The People's Commissariat for Higher Education

I'm a prof at a major British university you'll all have heard of. Been working here a long, long time. I used to love my job but in the last few years, especially since the pandemic, I am growing to hate my job because we are rapidly turning into a parody of a Soviet Ministry. I know this is becoming more common in the UK. Does this sound familiar to others around the world?

I don't mean the hiring of "revolutionary comrades" who consider research, teaching, supervision, pastoral care, and admin to be an inconvenient obstacle to their real goal of pretending they're storming the Czar's palace (don't get me started on the cosplay commies). I mean the rapid transition from an institution dedicated to teaching, to an institution dedicated to mindless, utterly pointless, administration. An incomprehensibly vast bureaucracy led by totally incompetent yes-men whose only job is to maintain their jobs by embedding themselves even deeper in bureaucracy to the extent they can't be removed without the whole system unravelling. An institution defined by administrators administrating administrators - for no purpose.

First is the ballooning number of administrative personnel. Administrators now outnumber teachers/researchers by THREE to one. The result is a massive increase in admin departments, admin managers, admin committees, and admin processes. All of these administrators (especially managers) need to justify their existence, so processes have become nightmarish. Earlier this year I requested a new computer monitor. In 2018 I needed one so I went two doors down to the office, asked for one, and was given one. In 2024 I had to complete three forms that needed to be countersigned by two managers and approved by SIX administrative divisions (which took 5 weeks), so that someone two doors down could unlock the cupboard and give me a monitor. EXACTLY the same outcome, but with a massive amount of unnecessary administration. Similarly, hiring internal Teaching Assistants has gone from being done by one prof per dept to TWENTY-TWO administrative divisions and committees being involved, meaning a process that used to take a week now lasts year-round. Bureaucracy for the sheer sake of bureaucracy.

Second is the huge number of "executives", the overwhelming majority of whom have no identifiable purpose, and many od whom appear to just be hired into newly-created jobs by their mates. So to justify their bloated nepotistic salaries, they create webs of even more administration that is even more inefficient and has even less purpose, to demonstrate how vital they are to the institution.

Third is the cronyism and corruption of executive promotions. Not new, I know, but much more naked now. And seems to take place primarily among the administrative/executive personnel, not teaching/research. People who are manifestly incompetent, incapable of doing their jobs, and/or highly unpleasant people whose management style fills their teams with despair, are promoted upwards so they're someone else's problem. So we end up with a leadership team of gerontocratic cronies, failed middle-managers, and toxic people nobody can stand to work with. Most of whom cling onto their positions by creating more committees, more regulations, more processes and impose them on us, just to justify their existence. They create little empires and because all that matters is their huge salary and sense of self-importance from having a meaningless title and a personal assistant, they cling on to their empire even when it is actively making things worse.

Fourth is the increasing surveillance of students just ao we can collate vast reams of pointless data and endless, useless, statistics - for the pointless committees and executives to pore over. Teaching staff are now required to continually monitor each and every student's somatic and social characteristics and collate laborious, time-consuming statistics so that managers can summon committees and write reports saying that some particular module is not doing enough for students with Protected Characteristic X (and I'm not whining about that, I am from more than one minority and students have real pressures). The problem isn't the students or professors, it's the admin divisions. Nothing actually gets done to help students with Protected Characteristic X, because if the problem is solved then that admin division no longer has a reason to exist. So nothing gets done, and we're just compiling data for no reason. If it was important, then surely the vast, bloated bureaucracy could collate it rather than exhausted frontline teachers. We are drowning in administrative tasks that have no purpose.

Fifth is the laughably inefficient processes and archaic technologies we use. To compile these endless reams of pointless statistics and vast reports that nobody reads, we are using ancient technology. There is zero automation. Every single administrative process is conducted either through meetings, or through emails. So Monday-Friday's timetable is completely colonised by useless meetings so that a pointless executive can feel important, while evenings, weekends, and any spare hour of the work day has to be dedicated to desperately trying to process the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of emails that come flooding in. The phone systems don't work (because nobody seems entirely sure who's in charge, and getting your voicemail ID login requires multiple admin divisions) so we get emails demanding answers to voicemails we can't access; emails sent to the wrong person and then we have to search through emails to find out who is doing UG Admisisons this year, for example; emails from students asking why we haven't answered their Sunday morning email asking for an immediate one on one meeting to discuss their grade; emails tersely reminding us to complete the mandatory-every-year three-hour video training on bloody workplace health and safety (and the 10-15 other smug, supercilious, excessively long training videos apparently aimed at six-year-olds, which we have to endure).... drowning in useless admin, because we have failed to move beyond the 1980s.

Sixth (and I hope this is unique to my institution) is the self-appointed political secret police. Wannabe commissars who do the bare minimum (or much less) in teaching, research, admin, and student support, and instead believe they are being paid to launch a global revolution. They surveil their colleagues for signs of political heresy. They actively sabotage admin tasks and committees (and even their own marking) so they are not assigned such tasks again - so their admin tasks are dumped onto good colleagues who are already drowning. They weasel their way into positions of petty power so that colleagues they suspect of heresy get probations extended, contracts not renewed, good candidates are passed over for vacancies while these peoples' mates get hired because they've been told in advance exactly what to say. The only reason they haven't taken over is that they spend so much time infighting and excommunicating each other for thoughtcrime, they remain at a level where they can't gain real power, but they can **** everything up for everyone else.

So there we have it. Post-Covid academia and the transition from places of learning fit for the twenty-first century, to crumbling, pointless, Kafkaesque Soviet ministries circa 1989, where utterly exhausted and deeply demoralised staff are caught up in an unending cycle of pointless bureaucracy, pointless statistics, pointless jobs, constantly dictated to by useless higher-ups who produce nothing but decrees and spied on by people who can't hide their lust for petty power, then go drown their sorrows with their fellow dejected drones before starting another pointless day of pointless tasks.

Better get back to my emails.