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Bev Skeggs on being a head of department: “a layer of protection against idiocy”

This is a wonderful reflection from Bev Skeggs on a new website:

Behind all academic research and writing lies an infrastructure of administration that is done at a department (or school, or faculty level). The department level is the most difficult as you are working with your colleagues with no institutional distance between you. A lot of it is totally pointless – seemingly aimed at monitoring us. Yet the Head of Department is a layer, often I thought more like a sponge layer, or a layer of protection against idiocy.  The senior management team (eg the vice chancellor and deputies) make decisions, sometimes with spurious consultation, that are then passed down, landing on the HoD. So you can be told “you need to cut out a third of your budget”. That means you are expected to decide how to do it. You have to be careful whether you pass on this message as cuts = people’s jobs and it can destroy morale in an instant. Or you can become adept in creative finance and ask others who are really good at innovative systems to help. 

You are often told to destroy people’s lives “no more research time”, “no travel allowances”, “no IT support”, and the message is direct. Your department colleagues expect you to resist. Because they have no idea how things work. And/or if they do, they accuse you of making the stupid decisions “an instrument for neo-liberalism”. “No!” I’d say “ I’m trying to keep a department/Centre/Unit/Institute from being shut down, merged, not getting any replacement posts, etc”.  As a HoD you have to work out which battles are worth fighting and with whom. And sometimes they backfire. I managed to resist handing on a huge amount of admissions administration to department colleagues only for the Uni to take away the power of the department to make admission decisions completely (it became a simple matter of quantification – they all have go have BBB?).

https://bevskeggs.com/bevs-labour/
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