In a document recently sent to the UC Provost by the Academic Planning Council, there is a discussion faculty "workload creep." An appendix to the document gives examples, many of which point to bureaucratic issues, computer systems that don't deliver, and mandatory training programs whose effects are not validated. We reproduce the appendix examples below:
Examples of faculty workload creep
Decisions made by higher level administrators without consultation have tremendous impacts. One faculty member reported that the UC Asset Protection Plan program (UCAPP) [equipment insurance coverage for repairs] was terminated. "The UCAPP program is unable to offer renewal terms and your coverage will terminate upon policy expiration." "Upon expiration of your UCAPP policy, if you desire to seek continuing coverage for your equipment, there are several alternative types of equipment maintenance management organizations that may be available to meet your needs." Thus up to the faculty to negotiate new terms. This kind of thing happens across campuses. One factor may be that administrators do not understand how, when, with what frequency, and why faculty use various systems.
The impact of student accommodation is overwhelming to some faculty. Reports from multiple faculty cite less than 40% attendance in classes and that students expect to receive help online to make up for the absences. This is outside of official accommodations. On some campuses there has been an increase in student affairs resources in light of increased student health needs, but often there is no corresponding support in the form of faculty resources. Nor is there help with managing student expectations.
Note: the well-documented increase in graduate student mental health needs affects faculty in myriad ways.
Human Resources and Hiring Practices. We no longer deal with people and the results are very bad. It is difficult to explain some positions, especially for short term undergrads, to HR staff in an easy way to get them hired. The back and forth and rejections that happen all take time. There are examples of postdoctoral researchers being hired and not getting access to the internet or lab training for weeks after their arrival. All of this requires additional faculty time. It is more difficult to hire GSRs. Additionally, bringing people on as consultants or paying stipends or honoraria has become harder. Among other impacts, this interferes with community-engaged research.
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Submitting Expenses
• Having to submit expenses/new hires/etc. in programs like Workfront (not sure if other UCs use this, but UCR does). At UCR, we are understaffed so often I will submit stuff on Workfront and then it will be months later, and I remember that the thing I submitted never got completed. I then must track down my request in Workfront and tag relevant folks to move it ahead. Sometimes this process repeats multiple times.
• Oracle is a disastrous system that has benefits for central accounting but nothing for the PIs or departmental accountants. Itemized spending is not available to monitor accounts, and there are multiple instances of accounts being overspent because of the failures of the system.
• Faculty encounter these systems as atypical users – often sporadic, with atypical uses, etc.
Given staff shortages at the department level, this means faculty are relearning systems over and over again, don’t know the shortcuts, etc. This is institutionally inefficient, as faculty spend more hours doing this work.
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Submitting Travel
• Oracle and Concur. Getting campus guests/visitors into concur. They need to be registered as vendors and the system is unwieldy and confusing for visitors (and these are faculty with PhDs mostly...). Our departmental staff can't help directly, and they are directed to contact customer service which apparently is not helpful. We cannot book plane tickets for visitors until they are registered, and the process has been dragging on for months! Some people have been able to register but others have had issues, and this is just unacceptable for a research university! I have spent hours sending emails back and forth and this is still not resolved adequately. This is just one example from a whole host of problems with the oracle transition.
• Oracle and Concur. Graduate student recruitment involves getting prospective students to campus. The office cannot prepay their airfare because of concur/oracle issues. This was standard practice before. It is faculty that are left trying to figure a way around this.
• Concur is a disaster that occupies considerable faculty time. First, it is like learning to walk every time when you only use the system very rarely. There is very limited administrative help and faculty flounder with entering data, getting rejected submissions with little or no explanation of the errors. It is also inflexible.
• Prior approval requests for travel authorized by FAO - why?
• Because submitting travel is challenging, faculty often can’t find the time to do it within the expected number of days/weeks/months after a trip. But then there’s another round of bureaucratic hurdles and sometimes shaming for being late. It should be noted that faculty are delaying their own reimbursements, often so as to prioritize other parts of our mission-driven work. Often, travel requires much money up front, out of pocket. Systems should help faculty get reimbursed quicker, rather than making it harder. And sending regular emails to multiple people whenever a submission is late (Concur) does no one any good.
• Reimbursement payments are being issued by check versus direct deposit, and multiple reimbursements are being combined into a single check with no explanation of what is being covered. Notably one faculty member reported having two checks stolen from their mailbox, resulting in further efforts to file an additional claim.
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UC Outside Activities Tracking System (OATS)
• Annual reporting
• Prior approval requests
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Time & Attendance
• Signing off on timesheets
• Needing to understand new rules for ASE and GSR timesheets Mandatory Trainings/Online Workshops
• For example, cyber security training is often comical in how silly the questions are (e.g., "someone randomly emails you and asks for your password. Should you give it to them?")
• Do these trainings really work, or do they allow the institution to say they did their best and point the finger at faculty, without fostering real institutional/cultural change? This is not meant to be a bitter question: I’d genuinely appreciate knowing the results of research on this.
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Multiple Committees, Many meetings
• Involves time and effort.
• Some committees are useful and have clear intentions (this one, for example, has a clear purpose and goal).
• Others, however, feel more like busy-work and often the meetings could have been an email.
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Increase in the number of questions received via email
• When I teach undergrad courses, I regularly have multiple people asking me (for an in person, synchronous course), "is attendance mandatory? I signed up even though I have work during class and can't come."
• I’m teaching 300 undergrads this quarter – the email volume is very difficult to handle, and students are less likely than they were years ago (in my experience) to ask peers or TAs for assistance before turning to the instructor. There’s a general expectation of faculty responsiveness that’s very different from how it was a generation ago, yet nothing is compensating for or redirecting these expectations.
• Is email broken? What can we do? I could spend 40 hours a week on email, and it’s not clear I’d ever catch up.
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Compliance Culture
• It seems like the pendulum has swung hard in the direction of compliance culture (with an emphasis on culture – this isn’t just about outside-imposed compliance requirements). Justifying uses for software purchases, etc. takes too much time and effort. What if we had a petty cash system? What if we erred on the side of assuming that faculty are doing things a certain way because it’s best for the mission?
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Research Administration
• Campuses are incentivizing faculty to do things by creating lots of small opportunities for grants, grad student awards, etc. However, each of these must be applied for. I routinely pass up such opportunities because I don’t think it’s worth my time to spend many hours on an application for, say, $1000. I routinely pay for research expenses out of pocket because it’s so much easier, but that’s not good for anyone. When grad students are applying and applying, we’re processing recommendation letters galore.
• Research administration rules are a better fit for lab research than for community-based research, ethnographic fieldwork, and the like. There’s little understanding of the latter, creating additional barriers.
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Increase in Student-Faculty Ratio
• The student-to-faculty ratio is going in the wrong direction on at least some campuses. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to grow enrollments. Classes get bigger, email loads grow, and tenure density decreases. With fewer ladder-rank faculty, undergrad and grad student research needs increase for each ladder faculty member, so there are more theses, capstone projects, etc. We’re doing more with fewer people. The numbers are stark on some campuses.
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Commute times cut into work
• On some campuses, faculty need to live further away from campus because of escalating housing prices. The commute time cuts into work and dulls the soul, for many. It contributes to making caregiving harder, too, leading to increased caregiving costs and/or a hit to wellbeing.
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