one point from the Fisher interview

Mark and I have discussed this in the blogosphere before, but it bears repeating:

“So there were increasing amounts of bureaucracy, in the form of performance reviews, spurious planning documents, log books: a proliferating thicket of self-surveillance and auditing, very little of which had any prospect of improving teaching – or of having any sort of effect at all, beyond demoralising and further exhausting the teacher. This kind of bureaucracy involves a kind of ritual acting out of one’s own subordination; that seems to be the point of this bureaucracy, actually. It has a ritualistic function – you have to mouth the words, use the vocabulary.”

On the one hand, he’s completely right. On the other hand (as Mark knows, and has already explained effectively), I personally have a different reaction to academic paperwork : I actually love it. Why? Because if you do it the way it’s meant to be done, it actually does force you to reflect on your trajectory. Writing my research statement and teaching statement for tenure/promotion in 2005 was a wonderfully rewarding exercise that made me think more seriously than ever before about what it is that I’m up to on both fronts.

I also love writing grant proposals: a chance to explain my work in terms intelligible to grant committee members such as choir directors, Arabic language teachers, historians, political scientists, anthropologists. And now that I’m in charge of reading all the grant applications on campus, I love that too. It gives me the chance to read about campus research ranging from robotics (one colleague is in the midst of inventing a robot snake) to gender studies in Upper Egyptian villages to case studies of Middle Eastern businesses. It’s wonderful to be able to learn about and support this work by colleagues, many of whom deserve more encouragement. (In fact, that’s how I largely see my job in this administrative post: Encourager-in-Chief. A little bit of a morale boost to each person you deal with really adds up on the level of the University as a whole.)

And finally, I love writing my annual reports, even though a couple of people have been lazy and repeatedly didn’t read them when they were supposed to. I write the annual reports, too, as an exercise for myself, reflecting on all that was accomplished in the past year.

Nonetheless, Mark is right that it can really be just as grim as he says when it comes to academic paperwork. One reaction I have is that my goal is to improve academic paperwork rather than simply create more of it. For example, right now our faculty are asked to submit their annual publications lists about four different times per year for various purposes. It ought to be easy to fix that and make it just once, and we’re in the midst of doing it. And being a good Latourian, I see streamlining paperwork as no different in kind from making a conceptual breakthrough. (It’s little wonder that Latour himself is now a Dean, Nigel Thrift a Vice Chancellor, and so forth. It fits in with their intellectual work quite nicely, and in some ways it fits well with mine too. There is a lot you can do in these positions to make people happier with just a little bit of effort and reflection.)

If administration becomes surveillance, then it has failed. But think about this… Have you really never been fortunate enough to know at least one great university administrator? These people are a joy to work for. You never feel like you’re under surveillance, you just feel like there’s an adult at the steering wheel and you can forget about it and do what you do best.