TL;DR
A recent Editorial in the journal Brain has riled up academics. In the article, Prof Masud Husain argues against “bullshit jobs” in academia. Online, people seem to either recognise the content or to take offense to its tone and timing. Because the piece really resonated with me, I aim to offer a few additional examples of “bullshit” in academia, while also passionately arguing for professional services staff.
What are “bullshit” processes in academia?
In his piece, Husain references David Graeber’s definition of “bullshit jobs” and describes it as “classes of work that have no value”. You can read this as an individual’s job, but I think a more helpful conceptualisation is to consider “bullshit processes” because (1) it separates the person from the work, and (2) every job comes with its pointless tasks. All of our jobs are bullshit to some extent, and that is not usually our own fault.
Husain uses travel as an example. When outsourced to a third party, this typically results in a poorer service at a higher cost. Here, outsourcing reduces the university’s efficiency. One alternative is for academics to book their own travel. Upside: most of us are well-equipped to find reasonably priced travel and accommodation. Downside: some universities make you pay up front and reclaim later, which is not financially feasible for many of us.
Some systems are clunky, yep, but as an ECR who got into a financial mess sorting out my own travel and expenses, I far prefer having a system that means my postdoc doesn’t have to use their own salary to purchase travel and hotel bills.
3/N
— Mark Haselgrove (@markhaselgrove.bsky.social) 8 March 2025 at 11:41
A workable solution here is obvious: allow people to use a company credit card that is managed at the departmental level. This ensures local knowledge, ease of communication between direct colleagues, and still allows for some oversight to avoid naughty people abusing the system. Note that this is not a solution without administrators! Not all admin is “bullshit” per definition.
Examples beyond travel can easily be found. For example, university’s tend to generate a “strategy” or a “vision” (or both) whenever a new Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Dean, etc. takes up their new role. This is a type of policy document that is typically vague by necessity: universities run a variety of programmes across all academic disciplines, so a single strategy or vision needs to be generic enough to apply to all. The direct result of this is that a new university-wide vision passed down from the oracle of the VC and their team needs to be interpreted by teams within each faculty. They then pass down their own new updated strategies, which get reinterpreted by schools and departments. This process takes months to years, and costs astronomical amounts of staff salary. The “bullshit job” here is not done by a single academic or admin individually, but rather a corporatisation trend that universities have taken upon themselves.
(For an idea on the return on investment of the “strategic vision” process, and some examples of blatant plagiarism between universities of each other’s strategies, see Ginsberg, 2011.)
A quick-fire round of some other processes that might count as “bullshit”:
- Contract woes for small jobs. Many universities require temporary staff to fill gaps in important work that keeps the place running (think admin, cleaning, catering, etc). Contracts for these jobs are often managed by a dedicated team of HR professionals, who have a set process that checks e.g. applicants’ eligibility to work in a country. In addition to temporary staff, universities often employ students for very small jobs (e.g. to help out at events). This is the right thing to do, as it allows students to get paid for their labour, even if it’s only for a few hours. Inefficiencies occur when every single low-hour student contracts are pushed through the same (arduous) process as other temporary contracts. This causes headaches for academic staff who have to complete the same forms over and over, and for administrative staff who have their genuinely important process gummed up with tiny contracts.
- Too much oversight for tiny grants. Grants for research projects are planned using internal finance systems. This makes sense for big grants that have wide cost implications (e.g. due to new equipment, software licensing, and staffing) that need to be approved at various levels in the hierarchy. However, not all grants are this complex. Issues arise when this is a unified process that is applied to all grants. For example, there are small (~$3000) scholarships for an undergraduate students to do few weeks of lab work. Administrating this grant will have cost more in salary after the academic supervisor has completed all the required forms, and the grant has been checked and approved by a succession of people (e.g. grant specialist in this field, head of department, department manager, finance business partner, dean of the faculty).
- Funder mandates for grants. In an otherwise laudable attempt at improving transparency and justification of spending of public resources, some funders have tipped towards too-involved recording (e.g. of detailed timesheets of all staff involved). The burden of administration falls on the university, which means that academics and administrative support have to share labour-intensive tasks.
One of the absurdest I can remember is (clearly based on the private sector) is some grants requiring to indicate how many hours one has worked on the project per day and my university administration said that to not make it look suspicious I could not just fill the expected amount of hours.
— Nicolas Clairis (@nclairis.bsky.social) 7 March 2025 at 08:17
- Unnecessary strictness around suppliers. Have you ever had to order a simple thing online? Amazing how quick and easy it is now, right? Imagine having to do the same thing through an internal system maintained by an external IT contractor that only allows you to shop from pre-approved suppliers. If they don’t have what you need, you can fill out a form to have a new supplier approved, but that process requires several increasingly senior managers to check and approve.
- Poor weighting of salary consequences in central decision-making. University programmes are typically relatively steady. We do try to update our teaching to fit the most up-to-date knowledge and methods, but we also don’t want to change too much to ensure continuity. (Imagine choosing to do a specific BSc programme only to have the university drastically change its content as you’re already going through it!) That said, a pro-vice-chancellor might have decided that the university course catalogue should have subtly different headings, so now every single module conveyor will have to rewrite the description of their module to fit the new format. Change like this isn’t always bad, but rarely is the amount of work weighed into decision making. Relatedly: changes in law (or the interpretation and/or implementation thereof) that necessitate similar changes.
It’s good, but doesn’t mention the wider structural pressures we’re under. I, an expert in the archaeology of the 1st mill CE, spent my morning re-writing PG course prospectus entries for the uni website. Why? Because consumer protection law commits us to offering exactly what’s in the prospectus.
— Susanne Hakenbeck (@shakenbeck.bsky.social) 7 March 2025 at 16:31
- State-enforced surveillance of students. Maybe you live in a xenophobic country that relies on international students but also vastly dislikes foreigners. Maybe said country outsources the surveillance of international students to universities. Congratulations, now you and your colleagues have to record attendance, administer a database for it, and brief potential violations to a government agency. If you dislike being complicit in this, prepare to have your funding cut at the next audit.
- Excessive PR to dance to rankings. International rankings are, per definition, “bullshit”. Sure, differences in quality exists between universities and departments, but it these are impossible to quantify with exact precision. Plus, much of the methodology is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they investigate direct (e.g. academics’ view of uni reputations, which is partially dependent on rankings) or indirect (e.g. research and teaching, which is partially dependent on rankings) consequences of the rankings themselves. As a consequence, rankings fluctuate somewhat randomly year-on-year, even if (big IF) they might harbour real trends over decades. However, rankins are also exceedingly important to universities that depend on international students. Some of these might not consider applying to lower-ranked institutes, or might not even be eligible for scholarships for universities that fall below a threshold in the ranking. As a consequence, many universities feel they have to invest heavily in self promotion. This is likely beneficial when it comes to press releases, which are relatively easy to produce and can have very wide reach through uptake in media. However, other initiatives do not always offer a good return on investment (e.g. something like a strategic partnership with a company that helps researchers produce podcasts that are listened to by several tens of people).
- Centralisation and tossing administrative tasks over the fence. As universities increase in size, so does the temptation of centralisation. The same occurs in large companies. Having one IT department is more efficient than having IT support within every team, right? Such centralisation often leads to silos that understandably optimise their own process. From each silos perspective, the most efficient solution is for other silos to do as much work as possible. This leads to e.g. HR outsourcing form-filling to academic staff, or to IT Services to force every user through the same ticket process even if a lecture theatre malfunction that prevents a 200-student class from starting is of higher priority than login issues from a single student that prevents them from accessing their emails while waiting for their class to finally start.
- Mandatory trainings by inept parties. Trainings are often good (e.g. to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace), and sometimes not good but legally required nonetheless (e.g. through government programmes aimed at reducing terrorism with questionable efficacy). Such trainings are often outsourced to expensive and not always high-quality companies, even if universities have good in-house alternatives (e.g. many of the Social Psychology staff could offer better information on implicit and explicit bias than any of the trainings I have ever seen).
About outsourcing academic work, some of the doctoral academy courses were run by inept external people. The most egregious example was a public speaking course, to a trained psychologist, the “tips” offered were ranging from useless at best, to flat out dangerous. At a uni with a great psych dept.
— Maciek Szul (@maciekszul.bsky.social) 8 March 2025 at 08:38
- Over-formalised Collaboration Agreements. Are you an academic who collaborates with other academics? Do you remember the time where this entailed communication between you and your collaborators, and potentially the sharing of anonymised data between you? Universities are increasingly demanding “collaboration agreements” in which they try to defend themselves against potential future legal trouble, including (but not limited to) patent ownership and reputational damage. Prima facie, this is not necessarily “bullshit”. However, for many collaborative grants the scope of the agreement far exceeds the risks and opportunities covered by the collaboration agreement. Not the mention the delays and additional costs incurred by necessitating legal staff.
Unis inflexibly think every agreement will lead to IP & income. We had a collab & I explained which parts would belong to who, but the Uni defaulted to the standard “we will own everything” position in the first instance… which meant the negotiations dragged on through several iterations of course ????????♂️
— Prof Anthony Isles (@profantisles.bsky.social) 9 March 2025 at 08:48
What about the people who do these jobs?
Many people online seem to have read Husain’s article as against administrative support staff in general. Many have rightfully noted that our administrative colleagues do crucial work without which universities could not operate, and that they take work out of academics’ hands. In UK universities, “professional support staff” are integral to our functioning. Personally, I disagree with this reading, as the original article clearly points the finger at corporatisation and the senior executive staff who push for it.
I agree with the sentiment and don’t like unnecessary bureaucracy. On the other hand, almost all admin staff I’ve worked with at UCL and Cambridge have made my job easier. They are more skilled than me in their area, whether it’s finance, HR or teaching admin. I could not manage without them
— Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (@sjblakemore.bsky.social) 8 March 2025 at 13:12
Agree with the general ideas, but what is the litmus test for a university job not having value? Some “admins” are unhelpful, others are incredibly productive and seem to do the work of 10 people. Same is true of the profs though . . .
— Baylink Lab (@baylinklab.bsky.social) 9 March 2025 at 15:29
That said, I can see how the term “bullshit job” can be read as an attack on the individual in that job. This is why I tried to outline a few “bullshit” processes in some more detail above, to show how they (1) often follow from otherwise sensible procedures, (2) are executed by professional services staff but also by academics, and (3) can be necessitated by external circumstances. As a consequence, many aspects of my job are “bullshit”, but that doesn’t mean my entire job is! Nor I! We should be able to acknowledge that vast inefficiencies exist without blaming the people who are saddled with them.
The department in which I work would simply cease to run without the administrative support from our wonderful professional services staff. Many of their tasks directly contribute to our core missions of teaching and research! Just like academics, they would also benefit from doing less busywork to allow more time and effort for those core missions.
What about the timing?
More than one thing can be true at the same time. For example, it could be true that a certain country that has an outsized influence on worldwide culture could be furthering its slide towards corporate fascism with an accelerated pace after a recent election. It could also be true that other countries exist, and that not everyone in those countries always considers whether the timing of their message is in line with what the current situation in the USA is. Brain is a journal by a UK-based charity, published by a UK-based company, and Husain’s article explicitly mentions a UK-based institution.
Obviously, the above is slightly facetious. Brain has an international readership, and science is an international project. I don’t know a single academic who does not look upon the current destruction of NIH, NSF, and ED with at least some horror, even if they do not work in the US. So, yes, offering rhetorical ammunition to the saboteurs does not sound like a wise plan. That said, do you honestly think this article is going to make a difference here? It does not strike me as though the US’ executive branch needs any further justification: They do as they please, and seem to offer opportunistic post-hoc justifications when pressed.
Fascists to academics: We’re cutting on all funding, firing many of you and banning research on these topics.
Academics: Omg, why is booking conference flights so hard? Please send help.
— Joao Barbosa (@jbarbosa.org) 10 March 2025 at 13:01
While the DOGE destruction is unprecedented and we haven’t previously had the anti-vaccination crowd run HHS, the corporatisation of universities is not a new phenomenon. In fact, all the way back in 2011, Prof Benjamin Ginsberg described how this process has essentially completed in the US in his book “The fall of the faculty”. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to all of its ideas, the book does do an excellent job of outlining the general process of corporatisation. It highlights how senior executive teams (i.e. people like Vice Chancellors who run universities) are centralising power, and putting distance between them and academics by increasing the administrative layers in the form of all sorts of pro-vice-chancellors and deans. (Inspired by the corporate equivalent of increasing layers of middle management between those who do the actual work and the C-suite.)
Husain himself has also previously published on the topic, describing how clinical work and science in the UK are increasingly hampered by bureaucratic demands in March 2024. In “A mountain of small things”, he describes how the corporatisation of UK universities and related institutions has led to the introduction of many processes that each come with seemingly small bits of bureaucracy, all adding up to a huge pile of work that drowns out research. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
In sum, is this “bad timing”? Yes, because what is happening to your country is awful, and I understand the fear that anything even remotely critical of academia can be used against it by bad-faith actors. But also no, because this is just the next piece in a longer-standing discussion that is relevant far beyond the US.
Conclusion
Maybe this Editorial did as it intended to: spark a discussion about the corporatisation of universities, and the way it has led to additional layers of management and their “bullshit” bureaucratic demands. It’s important we keep that discussion on point: it’s not against individuals doing jobs! We ALL do a few “bullshit” jobs in our work, whether academic or administrative. The causes for these are both internal and external university processes, and the current pressure on academia demands that we tackle them as a unified front.
References
- Ginsberg, H. (2011). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199782444.001.0001
- Husain, M. (2024). A mountain of small things. Brain, 147(3), p. 739. 10.1093/brain/awae036
- Husain, M. (2025). On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities. Brain, 148(3), p. 687-688. doi:10.1093/brain/awaf045