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canopic jug writes:

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.

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