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.

All the good Chronicle of Higher Ed articles are under lockdown these days.

I’m not going to link to a paywall article, because that’s a terrible move, but I will tell you that there was an article posted today on Kevin Runner, an education software guy, and his new environmental epiphany-slash-alternative university.

Here’s what Mr Runner’s LinkedIn has to say about Runchero U:

With a commitment to environmental sustainability, agricultural innovation and a healthy, thriving local community, at Runchero we’re on a mission. Situated on 2000 acres of Kentucky farmland in Shelby and Washington Counties, we are launching leading-edge initiatives in organic agriculture, hemp farming, vertical farming, aquaponics, alternative energy and ecotourism. We have begun to establish job-creating local enterprises, and we will soon be opening the doors of Runchero University, a non-traditional, forward-thinking educational organization projected to collaborate with the State of Kentucky, local universities and local
businesses on accredited degree programs, ongoing research projects, and certified vocational and professional skills training.

I keep thinking about this–about what it would mean to start an alternative university. The funny thing is, so far all the alternatives are leftward bent (with the exception of perhaps Hillsdale College). There was an MIT offshoot I read about a while back that looked promising. It focused on first-gen college students more than the environment. And it sounds like Jordan Peterson is finally getting moving on his online AI-driven university model.

It’ll be interesting to watch where these go, but I don’t really consider them alternatives to the university. Unless the specifically address the entrenched ideology issue that higher education (actually, make that all education) is having, “alt” it is not.

Runchero reminds me a little bit of an MFA program that I was interested in for a few months. It was a program in book arts, where you learned how to print and bind books, how to restore them, and about the book as art and artifact. Lots of fun, but also not much immediate applicability to the outside. The main benefit would like in your being creative enough to take what you learned and apply it to a real-life problem.

And that, now that I write about it with those words, is much the problem of pseudo-alt and legit universities these days. The value of the degree is in question, so what matters is how well the individual graduate leverages the degree. That is not a Learning Outcome that is taught in most universities, so you rely on the ingenuity, problem solving, and tenacity of the graduate in order to make your university look good.

The thing is, why would someone do that to make a university look good when they could do all that work to make themself look good?

(Tiny aside: let’s talk about tortured pronouns, yikes.)

Where’s the value-add?

I’m genuinely curious, because I would be very interested in backing and/or supporting and startup alt-u if it had the right chops.

Mr Runner’s software company – Runner – was my nemesis back in the halcyon days of my first job. (Just kidding, there were 28k students breathing down my neck every day – it was not living the dream.) Runner checks addresses in Banner, one of the more popular student databases on the market. Runner typically does a good job, and saves data entry monkeys a lot of work by populating city and state from an entered zip code. I liked that about Runner.

What I didn’t like about Runner were new construction projects. I don’t know how often they updated the local address validation tables, but sometimes Runner wouldn’t recognize an address as legitimate (even when both the Post Office and Google Maps would). The problem was that the auto-correct feature would change the address into something else, wouldn’t change it back, and there was no “manual override” feature.

You became stuck in an infinite loop of recursive address checking. No bueno.

I hope that they’ve fixed that since then, since it’s been a few years.

And I hope their university never gets stuck in that recursive feedback loop.

The kerfuffle in certain circles over Jordan B Peterson reminds me that 1. I haven’t written about his book yet, and 2. there was a bit in his book that made me go “Oh, this guy is still very much a faculty member” despite his being the recalcitrant, dissident faculty that we all want to like.

I think, as well (on what might be considered the leftish side), that the incremental remake of university administrations into analogues of private corporations is a mistake. I think that the science of management is a pseudo-discipline. I believe that government can, sometimes, be a force for good, as well as the necessary arbiter of a small set of necessary rules. Nonetheless, I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture…………….

I honestly remember there being more “there” when I first read this bit. I thought I remembered reading at least a paragraph on the positives and negatives of the university that ended in an typical faculty equivocation or digression or something equally handwavy.

Instead, now I’m getting the whiff of typical faculty butthurt. Something along the lines of : I liked the university the way it was and now these upstart non-rigorous disciplines (which is a bit rich coming from a psychologist, tbh) are alerting the public to the fact that we cannot live up to our promises and now my cushy job is in danger.

Most faculty cannot live with the fact that “a degree is something that you need to get a job” places the university squarely in the crosshairs of the capitalist marketplace. They instead imagine themselves to be in the pastoral world where only 2% of the richest, most intelligent men go to college, where they can be free of any and all constraints of the free market. Including the market of ideas and pesky things like funding.

Circling back to point 1, the only part of 12 Rules for Life that I’d reread is the last chapter about the light pen, but even that chapter begs the question IF YOU HAD A PEN AS COOL AS THAT WHY WOULDN’T YOU USE IT FOR EVERYTHING??

This is one of those books where I used sticky tabs to note passages I found interesting. But a month later, when I go back to find those passages, I’m really not sure what I’m looking at.

I came across a faculty rant this week, under the guise of a Q&A session with the university president, that illustrates quite well why certain college majors and dying out and why nobody seems all that sad about it.

When reading this, imagine a middle-aged woman’s voice with a meditative poetry reading-type cadence and more than a touch of condescension, coupled with a very combative slice of body language, like it’s stressful for this person to get these words out.

I’m [faculty member] in [social sciences] and I’m also the director of our undergraduate program. I study symbolic politics and what I saw today was, there was absolute, pretty much nothing from social sciences that was – that was actually accentuated in your program. And I find this very much a shame because I know that in our school we are doing so many very exciting things, whether it’s from the [Very Important Institute], our whole school is dedicated to solving the wicked problems of the world. So I just want to raise that issue but I’m going to attach it to a funding issue and also the [strategic plan].

Our school has been very dedicated in terms of being very productive and has a very high international/national reputation. I was co-editor of [some academic publication] for eight years, it was housed in our department. I’m quite well known in the world myself, not saying that you should have put me up there. But we just had a meeting with our dean, with the college: we are now down to nine full time faculty and we are staffing a PhD program. A PhD program. And we have 500 [undergrads in one major] and I’m not talking about [another major], this is just [the main campus]. And we were told that this is going to continue. We have three positions opening up this year, and they’re not being filled. So my question to you is very specific: what it is that – and we’re told that this is going on for three more years. So if we’re trying to do the [strategic plan] and we only have a cohort of nine – you know we used to have 17 faculty. I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this. I really don’t. And I think it’s quite telling that you didn’t have anything from the college of liberal arts, you didn’t have people from the social sciences or the humanities who are doing fantastic things.

And so I’ll just close with an even more provocative remark which is: it is the feeling on the part of quite a few people who I’ve worked with for quite a few years that we are seeing an instance of robbing Peter to pay Paul. We saw the headlining of the medical school, and it’s many peoples’ understanding that the budget that’s being brought together for that is being at the cost of many units within the college of liberal arts specifically. So thank you very much, with all my respect, but I’m a [social scientist] and I do critical thinking and I believe that it’s important to talk about these issues up front. Thank you.

First of all, there is no actual question. We were promised a question, and it never materialized. The faculty just went off on a tangent instead. If you don’t ask a question, it is highly unlikely that you’ll get an answer.

The accusation comes through just fine, though.

Now. I haven’t sat down with this person to talk about the specifics of her program. But what I don’t here in this forum, or any other, is talk like this: if your program used to have 17 full-time faculty, but now only has 9, why is that? Are you over-relying on adjunct faculty? Or is it perhaps that there is much less demand for your discipline?

If there’s less demand, maybe it’s time to explore if that’s an issue with your particular program, or if it’s a problem that is facing similar programs around the nation or world. Sometimes enrollments do lag, and that’s when you go out recruiting.

Is it that the PhD in your discipline isn’t relevant anymore?

There’s a defeatist attitude in your approach. Perhaps you could outline your unorthodox plan and run it by the president to garner his reaction. Perhaps your solutions to the wicked problems of the world could bring in some outside funds to stretch your budget.

Many ailing departments want to have it both ways. They pull back from participating in faculty governance activities, usually citing reasons like “we don’t agree with the way you’re approaching this topic,” but complain when a decision is reached without them. They enjoy the autonomy provided to faculty at a university, but when it comes to budgetary matters, rely with a childlike faith on the university.

When it comes to robbing Peter to pay Paul, many of the small humanities-type (although it’s not just them) are the ones being subsidized by other departments and colleges.

Rich departments (or programs or labs or PIs) are usually rich for a reason: they do things that create value, that make money.

I feel like this is yet another repackage of Christ’s talk of judgement in the Book of Matthew: Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

First put on your own oxygen mask, then help your brother take the speck out of his eye.

Technically it was the hallway outside of a meeting room, but close enough.

• Hi, we haven’t met yet. I’m Professor X from History.
• I’m Professory Y from the Physics Department.
• Oh, that’s smart.

Guys, the hierarchy is real. It roughly correlates with the list of IQ by majors, although I suspect it can be somewhat augmented by local departmental prestige.

Even the people who refuse to acknowledge it know that it’s real.

And a whole lotta people are trying to compensate for it.

What happens when a lobster gets a PhD?

Students being students, the prospect of a selfie with severed heads at a dental training conference is way cooler than privacy laws and proper lab etiquette.

Graduate dental school students and a top University of Connecticut orthodontics professor took a selfie with two severed heads used for medical research at a training workshop at Yale University last year – an episode Yale officials called “disturbing” and “inexcusable”.

The selfie was taken in June at the Yale School of Medicine during the 2017 DePuy Synthes Future Leaders Workshop, which focused on dental-related facial deformities.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the photo from a person who received it through a private group chat.

Maybe it’s wrong, but I’m deeply amused by this (mostly because I don’t have to deal with it or clean up the mess). Situations like this are at the intersection of like six different sets of rules all competing for who gets to come down the hardest. Who will institute the severest consequences, UConn or Yale? Will the severed heads be yanked from use? Will the FedGov get involved because HIPAA? SO MUCH DRAMA.

Severed heads are the weirdest non-sequitur, and I love absurdist humor. And this is absurdist humor in real life!

Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy said the School of Medicine took the matter very seriously. He said there was clear signage forbidding photography at each entrance to the laboratory. He also said the symposium was not part of Yale’s anatomy program, and the heads in the selfie were not donated to Yale.

It was not clear how the heads were obtained.

No one’s going to admit that they have severed heads in their anatomy lab basement? Trust me, when you walk through the anatomy freezer at the right time and hear the saw going full blast, you know what’s going on.

Of course the Yale School of Medicine is taking this seriously. The biggest problems with privacy in a School of Medicine is that–unlike educational privacy laws–HIPAA is actually enforced. Most schools do a training designed to scare people into following privacy laws, but this is not the first time that a student has hit the jackpot of stupidity by sharing a medical-related photo on social media.

Remember, kids: even metadata can count as protected health information.

(The unspoken thing here is that HIPAA breaches can cost millions of dollars in fines and corrective action plans.)

The drama of academia, folks.