Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You're Hardly Alone

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 8, 2018 at 12:14:06 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You're Hardly Alone
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone
> By David Graeber
> May 6 2018
> <https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318?key=17K21y7n_SjUZ04t4-9d7tInUaJwcLDdV_QpNsCZfqsG3f961B4gZ2-LQanQQNUSTHpDSl9ZMUdlWmNRZTZzX0g4eTAydXgwRTRPc0R2WG1RZDdqcWx0SnlZZw>
>
> I would like to write about the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in 
> teaching and academic management spend more and more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly — or not so 
> secretly — believe to be entirely pointless.
>
> For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those 
> who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 
> 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there 
> seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be 
> whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost 
> everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either 
> make no difference or make the world a better place.
>
> Generally speaking, we should trust people’s instincts in such matters. (Some of them might be wrong, but no one else 
> is in a position to know better.) If one includes the work of those who unwittingly perform real labor in support of 
> all this — for instance, the cleaners, guards, and mechanics who maintain the office buildings where people perform 
> bullshit jobs — it’s clear that 50 percent of all work could be eliminated with no downside. (I am assuming here that 
> provision is made such that those whose jobs were eliminated continue to be supported.) If nothing else, this would 
> have immediate salutary effects on carbon emissions, not to mention overall social happiness and well-being.
>
> Even this estimate probably understates the extent of the problem, because it doesn’t address the creeping 
> bullshitization of real jobs. According to a 2016 survey, American office workers reported that they spent four out 
> of eight hours doing their actual jobs; the rest of the time was spent in email, useless meetings, and pointless 
> administrative tasks. The trend has much less effect on obviously useful occupations, like those of tailors, 
> steamfitters, and chefs, or obviously beneficial ones, like designers and musicians, so one might argue that most of 
> the jobs affected are largely pointless anyway; but the phenomenon has clearly damaged a number of indisputably 
> useful fields of endeavor. Nurses nowadays often have to spend at least half of their time on paperwork, and primary- 
> and secondary-school teachers complain of galloping bureaucratization.
>
> And then there’s higher education.
>
> In most universities nowadays — and this seems to be true almost everywhere — academic staff find themselves spending 
> less and less time studying, teaching, and writing about things, and more and more time measuring, assessing, 
> discussing, and quantifying the way in which they study, teach, and write about things (or the way in which they 
> propose to do so in the future. European universities, reportedly, now spend at least 1.4 billion euros [about 1.7 
> billion dollars] a year on failed grant applications.). It’s gotten to the point where "admin" now takes up so much 
> of most professors’ time that complaining about it is the default mode of socializing among academic colleagues; 
> indeed, insisting on talking instead about one’s latest research project or course idea is considered somewhat rude.
> All of this will hardly be news to most Chronicle readers. What strikes me as insufficiently discussed is that this 
> has happened at a time when the number of administrative-support staff in most universities has skyrocketed. Consider 
> here some figures culled from Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford, 2011). In American 
> universities from 1985 to 2005, the number of both students and faculty members went up by about half, the number of 
> full-fledged administrative positions by 85 percent — and the number of administrative staff by 240 percent.
>
> In theory, these are support-staff. They exist to make other peoples’ jobs easier. In the classic conception of the 
> university, at least, they are there to save scholars the trouble of having to think about how to organize room 
> assignments or authorize travel payments, allowing them to instead think great thoughts or grade papers. No doubt 
> most support-staff still do perform such work. But if that were their primary role, then logically, when they double 
> or triple in number, lecturers and researchers should have to do much less admin as a result. Instead they appear to 
> be doing far more.
>
> This is a conundrum. Let me suggest a solution. Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, 
> not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the 
> proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work — real work, here, 
> defined not only as teaching and scholarship but also as actually useful administrative work in support of either. 
> What’s more, it seems to me this is a direct effect of the death of the university, at least in its original medieval 
> conception as a guild of self-organized scholars. Gayatri Spivak, a literary critic and university professor at 
> Columbia, has observed that, in her student days, when people spoke of "the university," it was assumed they were 
> referring to the faculty. Nowadays it’s assumed they are referring to the administration. And this administration is 
> increasingly modeling itself on corporate management.
>
> To get a sense of how total the shift of power has become, consider a story I heard recently, about a prominent 
> scholar who had just been rejected for a named chair at Cambridge. The man was acknowledged to be at the top of his 
> field, but he didn’t even make the shortlist. The kiss of death came when a high-ranking administrator glanced over 
> his CV and remarked, "He’s obviously a very smart guy. But I have no use for him." That judgment settled the matter. 
> When even Cambridge dons are presumed to exist to further the purposes of managers, rather than the other way around, 
> we know the corporate takeover of the global university system is complete.
>
> All of this doesn’t explain why people such as myself (and I have it relatively easy) are expected to spend hours 
> filling out time-allocation studies, writing recommendation forms and meeting notes, calculating measures of my 
> work’s social impact, or providing hypothetical grades on colleagues’ publications to assess how they’d likely be 
> ranked by an outside panel for departmental funding purposes — all during time that I might have otherwise spent 
> discussing the history of social theory with grad students or, God forbid, reading a book. (I can’t remember the last 
> time I read a book. I mean, like, a whole book, cover to cover. It basically never happens….)
>
> [snip]
>
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