I've made this kind of post many times, so apologies if you've seen it before.
My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field.
Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less.
Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need.
You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.
My question to you as an academic is this: everyone I talk to in your disciplines loathes university administrators and the politicians they effectively answer to, so why don't more academics cooperate across disciplines to topple the administrators? You're among the smartest people in society, you're in a cluster with expertise on everything from legal analysis to military history to economic analysis to system biology, and you have a relatively straightforward collective action action problem whose contours are pretty independent of geography and academic field.
Organize. You have an absolute embarrassment of intellectual and political resources at your disposal but you insist on playing by the very rules that are designed to limit your professional autonomy and keep you in your place. Doing everything by the book is clearly not working out for your profession, and if you keep doing what you've always done you'll keep getting what you've always gotten, ie less and less.
Find the people in your department who are most pissed off and select a small number that you trust. Network with people in other departments and encourage them to do the same. Develop an off-campus social life where you study the administrative organs of your university and analyze their composition, function, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Then start messing with the vulnerabilities to dislocate the control functionality of the administrative bodies. Start small, conduct experiments to deepen your understanding and get them to move this way or that. Then get them to misdirect their attention and resources to a dummy issue of your choosing and leverage their distraction to get something you actually need.
You're describing how administrative decisions basically have you subsidizing the university so people in your department can do their jobs effectively. This is such a common scenario that they definitely know what they're doing. It's OK for you to put stumbling blocks in their path.