but what colour should it be?
Work is currently giving me strong and recurrent desires to run in tight circles, screaming and tearing my hair out. The only saving grace of interminable, tedious Teams and Zoom meetings (I had eight last week. EIGHT!) is that I can, when the level of fuckwittery reaches critical, double-check that I'm on mute and rocket into the garden in order to soothe my soul a bit by petting kitties, talking to the spring-burgeoned plant life, or, in extreme cases, pacing up and down swearing creatively and shaking my fists. One of these days I'm going to forget the mute-check and whichever meeting it is will be electrified by various iterations of "fucking x and fucking y and why the fucking fuck they can't just fucking z" from my general direction, muffled in the distance amid the plaintive meepings of cats.
A university is not an efficient thing, god wot. It's a giant bureaucracy existing perpetually in the middle of an extremely turgid identity crisis, with its competing "selling a thing" and "testing the competence of a thing" goals being, at times, mutually exclusive. Students are, somewhat complicatedly, both a client and a product, which is why the default state of university administrators of any persuasion is "borderline insane". At the best of times the modern university lumbers around like an unamiable academic dinosaur, trampling its own student clutches and being shrewdly stung at intervals by managerial wasps: managerialism, and the increasingly sublime disconnect between upper leadership and the mere peons labouring at the actual student coalface, has done horrible things to our functioning. In the particular case of my Cherished Institution this manifests as recursive, self-replicating committees which bumble blindly about in something like a Dickensian Chancery fog, wherein actual measurable achievement is obscured almost completely by confused and conflicting management dictates, administrative intractability, membership bloat, and descent into the default tragic academic hubris, viz. addiction to the sound of one's own voice.
Add to that a giant world-threatening epidemic and the need to translate, at short notice, absolutely all of our firmly in-person processes to the virtual, and it becomes almost impossible. Balancing the competing needs of COVID safety, academic quality assurance, student sanity and university solvency is not a realistic goal in a reality with the normal number of dimensions. Everyone is stressed, tired and panicking; the institution has always worked in very distinct faculty silos, so the challenges of each faculty are different, and apparently all of the attempts to resolve wildly differing problems have to be debated at length, with appropriate woe.
The response to difficult problems appears to be to throw more people at them. This means that almost every meeting has new members, who will infallibly derail procedures by revisiting and rehashing issues we actually dealt with weeks ago. I swear six out of last week's eight meetings spent four-fifths of their time solemnly reinventing the wheel, arguing about its colour, entering caveats about how many we needed on any given vehicle, and eventually discovering, with innocent surprise, the same thing that we realised last week, and the week before, and the one before that: that the reason why we can't reach agreement is because Humanities has a unicycle and Law is a sixteen-wheeler, and you can't treat either of them the same way you do Commerce's sexy sports car with its regulation four. The whole is complicated by the occasional infusion of directives from the managerial godly bods up on wasp Olympus, who have vaguely heard of this "wheel" concept and have decided there should be five and a half of them and they need to be triangular. And purple.
My second, well-developed coping mechanism, after the "run in circles in the garden, screaming" one, is to remain very quiet in meetings, and to placidly continue to develop the orientation and registration programmes I think will probably work best, ignoring all dictates from on high, and occasionally nicking good ideas from more sane colleagues. At infrequent intervals I erupt into the meeting with barely-restrained ire, delivering a few pithy sentences to point out exactly how (a) this is irrelevant, and (b) it was also irrelevant last week, when we beat it to death. I am collecting those happy little yellow Teams upvote thumbs as a faintly reassuring reminder that I am not, in fact, alone in the frustration.
But I have never been so tired. Apart from the futility and exhaustion of these meetings, they're lengthy and time-consuming and cut into the limited time I have to actually do all this real work. Aargh, is all I can say. Aargh. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.
A university is not an efficient thing, god wot. It's a giant bureaucracy existing perpetually in the middle of an extremely turgid identity crisis, with its competing "selling a thing" and "testing the competence of a thing" goals being, at times, mutually exclusive. Students are, somewhat complicatedly, both a client and a product, which is why the default state of university administrators of any persuasion is "borderline insane". At the best of times the modern university lumbers around like an unamiable academic dinosaur, trampling its own student clutches and being shrewdly stung at intervals by managerial wasps: managerialism, and the increasingly sublime disconnect between upper leadership and the mere peons labouring at the actual student coalface, has done horrible things to our functioning. In the particular case of my Cherished Institution this manifests as recursive, self-replicating committees which bumble blindly about in something like a Dickensian Chancery fog, wherein actual measurable achievement is obscured almost completely by confused and conflicting management dictates, administrative intractability, membership bloat, and descent into the default tragic academic hubris, viz. addiction to the sound of one's own voice.
Add to that a giant world-threatening epidemic and the need to translate, at short notice, absolutely all of our firmly in-person processes to the virtual, and it becomes almost impossible. Balancing the competing needs of COVID safety, academic quality assurance, student sanity and university solvency is not a realistic goal in a reality with the normal number of dimensions. Everyone is stressed, tired and panicking; the institution has always worked in very distinct faculty silos, so the challenges of each faculty are different, and apparently all of the attempts to resolve wildly differing problems have to be debated at length, with appropriate woe.
The response to difficult problems appears to be to throw more people at them. This means that almost every meeting has new members, who will infallibly derail procedures by revisiting and rehashing issues we actually dealt with weeks ago. I swear six out of last week's eight meetings spent four-fifths of their time solemnly reinventing the wheel, arguing about its colour, entering caveats about how many we needed on any given vehicle, and eventually discovering, with innocent surprise, the same thing that we realised last week, and the week before, and the one before that: that the reason why we can't reach agreement is because Humanities has a unicycle and Law is a sixteen-wheeler, and you can't treat either of them the same way you do Commerce's sexy sports car with its regulation four. The whole is complicated by the occasional infusion of directives from the managerial godly bods up on wasp Olympus, who have vaguely heard of this "wheel" concept and have decided there should be five and a half of them and they need to be triangular. And purple.
My second, well-developed coping mechanism, after the "run in circles in the garden, screaming" one, is to remain very quiet in meetings, and to placidly continue to develop the orientation and registration programmes I think will probably work best, ignoring all dictates from on high, and occasionally nicking good ideas from more sane colleagues. At infrequent intervals I erupt into the meeting with barely-restrained ire, delivering a few pithy sentences to point out exactly how (a) this is irrelevant, and (b) it was also irrelevant last week, when we beat it to death. I am collecting those happy little yellow Teams upvote thumbs as a faintly reassuring reminder that I am not, in fact, alone in the frustration.
But I have never been so tired. Apart from the futility and exhaustion of these meetings, they're lengthy and time-consuming and cut into the limited time I have to actually do all this real work. Aargh, is all I can say. Aargh. This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.