I'm a Professor, Not an Administrator

As a professor, I value a lot of things. I value helping students to learn. I value ideas and research. I even value the service that one performs - participating in important conversations about curricular development, policy decisions, etc.

And as a professor, I'm a very hard worker. I put great effort into the work that I do, and I want to take pride in doing my job well.

I am not an administrator. And the more administrative duties that somehow land in my lap, the more I have to pick and choose which parts of my job I will do adequately and which parts of my job I let slide. Notice that there is no pride in doing a good job in this scenario, because it's pretty much impossible to do a really good job when you're being pulled in about a thousand different directions. Especially when some of those directions in which you're being pulled are into doing administrative bean-counting that has nothing fucking to do with being a college professor.

And here's the thing: I have no administrative ambitions. I want to be a professor. According to my contract, that is what I have been hired to be. So you know what? I really wish that people who are administrators would take care of the administrating, and let me do my job.