what's the most bat shit crazy thing your uni does and does it work?

[winteryshowers]

i think the uni i work for is actually fairly well run, overall, but there's the odd thing.
I have colleagues across other institutions who have:

• had their line manager say that they must not hang a coat over the back of their chair (in their private office)
• -- or that they must not play football with pg students
• -- or that paper journals are better than online only journals, and so count for progression/promotion (the rationale being that paper journals have length limits so they can only accept more important work)

- -- or that the group should run its very own preprint server (ton of work) to 'raise profile'

• no email forwarding (rationale that they want to control where information gets forwarded to / ensure nothing is out of microsoft control or the EUetc
• -- all applications must be done in MSword, no alternatives possible; simultaneously much noise about links to poor countries, improving access etc

So : in the name of 'raising profile' or 'ensuring standards are met' or whatever other rationale: what are the amusing but annoying things you uni requires and do you think they have the intended effect?

As application numbers are dropping, we are being asked to do more and more outreach/open days/phoning up applicants to sell them the dream and improve the "conversion rate". I'm not sure if it works, as in dating, it probably just makes us look desperate and thus less attractive.

I have a feeling redundancies are on their way (I'm SL at a RG in the Humanities). We've over-expanded and over-built (many of us said it was a bad idea) on the promise of rising student numbers and the assumption young people wouldn't eventually work out the DIWD (degree isn't worth the debt). Oh yes, and the idea that bigger is better, I think that might come back to bite our megalomaniac HoD on the bum.

huh, that'd be funny if it weren't going to be kind of tragic. agree about the debt problem - of course we (in the HE sector) did also oppose the massive fee hike.
i guess it also looks really prestigious to have presided over a new building, even a new name of something or a new school - then by the time it doesn't work out the next head / dean /vp gets to rebrand, rename. bit depressing, really!

Make insane top-down decisions that everyone who is not senior-most management can see Will Not Work, and then when there is a big backlash followed by huge PR damage in the press, do a massive U-Turn and scrap the unworkable idea.

They've done it about 5 times in the 8 years I've worked there.

Yep, I always had a feeling the tuition fee increase would come back to haunt the sector.
Even though there were protests, I was amazed application rates in 2012 didn't drop significantly, infact they barely dropped at all where we are.
It's a shame they didn't drop, as it could have tempered the ridiculous building work and expansion that has taken place since.
I'm no economist but I just have the feeling things are reaching a boiling-point and we could see a standoff between the government vs higher education over the fees situation. If fees do drop back down, and the government doesn't make up the shortfall, then I think a lot of universities could be in trouble.
Sorry for derailing the thread - venting after seeing details of our VCs recent pay-deal for last year! I'm sure if academics had some authority left in the running of universities, we wouldn't be in this mess; we may take a long time to make a decision, but that would be better than the default decision to grow at any cost which our VC and senior managers subscribe to without a second thought.

The funniest double-speak at our uni is that they decided to call their recent restructuring/downsizing 'transformation', got lots of people to resign/take VR, moved everyone about so no-one knows what they are doing or is doing it with fewer resources and then they did an audit of the 'transformation' which showed that both the transformed and those using them thought it was rubbish and seemed baffled by this finding! It just tickles me I guess every time I get an email about the shedding jobs transformation.

And, it wouldn't tickle me if I had been one of the transformed, that's for sure.

Telling us repeatedly to award higher numbers of firsts/2:1s (to match out competitors, improve our NSS, etc). Even though many of the students can hardly speak/write English. But simultaneously suggesting that our students have received lower grades compared to competitor institutions because we are crap teachers, and threatening us with a loss of autonomy if we don't improve. Then calling the blatant grade inflation that results 'evidence of improvements in teaching quality,' and handing out champagne to celebrate. I mean it's not crazy on one level ... but it's totally crazy and depressing on another.

Nothing like OP has said, opposite thank goodness. I don't know how any of that would work well.

My Ethics committee has a research governance role, too.
Shall I write an essay on weird stuff the Ethics committee have asked us to do, that they honestly think will improve study quality? (Maybe not, might lose my job). I'm reminded of this picture on Shit Academics Say.

I have colleagues who do loopy stuff. Do time-consuming counts by hand rather than filter in Excel. Or refuse to use any Microsoft product, which hinders collaboration. One coauthor cannot handle tracked changes in MSW. They print out the revised manuscript and read thru the suggested changes line by line, then type any accepted revisions into original version of manuscript.

Our admin team can't use filters on excel so send back files on email and ask for them to be placed in alphabetical order they genuinely don't even know the filter option exists.

Ethics process is a nightmare here too, sends back comments about the type of car you might be using to get to fieldwork sites asking for specific make, model and colour. A red car is not ethical after all.

Our ethics process is like the peer review process for some incredibly highly ranked journal. I'm convinced the reviewers think the point is to prevent anyone from doing any research. And the worst thing is that they ask completely inappropriate people to review your application. So you receive the most ludicrous reviews from first year PhD students who've never actually done a research project and have no clue about the realities of it.

The university have a problem with poor results in their staff satisfaction surveys. In particular, issues around communication and senior management not listening to staff concerns come up every single time. So they seek to resolve this by organising meeting where you have to submit any questions for vetting in advance (and can only ask if your question is approved) and send out incredibly closed questionnaires which actively prevent people raising important issues around the impossibility of career progression etc. Then they wonder why we're not all delighted with them. I think they genuinely believe that the academics they employ won't be able to recognise these as tactics to avoid hearing what anyone thinks.

those are great, in a dark humour kind of way.
we have "consultations" where it is mostly clear that nothing will happen or change about what they are planning to do - but after this "consultation" they will be able to say that they have closely consulted with staff...
My uni incentivises research much more than teaching, then wonders why it is that we don't have much of a culture of deeply valuing great teaching. The occasional teaching prize occasional enough that pouring effort into great teaching will not assure you of the prize, and even if you won it, you'd hardly get a promotion over it somehow does not change the culture too dramatically. :)
In fact, reliance on prizes, either local or external: since prizes have a much lower award rate than grants you are always better off putting time into applying for (highly incentivised and rewarded) grants than internal prizes. or even external ones.

I am on the email lists for "Early Career Researchers." All about the special options available to ECRs. And only ECRs.

I stopped being an ECR 15 yrs ago. Most of us on the list are long (like a decade or more) past the stage of being an ECR. Those programmes & that information might have been useful 20 yrs ago, but it's just clutter in my inbox now (FFS).

I was also on the wrong research cluster group list, too (so being pestered by the wrong admin bots about things like 3 yr overdue appraisals). At least it only took one email to get off that list.

Our last chair of ethics was a deeply religious guy who didn't believe in same sex marriage and wasn't all that keen on gays in a general sense really. One of our colleagues does lots of work on sexual subcultures in the gay community. Wow, that made for some very interesting conversations and reviews