Taskageddon: lecturers workload and why we need more admin staff

Universities have largely blown the ‘golden age’ — ok, let’s not go nuts — of sectoral funding. New buildings. Quadrupling or Octupling Vice-Associate-Deputy-Deans of Strategic Executive Strategy. Recruitment agency spend. External consultants. Retreats. Open day bells and whistles. Noise.

Marketisation plays a huge role in the expansion of the above fluff — and that’s beyond any individual or university. But it’s worth thinking about what could be done if they suddenly came by a bit of cash, and put it somewhere more useful.

I’ll start from the selfish angle — it’s just the thing I can observe the best — and then work backwards.

Put simply, the role of university lecturer has become worse in the past decade. Some of that might be fine — the image of a crusty old Oxbridge don sat in leather bound chair dispensing vague advice on a bedraggled student’s essay on Henry VIII always had its issues, to say the least. To be clear, also, it’s still an ultimately rewarding gig. This is moaning about a good job — but I think worth doing.

In recent years, in short, the average lectureship has shifted towards becoming more akin to a caseworker for an MP. This has happened in a step-by-step piecemeal way, but it is a palpable trend over the long run.

Students come with problems, lots of them. Understandable — the gig is about people and people have problems! Young people have challenges and a lack of life experience that needs assistance. But because they are the figures students actually see, lecturers’ role is now largely triaging these across a range of areas. And because of cuts elsewhere there isn’t always somewhere to quickly direct them to — leading to its own stresses.

“I can’t log into my email!”

“I’m having a mental health crisis!”

“the changes to the VLE [said lecturer didn’t ask for] are confusing me!”

“the university website says we should have group Personal Academic Tutoring sessions every fourth week — where’s ours?”

“hey — my online assignment is saying I submitted late but I didn’t!”

“my essay was submitted into Essay_Reassessment_Extension_Second Extension_2021 — why haven’t you marked it?”

“what’s the point of this Career’s Excellence Task [the lecturer didn’t create] you are making us do!?!”

I don’t know the answers to all of those. I might not be qualified to help with others. I’m often not sure who to ask. I don’t have the power to change some of it. Maybe in some cases I just don’t think it’s my thing, and I don’t want to attend some training because I didn’t ask for it in the first place. Some of that might be IT misfiring — hard for me to know. And yet here we are.

Right now, the one-stop-shop model is failing. I mean its failing for anyone trying to get any research done amidst the ping-ping-ping of email inbox rattle, but also just in its own terms. And whilst the EduWonkers might want to add more roles onto that pile to justify their opeds — honestly, you can almost “fruit-machine pay out” their recommendations: EMPLOYABILITY…STATUS…CHECK-UP — I’m picturing a perfect sector: one with a bit of extra cash.

So, the thing you wouldn’t instantly do (imho) is hire more lecturers. Obviously this is a good long term goal — but with the system as knotty as it is there needs to be some disentanglement better carried out by others.

No, as a first step, you’d hire more frontline admin and pastoral staff. People to sort the entering of marks. With the skills to address mental health issues. To handle paperwork. To free up lecturers and others to do the bits of their job that are core, that they understand, and they signed-up for. These admin, process, and counselling roles are the glue holding the current system just about together. They are heroes and should be paid more. More of them would stabilise the sector a bit.

Given that universities everywhere are implementing open plan offices for academics — read; said academics are not coming in anymore except to do teaching — the increasing under-resourcing of these roles will become a pretty acute thing in the real world. Hell, there might be benefits — some students’ email etiquette may have to improve. Or universities may be forced to make simple procedural tweaks that would help a lot — like embedding Student ID numbers into their email signatures so lecturers can easily look them up on the Byzantine systems unis have erected for everything.

As it stands, too much stuff is getting caught in a space where it is nominally on an academic’s workload, but they don’t have the time, skills, or inclination to properly attend to it, so it just hangs in purgatory. This is because the goodwill on which doing these tasks has evaporated. And that’s no mystery. If you keep clearly adding more tasks to the working day but people’s nominal workload on paper hasn’t changed then they’ll just work around it, that’s human nature — particularly when pay has shrunk in real terms for some by up to 30%.

A good example is personal tutoring — a role which has always existed, rightly, but which has morphed from an introductory chat/friendly face instigator/simple problem backstop to some kind of designated 24/7 hand-holder.

Here theory meets practice. In the world of Wonkhe, ‘a personal tutor [is about] investing in the relationship with students. It is about simply “checking in” and encouraging open conversation that goes beyond the formal and the academic.’

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that as a statement. The issue is buy-in from the people doing it. What, in concrete terms, lies beyond the formal and the academic that I can do that is beneficial? How do I get an hour of non-course related chat with a dozen disinterested and/or busy 18 year olds out of it? What does that actually look like? Good people have really tried with this stuff, it’s just bloody tough.

The comments to that Wonkhe article pointedly include the caveats that it is ‘all predicated on the assumption that students will actually show up for their tutorial sessions’ whereas, in reality, ‘students overwhelmingly ask for more support at the same time that they ignore any that is actually on offer.’ The shift towards group discussions of personal tutor related content — it’s not really clear what this would be — has exacerbated the level of non-turnout. Unis have tried to offer more, but somehow delivered less.

That’s not universities fault — they can’t shape everything about the modern world. That’s not always the students’ fault either — the need to work, relax, or prioritise other elements of their lives is fair enough — but, let’s also be clear, sometimes it is. The people introducing this stuff are market led — if students didn’t say they want it then it wouldn’t happen (although something else might).

Even if students did attend en masse however, the chance of such sessions leading anywhere remains long odds. Very few PhDers in obscure topic X are that qualified to go full Jez from Peep Show Life Coach. Yet university strategies still pay heed to this type of low-cost thing solving all ills. Banking on your average 40–65 year old wanting to nebulously hang out with 18–21 year olds in a not-quite-social, not-quite-work way just seems suboptimal on a number of levels. So nobody wants to be there — cool. You can see the keywords — mental health, loneliness, important stuff — this is trying to fill, but it’s not working. If this stuff matters (it does!) then properly resource it.

There’s a broader point about process here — universities need to get better at cancelling stuff that doesn’t work. In 1932, when promoting the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that“it is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.” There’s something in that. Scrapping stuff is ok and doesn’t make the originator of the idea a fool. Universities need to be way more good at this. Academic workloads (and I’m sure others) keep going up because nothing gets cut. It’s all just stuff on the growing pile.

Personal tutoring is just one facet. As lecturing gigs get whittled down, more and more gets bundled on to those that remain. Theoretically — hell, it happens — the same person could end up leading every Welcome Week task nominally allocated by, say, someone in marketing to a separate head of subject, personal academic tutor, person with an interesting lecturing topic, or someone who knows a good icebreaking discussion. Maybe they literally change hats? Sharing [more] responsibilities “amongst the [shrinking] team” has become a bit of a hollow phrase from managers, to say the least.

This isn’t just moaning about increased workload, though it is that — it’s that increased workload brings ever greater potential to drop the ball. For example, as administrators have diminished in number you have academics checking assignment submissions have been submitted, marking essays, entering those marks into a system, checking them at some kind of departmental meeting, and processing the paperwork to do with external moderation.

I’m not alleging the likelihood of some kind of misconduct here — more that the potential to mess up, lose a grade, miswrite it once or whatever, seems quite high. And then it’s on that person because there isn’t anyone else. Introducing IT systems to check how people are doing such tasks might have a logic in trying to catch out errors, but is deeply frustrating in its own terms.

So, in a perfect world, you’d hire loads more of the type of person who can cover these tasks— and be properly paid for it.

But maybe that’s not so over the rainbow. Maybe universities could return to their core tasks, and be incentivised by government to do so. Maybe a bit of shrinking in some areas to grow in others makes sense. Maybe the next the hiring round could re-build the hollowed out provision of admin and related roles. Rather than academics not being replaced, and the carousel of managerial jobs keeping turning, maybe the latter could experience the same kind of freeze as the former — and some frontline problem solvers get injected back into the sector. Maybe.