When efficiency backfires: how academia's 'savings' are costing us
I met this professor at a women in leadership event, and she was telling me about the time she spent her entire morning looking for these name tags and a welcome banner for the departmental open day. This woman is famous internationally and must be on 6 figures, I would guess.
The story was a familiar one. Her university was going through a centralisation process, and it meant the admin staff were being taken out of the specific departments and into a central system. The idea is to cut costs and avoid duplication of work, a more efficient system. This is all well and good (apart from the people who lose their jobs, of course) as soon as you realise there are gaps in the system.
The problem is the "overhead tax"—the non-promotable, often invisible work that falls to whoever is left. It might be knowing where the cups are stored for events, finding the department's welcome banner, or handling countless other small but important tasks (I could list 100). Lose the people, and you lose the knowledge.
Then we have internationally renowned experts whose time would be best spent writing some great world-changing grant, teaching and inspiring the next generation or writing a great paper instead of on their hands and knees, spending hours sorting through old dusty boxes.
I don't want to set the wrong tone here. I'm not saying this work is beneath her, or she's a top professor, so she's above doing menial work. What I'm saying is that the division of labour is fucked in academia, and ultimately it's a false economy to cut down admin support when it means your highly paid professoriat are spending hours doing jobs that a 16-year-old on work experience could do or that would take a former admin staff 3 minutes to sort.
Do other industries have this problem? Does NASA have their top astronaut looking for space pencils before a mission? Does Serena Williams muck in and cut the grass before a game at Wimbledon if need be? Does Kylian Mbappé take the bibs home to wash after the game?
I actually don't know; maybe this is common. But it's daft and a waste of money, and worst of all, it drives out skilled people who keep things running smoothly while failing to utilise your most expensive staff properly. Costly.
It might be the cost of transition, and this will sort itself out all the time. I'm down for centralisation if it actually works. But you see this everywhere – too often, these changes create more unseen problems. We're promised "efficiencies" that sound great in theory but end up making us busier than ever. It's like when the washing machine was invented: it was supposed to free up time, but instead, it just raised expectations and added more to our workload. In academia, centralisation can save costs on paper but often results in hidden burdens that waste time and talent.
