SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:41PM
Well, there are professors, and there are professors. I am one, at a "teaching college", by which I mean a school whose primary mission is to educate at the bachelor's level.
What I've seen happen in the past 20-30 years is this:
- Colleges and universities in Europe, as part of the Bologna system, have been equalized. Polytechnics in the UK and Fachhochschulen in Germany are no longer limited to bachelors degrees, but can do research and offer Master's and even doctoral degrees. This has given a lot of people - including the school administrators - ambitions to compete with the big universities. So they throw resources at research, most of which is utter crap. Resources that used to go into teaching.
- Well meaning but empire-building administrators keep wanting to "help" by adding in new systems. So rather than a bunch of shared drives to distribute material to students, we now have Moodle, a Gitlab installation, an SAP portal, and - god forbid - a whole massive SharePoint site where the school publishes information, and individual people can create groups and share documents. The result of this is a lot of tools that we all have to learn, and are required to use - wasting far more time than the tools save. Not to mention the money and staff necessary to create and maintain those tools. Resources that used to go into teaching.
The net result is measurable: The number of non-teaching staff has risen by more than 50% in the past 10 years. We don't get any more funding per student, so this means that class sizes have nearly doubled. That will undoubtedly improved our teaching. /sarc
I really wish the administration would stop "helping" us. Fire all those extra non-teaching staff, get rid of all the nifty tools, and just let us teach our students..
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.