What do you want from senior management in your university department

[flumpybear]

Hi
Can I ask what you feel is important for university senior management within say faculty/school to concentrate on in short Medium and long term to benefit the school/staff etc ?

Also what's your thoughts on Brexit for academia?

I'm asking as I've got an interview coming up in a week or so which is in this field, I know my own views and would be good to hear others - can you say what your role/field is as it may be helpful
Thank you

I fear I have nothing polite to say.

NeverEverAnythingEver sums up my thoughts very accurately. I'm leaving academia, along with another 4 teaching members of our dept, due to crap behaviour by our HOC and HOD.

CrashBank and good luck.

Bad things are ok too / air laundry!

To plan for potential upheaval in recruiting if visa regime changes post brexit. That is true both for students and for research staff.

In humanities consider future impact of monographs needing to be open access in REF.

Depending on where you’re based, balancing growth of research teams against expense of facilities expansion, especially if research then contracts.

Staff retention as housing costs continue to rise.

Workload management as student demands and TEF increase their pressure on staff.

Thank you @impostersyndrome

And stop re-organising for the sake of reorganising like some spoony fucker.

And stop re-organising for the sake of reorganising like some spoony fucker.

^ This!

Especially when it involves taking some crappy hierarchical management tool from the 1990s corporate sector and insisting academic departments reorganise themselves to suit. It only goes to show that senior management know sweet fuck all about how academics actually function and what makes them work best. You're never going to get a bag of angry cats (academics) to do tricks for whistles and treats like well-trained puppy dogs (senior managements' view of what employees are like).

But lots of senior management used to be academics. This leads me to think that they were shit academics. Those who can't, manage.

I'm academic in sciences (SL), with significant responsibilities in both teaching and research.

Be people-centred, not metric-centred. Find out what your staff care about. Make small changes when you can't make big ones (e.g., don't go "ah, nothing we can do about that, just suck it up" -- more like "this is the situation, and we change X, but is there anything we can do to make X or other related things better?"). Don't make people 'chose' between teaching and research (so people like me don't have to soul-search about which of the things they love doing they love doing less and thus are willing to give up - I've seen so many of my colleagues at other Unis have to do this, and then regret their choice - while knowing they probably would have also regretted the other choice, too). Also, don't make teaching-only staff second-class citizens. Recognise a range of contributions and let people gravitate towards their strengths (if someone is never going to be able to explain things to first years, don't force them to - just let them teach the masters students). Recognise that research funding is pretty stochastic once you get to a certain threshold of 'good enough', and don't punish people for not bringing in money. Also recognise that different fields bring in different amounts of money, so don't try to metric-ise worth based on funds brought it. Foster good relationships between academic and professional/support staff. Even in my own Uni, I so many set ups where it seems like they pitted against each other - each being only names on the other end of an email, rather than a real person. And it's probably a pipe-dream, but work towards a situation where workload and available time actually match up. A world where a "working to contract" strike isn't a strike at all, because everyone can accomplish their job in normal working hours.