The Decline of Academia
 

After having spent the last week entirely writing draft proposals, cost/benefit analysises and time useage reports, I get the feeling that increasingly the world of academia is being taken over by the beaurecrats and the economists.
I understand that funding is sparse, and that a lot of our funding comes from commercial sponsorship, but I continually feel there must be a better way than us researchers having to spend all day dealing with admin rather than research.
Additionally I feel that this is impacted the more theoretical sides of subject in favour of more practical sides. As an example I work in computational/physical chemistry which is fairly speculative. We get much less funding than the synthethic and medicinal chemists as their work is a) more understandable b) has more direction and c) has more direct benefits and are good for bringing in money.
These fields are important but without also sponsering theoretical fields one will soon outstrip ones theoretical approach.
Others got any thoughts on such developments? Has it always been this way? Are there any better ways? Am I just frustrated and grumpy?

I think what you're talking about is becoming more prevalent throughout all forms of business. It makes me quite grumpy, but the obsession with doing more with less money makes a paper trail an evil that is here to stay.

Except it wouldn't be save for the pervasively corrupting effects of allowing a tiny percentage of our society hoarde an increasing share of its wealth.

My alma matter has been run for the past 10 years or so on the principle that a university is essentially a business. Everything school-like is being torn away; non-compliant professors are forced into early retirement or into looking for a new job regardless of how valuable they are as teachers, huge amounts of money are being spent on things that are totally not necessary - like a huge new student union building (think of it like an old school shopping mall in the middle of campus) - and taken away from programs like foreign languages and computer programming. Seriously. The whole philosophy is to make the school turn a buck instead of providing a wide and fully functioning education. Buying stuff from the lowest bidder and adding 'bling' to the campus to attract new students are the surest way to turn a school into a crap school with crap students that are crap workers and crap citizens later in life. But the school will be turning a profit. Call me a communist, but I believe that there are more important things than money.

I do too. I could be earning big money out in industry (I even got some offers) but I stayed at uni because I love to learn, and I want to teach and inspire others but what is happening depresses me.
I found out today we have twice as many administrators as teaching staff at our uni which I find ridiculous.
I'm just fearing what will happen to beloved knowledge.

Who cares? Universities are becoming as useless as k-12 public education. The best ones will still carry their research-focus, but most of them are just there to process human beings from one thing into another thing, like a giant sausage factory. Whether that factory works well or not.... I don't really care. My only motivation is to make it through the sausage factory without becoming a sausage. Ya know?

I'm finding that more and more people are just skipping college to do what they love. There are some things this is a bit hard to do, but if someone is already in love with any area of study they study it on their own. And so while college becomes a processing unit for people who are incapable of self motivation, those who are self motivated will carve out a new path, a new way of doing things. People adjust and people adapt, it's what we do. Once people begin to realize that xyz of doing things is very bad they begin to look for abc.

The college I went to is undergoing a lot of the same problems. They recently lost a lot of outstanding teachers, world reknown teachers, because they refused to pay them, they're losing money because the one teacher that teaches every foreign language class (yes only one for a class that's required for just about every major) the students hate, so they're enrolling jointly with another university to take a class from there.

They recently built a Huge Dome to House student activities, and mostly so they could have a huge gymnasium. I guess having another gymnasium will bring them money. They're focusing on their basketball teams even tho the tennis team they actually had was one of the top in the nation and in the world. Yah isn't that stupid???

I've talked to some of the teachers about what's happening and they tell me in order for them to get more money to hire more teacher and increase salary they have to increase their spending and increase the number of students who attend. And there's some weird catch-22.

College still takes a lot of self motivation. And it opens doors later in your career. People who aren't self motivated flunk out of college, it happens often. For the few who persevere, the rewards are better earning potential.

My university's great. We keep our world reknown teachers, increase spending, build new buildings, tear down old dormatories and replace them, remodel middle aged dormatories that aren't quite old, we got that new gym, but we kept our old one as well. We got a great theater and a student run events thing where the students choose which entertainers come to campus to do movies, shows and stuff (last year it was Bob Saget, this year its Jim Gaffigan (sp?)), we also have the old basketball stadium as well as the new one. We're building a new baseball diamond and keeping the old one as well.

You know what the worst of it is though? The meal plan doesn't roll over, couldn't find an open air parking spot to save your life during the week (Forcing many students to buy a garage spot which admitedly we have quite a few garages spaced around campus closer than open air parking lots) and our football team isn't the greatest. And we can't use our meal plan off campus. Yea, thats become an issue, using your meal plan off campus, and our school is WORKING on that apperently...for some unknown reason. ($$$)

My university is pretty good actually ( we recentely popped into the world's top 50 universities which is not bad for a country of 4 million) and has a strong research focus.
But even so it's still way too much of a business and we are going downhill (just built a massive new business school to pump through business students when all other departments are scrabbling for money). I'm probably going to leave once I finish my various projects but the problem is finding somewhere to go.
I'm a researcher but I don't want to work for some company. My best hope is to find some little institute somewhere but these are becoming rarer and rarer.