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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article asking if intranets are making professors stupid. The article starts out focusing on e-mail and quickly drills down to identify all the time-wasters that turn expensive faculty members from productive, professional thinkers to unproductive, amateur administrators.
A subtler factor arose as an unexpected side effect of the introduction of "productivity-enhancing" networked personal computers to professional life. As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff — you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money. But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue — creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of "intellectual specialization," and it's a dynamic that's not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.
We can actually quantify the background hum of busyness that Knuth so assiduously avoids. In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 percent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:20AM (6 children)
I take it as a given that Americans are stupid. Hard to go wrong with that one, as PT Barnum said" "No one every lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people!" Remains as true now as ever. But the thing is, with an American anti-intellectual bias, how can American tell when they are protesting against political correctness and fake science, and when they are just being ignorant lowland Scot illiterate Hillbillies? Quite the Quandrary! Which if you are one of the afflicted, mean a problem with four equi-probable outcomes. LIke Barney the Gay Dinosaur, right?
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:27AM (5 children)
I totally agree? So why am I not able to up-mod you, my master? Your wisdom must make it to the +1 level of read, at least.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:20AM (1 child)
"So why am I not able to up-mod you, my master?"
You can't moderate your own sock puppets, Ari.
(Score: 2, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:38AM
Usually, I can. If they are True Sockpuppets. Grok the Rehash, AC!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:23AM (1 child)
Aristaphylococcus outs himself as a sockpuppeteer!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:53AM
Sounds like a case of aristarchusyphilis to me, but I am not a doctor or as smart as Runaway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:31AM
Why don't you research that, Professor?