Let's Hear It for the Staff

The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday:

Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (There's some limited ability to use work-study students in a few roles, and funding for that has actually increased. It helps on the margins, but anything sensitive is out of the question.) We can't expand capacity on the cheap with staff, the way that we usually can with faculty.

Worse, much of the back-office staff work only becomes visible when it fails. Inspired teaching is visible; effective paper-processing isn't. Perversely, success becomes an argument against additional investment: why do you need more staff when the current staff is getting the job done? Failure, too, is an argument against additional investment: why pour good money after bad, or why reward failure?

this is something that I try hard to be sensitive to, but don't always succeed. The support staff at any academic institution are incredibly important, and incredibly underappreciated, especially by the faculty.

I'm not sure how this happens, because everybody who's on the faculty has a graduate degree of some sort, and if there's one thing you learn about academia as a graduate student, it's that the department secretary has all the real power. In many places, the secretary is the only person who has any idea how to get stuff done on campus.

And yet, hundreds of people get out of graduate school, get faculty jobs, and immediately start walking all over the secretaries and other support staff. It's really kind of baffling.

(Of course, as bad as some faculty are, the students are a hundred times worse. They at least have callow youth as an excuse, but the way they overlook or disrespect the people who feed them and clean up after them can get really appalling.)

At any rate, I think it's absolutely true that, as the Dean Dad says, many faculty view the support staff as "overhead," like electricity or phone service. They're just part of the building-- applications come in, and are magically processed; tuition checks are cashed by invisible elves; alumni donations are something that just happens naturally, like rain or wind. In reality, there's a great deal of frantic work going on behind the scenes to make all this stuff run smoothly.

Are there things that could run better? Absolutely. Ask me in person, and I can give you a big long list of things that I think are badly run, and I'm sure any faculty member at any college in America can do the same. But I don't for a minute doubt that these jobs are an essential part of the functioning of the institution, or think that we would be better off without those situations. Realistically, I think that hiring more staff in key areas would probably do more to improve the quality of the institution than hiring more faculty in Trendy Subfield Studies.

So, if you're in academia as a student or faculty member, take a few moments to appreciate the hard work done by the invisible support staff who keep the place running. They're every bit as important as the more visible faculty, so be nice to them. And the next time a budget crunch meeting comes around, think twice before demanding that the majority of the belt-tightening come from the staff side of things.