Piling on tasks we never used to have to do

[waterboy]

Anyone else feel like you've now been required to do tasks that staff used to take care of? I'm spending more and more time doing this stuff and getting quite irritated - po'd really. I don't blame staff as they're getting more and more dumped on them as well. Ugh...

[Parasaurolophus]

I recently read around 500 papers and books in my subfield from the last sixty or so years. I discovered that staff used to take dictation for papers and books. Writing my own work is definitely something I spend too much of my own time doing! Also, my own printing and photocopying.

More seriously, though, I don't really think that's the case at my institution. In fact, I worry more about drift in the other direction, so that faculty governance stuff is increasingly in the hands of uncaring (and largely not super competent) mid-to-upper-level administrators with little or no contact with the faculty side of things, and our needs.

[mythbuster]

We now do out own janitorial work in the building. The trash is taken out once a day IF you leave your can in the main hall by 5pm. Otherwise, it's all on us, even for the class and lab rooms.

[secundem_artem]

I don't mind taking my trash can into the hallway.  What troubles me is the increased expectation to be some kind of unpaid, untrained and wholly unqualified therapist.  I get that the last few years have been tough on students.  That said, it's not as if faculty life has been an unending drive through wine country the last couple of years either.  Where's our support system?

[mamselle]

Yes, having been "staff," the dumping comes laterally, as well, from HR and Accounting, in which the EA does all the "onboarding" entries in SAP or Oracle or whatever, on the one hand, and has to do a lot more of the cash accounting-type entries for expense reporting, etc. on the other.

And most of the other EAs I knew did still do much of the editing, formatting, and layout for everything from PR pages to grant requests to article submissions--which again, meant knowing how to spell "hysterosalpingogram" correctly in one setting, and understanding how to do those cute little +/- uncertainty bars over a bar graph if the post-doc hadn't learned how to make them yet, in another. Oh, and pivot tables. One position I had to learn how to do them, how to use them, how to filter stuff to make different ones from the same data, and how to enter the whole shebang in Excel files for the Ops manager to use to confirm the budget expenditures were on track....

I did have a friend with severe tendonitis who was able to dictate her dissertation on DragonSys, but of course that's not the same as those scenes you see in the films, where the secretary pulls up with her typing machine and starts taking dictation, either.

M.

[mythbuster]

My PhD advisor had his wife type up his dissertation. In addition to her own.

By the time I worked for him he had advanced to semi-rapid hunt and peck typing. But the minute he realized that I knew how to format graphs in excel, I was doing them all for his grant applications.

I often say that my experience as the high school yearbook layout editor ended up providing crucial skills to being a successful scientist.

[clean]

I did a grade change form yesterday.
They USED to be on duplicate paper.  I filled it out by hand, took it to the deans office and one of the copies was retained and passed to the next point.

Well NOW, I have to fill it out on a PDF.  THen email the PDF to one of the Dean's Admin Assistants  (as faculty have no access to student workers OR administrative help).  The Ad. As. then uploads that form and creates some file that I have to THEN digitally sign, then that goes to the chair to digitally sign, then to the dean to digitally sign, and on to the Registrar. 

Im not sure how much more efficient it is to have me create an electronic document, to be uploaded in a new Docusign form, to send BACK to me to docusign, .... rather than bypass the chair and give the actual paper copy to the dean's office. 
Maybe the dean can not hold a pen!  (or can not be bothered to come to campus regularly to sign paper anymore). 

[mamselle]

It's simpler than that, and it's for your benefit as well.

When it's electronic, everyone can do it anytime and send it right along.

When it's physical, it has to go from yellow envelope to yellow envelope, office to office, and it takes forever.

And if it gets lost, the whole thing has to start over again.

Trust me, this is definitely better (having had to go running down halls and across campuses to retrieve this kinda stuff...)

M. 

[pgher]

It's simpler than that, and it's for your benefit as well.

When it's electronic, everyone can do it anytime and send it right along.

When it's physical, it has to go from yellow envelope to yellow envelope, office to office, and it takes forever.

And if it gets lost, the whole thing has to start over again.

Trust me, this is definitely better (having had to go running down halls and across campuses to retrieve this kinda stuff...)

M.

Yeah, except that our sign-off process is still linear, so instead of sitting on someone's desk, it sits in their email inbox with hundreds of other messages until they get back from a trip or whatever. Argh.

[mamselle]

Ah...the email clowns.

They get in the way of everything...

M.

[Dimple_Dumpling72]

I don't mind taking my trash can into the hallway.  What troubles me is the increased expectation to be some kind of unpaid, untrained and wholly unqualified therapist.  I get that the last few years have been tough on students.  That said, it's not as if faculty life has been an unending drive through wine country the last couple of years either.  Where's our support system?

+1

[clean]

It also ensures that the Admin Assistant stays employed!  It adds another layer of bureaucracy (and another in box to navigate). 

The bottom line is that Because the DEAN doesnt want to  be tied to campus, he wants things done THIS way.  So to make one person's work load less, they add to MINE and create work for another person that was previously uninvolved!  (2 actually, because the chairs didnt have to sign before, only the dean!) 

So rather than the one HAND WRITTEN document going 12 feet from my office to the Dean's office, I have to type it In an editable PDF (which is a pain in the ass), email it as an attachment.......  My 2 minute job becomes 5, and generates several more emails for me to track as well. 

Remember, for the most part, I dont really care if a grade gets changed!  In this most recent case (2) it was for Academic Misconduct!  Let the cheaters wait for a grade change!  I am annoyed I had to deal with ANY of it!  Had they not cheated, none of this would have been necessary!  (Including the trip to campus on Sunday to process the paperwork that I wasnt able to do earlier because same dean decides that we need 3 FULL DAYS of meetings!  )

(Transfer to vent.... I get that others are excited to start the new term.  I am NOT!  At that point I was in Week 7 of a 7 week, online MBA class with 70 students, with plenty of assignments coming in and needing grading in the last week of the class!  I didnt have TIME to sit in useless meetings so that the Dean could put a check in the "Im an Asshole Box!".

Oh, did I mention that he mailed EVERYONE in the college a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? 

anyway, he is not a bad guy, and so far, much, much better than the last one that prompted me to start a retirement countdown timer (850 days left to go!!) 

End of vent, which belongs in another thread.

[fishbrains]

I feel your pain, clean.

However, I did score a minor victory this summer when I refused to go into extreme detail about why a student had plagiarized 75% of his essay when an admin requested me to do so. I simply said refer to the Turnitin report, and that I could easily defend the "F" if the student challenged the grade.

To the admin's credit, she said, "Okey dokey." It felt maybe a little too easy, but so far so good.

[mamselle]

It also ensures that the Admin Assistant stays employed!  It adds another layer of bureaucracy (and another in box to navigate).

Believe me, the Administrative Assistant sees as much nuisance value in such stuff as you do, and doesn't need a job so badly as to multiply the number of papers to be handled daily (real or virtual) unless they've been ordered to do.

M.

[Harlow2]

Our administrative assistants are wonderful and overwhelmed. Those who leave are not replaced quickly if at all. We are increasingly asked to take on work that a well trained assistant could do much better.