joshua

Have you ever had that feeling? Well Will Ferrel had that feeling in the movie Zoolander and whenever I think about my school, I feel the same way.

The teachers are currently on strike, because they aren’t paid enough and some of them are going to be laid off and yet the administration is hiring administrators like they are going out of style. As I write this, yet another vice-president position has been created at the university. What is the mandate of the position? “Vice-president of Administration”. I hope that everyone can appreciate the irony of the fact that the administration is proposing to cut teachers while at the same moment promoting one of their own administrators into the position of Vice-President for all administrators.

It reminds me of the old British comedy “Yes, Minister” . The premise of the show is an inept politician landing the top job in the ‘Department of Administrative Affairs’, where his bureaucratic counterpart really runs the show. Every episode has the politician, The Honourable James Hacker (played by Paul Eddington), face off with Sir Humphrey Appleby, the top administrator in the ‘Department of Administrative Affairs’. Although Hacker is by no means innocent, he often represents the side of ‘common sense’ in the face of the incredible mental gymnastics Sir Humphrey performs in order to justify the unceasing expansion of the bureaucracy.

One episode in particular I find very relevant to the current situation, it involves Hacker trying to deal with a hospital that has 500 administrators and staff but no doctors and therefore no patients. Sir Appleby uses every sort of argument to defend the staff at the hospital whereas Hacker is left simply spluttering over and over, “But there are no patients!”. Some choice dialogue is quoted below:

Hacker: “Are we or are we not agreed that there is no point in running a hospital solely for the benefit of the staff”

Sir Appleby: “You talk as if the staff have nothing to do simply because there are no patients there!”

Hacker [on a general trend in British healthcare]: “You think that spending more and more money, on fewer and fewer patients, so that we can employ more and more administrators is a good way of spending money voted by parliament and supplied by the taxpayer?”

Sir Appleby: “Certainly…activity is the considerable and productive, those 500 people are seriously overworked!“

Hacker: “But there are no patients!”

You really have to see Eddington’s performance to appreciate the incredible frustration he, and I, feel when trying to reason with the untenable position of bureaucrats and administrators who don’t seem to understand that their jobs are to service the customer and not themselves.

The administration’s main justification for cutting teacher positions is that enrollment is down. With that in mind I have a suggestion for the for the new “Vice-President of Administration”, whose job description is, according to the Atheneaum, “unknown”.

Start cutting executive positions. Begin with the defunct ‘Dean of Students’ and don’t stop till sunrise. Maybe once the school isn’t so ‘top-heavy’ it can do one of two things, both of which would attract students.

a) Lower tuition.

b) Keep the teachers we have now, and make their wages more competitive.

It has been argued that any student who makes this sort of suggestion is completely partial to their dear professors who they see every day, and are such emotional wimps they can’t possibly form a cogent argument. you got me, I am a student, but I’m a student that realizes that in lean times both sides need to make concessions. I have yet to see the logic of hiring more administrators for less students. I love the services this school offers, but the main service I am here for is learning.

In the spirit of concession I implore the new ‘Vice-President of Administration’ to make it his first priority to find where money can be saved among his executive colleagues if the administration continues to hold the position that professors need to be fired.

I’m pissed off by bureaucratic waste on any given day, the fact that it continues while teachers are being laid off is completely unacceptable. I’ve been witness to, over my four years here, the unceasing expansion of the number of Deans and VPs, and it has never sat well with me.

I used to be a bureaucrat. I worked in the nation’s capital, I know all about the sorts of arguments used to justify bureaucracy and they ways it is hidden. This is an elephant is an ever-shrinking room that we must finally address.

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