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

This is the first in a series examining structures and assumptions in academic research that have gone unquestioned long enough to feel permanent. The last several years have stress-tested a lot of them. Some didn't hold. This one is worth naming directly.

I want to be clear up front: this is not an argument against faculty. The current structure has roots dating back to the early 2000s, when research administrators and faculty will tell you things were simpler - when we printed reams of paper and shipped grant applications by overnight FedEx.

In 2003, the NIH effectively doubled its budget. Since then, competition for those dollars has only intensified even as real purchasing power has stayed roughly flat. Research moved toward growth and expansion. Operations became more complicated. Specialized staff were added. Then Uniform Guidance arrived in 2014, and the compliance burden steadily increased. Very few departments, schools, colleges, or universities responded with new staffing models. Most just plodded along with a faculty leader and an industrious staff member reporting to them, tasked with absorbing whatever came next.

That failure to adapt has had real consequences: widespread burnout, chronic understaffing, and persistent difficulty recruiting, training, and retaining quality personnel. Research administrators are caught in the middle, expected to manage compliance and process issues for staff who are not accountable to them.

Staff should not report to faculty to fullest extent possible. Faculty should focus on what they were hired and trained to do: teaching, writing, advising, mentoring, and leading scholarly work. Even those in formal leadership roles are better positioned to guide vision and direction than to manage day-to-day operations. Why do we expect a faculty leader to have the same skillset as a seasoned operations manager? Instead of devising new ways to make that fit work, the more honest move is toward shared leadership that leverages what each role actually offers.

Staff who manage projects, operations, or research administration have fundamentally different professional needs. They require coaching, oversight, performance management, and development from someone who understands the day-to-day work and its requirements. Most faculty are neither trained nor positioned to provide that - not because of any failing on their part, but because it falls entirely outside the scope of what their career has prepared them for. Early-career staff in particular, who tend to want transparency, clear feedback, and a visible path forward, are poorly served by supervisors who are overloaded, often unavailable, and unfamiliar with staff performance systems. We see the consequences in exit interviews and in the cynicism that sets in when people realize the development they were promised isn't coming.

When staff report to faculty, other staff lack the authority to intervene when something goes wrong, because those staff don't report to them. Accountability becomes diffuse. Roles blur. Performance gaps go unaddressed not because anyone is indifferent, but because the structure makes addressing them genuinely difficult.

Faculty tend to think in terms of growth and opportunity. That's how they're trained, and it's valuable. But navigating personnel management within compliance frameworks is a different discipline, and when the system assumes faculty can do both, it sets everyone up to fail.

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 capacity, but not be subordinate to them. The same logic 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 and implicit hierarchy. A research administrator overseeing how work gets done - ensuring compliance, quality, consistency, and professional development - and a faculty investigator providing direction on what work gets done within the research agenda. Shared accountability that respects expertise on both sides without conflating the two.

Decoupling academic leadership from administrative management means stopping the pattern of mistaking effort for structure and loyalty for sustainability. The distinction matters, and the research enterprise depends on getting it right.

This is Part 1 of the Killing Sacred Cows series. Part 2 examines why we can't train what we can't define.

Further Reading What Drives Workplace Learning: A Systematic Review of Key Antecedents, Marijn Wijga, Simon Beausaert, Eva Kyndt, Journal of Workplace Learning, 2025