Archive for Bullshit Jobs

Universities: Death by Bullshit

Posted in Education, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , , , , on March 9, 2025 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post to pass on an Editorial by Masud Husain with the title On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities which appeared in BRAIN magazine (which I buy for the Spot-the-Cell competition). I agree wholeheartedly with the article, which is available free of charge so I recommend you read it in full here, but I thought I’d give you a couple of tasters. The first is:

For some years now, it has become increasingly apparent to me that we are sleepwalking into a disaster. We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of societal improvement. There are many reasons why this has occurred over just a quarter of century but a key contributor has been the corporatization of academic institutions.

The second is

To undertake corporatization, universities have borrowed principles that they think work in the private sector. These involve creating layers of administration to run different sectors of our institutions. In the UK, for example, between 1995 and 2019 while spending on university departments roughly doubled, the amount allocated to administration and central services more than quadrupled.

As you probably imagined, the piece borrows some themes from the book Bullshit Jobs (subtitled The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It) by anthropologist David Graeber that I wrote about here.

The other day a colleague asked me if what I thought could be done about the underfunding of UK universities and the consequent job losses. I replied to say that I don’t think the problem so much that the universities as a whole are underfunded, but that the core missions of such institutions, by which I mean teaching and research, are. What is happening is that a huge slice of the money coming into universities is dissipated on bullshit jobs in a bloated management superstructure instead of being spent in the departments, which have become entirely subservient to “The Centre”. That is not only the case in the UK, but also here in Maynooth. Hardly a week goes by without some new bullshit job being advertised while our student-staff ratio soars and we academic underlings are starved of the resources we need to do our real jobs properly. It’s very dispiriting that Management continue to get away with this nonsense. If it continues, Ireland will undoubtedly encounter the same structural problems as are currently affecting the UK. I’m sure this is also the state of affairs in many other universities around the world.

It seems obvious to me that when your income falls, among the first things to do is reduce waste. If I were in charge of Higher Education funding my first priority would not be to increase funding but to impose penalties on universities that spend too little on what they’re actually supposed to be doing and too much on bullshit.

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Value versus Values

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , , , , on December 9, 2023 by telescoper

I noticed last week that the United Kingdom has a new Home Secretary, the ironically-named James Cleverly, who has taken over the task of making the country even more xenophobic. Among the measures he is proposing is hiking the minimum salary needed for skilled overseas workers from £26,200 to £38,700. That figure has come as a shock to scientific researchers, as the entry level for a new postdoctoral researcher in the UK is about £36-37K. No foreign postdocs, please, we’re British! I wonder how this squares with the recent (belated) decision to join Horizon 2020? I don’t see this latest bout of small-mindedness doing much to repair the damage done by a two-year absence from the programme.

Anyway, the decision to set a high salary threshold for skilled migrants, reminded me of something that struck me when I read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. It’s really just a side issue in the context of that book, and it’s probably something well known to students of ethics, but I found it interesting:

In English, as currently spoken, we tend to make a distinction between “value” in the singular, as in the value of gold, pork bellies, antiques, and financial derivatives, and “values” in the plural: that is, family values, religious morality, political ideals, beauty, truth, integrity, and so on. Basically, we speak of “value” when talking about economic affairs, which usually comes own to all those human endeavors in which people are getting paid for the work or their actions are otherwise directed at getting money. “Values” appear when that is not the case. For instance, housework and child care are, surely, the single most common forms of unpaid work, Hence we constantly hear about the importance of “family values”.

Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, p. 203

The point of relevance here is that defining the “value” of a job only in the sense of how large the salary is misses the fact that the financial reward isn’t the only sort of value that a job has; there is social value too. As far as I am aware, though, there is no really satisfactory theory of social value. On the other hand, it does seem that many jobs with the highest social value (care worker, nurse, primary school teacher, etc) are poorly paid, i.e. have low financial value. Nevertheless, people still do them. Why is that? It’s because people are motivated by things other than money – values. It’s possible to find work rewarding in a way that’s not primarily financial. That’s yet another reason why it is daft to measure the success of a University course in terms of the salaries of those who graduate from it.

One thing that confuses me is that there seem to be people – perhaps many of them – who actively resent those who find their work enjoyable or fulfilling. This sometimes manifests itself as exploitation. Take nurses, for example. I think we all agree that health services would fall apart without them, but the are routinely denied decent monetary reward for their work. One can’t live off values. A system that drives nurses out of the profession due to financial hardship is truly rotten.

As a University Professor, I’m well off financially, but that’s not the reason I chose a career as an academic. I don’t think the reason is simple, actually, among the factors are: (a) I think science is important and wanted to make a contribution; (b) I enjoy teaching; and (c) I didn’t want to be bored (in other words I didn’t want a bullshit job).

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Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Posted in Books with tags , , on December 5, 2023 by telescoper

A little later than promised I thought I write a few things about the latest book I’ve read, Bullshit Jobs – subtitled The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It – by anthropologist David Graeber. The book, published in 2015, was inspired by an essay Graeber wrote in 2013 on the same subject and is largely based on anecdotal testimonies sent to him by social media in reaction to that original piece.

I don’t have time to go into every issue raised by this book but I will make some comments based on my experience as someone working in a university, though I should point that it’s not a book about specifically universities. A huge amount of what is this book rings very true and I urge all my colleagues to read it. I suspect however that the people responsible for the proliferation of bullshit jobs in higher education institutions won’t bother.

It is useful to mention the definition of a bullshit job that Graeber settles on:

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

pp. 9-10

In addition, Graeber divides bullshit jobs into five main types:

  1. flunkies,
  2. goons,
  3. duct tapers,
  4. box tickers,
  5. and task masters.

I think each category is fairly self-explanatory, but you can find each described in detail in Chapter 2. In a typical modern university you will find examples of all five; and many people have jobs in more than one category of bullshit.

An academic and former Head of Department at a UK university is quoted thus

As managerialism embeds itself, you get an entire cadres of academic staff whose job it is to keep the managerialist plates spinning – strategies, performance targets, audits, reviews, appraisals, renewed strategies, etc., etc., – which happen in an almost wholly and entirely disconnected fashion from the real lifeblood of universities: teaching and education.

pp. 53-54

This is very true, but it’s not only the exasperation of the “disconnect” that is the problem. There’s also the level of resources being taken away from teaching and research to sustain the ever-increasing bullshit which is extremely damaging. I would contend that it’s in the interest of the managerial class to keep the academics under as much pressure as possible because by labelling individuals and departments as “struggling” they have an excuse for even more managerialism. And so it goes on.

It’s worth pointing out an even clearer mechanism by which bullshit jobs proliferate in universities. This is that managers generally get paid according to how many people they manage. Appointing more flunkies, goons, and the rest is a sure-fire way of getting ones job “re-graded” and salary increased. A genuinely good administrator should aim to reduce administrative costs so as to maximize the investment in core activities, i.e. teaching and research. This is the exact opposite of what happens now.

Particularly irritating bullshit activities include systems that require one to download data (e.g. coursework marks) from one system only to reformat them for upload to another. Why not just integrate these applications? And the excruciatingly painful process of claiming minor expenses. That is something could easily be automated with AI, but instead every sandwich and cup of coffee is scrutinized by individuals whose wages cost more than could ever be saved by identifying incorrect claims. Financial control of this sort is emphatically not about saving money. It’s about asserting control. The message from the Management is “We have the power, and we don’t trust you. You will have to jump through many hoops for everything you get from us. Or better still, give up and just bear the cost yourself.”

Here is another comment from an “anonymous British academic” that will strike a chord with everyone who works in a university:

Evert dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of a university.

pp. 181-2

I could write more about this – and may do so in the future – but I’ll leave it there, except to say that bullshit jobs are only part of the problem. There are entire bullshit industries whose existence satisfies the criterion that they are “pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious”. Academic publishing is just one example of a bullshit industry; University rankings are another.

Anyway, this is an enjoyably vigorous polemic written by a man with a very inventive mind. It’s very sad that he passed away in 2020. David Graeber would, I think, have described himself as an anarchist. Not in the sense of the Black Bloc lunatics who smash up buildings for fun, but in the sense of being opposed to excessively hierarchical institutions and systems and the power structures they encourage. I agree with him on that. There’s no doubt in my mind that hierarchies allow bullshit jobs to proliferate just as they also allow abuse and harassment to do likewise.

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