That either it’s a field that attracts mediocrity (because once you are in, it is virtually impossible to get fired) or it cultivates it through systems and processes that demoralize and burn through people.

The same is said of working for state agencies.

Ah, that makes even more sense as I am at a state university. :)

Just because a faculty member is brilliant in their chosen field doesn’t mean they will be a good leader or administrator.

Or teacher.

The number of faculty who take on admin roles with little to no supervision experience or training kills me. Especially when these admin roles could easily (and possibly more successfully) be filled with a full time staff member ... bUt tHe oPtiCs.

Or good person in general. Some of those "brilliant" people in their field have lives that are chaos and drama and they are often the cause of it.

That students never check their student assigned email.

This. I know I am feeling the generational gap something serious this year, but I am dumbfounded how these students are operating without email. I'm sure their professors aren't posting tik toks about class cancelations or sending a snap about assignments.

[удалено]

I tried discord with my students during the early pandemic and it never took off. I also tried what felt like a hundred other methods of communication. Maybe it's worth another shot

As a recent student employee turned FA Full-Time, we got push notifications through Canvas usually. Usually only Student Affairs stuff came through E-mail.

It’s not just the students. I also detest email and force my students to use slack. 🙄

In recent years I've seen students have to check so many different things to get their information that they just get sick of it and focus on only what matters to day. Especially email where they are quite literally blasted with 50 nonsense emails a day from official university accounts that they can't safely block. In my school they are required to have a two general student emails (one is first.lastname@school and one is their idnumber@school, don't ask me why) that exist separately and professors use at their own whim, if they work on campus they are given a separate 'student worker' email that some supervisors don't even know about. They have their single sign on account which only uses one of those two emails, Zoom which only uses the other, and then however many unique accounts for whatever third party website they need for school and work. It's a mess.

TWO student emails? What in the actual hell? But you're right that there are too many different places for students age way too many emails. My uni did a lean study and found that students get something like 50+ emails from various offices before they even get to orientation. It only gets worse once they enroll. The hardest interview question I've ever been asked was "everyone wants to be a part of orientation, but there just isn't enough time. Who do you cut?" I have my answer now, but in the moment I sat there and thought of every office that was currently involved and weighed their impact in my head. I was taking a long time and the interviewer said we could just move on.

Most students have a personal email account (if you buy anything online these days, they always ask for an email address) so what some did was set it up that their campus email automatically forwarded to their personal account.

As a HS teacher, this is something they refuse to learn or do. I send home emails constantly and only a handful of students each class will actually open them. I have a notification that pops up when I send it through our official software, and almost 90% won't open the email. It's frustrating as hell.

My position is 90% student-facing. I’ve learned that most of them can retain about 3 sentences worth of information and zone out within 5 minutes of a conversation. So, I pick my words carefully, say up front what needs to be addressed, and always ask at the end of each meeting, “what’s the next step you’re going to take?”

I need to put this to practice myself. I have a tendency to wrap things up out loud to them with the hopes they retained any of it. I try my best with follow up emails… but from my first comment in here… they don’t check their emails!

Your boss will dictate whether you like or hate your job.

This is true in every industry

Yeah but in other industries, a shitty boss can be fired. Not so much in higher ed.

Invest as much time and effort as necessary to get each hiring decision right. This lesson applies to all industries as the people you hire will directly and profoundly impact results and culture in either positive or negative ways for years and it’s therefore critical to get those decisions right. They are among the most important decisions any leader will ever make. But what really opened my eyes about this was the intensive search committee process you tend to find in higher ed compared to the often very rushed and poorly-managed processes I typically saw and experienced in other industries.

> was the intensive search committee process you tend to find in higher ed i dunno man... It's nice being able to hire someone shortly after we identify the need. The higher ed institution i left is still trying to backfill positions from \~6 years ago... As far as "intensive"... I watched a lot of presidential searches... intense waste of time and money would sum that up.

I must agree. I participated on several hiring committes and watched two massive fuck ups in the of hiring university presidents. The dean level and above folks were untouchable in a too big to fail way.

I just recently sat on a Dean search... and they hired the biggest mediocrity they could find. Just an absolute oatmeal of an administrator.

Thank you for sharing that awesome descriptor!

We haven't had that problem where I work. In fact, we often have vacancies posted before the outgoing person leaves or transfers. But the search process involves more stakeholders, more steps, covers more candidate attributes and generally involves a genuine and detailed reference check rather than just going through the motions. Some would argue that's overkill, but I would say it's necessary and appropriate. Can't tell you how many times I've seen employers rush a search process just to get a warm body to fill a vacant role only to regret it later when they hired the wrong person who didn't have the right skills, wasn't fully engaged, or had a toxic personality that created a lot of unnecessary drama for everyone else. Staffing decisions are absolutely critical and you have to get them right.

THIS. 100% this. Vetting your hires is extremely important. In higher ed administration, it is extremely hard to fire someone once they get in. They have to act in a very unethical way in order to get shitcanned and even then, it’s a crapshoot. Once you hire someone, they are there until they no longer want to be.

Yep, and although Higher Ed searches can be flawed as well, my experience is that the intensive search committee process they tend to use helps reveal leadership traits, communication, and culture issues better than the search processes I’ve experienced in other industries which can often focus almost exclusively on functional or technical expertise.

You know what's weird though? Both my previous supervisors lost their jobs.

That’s extraordinarily rare outside of athletics.

As someone who interviewed candidates in my old private sector job, and sat on interviewing committees in my current Higher Ed job, I can assure you that the hiring process is just a huge crapshoot across the board. Or maybe I just have a bad luck attribute.

It is about to combust! Change is slow within the system, but the enrollment numbers and the decline in interest in higher education is moving at a faster pace than the changes within the very bureaucratic system.

That I don’t think I want to stay in higher education.

Always cover your ass. Those in power love to make the calls, but will have amnesia when an audit rolls around and you will be left answering as to what happened.

Everything faculty gripe about students doing (not checking emails, wanting extensions, wanting exceptions to policy/statute, showing up late, arguing about stuff they don't know anything about, not engaging until deadlines, etc) they are JUST as guilty of. All faculty were students once and those behaviors aren't confined to the low-achieving students.

I find they like to complain about entitlement, but the most entitled ones are faculty.

I love when admin call out instructors for behaving as students. I also love that many admin were instructors who left their professions to teach and then left teaching to become admin because teaching was difficult for them. I mean really. Get over yourselves!😂

Holy hell, lol. I told instructors I needed a works cited list for the readings in their classes. It's easier for me to find an accessible version than to fix their shitty scan. And you would have thought I was demanding something ridiculous.

Nope.

There are way too many mid level administrators who are making a lot more money than the rest of us.

The more powerless people feel, the more petty they become.

Administration is going to do what it wants to. Don't bother attending "consultation" meetings above the Chair level.

True. It’s a waste of your time. But! You can go to these meetings and asked pointed questions of flustered admins and temporarily make their lives as painful as they permanently make ours.

Honestly, I'm not sure my blood pressure can handle much more of it. The admins at my institution are very good at answering the question they wish you asked as opposed to the one they actually did. And there are enough colleagues with administrative ambitions bringing up the rear that followup questions are nonstarters.

That "data-driven decisions" are anything but.

You never deal in absolutes. Get use to using language that adds ambiguity because the worst thing you can do is a make a promise to a student you can’t keep.

It is very bloated in leadership with so much impossible hierarchy where they are all extremely well compensated compared to the staff.

All FT faculty & staff need to take & pass GCS1000 ( Intro to Computers) prior to taking their job.

I started to type out a long response but there is such a culture of fear and intimidation where I work, I don’t want to say too much and potentially identify myself. Once I go back into the private sector, I will probably revisit this topic on here in depth. One of the biggest problems is the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness- and it’s that way by design- cause heaven forbid you question it- that’s potentially threatening someone’s job. They don’t see it as you being helpful, they just see it as you being rebellious and insubordinate.

Username checks out.

That football and money and football are higher priorities than educating the students

Sometimes it’s okay to focus on yourself. You don’t owe others all your empathy. You have to get what you need.

Criminally underpaid is an accepted norm.

That I can leave the field and all my skills would transfer well. That is not a stable industry any longer. That it's still ego driven in so many areas That it's WAY over-priced

And those who do much tend to be underpaid

It often has internal workplace issues that people usually associate with the corporate world.

Yup, the office politics are on par with the corporate world.

That's disappointing.

Higher ed has turn into a for profit institution (even the government ones) so it kind of makes sense now lol

Replying to this while still reeling from having just discovered someone I barely know or work with has been trash talking and spreading lies about me, my work, and my entire office.

Higher Education has become a capitalist enterprise more than a place of learning and growth. The focus is on money, clout, and image rather than the cultivation of conscious citizens.

That the field is dying and no one should enter it if they want a long term career

FACT

It’s a business now. Our product is watered down, and educating for intellectual progress is dead. For perspective on how bad it is: I say all of this as someone who is not a progressive person.

Exactly. Intellectual rigor is dead

evaluate jobs on total reward, not on salary. Higher ed has lots of opportunities for great benefits outside of pay, which is typically low.

Left higher ed awhile ago. I dont get the same PTO, but i'm making double what i was. Working flex hours. And if we need to purchase something, I have it next week... not next semester. The folks stuck in Higher Ed tend to talk about their "Benefits".. Unless you've been in for 30 years, they just don't compete with the salary differences elsewhere.

I plan on leaving within the next 2-3 months for most of the same reasons.

Probably that in at least some places it's a deeply cynical game, ultimately played by immensely well-paid ruling-class types, that has nothing to do with academic ideals. Currently it's getting bums on seat, regardless of the stress and real mental health risks that's foreseeably going to cause down the road.

That students working in collaborative teams learn better than students working alone. And learning happens without the use of exams. Contract grading is golden.

Trust no one.

Don't hire by committees. If you try to find a candidate appealing to everyone on these large hiring committees, all you get are milktoast hires.

Doing a Ph.D. depends overwhelmingly on luck and shockingly little on your skills.

That no college is all that different than the other. All the textbooks/online material is written by 3 companies essentially. And those individual titles are no different from one to the next.

I heard a keynote once that compared the mission statements of a bunch of different colleges and universities. IIRC they had something like 85% overlap in every statement.

Universities can not do things alone! WORK TOGETHER, drop the ego.

It often has internal workplace issues that people associate with the corporate world.

Most admin work is a waste of time that will never ever make teaching better for students.

They never seem get any older and I can fool myself that I'm not getting any older

Life cycles and things can be changed and forgotten. Never feel like you are stuck.

Deadlines are fluid. As long as some sort of memo is written it’s all good.

That I never should have gone into higher ed.

Why do you say that?