What are Administrative Mandates?

Administrative mandates are temporary or new permanent tasks that departments, programs, or centers must accomplish that are not accompanied by additional resources (money and/or staff). Tasks such as payroll, travel arrangements and reimbursements, grant and contract administration, web site construction and maintenance, computer technical support, and class scheduling have been decentralized to the department level, with central administration providing only computing and administrative support and technical training. Academic reports are more frequent and require more effort. In addition, tasks such as visiting committees, newsletters, alumni outreach programs, and donor and fund raising events have all become standard department tasks requiring department resources.

Why are there more Administrative Mandates?

There are at least four reasons for the increase in administrative mandates. For one, budget cuts and staff reductions create a situation where there is less money and fewer staff to do more work. Second, higher education faces pressures for greater accountability. Legislators, Higher Education Boards, parents, the business community, tax payers, and donors expect improved education and greater research output with the same or fewer resources. Institutions must be able to demonstrate that they are using their resources effectively and efficiently. This requires more documentation and analysis on the part of all levels of administration for such things as objective student learning outcomes, graduation rates, and faculty/student contact hours. Third, there is greater competition among departments for resources such as faculty lines, teaching assistantship allocations, graduate student fellowships, faculty leaves (sabbaticals), computer equipment, student technology fee money, and curriculum transformation initiatives. To win these resources, department heads have to prepare better proposals with more persuasive arguments containing concrete evidence of need. Finally, central administrations need to demonstrate they are lean and efficient. But the work still must be done somewhere. So, some of the administrative burdens are shifted down to departments—analogous to shifting of work and tax burdens from the federal government to state and local government.

How to manage Administrative Mandates without doing all the work yourself

As one fellow department chair commented, “How do we respond (to increased administrative mandates)? I suppose most of us make the best efforts we can, knowing we are not doing what we should be doing, and feeling badly about it.” You cannot do it all yourself; this applies to department chairs and administrators alike. While it is certainly possible to do almost all the work associated with increases in administrative mandates, two things are likely to happen. Either you will not have time to do other important things such as research, teaching, and other important department functions, or you will be so frustrated and overworked that the quality of your work will diminish. Both situations are liable to make you finally throw in the towel and quit. It is important to understand department priorities and goals. Some administrative tasks and reports are crucial to achieving those goals and deserve serious effort. Others are not and should not warrant major effort.

• It is essential that you delegate responsibility for handling significant portions of the work. Staff are (or can be) competent and can handle a considerable amount of the work. It is noble and often appropriate to shelter faculty from administrative busy work—that is one role of a good departmental chair—but they need to be engaged in important administrative projects; particularly those that they have a real stake in. Whenever possible and affordable, provide staff with training opportunities so that they can handle new and different administrative tasks.
• It can also be quite helpful to periodically evaluate staff organization and structure. As the work demands of your staff change so should staff organization and structure. Sometimes this may well mean redefining job descriptions (and appropriate personnel) to meet changing work demands and skills.
• Also, never underestimate the value of using hourly money to hire graduate or undergraduate students to help with specific projects. When crunches come, hire “temporary” staff and support your needy students.
• Lastly, though this is a delicate process, work to gain more departmental control of the resources necessary to accomplish the required tasks. Having control of resources and the local flexibility to deal with workloads can be essential to coping with administrative mandates. While administrators talk a good line about decentralizing authority and responsibility and how department chairs are key leaders, most high level administrators tend to hold a tight grip on scarce resources. Perhaps the rhetoric of decentralization, empowerment, and accountability can help to gain more local control.