Don't Try This At Home

Two of my pet peeves are college administrators and speed bumps/humps.

Regarding college administrators, there's an old saying:

Those who can, do.
Those who can't teach.
Those who can do neither, administrate.

I'm here to testify that there's a lot of truth in that.

It used to be that college administrators stayed in their offices and developed programs that only affected other administrators. But recently, they have emerged from their lairs and begun to intrude on the faculty and students.

Between 1993 and 2007, student enrollment at America's leading universities rose by 14.5 percent.

Meantime, the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service climbed 17.6 percent.

Over those same years, the number of full-time administrators climbed more than 39 percent.

During that same period, inflation-adjusted instructional spending per student rose by 39 percent, while spending on administration per student increased by nearly 66 percent. 

In short, universities are suffering from administrative bloat, expanding their bureaucracies significantly faster than their numbers of students, instructors, and researchers.

(source: here )

It's not just the money, it's the impact on the core mission of the universities - teaching and research.

I now spend almost as much time on administrative nonsense as I do teaching. My supply of time is finite, so as administrative demands rise, I must take time away from something else. It's not going to be my family, so that leaves teaching or research. My evaluation and incentive package, as implemented by the administrators, is weighted towards research. I get raises and promotions based more on my research productivity than any other factor, so guess which bucket the time for increased administrative chores comes from.

That's right - teaching.

The students are getting shortchanged while the faculty jumps through all sorts of administrative hoops. Even worse, their nonsense is beginning to intrude into the classroom. Case in point:

At my university we have a program designed to improve the students' writing skills. (It's actually to make up for the failure of the public school system to teach kids how to effectively communicate, but that's beside the point.) Certain courses are designated writing-intensive courses, where the emphasis is on written assignments and feedback to the students. It used to be up to the faculty member how to conduct this course. That's a part of academic freedom, something we professors feel very, very passionate about. Now the administrators are telling us that written assignments must constitute at least 60% of the course grade, and have given us a detailed rubric for grading those assignments. There is little value given to the content of the written assignments. Most of the points are based on the mechanics of writing, and not on mastery of the subject.

I teach courses in Information Systems, one of which has been designated (without any input from me) as a writing intensive course. My grading criteria is based primarily on whether or not the students can develop working systems, not on how well they can write a report explaining why their system failed. I can't seem to get this point through to the administrators in charge of the writing program. 

Evidently I'm not the only one who has a problem with administrators. However, as much as I bitch about them, I don't approve of this solution to the problem.

Jackson County prosecutors today charged a student wearing a bullet-resistant vest with slashing the throat of a dean at the Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley.

The suspect — dressed all in black — appeared to be under the influence of drugs, police said.

Other students described him as having demonic tattoos and said he had written symbols on a wall poster before the incident began. Brezik reportedly has a tattoo on his hand of an “A” with a circle around it — an anarchist symbol.

Brezik’s Facebook page paints a portrait of an angry man. He had 26 friends and bragged in June about being the first person arrested at the G-20 Summit.

The slasher is obviously a nutjob, but I know more than a few faculty members who could fit that description. Fortunately, the dean's injuries are not life-threatening.


As for speed bumps/humps, I hate those damn things. The so-called "traffic calming devices" do nothing but divert traffic to other streets, slow emergency vehicle response time, and increase stress on suspension systems and drivers.

They just installed a series of them on a street I frequently drive on. Far from calming me, they have increased my level of road rage to the point where I honk my horn every time I go over one in order to share my aggravation with the nimrods who wanted them installed. Alternatively, I take a parallel street and speed merrily on my way. If officials really wanted to lower the speed, post a radar car along the road a few times a week. That'll do more to change driver behavior than raised chunks of asphalt.

I'm not the only one who hates those infernal humps. Unfortunately, some people just can't control themselves.

Stephen A. Carr worked aggressively, but patiently, to try to slow down the cars that flew past his house in the Burke area of Fairfax County. Most of his neighbors applauded his help, and earlier this year a speed hump was installed in front of his house.

But David A. Patton evidently was not a fan. In June, court and police records show, Patton angrily confronted Carr about the speed hump outside Carr's house. Patton was charged with misdemeanor assault. His trial was set for Thursday.

On Sunday night, police say, Patton went further. Witnesses told police he burst into Carr's house, tied up Carr and his girlfriend and, when Carr struggled, fatally shot him in the head, court records allege.

I obviously don't condone either throat-slashing or tie-up-and-shoot (well, except in a few special cases, like child molesters, rapists, and terrorists), but I can understand the frustration that underlies them. Maybe the solution is to make speed humps out of college administrators...