In fact, my job pulls from both BS job #1 (Compliance) and BS job #7 (Academic Administration).

Over the last several decades, university administration has ballooned insanely — even while the number of teachers and students remain pretty much the same. There are hosts of new provosts, vice chancellors, deans and deanlets and even more, who all now have to be provided with tiny armies of assistants to make them feel important. First they hire them, then they decide what they’re going to do — which is mostly, make up new paperwork to give to teachers and students. As one complained: “Every 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 our jobs.”

I like this article because it’s such a ballooning caricature of these jobs–each blown out to the utmost limits of its BS capacity.

Rather, it’s a series of articles that I’ve watched make the rounds on higher ed sites and now mainstream sites to promote the author’s new book. Academics don’t take kindly to the fact that many of their jobs are BS, especially when they themselves take their jobs so very seriously.

I work in an area that deals with a lot of compliance, that comes wrapped in the clothing of improvement. Statements like this

“It was not enough for the compliance office to submit bulls–t work, attested to by bulls–t third parties, to bulls–t quality-control people. We had to develop ways to measure this maelstrom of bulls–t.”

are something I can relate with. In fact, I think some of the people that I deal with every day have said that exact thing to a significant other over a large glass of alcohol at night.

When you have to spend just as much – or more – time convincing people that your job is legitimate as you do actually doing your job, your job is probably BS. Your job (my job) probably doesn’t need to be done at all, and is likely tethered to a number of positions, systems, regulations, and policies that also do not need to exist.

While it’s funny from a zoomed-out perspective, having someone else confirm that my job does not need to exist is kind of depressing. From the inside, I know this. I even tell certain people that I don’t understand why my position exists or why I make so much money (relatively speaking, I don’t make that much) doing not much.

But there’s a difference between knowing something yourself and having someone tell you, harshly. And that sucks. It sucks knowing that my day-to-day is pretty much useless, that every bit of effort and energy I put forth isn’t really worthwhile.

And that goes double with my desire to completely dismantle the education system, which I believe has failed.

So I’m doing useless work for a useless entity, spending my life energy and my creativity and time on essentially nothing. Throwing it into the void. Boy, that’s depressing.

What’s more, I’m the sucker that took this job in the first place.

Now it’s my second job to get myself out of it.