplinary offence).
It was “the product of negligent acts” rather than plagiarism. That kind of mental contortion takes a special kind of person, worth every penny of their substantial salary.
August 2, 2023 at 10:37 pm
There’s a kind of instability at work here, in that the more administrators are employed the more demand there is from those administrators for even more administrators. Another effect is that the workload of other staff increases with the number of administrators, as the latter keep dreaming up new things for the former to do.
August 3, 2023 at 12:09 am
When I was a graduate student, I thought Professors were powerful people.
Now I am a Professor, I can see that Professors have almost zero power in how things are run at my University. The committees through which the Department or School nominally acts have lost much, if not all, their actual power to central administrators.
Of course, Professors have been somewhat complicit in the expansion of University bureaucracies. Almost every Professor would prefer to spend time on research or teaching rather than administration.
Still, I think there are many Professors who would happily contribute more to administration, if there was any sense that we could actually change or influence things.
But, at my University, I think that it is too late.
August 3, 2023 at 9:30 am
A phenomenon known in organisation studies as Parkinson’s law ( 1955). The disease-like phenomenon is extremely hard to turn back. Extreme cases remind one of eternal chaotic inflation…
August 3, 2023 at 9:44 am
There seem to be two hierarchies of authority, academic staff and administrators. How *exactly* do they interweave?
August 3, 2023 at 11:27 am
“How *exactly* do they interweave?” They don’t. Academics have become pawns that are pushed around.
The fundamental difference is that academics see the role of Universities as research & teaching. Professional administrators don’t.
Many administrators are individuals who earned advanced degrees usually in applied fields (eg management, administration, public finance, accountancy, employment law, HR), and were promoted to positions of enormous responsibility (& large salaries), despite having no academic background.
Lack of academic credentials or experience in teaching and research is no disqualification for a career as a very senior manager, effectively running large parts of a University.
Many administrators then like to redefine the mission of the university to enhance the centrality of their own roles. Shouldn’t “human resources” or “marketing and communication” or “compliance” be as important as “physics”? Shouldn’t money and personnel be poured into these activities rather than teaching and research?
Well, no. Because the role of a University is research and teaching. Though if you know lots about “marketing and communication” or “human resources” and nothing about “physics”, I do see why the argument is attractive.
As Peter says, “the current strategy [is one] of expanding the number of senior administrators at Maynooth University at the expense of resources for teaching and research.”
This is true in Cambridge as well.
August 3, 2023 at 12:40 pm
In his time as head of mathematics and astronomy unit at Queen Mary college, London, Prof Ian Roxburgh had much critcism for machianvelian ways. Maybe such professors with political ability were preferal to senior administrators with no interest in research whatsoever
August 3, 2023 at 2:21 pm
Ian was indeed somewhat Machiavellian. He was successful in many of his schemes because he was much cleverer than the administrators around who he regularly ran rings. But that was a time when a Head of School had considerable power. Nowadays the dead weight of administration is too heavy for even Ian Roxburgh to succeed.