Hyper-bureaucracy

Times Higher has a leader by Ann Mroz on the rising tide of academic bureaucracy, to which, we might add, rankings, ratings and assessment have made no small contribution.

"But banal and mind-numbing though it is, bureaucracy isn't neutral. It is insidious, changing the nature of both teaching and research; it also, of course, has been used to push academics in uncomfortable directions.

A scary new word to emerge in our cover story is "hyper-bureaucracy", which describes "an out-of-control system" that emerges in the search for optimum efficiency and takes no account of the costs in time, energy and money that are needed to achieve it. It is a bureaucratic nightmare in which there is no end to the extra information that can be acquired. The monitoring of contact hours and how academics spend their time are examples of the type of bureaucracy that "eats up people and resources", according to Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick. "