Uttered by my dean as an intense, two hour long committee meeting was adjourning:
“There’s a lot of untapped administrative talent in this room.”
Help!
Words that strike fear into the hearts of faculty members.
Uttered by my dean as an intense, two hour long committee meeting was adjourning:
“There’s a lot of untapped administrative talent in this room.”
Help!
I always get, “The reason I’m asking you to (insert anything that is a lot of extra work but unpaid) is because you’d make a great principal one day”
I’ve gone for a dual strategy:
1. Don’t learn Finnish. OK, perhaps it helps to explain that I’m in Finland. And I have learn enough Finnish to order a beer.
2. Culture mild administrative incompetence. Nothing too serious, but enough to make the point. As a corollary of this, I also make sure I’m friendly with our admin staff, so I have some back-up.
Thus far it’s working.
Bob
Ulp. If you really think you’re in danger, you should quickly find the least tedious admin duty and volunteer for it, before you’re ‘volunteered’ for the really dull and tedious stuff… then you can play the ‘but I’m already doing x’ defence.
As a software engineer, the words that strike terror into me are “You’re too talented to just write code”.
Oh, that ain’t good.
I would suggest feigning incompetence, but that never seems to work. Instead, make a powerful enemy who will exact vengeance by making sure you never hold any office with power as long as s/he has anything to say about it. At least, that’s what I would do.
Aaah! Run for it!
Or, sometimes the carnivore can be diverted by throwing other professors out as distractions…. can you install some administrative spigots in your colleagues??
Ooh, ooh, pick me!
Granted, I’m sure we’re fairly far away from each other, but I spent my entire high school career doing just that – helping teachers and counselors with admin stuff they didn’t want to do. Heck, a couple years I programmed entire grades, and made sure that everything got to the registrars for a few hundred students. There are things I find more interesting in life, to be sure, but none of them are what I’m currently doing. 😉
I hereby volunteer for any academic admin makework that’s available, so long as someone can pry me away from my current job.
In the pharma. industry, this usually coincided with the United Way effort to get employees to contribute big bucks at the annual fund drive! If you were ever an “arm twister” for the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Little League, or any other kid-related fundraiser, you learn very quickly how to read the signals and run the other way.
Thank goodness I’m a self-employed freelancer now!
A quick scan of comments supports one of my basic tenets: males are born understanding that incompetence is a fine art; females learn this late, if ever.
Only accept tasks that contribute to the tenure vote for the next few months, please.
Did no one think to suggest that members should adjourn to the nearest pub in order to get tapped?
Well, THAT, will teach you to speak up at meetings!
Well, we do practice it more.
Bob
I’m going to sail against the prevailing wind here and say that administrative work in a university setting can be incredibly rewarding if the situation is right. One of the best jobs I ever had in my life was a university administrative position. Now, mind you, being a faculty member and being asked to serve on endless committees is, I think, not terribly rewarding. But being an administrator and having a real chance to shape some of what the institution is doing, having a chance to create positive change, is intoxicating. I think you have to be somewhat extroverted to truly enjoy administrative work, however, and many many faculty members are actually introverts. But I tell you – when I think back on my days in that job, I just salivate. If you run a lab of any size, you are already an administrator, you just don’t have an official title for it. It’s a pity there’s so much hostility among faculty towards the idea of administrative work and towards administrators, because it can be an incredibly rewarding career path.