[JadeNB]

What distinction do you draw between academics and teachers? Those are usually overlapping roles.

According to https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/compensati... (just an example of a public university), it's $376K to executives, $481K to deans, and $152.7K to faculty in FY2013. Deans usually count as ~50% admin, so we could call that $376K + $240.5K = $616.5K to admin and $240.5K + $152.7K = $393.2K to faculty, roughly a 3:2 ratio.

[nathan_compton]

I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.

[JadeNB]

> I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.

I'm also an academic. To me, the primary role of a dean is to insulate me as much as possible from upper admin. I've had deans who are good at this job, and those who either aren't good at it, or think that their job is something else. The ones who are good at what I think their job is ... I'm not sure I'd want to see them get 3–4x my pay, but I'm definitely willing to pay a premium to have someone else deal with upper admin.

[darth_avocado]

So it’s a management layer created to help protect people who actually provide value from the OTHER management layer. Sounds like a made up problem to me, and also an example of what everyone complains about when it comes to higher education: too much admin pushing costs higher.

[eigen]

I mean this is an issue in private industry as far as I've seen as well. as a company grows layers of middle management are added to translate and implement policies from other management layers

[analog31]

My relative is an administrator. One of the things he does is to manually process the flood of requests to override this or that policy because the system for enforcing the complex course selection and graduation requirements (e.g., prerequisites etc) doesn't work perfectly. The other is to adjust those requirements on a real time basis to comply with this or that complex, contradictory, and unclear mandates handed down from above (such as getting rid of all traces of wokeness).

Pay him his professor salary, and he'd never have stepped up to the role.

"All complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time." What this means is that systems operate with some of their automatic controls bypassed, and with those processes being carried out manually. The Gimli Glider took off with two broken fuel gauges.

My thought about bureaucracy is that you can automate complex human processes only to a certain point, and then the system needs some manual override capability, and possibly human interfaces, to work. This is what bureaucrats do. The reason why its seems chaotic and inefficient is that the easy stuff has been automated away, leaving only the hard stuff.

I can't vouch for every bureaucratic process, and bureaucrat, being optimally efficient or necessary. But in the past few months, I've observed the hard lesson of what happens when you think you can deal with bureaucracies that you think are wasteful by taking a chainsaw to them. I don't believe in that approach any more, even for dealing with systems that I hate.

[throw0101a]

> The reason why its seems chaotic and inefficient is that the easy stuff has been automated away, leaving only the hard stuff.

Some combination of:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[analog31]

"Academic" is kind of a broad brush. A professor and a teacher are both academics. One difference is tenure and research. A professor is eligible for tenure, and expected to do research or scholarship. They can train grad students.

In contrast, most undergraduate teaching is done by "adjuncts" for whom the job is essentially gig work. Moreover, professors are considered "faculty" and adjuncts "staff," making it confusing to figure out how many employees of a university are engaged in teaching versus doing other things. For instance a faculty-to-staff ratio would be misleading.

Disclosure: I was an "adjunct" many years ago.

[bpt3]

In my experience, adjuncts are not staff. They (we) are not considered faculty either at most institutions, but are a separate category of their own.

Adjuncts are basically contract labor who in general produce much more revenue than they cost.

[darth_avocado]

If you’re not directly teaching or doing research, imo you’re an admin or “staff”. You need to look at what people actually do.