The organization and structure of university job markets have been the subject of much debate in recent times.
The main focus was on the scientific job markets, which have been characterized for years by orgies of fixed-term contracts and unclear prospects for the so-called mid-level faculty.
That's the page.
While permanent positions, in the form of professorships or permanent mid-level positions, are becoming increasingly rare in academic service, there is a segment within the university job market that has been growing for years: academic management.
In order to illustrate the changes within the university's internal job markets, here are just a few job titles that did not exist at the university until recently: coordinator, diversity officer, course director, quality manager and many others.
These job titles or positions alone indicate a far-reaching change in the university job markets.
The chance of a permanent contract in the field of science management is relatively high, since most of the time it is about so-called permanent tasks for which you cannot be hired on a fixed-term basis.
That makes the jobs attractive;
especially since they are all in the higher service and guarantee a relatively high income.
Of course, these colleagues, who are not part of the administration but mostly “scientific” employees, are released from teaching because they have to evaluate the teaching.
They are also exempt from research, since they have to advise researchers and evaluate research.
More than administration
The boom in these professions at the university has to do with a process that has to do with the withdrawal of the ministerial bureaucracy from the management and control of the university and its processes.
The proverbial “unleashed university” is one that has freed itself from this management and control by the ministries and has transferred the management and control mechanisms to the university itself.
This has led to a shift within the personnel cost structure.
While the strict dogma of austerity prevails in the financial planning of the core areas of research and teaching, the staffing and equipment of steering and control bodies is quite generous.
This is hailed as a liberation from the administrative form of the ministerial bureaucracy,
This is exactly where science management, which no longer wants to be an administration, comes into play.
The new dispositif of science management likes to describe itself as contemporary, innovative and less dusty than the good old university administration.
Science managers represent the avant-garde, while the classic university administration is more of an arrival-garde.
In his self-description, which can be read on the website of the lobby association "Netzwerk Wissenschaftsmanagement", it says that science management has a "hinge position and function between scientists and the classic (university or scientific) administration".
Science managers perform “specific tasks in the complex, structured modern scientific landscape”.
But administration doesn't want to be that