Reply #25: I agree that they are busy, but much of what they do is busywork, or

[QC]

worse yet, creating busywork for the faculty.

My administration lives and breathes bureaucratic process, which has become an end in itself that has little to do with teaching and learning.

At my college, faculty have been burdened with so much committee work that teaching has become an afterthought, but in most cases the recommendations of those committees go straight into the memory hole and the administration does whatever it wanted to do originally, before we spent a year studying an issue, making recommendations, etc.

But, and this is the purpose of the whole thing, the administration points to all those irrelevant committees and pointless meetings and ignored recommendations as signs of:

1. How productive we are, and
2. How the administration values the ideal of faculty governance

The people who orchestrate this charade are each being paid from two to five times what a classroom teacher gets.

I agree with you 100%--it is time to examine each part of the bureaucracy and decide whether we really need it. I think we could probably dispose of a lot of it.