The Cause of Academic Anomie
I thought I’d share a paper entitled Academic anomie: implications of the ‘great resignation’ for leadership in post-COVID higher education, which presents a new study of 167 academics who quit UK academia, finding they often blame the declining quality of academic management. The abstract is here:
The full paper can be found here (Open Access). In case you weren’t aware the word anomie according to Durkheim, being a state of “normlessness”, in general means the lack of social cohesion and solidarity that often accompanies rapid social change. I’d say there’s a lot of that about these days.
The study relates directly to UK universities, many of which are struggling and some of which are on the verge of collapse as a result of several factors, not just those stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the surprising (and depressing) things about Ireland is that the people in charge of third level education here seem to be determined to repeat here the terrible decisions being taken across the Irish sea despite all the evidence of the damage they have done in the UK. Many of the comments made by individuals mentioned in the paper will definitely resonate with colleagues in Maynooth.
This bit particularly caught my eye:
All too often dangerous managers simply skip from one university to the next causing havoc wherever they go. (RS2 – Male, former Senior Lecturer, pre-1992 institution)
Tell me about it!
In the Dark 
July 22, 2024 at 5:31 pm
There was too great an expansion of higher education under Major then Blair. The UK would be better served by contraction of some of the worse universities back into polytechnics, and the ending of some of the mickey mouse degree subjects.
Within universities, the amount of useless paperwork that university scientists have to engage with seems to increase every year – a slow process but, after 20 years, a debilitating one. In the beginning, universities hired administrators to do the paperwork so that academics needn’t waste time on routine tasks when they could be getting on with research. But, whereas academics have motive to reduce paperwork, administrators have motive to increase it; and they have now gained so much power that they tell full professors what to do even as those professors spend more time on paperwork than ever. Lecturing is gladly borne in order to teach the next generation, but administration is a waste of time. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists who are not tied to a laboratory often yearn for retirement nowadays, so they can get on with their thinking undisturbed. Administrators’ salaries come from money that should go to research, moreover.
As a matter of principle, the most junior research student should have a higher rank in their university than the most senior administrator who is not also an academic. Virtually all full-time administrators should be given a year’s notice, and professors should return to do-it-yourself administration. After a year of drudgery they would have learnt what paperwork was necessary and what wasn’t. Surgery is indicated.
July 23, 2024 at 4:07 pm
I’m not sure how you would get rid of all administration. For example when I started out you just booked travel and that was that. You got a “per diem” and were trusted. Now I must fill in a risk assessment, do a training course so I can be trusted to do the former, answer a questionnaire so they will provide travel insurance, provide receipts where I justify every item on it (and then my employer pays someone to go through to find anything they can push back on and say “you can’t claim for that). Most of these are do with the regulatory environment set by the government they must now follow, so they can’t just sack all the people associated with all this.
July 23, 2024 at 11:58 pm
You need two things: A united front by senior professors, and a minister for higher education with some sense and some guts who is sympathetic.
July 24, 2024 at 12:02 am
I wouldn’t be too sure that the risk assessments are actually read. I know of a retired teacher at secondary level who got tired of this drivel and started putting ‘alien abduction’ as a risk factor on school trips he led. It took several years before he was asked to take it a bit more seriously.
July 23, 2024 at 8:08 am
Oh Mickey, you’re so fine
You’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey
Hey Mickey
Don’t agree about Mickey, but the analysis of the growth of administration in universities is all too accurate
July 23, 2024 at 10:20 am
Fully agree. The amount of administration that academics need to do increases and increases, at the same time that the number of administrators increases. At least in Ireland you don’t have the REF – which uses up an enormous amount of staff time, and even though after every REF its claimed that the next one will be ‘lighter’ it doesn’t happen. I read somewhere that the cost of running REF to universities was the equivalent to the running costs of 2 whole universities….