Toilet cleaning, department chairing, and the ratchet effect

One of my all-time favourite paper titles is Marc Bilodeau and Al Slivinski's "Toilet cleaning and department chairing: volunteering a public service." 

Like any great title, it conveys the gist of the authors' argument in just a few words. Chairing a university department is a public service. Like toilet cleaning, it is something that has to be done, and is done most efficiently by just one person. But nobody wants to do it. 

Bilodeau and Slivinski consider the situation when the department chair/toilet cleaner is a volunteer. They argue that the job will inevitably fall to the person who has the least tolerance for mess and/or the person who can do the job at the lowest personal cost. (This has an immediate implication: to avoid administration and/or housework, cultivate a tolerance for dirt and disorganization.)

A couple of years ago, I asked my students to imagine themselves sharing an apartment with housemates, and to devise ways of allocating the job of toilet cleaning. Most opted for some kind of rota system, enforced in creative ways from putting a lock on the bathroom door and barring non-contributors, to evicting those who did not take their turn. Other students suggested an alternative strategy: everyone pitching in and hiring a housekeeper.

Uniformly, my students came up with workable and creative solutions to the toilet cleaning problem. So why is it so hard to get academics to do administrative work? Why is it almost impossible to find anyone willing to take on tasks such as undergraduate supervisor, graduate supervisor, and so on?

To begin: some background.

First, the administrative jobs that are particularly hard to fill are ones that are undertaken for the benefit of students in general. People will volunteer to chair a hiring or tenure committee because they want to see the job well done - a good colleague is a joy, so making the right hiring and tenure decisions is critical.  

But for academic administration, every person might believe the personal costs of doing administrative work outweigh any personal benefit. An individual academic will suffer few adverse consequences if her department has to go a few months without an undergraduate supervisor. After all, if Belgium can run for 8 months without a government, an academic department can muddle along too. Under these circumstances, no one will volunteer.

Second, in modern Canadian universities people can't be made or required to undertake administrative tasks. Yes, a department chair could say to a reluctant colleague, "You must serve as undergraduate supervisor." But forcing people into administration can have disastrous consequences. Incompetence, strategic or otherwise, is rife. "Sorry, I just forgot about that meeting." "I'm off to Australia for a couple of months, students can contact me by email." "I'll look at those files next week." 

The penalties my students dreamed up for those who do not contribute to the public good, for example, evicting laggards, cannot be implemented in academia. Tenure means that those who are delinquent in administrative duties cannot be fired. Only a few universities (Toronto, Waterloo, SFU, Calgary, some others) have any merit component to faculty salaries. Without merit pay, there is no financial incentive to do administrative work well. Yet where there is merit pay, there is even less incentive to undertake administration, as merit is based largely on research productivity, and administration eats up research time. 

Informal rota systems - for example, everyone has to take a turn as department chair - have more potential. Yet it is hard to get the rota right. In a department of, say, 24 people with 4 administrative positions (chair, PhD supervisor, MA supervisor, undergrad supervisor) each person should have an administration position for, on average, 4 years out of 24, or 1/6 of his or her career. If any colleagues are deemed incapable of all administrative tasks, that fraction rises. My sense is that in a number of departments, older colleagues will decline administrative tasks on the grounds that "I've done my time." (This study confirms that time allocated to service peaks in middle age and then declines as faculty members get older). But the end of a standard retirement age means that academic careers are getting longer. In my example,if an academic has a 36 year-long career, that means at least 6 years, or two terms, in an administrative position. Once is not enough to get the job done.

Because the tenured cannot be compelled to undertake administrative duties, desperate chairs foist these jobs upon the untenured. (Junior faculty may also be the only ones who have not yet done their time). This is a terrible misallocation of resources - just at the time when people are at the height of their potential research productivity, they get loaded with administrative tasks. They foolishly think that their willingness to work hard will count in their favour when their tenure decision rolls around - but, alas, tenure decisions are based more or less entirely upon research output. 

So what is a university to do?

My students worked it out: hire a housekeeper. More precisely, hire professionals to do administrative work. The money can be found by capping the growth of academic salaries - but given a choice between a 0% pay increase and minimal administration, or a 2% pay increase and hours of student advising, I'd certainly opt for the former. (Hiring professional administrators is also cheaper than another possible solution to the lack of volunteers: increasing the financial compensation received by academic administrators).

The hire a housekeeper solution explains one puzzling aspect of university life in recent years: the ratcheting down of faculty administrative loads, and the growth of what has been called the administrative lattice. Central counselling services have replaced faculty advisers, writing tutorial services have replaced one-on-one professorial instruction, and so on. 

Yet it is a faustian bargain. Once a professional, administrative class is brought into the university, it role begins to expand - from advising students to drawing up policies with respect to student advising, for example. It is argued (for example here and here) that the collegial model of university governance - where important decisions are made by Faculty Boards and Senates controlled by academics - is in decline, and increasingly career-managers dominate decision-making. (On the other hand, this paper argues that faculty involvement in decision-making is not always a good thing - and not always a bad thing either). 

Is there any way of attaining some better state of the world, where administrative tasks are done willingly and competently?

If universities ratcheted up teaching expectations, then it would be easier to convince people to undertake administration - a load of administration + 3 one term courses is relatively more attractive the higher the standard teaching load. Now, according to proponents of the ratchet theory, teaching loads have been ratcheted down along with administrative loads. This seems plausible to me based on anecdotal evidence - full-time teaching loads at my university have decreased, on average, over the past 20 years. But the only study I could find that relied on something other than anecdotes found little evidence of falling teaching loads.

Apart from the load issue, my gut feeling is that the price that people demand in terms of teaching reductions for doing administration work may be increasing. New technology, such as powerpoint and blackboard, makes teaching easier. Changes coming from within and outside the institution might be making administration harder: privacy policies, freedom of information policies, and other policies reduce administrative discretion, while requests for information and other demands increase workload. I don't have evidence on this, though, so I could be wrong. 

I think ratcheting up of teaching or administrative loads for existing faculty will happen only if there is an extreme crisis. U.K. universities are currently experiencing huge cuts to their funding levels. An article in Times HIgher Education, reporting on an August 2010 survey of university administrators, describes

 a widening gulf between senior management and staff, with 60 per cent of vice-chancellors citing their "inability to move or change intransigent staff" among their three greatest internal constraints.

What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object is anyone's guess. 

Comments

[tomslee]

Fascinating and illuminating. The UK model is to make department chair responsibilities the down side of an otherwise desirable, high-prestige position (professor). Perhaps it's like making the room mate with the best room clean the toilet? I can't extrapolate to the consequences though.

[Frances Woolley]

Tom "The UK model is to make department chair responsibilities the down side of an otherwise desirable, high-prestige position (professor)."

Yup, that's a potentially workable version of the rota system. It tends to break down in the N. American context because (full) professors earn that rank by building an international research reputation, but not everyone who attains the rank of professor is capable of running a department. It was, I think, different in the UK, because it used to be much harder to achieve the rank of professor. And then once some people are excused from the rota because of either incompetence or "I'm just so valuable elsewhere" the system breaks down.

[Determinant]

If tenure is a problem in that it lets professors dodge their share of the unpleasant load, then we need to examine what tenure means and what it entails in responsibilities. Tenure is supposed to enhance the ability to undertake research freely without undue restraint; it is not and should not be a get-out-jail-free card to avoid duties to the greater institution and making that institution work. Surely the Classics Department would agree that historically in civic republics like Athens or Venice public service was seen as much as a privilege and honour as it was a duty?

This post also touches on the subject of teaching. My university had a policy that all professors had to teach undergrads, no exceptions. The student union teaching award, either a nomination or an actual award was also a significant feather to have when applying for tenure; departments liked getting good teaching profs when possible and this was the standard by which they were measured. It was still a very, very research-heavy institution, so it was not a bed of roses by any means.

It really comes down to the fundamental conflict of research vs. teaching that universities have never fully resolved. There are lots of great researchers who can't teach, conversely good teachers aren't necessarily considered to be profs based on their lack of research.

[Frances Woolley]

Determinant - "If tenure is a problem in that it lets professors dodge their share of the unpleasant load, then we need to examine what tenure means and what it entails in responsibilities."

I wondered if I was doing the right thing writing this post - I'm sure lots of people will read this and think exactly what you're written.

I don't want to see tenure come under attack.

Yet many people - myself included - figured that once the standard retirement age was eliminated, an attack on tenure was inevitable. I didn't want to be the one to start the debate. But it's started - or, at any rate, it's being talked about in the New York Times.

Something has to change. I've seen things happen that don't pass the Globe and Mail test (This is the test that goes: "How would I feel if this appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail?").

What are the alternatives to an abolition of tenure? Personal responsibility? Inspiring leadership? Constructive dialogue between faculty and administration? This is what I'd prefer. Hope it'll happen that way.

[Bob Smith]

Determinant may be on to something. The existence of tenure, in and of itself, doesn't explain why universities can't compel professors to perform administrative duties. They can, after all, compel professors to teach the courses they're assigned, to mark the papers and exams of their students, etc. So the issue seems to be less one of about tenure, and more one about the contractual relationship between the university and the faculty associations and the expectations as to what constitutes the duties of a professor. And the explanation is probably that university adminitrations have decided, heretofore, that it's preferrable to just muddle along, then to fight a knock-down, drag it out, fight with the faculty assocations over what they expect their professors to do.

We'll see whether that remains the case.

[Determinant]

Bob is right. Tenure in an of itself is fine, but why on earth should it mean that a professor has no duties to help run the institution that makes their tenure possible? I am not advocating abolishing tenure, I just want to say that if we see tenure as a good thing, then that tenure should require at a professor take their share of the administrative load. If you don't want to hire a professional admin staff with the problems Frances noted, then this seems the only course.

I see nothing unreasonable in saying that "for the considerable academic freedom we will grant you, you must take your turn on the admin rota." There is nothing inconsistent with the tenure model in requiring a predetermined amount of duty in return for privilege. Those to say that tenure absolves them of admin duty are making the same arguments as those who don't want to pay their taxes. We don't accept those arguments in that context, so why can't we make profs pay their "admin tax"?

The fact that some may choose to act as prima donnnas in the face of such demands is a personal and personnel issue.

[Frances Woolley]

Determinant - imagine yourself in the position of a department chair. You say: I see nothing unreasonable in saying that "for the considerable academic freedom we will grant you, you must take your turn on the admin rota."

The faculty member says "No, I won't do it." If they are assigned the task, they simply don't do it - they leave town, don't answer their phone, and let their email account get so full that it jams and no more messages can be sent.

What do you do? This is not a rhetorical question.

[Alice Woolley]

I think there are a few things department chairs (or faculty heads) can do. First of all, they can reward those who do administrative work, not necessarily with less teaching (for the reasons you indicated here or earlier) but also with better timetabling, research assistance, assistance with grant preparation or what have you. Second, they can use their soft power to punish those who won't do the work. They can assign burdensome courses. They can timetable courses at awkward times. They can actually talk to people and try moral suasion, and point out the fairness problem (which I think people are more sensitive too than one might think - in my observation there aren't that many people willing to be jerks on a sustained basis, when it is obvious that their jerk-ery is observed and condemned).

Most significantly, though, you need to have a faculty culture in which people who don't pull their weight administratively are shunned. Much like what actually would happen to the roommate who never cleaned the bathroom. But to have that culture a few preconditions are necessary: 1) there has to be a core of people who are willing to do administrative work (if none of the roommates will clean, who do you shun?); 2) the faculty can't be too big; 3) the administrative work has to be rewarded, either directly (through merit pay) or through some other method.

I also think, though, that there is something to be said for effective administrative support. I am the Director of ADmissions for the law school, which is one of the heavier administrative jobs. However, I have a fabulous team of administrative staff too, and I am looking to increase the amount of front line decision-making they do. They are competent to do it, and it would allow my job to be more focussed on policy/applicant contact and less on data review. That type of administrative help may avoid some of the legitimate problems you identify here of the university administration that consumed the academic staff.

[Determinant]

In that case as chair I declare that after a certain period of time, say three weeks, they have vacated their position and suspend them from the department pending review. This of course assumes I get to set my rules, I don't know what Carleton's specific rules are.

At my old university, there was a note in the course calendar that graduate students who were absent from the university for more than three weeks were deemed to have vacated their studies and they were suspended from grad school accordingly. It does not seem unreasonable to enforce the same standard on professors who are in a similar position. "Prof failed to fulfill tenure duties as enumerated in University regulations to which all profs must adhere" and have adhered since the profs make the system work, seems to be a very reasonable charge.

What does a review mean? It means a board from the university, consisting of fellow professors hearing the complaint. That in response to fulfill a known duty, the prof in question dodged the request and vacated their duties. They knew the duties they assumed when taking tenure.

This isn't unreasonable, any large organization works in this way, self-regulating organizations like accountants and lawyers do this all the time.

The prof in your example is acting what I think of a "prima donna" way. Why should we tolerate it? This prof wants his benefits (tenure) and won't pay his taxes (admin duty). It's not an acceptable position in the tax world and it isn't an acceptable argument here.

[Alice Woolley]

And Determinant's general point is a good one): despite what some profs (and even administrators) think, tenure is **not** a guarantee to have a job even if you don't fulfill it. Any university could fire a professor who refused repeatedly and determinedly to fulfill her administrative or teaching obligations. I understand why universities don't want to use that avenue, given the cost and difficulty involved, but it is a possibility that tenure doesn't preclude, and a few instances of university steel against recalcitrant faculty might create a changed culture relatively quickly.

[Determinant]

I believe the actual defintion of tenure is "Can't be dismissed except for cause". Surely it then follows that a Senate decree to the following can be made:

Cause in cases of violation of tenure means:

m) wilful failure to fulfill assigned administrative duties as established by University, faculty and departmental regulations for tenured professors or,

n) (i)absenting oneself from the University premises for a period greater than three weeks without reasonable excuse.

(ii) Notwithstanding (i), failure to fulfill the administrative duties required of tenured professors without informing the department or faculty as the case may be in a prompt and timely manner in order to make alternative arrangements for the fulfillment of those duties shall be cause for dismissal.

[Frances Woolley]

Determinant, Alice, good points on the nature of tenure.

"Most significantly, though, you need to have a faculty culture in which people who don't pull their weight administratively are shunned. Much like what actually would happen to the roommate who never cleaned the bathroom." - excellent point. Yes. Exactly.

Though if people live in a different city and are only on campus for a few hours a week shunning is more difficult. Which comes to Determinant's point - but how much more would faculty demand in terms of salary if they had requirements to be on campus for certain amounts of time?

[Rachel Goddyn]

My daughter is engaged to a young Filipino man who lives with us. One day, as I was cleaning the house, it occurred to me that I must be one of the very few white people in the world who cleans a Filipino's toilet. You are right, who cleans the toilet says a lot about how the world is run.

[Determinant]

In my limited experience, tenured profs had managed the necessary research and teaching load to get tenure, and that usually meant living locally out of shear convenience. I didn't know of any profs who didn't live locally.

As for pay, if presence is a condition of tenure, itself a prize, I don't see that increased pay necessarily follows. We already require profs to take teaching loads and expect it as part of their salary. Unless you have a half-time prof or Carleton doesn't have such high teaching loads. Or you are recruiting faculty who prefer to live in Montreal, which is a Carleton-specific problem due to geography and the location of the business community. In which case you really need to consider as a department/faculty/university what exactly you want of tenured professors and what isn't acceptable.

The presence test I put forth was just a method to ensure that tenure isn't abused.

Of note, the Supreme Court of Canada requires that all of its nine justices live within 40 km of Ottawa. This is because they are the constitutionally-designated successors to the Governor General if the GG should be unable to carry out his/her duties. But it's still an example of a tenured position having a residence requirement and nobody thinks its onerous.

[Patrick]

Not my area of expertise at all, but isn't tenure just a guarantee that the prof can only be fired for cause - the intent being they don't have to fear for their job if they hold unpopular or unorthodox views related to their academic work. If the department head says "you will do admin duty X", and the employment contract says "job includes admin duty X", and the prof says "no, I won't do admin duty X", wouldn't that be gross insubordination? In the private sector, you can be fired on the spot for that; no notice, no severance, hit the road. Of course, nothing is ever that simple when it comes to law, but still ... "No I won't" seems a bit over the top.

[Mike Moffatt]

"Of note, the Supreme Court of Canada requires that all of its nine justices live within 40 km of Ottawa. This is because they are the constitutionally-designated successors to the Governor General if the GG should be unable to carry out his/her duties. But it's still an example of a tenured position having a residence requirement and nobody thinks its onerous."

If you had this requirement of University of Wyoming, the entire business school would shut down. I don't think any of them live in Laramie.

You'd have to couple such a requirement with a rule that if a school hires a new prof, they hire their spouse is well. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen couples that teach at different schools in different areas (and in a couple of cases different countries) - at least one member of the couple would be breaking this rule.

[Frances Woolley]

"No I won't" seems a bit over the top.

Here's a question for WCI readers - does anyone know of any tenured academic who lost their job because they, say, refused to admin work, had one or more other full-time jobs in addition to their university work, had wandering hands, or were terrible teachers?

I'm thinking back a few years and I can vaguely recall that U of T professor who was accused of goggling students through his goggles in the swimming pool, but I don't think even he was let go in the end. There have been a couple of cases in the news with high profile medical researchers recently(e.g. the Nancy Oliveri case http://www.ecclectica.ca/issues/2005/3/index.asp?Article=2 ).

There was that prof at U of Ottawa who was fired after he gave all of his students an A+ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article970280.ece but I can't think of any other cases.

[Mike Moffatt]

"Here's a question for WCI readers - does anyone know of any tenured academic who lost their job because they, say, refused to admin work, had one or more other full-time jobs in addition to their university work, had wandering hands, or were terrible teachers?"

None here. Asked my wife and she couldn't either (and she's the daughter of a prof as well).

[Alice Woolley]

I think it is only partially accurate to say tenure means you can only fire for cause. It has the additional substantive component of precluding from consideration as "cause" the substance of a professor's scholarship or, I would guess, some of the substance of the professor's teaching. It is the additional substantive component, and problems such as an asserted lack of administrative work being viewed as a pretext for firing someone for their scholarly views, that makes university's very reluctant to exercise the power they have. Also, the procedures imposed by collective bargaining make it costly. To step into the turf of the economists, I think tenure simply imposes very high costs on universities seeking to terminate faculty, costs that in most cases outweigh the costs arising from the annoyance of having the unproductive faculty member sit around until you can push them to early retirement. It's not a legal preclusion of university action; it's simply a cost the law imposes on university action, a cost sufficiently high to lead - it seems - to total inaction. Finally, people can be unduly intimidated by the procedural requirements the law imposes in cases like this. A recent Ontario judgment dealt with a decision by the Dean of Western to kick a student out of law school who had made threatening comments on Facebook and in class. The Dean dealt with the matter with absolute procedural propriety, and the decision easily passed judicial scrutiny. If university administrators in general viewed procedural requirements as something to guide action, as opposed to justifying inaction, this debate might look quite different.

[Bob Smith]

According to wikipedia the number of tenured professors who are fired for cause in the US is only 50-75 a year, so for Canada it would probably be 5-7. Not a huge number.

That said, I'm willing to wager that you'd only need to fire one professor for refusing to perform administrative duties "pour encourager les autres". Given the market place for university professors, who's going to risk a tenured job, decent salary and reasonable pension plan? (Although, I could see this being a problem in departments where there are feasible outside alternatives. A sociology professor might not take that risk, an engineering professor might). Whether there's a university administrator in Canada with sufficient cajones to take that first step, though, is another question.

[Determinant]

"Of note, the Supreme Court of Canada requires that all of its nine justices live within 40 km of Ottawa. This is because they are the constitutionally-designated successors to the Governor General if the GG should be unable to carry out his/her duties. But it's still an example of a tenured position having a residence requirement and nobody thinks its onerous."

If you had this requirement of University of Wyoming, the entire business school would shut down. I don't think any of them live in Laramie.

You'd have to couple such a requirement with a rule that if a school hires a new prof, they hire their spouse is well. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen couples that teach at different schools in different areas (and in a couple of cases different countries) - at least one member of the couple would be breaking this rule.

I disagree. In the United Church of Canada with M.Div. education ministers, the process of ordination involves settlement, which means you go to a remote pastoral charge. Normally Saskatchewan or the Maritimes. Our rules are clear, no settlement, no ordination. We have enough clergy with this requirement, and we don't have a "hire the spouse" rule. The pension is nice but the pay itself isn't high.

How many of those Wyoming profs are carrying an undergrad teaching load?

I don't have a problem pushing the envelope on this point. Profs want to push back? Fine, let them. What's wrong with "management" showing some gumption? Profs think they rule the market, with all the faculty waiting in the wings for tenure that Frances has mentioned? I think the profs will lose that argument.

[Mike Moffatt]

"How many of those Wyoming profs are carrying an undergrad teaching load?"

Pretty much all of them. You live in some place like Fort Collins, CO drive in on the days you teach and work from your home office the other days.

[Determinant]

Which makes Wyoming an excellent candidate for using full-time administrative staff, however Frances rejected this option in her earlier post.

[Frances Woolley]

Rachel - love your toilet cleaning story.

Alice: "costs that in most cases outweigh the costs arising from the annoyance of having the unproductive faculty member sit around until you can push them to early retirement."

And this is why the abolition of a standard retirement age changes everything. Bearing these costs seems much more worthwhile if a 40-year old delinquent faculty member has, potentially, 40 years more years of service, as opposed to 25. Also to the extent that the abolition of a standard retirement age makes extends the average length of an academic career (therefore makes new hires harder to come by) it becomes more desirable to take action against the negligent.

This is why I suspect those US numbers can't be generalized to Canada - the US had not had a standard retirement age for some time.

Determinant - on residence requirements - it's interesting to see what's happened in the U.K. As the research assessment exercise has increased the competition for star faculty, universities have become more willing to relax residency requirements - you can live in London and commute as long as the university can have your c.v. when the research assessment exercise rolls around. And then once the rules are relaxed for one they're relaxed for all.

Interestingly, Carleton does list this as a faculty responsibility: "an employee who wishes to spend more than one-half (1⁄2) day a week on a regular basis off campus during the academic year (September to May) shall so advise his/her dean/University Librarian or director;"

[Mike Moffatt]

Interestingly, Carleton does list this as a faculty responsibility: "an employee who wishes to spend more than one-half (1⁄2) day a week on a regular basis off campus during the academic year (September to May) shall so advise his/her dean/University Librarian or director;"

Is that seriously enforced? In the past I've been in departments where you could shoot a cannon through the hall on a Friday afternoon.

[Frances Woolley]

Mike, in a word? No. (she says, with great restraint).

[Nick Rowe]

There was that recent case, at a Canadian university, of a tenured prof in a science department. He taught no science whatsoever in his classes. Just talked about his politics, then gave every student an A+. finally fired after some years. Now running round claiming his academic freedom has been violated.

Nobody mention his name please, or he is likely to come on here and start ranting.

VP Finance positions always used to be held by academics. Nowadays it's very rare. They are professional administrators.

The best model for how universities operate is the old Yugoslavian worker-owned co-operative, with tenured faculty the worker-owners. Not quite exact, but not far off.

There's an old Carleton story, only partly apocryphal, that two people would meet across the bargaining table to negotiate profs' salaries. One representing management, the other representing the faculty association. But both would be profs. And after a few years, the same two people would swap sides of the table, when the VP became head of the faculty association, and vice versa.

[Determinant]

Google was informative.

Actually relevant to this thread; tenure isn't a license for everything. Holding evolutionary views in a biology course was once the poster-child for tenure. Or modern biblical interpretation based on English Lit theories in a theology faculty. Those profs had firm views, made sure the theory was controversial but still relevant to the course at hand, and taught accordingly. Students still knew what they were signing up for.

When a science course morphs into a diatribe which contains no science, then relevance is lost. There is a procedure for radically changing the content of a course, it's called offering a new course.

When an undergrad signs up for 4th Year Math course, she has a reasonable expectation that the course will follow the published description and approved curriculum.

Why is it that that example and Frances example of a colleague who disappeared into a fifth-dimensional vector space (sorry, undergrad humour) when asked to do some admin work seem to be more a case of a prof with a haughty attitude and poor social skills instead of actually being a case of academic freedom?

Now if Nick came to grief over his entirely topical yet incendiary posts on New Keynesianism and Unions or his series of entries "bashing the poor" (as the rest of the blog called them), that would be a genuine case for tenure and academic freedom. But not the previous two examples.

[Kevin]

It is unfortunate that university professor's seem to have such a disdain for administrative work that benefits students. Their salaries come from students tuition and the government. The government funds universities based on enrollment. Yet job performance is based almost entirely on non-student related factors. There is definately a disconnect between the revenue source and the incentive system.

I have been watching interviews with some famous MIT faculty(as part of their Infinite History Project). It is interesting to hear Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson say that professors rarely shirked on their teaching duties and administrative responsibilities. It was in fact quite frowned upon. If the leading researchers in the field have to do administrative work at their institutions then what makes other faculty so special?

By the way, I am a student!

[Frances Woolley]

Kevin - " It is interesting to hear Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson say that professors rarely shirked on their teaching duties and administrative responsibilities."

Three thoughts.

One - perhaps it's not coincidental that these statements are part of a history project? As I argue in the post, there's reasons to think administration is becoming less desirable, as the 'administrative lattice' grows.

Two - as Alice pointed out earlier, departmental culture is vital. Shirking is contagious. Once one person, say, runs a full-time consulting business while holding down an academic position, others take note and think "why should I take up the slack"?

Three - teaching is different from administration. Standing up on front of a classroom is a bit of a rush - it's like any other kind of performance, applause feels good. That's why I've focused on administration in this post.

[Kevin]

Frances, I definately agree with points 1 and 2. I think MIT had (and maybe still has?) a very special culture. This was in no small part due to Samuelson. I wonder if they have been able to maintain this in the new era of "big administration". I was just trying to make the point that being a researcher should not mean that someone is above doing any type of work that is undesirable.

Consulting businesses are something I am not too familiar with. Am I correct to assume that those holding down full time consulting jobs still take full university salaries? There has been a lot of talk in the comments about residence requirements. Could there also be requirements about the number of hours spent making money outside of academia? I know some won't like that, but students are the ones who suffer when a faculty member's priorities are elsewhere.

Some faculty are more motivated by the applause you speak of than others. That being said, I TA as well and I know that some students don't exactly hold up their end up the bargain either.

[Frances Woolley]

Kevin - think of people someone like Ken Binmore - a very prominent game theorist who made lots of money using auction theory to design real world auctions for wireless spectrums. A university could say "you can't do this consulting." But real world experience probably improves the quality of student instruction, so it's not clear that students gain from the ban. A university can say "you have to share your consulting income with us." But someone like Ken Binmore also mobile - if one university says "no" then someone else will say yes.

Plus the opportunities to make outside consulting income are a way of moderating faculty salary demands. The London School of Economics has been rumoured to have seminars for new faculty explaining how to balance their university with responsibilities with the outside activities they have to take on in order to pay for the cost of living in London.

And then once the rules are relaxed for one...

Though as other commentators have said, tenure is not a get out of jail free card. Collective agreements set out the responsibilities of faculty members, and they can be enforced - it's a matter of university steel.

[Kevin]

Thanks Frances. I am convinced now that the outside work issue is unique for every school and person. I don't think regulating things that faculty can and can't do is the answer. The answer is to create incentives for doing the right things. Unfortunately tenure gets in the way of the universities ability to do this. Now my issues are very similar to other commenters.

[Al Slivinski]

Having done some Chairing (and some toilet-cleaning) since co-writing that article, I thought I'd add to what has been an interesting discussion. First I'll note that I agree that University administration has changed over the years. There is more of it than there used to be (I have no good model to explain that observation) and more of it is done by non-academics. This makes doing it even less appealing to academics, I think - I remember once having to explain the concept of a Sabbatical to a senior administrator in Western's Research Office. However, I'd also say that tenure, and the use of various incentive devices have at most a second-order effect in getting academics to do administrative tasks. Western has merit pay (if not enough, by my lights) and 'Service' counts in determining it. Moreover, the Department has a reasonably strong culture of expecting tenured people to do their bit - I'm happy to say we don't eat our young on that score. The real issue in getting Department administration done, particularly for the 'Big Four' jobs mentioned, is ability. The correlation between teaching ability and research productivity isn't 1, but it's at least likely positive. Administrative ability is rather rare among academics, in my experience, and particularly so for the so-called 'people skills', which do matter for most administrative jobs. Since the Department generally suffers if these tasks are done badly, the real issue isn't so much `who can we persuade?', but `who can we live with?', and the candidates on that basis are usually few.

I'll add that I have no doubt that some academics engage in `strategic incompetence building' with exactly that in mind, but not so many, I think.

[Nick Rowe]

Al: "Administrative ability is rather rare among academics, in my experience, and particularly so for the so-called 'people skills', which do matter for most administrative jobs."

And, especially rare among academic economists? ;-)

[Frances Woolley]

Al, thanks so much for those comments. I'm interested in your perception that the admin workload has increased and become less appealing.

"The correlation between teaching ability and research productivity isn't 1, but it's at least likely positive."

But if the correlation between research productivity and administrative ability is perceived to be negative, does willingness to do administration become a signal of research incompetence?

[Al Slivinski]

Regarding Nick's arched eyebrow comment, I don't really know that economists are so different. It's an empirical question that's hard to answer, but since my fellow Social Science Chairs seemed to have the same problems we did in Econ, maybe not. As to the increase in administrative burdens and unpleasantness, it is a verifiable fact that the number of administrative positions at Western has increased more quickly than faculty numbers (which have not moved much at all) over the last 10-15 years. Some of this is due to external effects, chiefly coming from an increase in governmental and legal reporting requirements and the like, but some (I am convinced, even with only impressionistic evidence) is due to an increasing 'command and control' mindset among senior administrators.

Finally, I don't know that research ability and admin ability are negatively correlated, but ability is damn hard to measure, and the inescapable contemporaneous impact of any major administrative task, like Chairing, on research productivity would make that very hard to sort out, for sure.

In the grayer moments at the end of my term as Chair, I found it easy to decide that the whole post-secondary enterprise (in Ontario, at least) was spiraling down the toilet, so the two tasks named in our paper title would soon be indistinguishable. But then I'd go have a beer with some grad students and things would seem less gray.....

[Frances Woolley]

Al - "As to the increase in administrative burdens and unpleasantness, it is a verifiable fact that the number of administrative positions at Western has increased more quickly than faculty numbers (which have not moved much at all) over the last 10-15 years."

Which begs the question: is the administrative work done by those in administrative positions a substitute for, or complement to, the admin work of faculty?

If a substitute, then all of those administrators would mean less administrative work for full-time faculty members. If a complement...well, as you say in your last paragraph...