Note: I am in the process of leaving the German University system. This is the first of a series of posts recapitulating on the experience, in no particular order, to be written as the mood strikes and the opportunity arises.
A German university (full) professor and chair holder is typically endowed with his own secretary. Since I became a chair holder in Germany over twelve years ago (I am about to leave the system right now), I’ve had one, or rather a succession thereof. But, when the last one resigned, I gave up the position, and I have been without ever since. And, I have to say, this was an improvement for my research group.
German chair secretaries are a remnant of the times where professors used to dictate their letters and research papers (my first secretary actually expected me to, and was rather shocked when I asked her whether she could type maths in LaTeX). Sorry, but nowadays, computers have taken over all the traditional secretary tasks. You do your own typing and answer your own email. Duh.
The only reason chair secretaries remain necessary in Germany is that large amounts of administrative work are dropped on you as a chair holder, from organizing exams and writing contracts to taking care of budgets and managing your equipment. In a proper department/faculty, those tasks are centralized, and there is no reason they could not be centralized in a German university department too (some are actually going this way). Indeed, in a typical German department, I think there would be huge efficiency gains to be had by simply pooling all the secretary resources of the chairs and building a front office. Which I have been actively proposing to do for a long while.
For one, that would allow to pay them (a smaller number of “them,” of course) a decent salary. Here is the other problem: since German universities have to finance huge numbers of secretaries, the salaries are quite low. Which means you cannot expect highly-qualified candidates (with apologies, but there is something called the market…). Which in turn means that, to be blunt, there are limits to what the secretary will be able to cope with, for the salary paid. Nowadays, a university secretary has to be a multilingual, highly skilled manager with a good understanding of organization and research support, and also be able to double as an accountant and a little bit of IT specialist. In my case, managing a chair with an associated EEG lab, a dozen different budgets, a number of research projects, both individual (meaning just the chair) and coordinated (meaning large scale), communicating with an interdisciplinary, multinational team where only half of the members spoke German, and organizing regular conferences and workshops proved to be just a bit too much for the wage. Understandably. At some point, me and my group had to accept that we were spending so much time fixing the problems caused by the secretaries’ lack of qualifications for the actual job (not blaming anybody here: just a mismatch!), that it was better to do everything ourselves. Which we did. Once the last of a chain of secretaries resigned (maybe overwhelmed by the tasks), I simply renegotiated with my Dean and gave up the secretary position in exchange for some additional money for researcher positions. We never looked back (and I am still grateful to the Dean for his understanding).
The process to give up the secretary position of my German chair was a bit of an eye-opener, though. Naively, I thought that it would be a chance to implement an efficiency gain, so I initially offered to merge resources with any chair that would want it. Just take the resources away and build a small front office, with a full-time position or two part-time ones. You know, increasing returns to scale and all that, as taught in Econ 101. Well, even though my (Economics) department at the time was by no means old-fashioned, and everybody understood economic efficiency… no takers. Although all of my chair-holder colleagues had valid reasons to say “no,” I cannot help but think that maybe, just maybe, unconsciously, the negative had a bit to do with an implicit view that a Chair holder needs to have a secretary, full stop. Appearances before efficiency, maybe?
In my colleagues’ defense, however, there is a valid reason to be careful and risk-averse here. Plain forward-looking thinking, coupled with a maybe-healthy distrust in the higher echelons of administration. Once it becomes obvious that there are efficiency gains to be had, we can all predict what will happen: cash-strapped faculties and universities will progressively reduce the money for admin support, again and again. And where will it stop? Well, I once worked in a Spanish university department where there was one (efficient!) secretary for 40 researchers. Which meant obvious inefficiencies of a completely different class. However, I refuse to think that we need to keep one kind of inefficient arrangement for fear of a different kind. After all, labor union analogues (“Personalrat”) are quite powerful in German universities, and they will hardly allow hundreds of positions to disappear. But on a more positive note, there are reasonable people at all levels, so the current immobilism might be due to mere inertia.
Of course, having a Chair without a secretary was not an optimal arrangement for my group. Somebody has to do the administrative nitty-gritty. Let’s admit it, those tasks cost a highly-skilled scientist a fraction of the time it would cost an underpaid secretary. But it is still not an efficient allocation of resources: the scientist should be doing research, not research support. The reason we did it is that, with the current institutional constraints, it beats the alternative.
Simply put, there are enough resources to endow each and every German department with a reasonable number of well-paid, highly-qualified administrative assistants, but the structures in place are forcing us to employ a too-large number of underpaid ones, just so that every professor has a secretary. In my never-very-humble opinion, this arrangement might be a bit of a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Carlos' Ramblings 