Different Topic – Academic Regulation
I have some hiring to do, a Admin Assistant and a post-doc, and that has put in me in contact with our dreaded Human Resources Department. You know the drill: it starts with two half-hours on university attorney-generated websites, getting certified once as a "hiring official" and then again (over exactly the same subjects) as a member of a search committee. Then a long session with my HR officer (who was actually quite pleasant) generating incredibly detailed job descriptions, including lists of responsibilities that could be completed without supervision, and another that required supervision. Policies on top of policies on top of policies. All I want is a couple of people to help me do my work. Why does it have to be so complicated?
Nowadays when I submit a grant I have to spend almost as much time filling out forms as I do writing the scientific part. There are compliance people in the psychology department, at the Dean's office in Arts and Sciences, at the Provost, and then all over again at NIH. They all seem to compete with each other about who can be pickier about tiny details. No one ever seems to care what I actually put on the forms-- I have the feeling I could write on the bottom that I am a meth addict and a child abuser and no one would ever notice-- as long as the forms are filled out and signed on the bottom. Seen the new NIH biosketch form? I'm sure most of you have been there, and it is easy to complain. I do all the time. But it got me thinking-- does my complaining about pointless regulation and paperwork put me in the same category as your typical Republican congressman griping about the EPA and OSHA? Say you are Tom Delay. You are an exterminator in West Texas, and you like doing two things: poisoning bugs and making money. Then along comes the EPA and makes you fill out a bunch of forms before you put any chemicals in someone's foundation, and there is more paperwork for EEOC and OSHA every time you hire or fire someone. But of course all these rules exist for good reasons. I want minorities to have an equal chance of getting hired, I don't want to discriminate against old people, I want to help people with disabilities. Just like I want an exterminator to care about the chemicals he is putting into the environment. The problem is that somehow, all the things you have to do-- fill out forms, make lists of things, check boxes agreeing to policies-- don't seem to be connected to accomplishing the worthy goals. Instead, they mostly seem designed to ensure that if anything ever goes wrong and the university gets sued, they can safely blame it on me, because they did everything they could to get me to play by the rules. I suspect it feels the same way to Tom Delay-- all the form-filling isn't actually helping the environment, it is just about rule following and making it hard to do the bug poisoning and money making he wants to do.
So my question is, is there a more humane model of regulation? Has anyone thought about how an institution could work to ensure equal hiring practices without burying people in forms? About engaging people in a regulated task in a way that makes them want to participate, and to feel good about the effort being expended?