Reducing bureaucratic burden for academics
Many are aware of the burden of bureaucratic administrative tasks on professors. A colleague of mine called it “Death by 1000 paper cuts.” It takes time away from research and other scholarly activities, and oftentimes the time commitment is substantial, taking 20-40% of a professor’s time, depending on who you ask and what items are included. Sylvain Gigan’s Twitter post pointed me to an article by Stuart Buck.
In Stuart Buck’s piece– which is nice, I recommend reading it, it’s brief– he uses the example of military base closures in the US to suggest a similar strategy for reducing bureaucratic burden. I agree with Buck’s premise that when a bureaucratic process is marked for elimination, blocking such an elimination should require extraordinary action.
Of course shutting a military base down is a massive action, on a much larger scale than, say, streamlining grant progress reports. Still, I appreciate Buck’s point and agree with it.
I have a some thoughts to add.
Bureaucratic burdens on academics grow in an unrestricted fashion because there is no check on their expansion.
Buck remarks that top professional athletes are free from such bureaucratic burdens. While that seems likely to be true, academic professors are not necessarily directly comparable to top professional athletes. A more apt comparison might be to scientists in the private sector. A scientist at a pharmaceutical company, a technology company, or even a private nonprofit research organization like HHMI Janelia or The Allen Institute likely has at least some bureaucratic burden. However, it is less [1].
The profit motive in private industry makes it a priority to not waste a professional’s time [2]. For example, there have been broad efforts in industry to reduce the burden of expense reporting. By contrast, if anything, such processes have gotten more burdensome in academia. Why? One reason is that there is no cost to asking more from professors. There is no one accounting for the burden and the costs entailed. No one gets in trouble if they ask professors to do too much. By contrast, in private industry, if a person has too much on their plate to be productive, there is a strong motivation to address the issue: hire more help, reform processes, and so forth.
While there is no check on adding ever more bureaucratic burdens on professors, there is certainly hell to pay if something goes wrong. If someone misappropriates funds, it can be a headache up and down the line, especially for academic administrators who have the power to add new processes. One serious compliance infraction can be enough to motivate sweeping changes and new additional bureaucratic demands on professors. Thus, there is high motivation to add burdens, and nearly zero cost to doing so. In fact, often the only cost to academic administrators is enduring whiny faculty, who vent on social media or blogs. 😉
Ideas for reducing bureaucratic burdens on academics
Adopt a trust-but-verify approach. Instead of demanding evidence for compliance up front, burdening not just professors but all of the support administration, create processes to detect non-compliance in an automated fashion– designed to minimize costs to researchers. For example, instead of asking professors to write grant progress reports, have someone look up papers by the professor and see if the grant is acknowledged. Automated tools already do this to an extent, and there is room to enhance those resources.
Empower and motivate people to reduce the burden. This needs to be done thoughtfully to be effective. Reforming and streamlining by committee is difficult in practice. I noticed a top research university that has a “Reducing Bureaucracy” team. That team has 14 people on it, many of them professors and high level admins. First of all, coordinating schedules to get them all to meet at the same time is probably daunting. Second of all, the salary and overhead cost per hour for each person is at least $100 per hour, so it costs at least $1400 just to have a single 1-hour meeting with all of those people (and, no, the admin will not approve the expense to have free coffee at the meeting). Plus, how much real work gets done in that one hour? Big meetings can be good for reporting and discussing, sometimes even brainstorming, but they do not get real work done.
Real work is done by individuals and very small groups, maybe 2-4 people. So if we’re serious about addressing the issue, we don’t need a bunch of people, we need a few experts. And we need to give them the tools they need: time and power. They need time away from other responsibilities to dedicate to this. The task can’t be thrown on top of an existing pile of responsibilities– that’s the exact problem we’re trying to address. They also need power— they need to be able to get the data and advice they need to design solutions, and they need to know that their recommendations and ideas will be implemented.
Footnotes
[1] I say this based on personal reports from people I know from academia who have gone to work in these other types of institutions. Perhaps good data exists on these comparisons. I haven’t bothered to look, and I would be happy to have my perception corrected if someone points me to data. I am only writing this as a casual blog post. [2] Why do private research organizations like HHMI and The Allen Institute also have less bureaucratic burden (like private industry)? I’m open to your suggestions. Two thoughts: The Allen Institute has leadership with a lot of experience in private industry and maybe that guided their organizational principles. HHMI Janelia made a conscious design choice to minimize bureaucratic burden on their scientists at their research campus, perhaps as a reaction to the observed demands in academia, and aspirational goals to mimic organizational principles at Bell Labs (which again, was private for-profit industry).