Killing Sacred Cows, Part 1: Staff Should Not Report to Faculty

In times of instability and uncertainty, I tend to focus on opportunity. In more stable times, the status quo is too entrenched to shift or challenge. Humans—and markets—gravitate toward predictability and often enjoy the comforts of the familiar, which is why the last five years of turbulence and the pace of change have felt both exhausting and paradoxically full of possibility.

Instability creates openings. If we’re brave, it gives us a chance to build better systems and structures in academic research settings—something needed now more than ever. Right now, things are so unfamiliar that many people are in a kind of shocked paralysis.

In these moments, strategy matters. Strategy is not about reacting to the moment—it’s about positioning yourself to win in the future when the environment is unpredictable and competitive. It means making deliberate choices about what to stop doing, where to invest and pivot, and how to design systems that can adapt when conditions shift again; and they will.

That’s where higher education often struggles—there’s a tendency to use planning, rather than strategy as a tactic because frankly, the academy is used to predictable, hard to reform systems. Planning is useful, but only in stable environments. Strategy is what moves you forward when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.

I want to lay out a realistic view of what’s happening and why this moment gives us a rare opportunity to move toward something better—and why we should be running at a full sprint toward change. That starts with saying some quiet parts out loud about the dysfunctional systems and structures currently being stress-tested. The last 10 months have delivered the results: higher education is fragile and vulnerable. But it can be fixed.

Quiet 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 pivot 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 quiet 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.