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posted by martyb on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the giving-them-a-lecture dept.

Meaningless tasks and faux-business strategies prioritised by British universities have skewed their real roles of teachinig and research. Looking at decades of university growth, most expansion has been by university administration, not faculty. On the other side of the pond, one US study found that between 1975 and 2008 while the number of faculty had grown about 10% the number of administrators had grown 221% during the same period. In the UK, the large majority of universities have more administrators than they do faculty members. We are on the way to realizing an “all-administrative university” if nothing is done. André Spicer at The Guardian comments that since universities are broke, we should cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:33AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 24 2017, @06:33AM (#558342) Journal

    (in bad taste, I know... I mean, replying to myself)
    The "(reality of life)" point has a "scientific basis": Peter principle [wikipedia.org] (promotion to the level of minimal incompetence) and Dilbert principle [wikipedia.org] (managers can advance beyond the level of minimal incompetence through promotion until reaching the level of minimal damage on the system)

    Second, a TFA snippet

    In some courses, like business administration, students’ capacity to think got worse for the first few years.

    There are your tomorrow's university administrators.

    (Careful how you deal within a system that has positive feedback capabilities - such as the education system)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:52PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:52PM (#558442) Journal

    I RTFA (really!) and nowhere did I see any mention of corruption and nepotism as one of the explanations for this expansion. Mostly, it was blamed on mandates and bureaucratic creep and expansion.

    Powerful politicians' relatives with all this training in leadership need suitable jobs, and what better than some sort of university admin position? They get to brag about serving in education. There's not much that's as lily white as that. These positions just happen to pay extremely well (which keeps Uncle Sugar happy to hand the uni more fat grants for more initiatives) and are in fact useless and powerless so that the upper class twits who eventually are handed the positions can't do much damage.