Killing Sacred Cows, Part 1: Staff Should Not Report to Faculty
In times of instability and uncertainty, I tend to focus on opportunity. In stable periods, the status quo becomes entrenched and difficult to challenge. Humans and institutions alike gravitate toward predictability and the comfort of familiar systems. That is why the last five years of turbulence and accelerated change have felt both exhausting and, paradoxically, full of possibility.
Instability creates openings. If we are willing to act, it gives us a chance to build better systems and structures in academic research settings, something that is urgently needed. Right now, the environment is so unfamiliar that many people are stuck in a kind of shock-induced paralysis.
In moments like this, strategy matters. Strategy is about positioning yourself to succeed in an unpredictable and competitive future. It requires deliberate choices about what to stop doing, where to invest, and how to redesign systems so they can adapt when conditions shift again. They will.
This is where higher education often struggles. Too often, planning is treated as a substitute for strategy. Planning works best in stable environments, and the academy is accustomed to systems that change slowly and resist reform. Strategy, by contrast, is what allows institutions to move forward when the ground is unstable.
I want to lay out a realistic view of what is happening and why this moment presents a rare opportunity to move toward something better. Doing so requires saying some quiet parts out loud about the systems and structures now being stress-tested. The last ten months have made the results clear. Higher education has been weakened and is vulnerable. That does not mean it is broken beyond repair. But fixing it will require a more honest reckoning with how authority, accountability, and decision-making are structured inside our institutions.
Truth #1: Staff should not report to faculty.
I want to be clear up front: I’m not villainizing faculty. The current structure we find ourselves in has roots dating back to the early 2000s, when we printed reams of paper and shipped grant applications by overnight FedEx. Despite the manual labor, many research administrators and faculty will tell you those were simpler times.
In 2003, the NIH effectively doubled its budget, and since then it’s been a bonanza of competition - with real purchasing power more or less staying at those same levels today. However, the competition for those dollars has only intensified.
With this initial injection of funds, research moved toward growth and expansion to compete. Operations became more complicated with the addition of more specialized staff. Then Uniform Guidance hit in 2014, and the research environment steadily moved toward greater regulation and compliance expectations. Very few departments, schools, colleges, or universities addressed these changes with new staffing models. They just sort of plodded along with a faculty leader and an industrious, trusty staff member reporting to them - tasked with absorbing and figuring out how to get all the work done.
This lack of a meaningful structural staffing pivot to address these realities has been an epic failure, resulting in widespread burnout and overwork, especially among career research administrators. Evidence is everywhere: many units report being chronically understaffed and struggling to recruit, train, and retain quality personnel. Meanwhile, research administrators are caught in the middle, expected to manage compliance and process issues for staff who are not accountable to them.
Let’s change this. Faculty should focus on the core aspects of their role: teaching, writing, advising, mentoring peers and students, and leading scholarly work. Even those in leadership roles should concentrate on guiding vision and direction, not managing day-to-day operations.
Research administrators have been lamenting for decades in the confines of the conference eco-system how ill-prepared faculty are with respect to fiscal, human capital, and operational management. Honestly, why do we expect a faculty leader to have the same skillset as a Fortune 500 CEO? Instead of devising new ways to fit a square peg into a round hole, we should move toward shared leadership and leveraging strengths.
Staff who manage projects, operations, or research administration have fundamentally different needs. They require coaching, oversight, and professional development that most faculty are neither trained nor positioned to provide, because they don’t understand the day-to-day work or its requirements. This doesn’t make them bad people. We need more honesty that everyone gets the same 24 hours and we can’t be everything to everyone.
When staff report to faculty, it creates dynamics where other staff lack authority to intervene because those staff don’t report to them. It also creates confusion about accountability and roles. Faculty often don’t fully understand the expectations and responsibilities of staff positions, which leaves gaps in both support and performance management.
Again, this isn’t about blame. Faculty tend to think in growth terms. They’re trained to pursue opportunity and innovation, not to navigate bureaucratic guardrails or manage personnel within compliance frameworks. But when the system assumes they can do both, it sets everyone up to fail.
These gaps are becoming even more visible as Gen Z enters the workforce, bringing different expectations for communication, feedback, and career growth. They want transparency, clarity, and development opportunities from their supervisors. When their supervisor is a faculty member; often overloaded, unavailable, and unfamiliar with staff performance systems, it creates frustration and turnover.
We see this in exit interviews, in staff satisfaction surveys, and in the cynicism that takes root when early-career professionals realize there’s no real path forward. Institutions that continue to rely on outdated reporting structures will struggle to recruit and retain strong staff, full stop.
Looking ahead, the path forward isn’t adding titles; it’s redefining authority. Departments don’t just need Chiefs of Staff or Directors of Operations in name; they need administrative leaders with genuine oversight, clear lines of accountability, and independence from traditional academic reporting structures. These roles should partner with faculty chairs and directors to align academic and research priorities with operational excellence, but not be subordinate to them. The same applies within labs and teams: research staff should report through a professional chain of research administration, not solely through faculty.
In practice, this means structuring reporting lines around function rather than tradition. Professional research assistants, for example, should report to a staff administrator who oversees how the work gets done, ensuring compliance, quality, and consistency while also providing mentoring and professional development. Faculty investigators, in turn, provide input on what gets done within the research agenda. This shared accountability respects expertise on both sides without conflating performance management of how work is executed with guidance on what work should be done.
Until research organizations decouple academic leadership from administrative management, they’ll keep mistaking effort for structure and loyalty for sustainability. The future of research depends on getting that distinction right.
