The slow death of knowledge (by admin request form)
There’s a particular kind of quiet tragedy in academia: not the big headlines about REF or funding cuts or strike action (though those matter, of course), but the small, daily loss of what academics were actually trained to do—produce knowledge.
I don’t mean this abstractly. I mean that actual hours that could have been spent researching, reading, writing, or even just thinking are now spent doing things like:
Reviewing Turnitin originality reports that are 78% similar to your own lecture slides
Spending 25 minutes trying to expense a cappuccino
Sitting through a 47 minute mandatory GDPR training video that ends with a quiz asking if you should leave a spreadsheet on a train (answer: no)
Uploading feedback to a marking system that doesn’t let you “bulk upload”.
Individually, these are small things. But the cumulative effect is devastating -- not just to workload, but to purpose. The core function of universities is knowledge creation, yet the people tasked with that work spend large chunks of their week ticking boxes, uploading forms, replying to emails, and reformatting PDFs because the filename contained a capital letter.
And yes, we’re all overworked. Everyone. But what makes this particular kind of overwork especially corrosive is that it often feels actively misdirected. We are not just busy -- we are busy doing the wrong things. And that has a cost.
The misallocation of talent
In other sectors, this kind of misallocation would be a scandal. Imagine paying a surgeon to spend half their week updating Excel trackers or forwarding emails about car park lighting. Imagine Marcus Rashford having to fill in a Doodle poll to book a slot on the team minibus, or Stella McCartney filling in a 14-page health and safety form before she's allowed to light a scented candle in the showroom?
In academia, it’s normal.
A 2021 UCU workload survey found that UK academics were averaging 51 hours a week—a level of overwork well above healthy limits. But perhaps more worryingly, a significant portion of that time wasn’t going into research or teaching. It was going into email, bureaucracy, and form-filling. A US-based study found that over 40% of time on funded research projects was spent on administering those projects, not actually doing the research.
That’s not just a workload issue. That’s a knowledge issue. We are actively limiting the production of new ideas by tying up the time and energy of the very people capable of producing them.
And it’s especially bad in the UK. Between the REF, the TEF, student satisfaction surveys, and a level of micromanagement that would make most civil servants puke, UK universities have become global leaders in academic admin. As one report put it, British academia has become a “world-class producer of documentation.”
The irony writes itself.
What are we even doing?
Let’s take a regular Tuesday, for instance. You might:
Reply to a student who wants to change seminar groups because they’ve joined a new netball team
Chase a missing signature for a £8.40 train ticket claim
Write the third reference for the same student applying for a different MA programme
Walk the entire length of campus to attend your poorly-attended departmental seminar in a completely different building.
By 2:30pm you’ve used no hours of your expertise and all of your patience. You may have glanced at an article you actually wanted to read, before being interrupted by an email asking whether your meeting room booking form was the most up-to-date version and if you could confirm it includes the correct accessibility tick boxes.
This is the reality for many of us. We joke about it in corridors. We screenshot the worst emails. We forward the most absurd admin requests to our friends with a subject line that just says “I give up.” But behind the jokes is something more serious.
Knowledge production is not infinite. It requires time, energy, and space. It needs freedom from interruption. And it needs respect – respect for the work itself, but also for the people who do it.
The loss that can’t be measured
In academia, women also take on a disproportionate share of teaching and service responsibilities—committee work, student support, pastoral care—roles that are time-consuming, emotionally taxing, and rarely rewarded. When institutions layer additional administrative burdens on top of this, often framed as 'just helping out' or 'being organised,' it quietly replicates the same gendered patterns of invisible labour. It’s not just a waste of time, it’s a waste of feminist progress.
Here’s the part no REF metric can quantify: the paper that doesn’t get written. The research idea that never fully forms because its author spent the afternoon entering student numbers into an Excel sheet with broken macros. The colleague who used to write articles that made you think—but who now just looks tired all the time.
The loss of knowledge in academia doesn’t happen dramatically. It happens slowly, through accumulation. Through duplicated forms, unread reports, back-to-back meetings, and the endless emotional labour of trying to keep up.
This is bad enough for theoretical linguists like me, but so much worse when I think of some of the women I coach in climate change, humanitarian aid, women’s health, NHS leadership, children legal rights, animal rights, the list goes on. This is not just inefficient – it’s an absurd waste of rare expertise.
We can’t keep pretending this is normal
I don’t know exactly what the full solution is. But I know it starts with naming the problem clearly. Not just “overwork,” not just “poor systems,” but something more systemic: the division of labour in academia is fundamentally broken. We have placed the burden of bureaucracy on the shoulders of researchers, and in doing so, we have robbed them—and all of us—of the knowledge they could have created.
One obvious fix? More dedicated operational or professional services support staff, properly trained and paid, who can take on the tasks that quietly eat our weeks. And a serious cultural move away from using email as the default mode of doing everything, all the time. Not everything needs a thread. Some things need a system.
And that is the real scandal.
✨If this hit a little too close to home, you’re not alone. This is exactly the kind of thing we talk about—and push back against—in The Sisterhood. If you want to find a smarter, saner way to do this job, come join us.
References
Guarino, C. M., & Borden, V. M. H. (2017). Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672–694. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2
O'Meara, K. A., Culpepper, D. K., Templeton, L. L. (2021). Nudging Toward Equity: How Administrators Can Reduce Faculty Workloads. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Misra, J., Lundquist, J. H., Holmes, E., & Agiomavritis, S. (2011). The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work. Academe, 97(1), 22–26. https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling-service-work#.Yq7VvmjMLIU
Link, A. N., & Van Reenen, J. (2021). Administrative Burdens in Research Funding: A Review. Research Policy, 50(6), 104246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2021.104246
UCU (2021). Workload Survey Report. University and College Union. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/11864/Workload-is-an-education-issue-UCU-workload-survey-report-2021/pdf/UCU_Workload_Survey_Report_2021.pdf
Schneider, B., Brutocao, J., & Dull, M. (2014). 2012 Faculty Workload Survey Research Report. Federal Demonstration Partnership. https://www.src.org/newsroom/src-achieve-2012-faculty-workload-report/
Curtis, J. W., Mahabir, C., & Mathews, C. (2013). Eaten by E-mail: Faculty and the Push for Paperless Communication. Academe, American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/article/eaten-e-mail
Tickell, A., et al. (2021). Independent Review of Research Bureaucracy. UK Government Report. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-research-bureaucracy
Johnson, R. (2022). Why Are Academics So Busy? A Look at Research Bureaucracy. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/03/15/why-are-academics-so-busy/
Kord, S., & Wilson, M. (2006). The More Things Change: Revisiting Academic Labour. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/oct/10/highereducation.academicexperts
Spicer, A. (2017). It’s Time to Tackle the Toxic Working Culture in Academia. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/nov/16/its-time-to-tackle-the-toxic-working-culture-in-academia
Times Higher Education (2021). How to Avoid Being Sucked into the Black Hole of Administration. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/how-avoid-being-sucked-black-hole-administration. Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672–694. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-017-9454-2
O'Meara, K. A., Culpepper, D. K., Templeton, L. L. (2021). Nudging Toward Equity: How Administrators Can Reduce Faculty Workloads. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Misra, J., Lundquist, J. H., Holmes, E., & Agiomavritis, S. (2011). The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work. Academe, 97(1), 22–26. https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling-service-work#.Yq7VvmjMLIU
Link, A. N., & Van Reenen, J. (2021). Administrative Burdens in Research Funding: A Review. Research Policy, 50(6), 104246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2021.104246
UCU (2021). Workload Survey Report. University and College Union. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/11864/Workload-is-an-education-issue-UCU-workload-survey-report-2021/pdf/UCU_Workload_Survey_Report_2021.pdf
