Regulators…Mount Up!
Nobody likes red tape when it’s happening to them, but it’s one of those necessary evils without which we might as well kiss scientific advancement goodbye. Yes, scientists are those discovering cures and investigating phenomena, but they’d never have time for their research if not for the bureaucrats in the background taking care of the paperwork that makes science possible. But in fiction, if we see the paper-pushers at all, they’re usually either part of the scenery or casualties waiting to happen. When they’re given development at all, they’re often slapped with the same stereotype as postal workers.
For the record: Most Administrators are unarmed.
The unfortunate thing is that by ignoring the clerks and auditors, writers bypass numerous sci-fi plotbunnies (or at least sub-plotbunnies) with great potential. They may seem like expendable peons, but bureaucrats are a bit more like chaos butterflies; they push the paper that makes the world go around. And when they stop pushing, it all falls apart.
Take the lowly Administrative Assistant, for example. Their job title and many of their responsibilities are generic, but they are indispensable in a research setting. They know where everything is! If the FDA comes looking to bust heads, a good Admin Asst can save your bacon just by knowing the filing system and its inefficiencies better than anyone else does. AAs also have a wonderfully helpful habit of getting to know people outside their department. They spend a lot of time chatting with Payroll and Information Services, and those are good friends to have if your starving Lab Tech ever fills out their timesheet incorrectly, or your computer dies the morning before a big grant deadline.
Research Administrators do a lot of detail-oriented, frustratingly repetitive work. Each RA keeps track of several scientists’ outgoing grant applications (budget, conflicts of interest, deadlines, etc.), reconciles spending on each scientist’s various research accounts, and works with Human Resources on laboratory staffing matters. Research Admins are the go-to people for scientists and sponsors alike. They have intimate knowledge of every Project, Core, and study in their portfolio, and a good RA handles enormous and fragile egos equally well.
Contracts Administrators make sure sponsors aren’t screwing the scientist or the institution, and by necessity act as background diplomats to Regulators and other laboratories. Financial Administrators look at the big picture and make sure everyone’s salaries and other projected expenses are actually covered through the end of the fiscal period, etc. Scientific Reviewers examine grant applications and help decide which deserve funding and which don’t. Regulators and Auditors are the law; comply, or else!
See how perilous it is to interfere with bureaucrats? Science is hobbled when their ‘little’ jobs don’t get done. Those stakes are certainly high enough for fiction, but they’re not very…interesting. Face it: There’s no glory in bureaucracy. But there can be conflict.
First, remember that Administrators are people, too. They want something they don’t deserve. They need something they can’t have. Sometimes they make big mistakes, and sometimes they’re just jerks.
Second, they work with the best educated, most expert people on the planet. Some of that is bound to rub off on interested people, but paper-pushers with inferiority complexes or problems with authority are going to suffer in that environment.
Third, plenty of Admins have a relationship with science independent of their dayjob. Some were scientists once upon a time. Some chose these careers because they either couldn’t afford a science education or couldn’t commit to one, and the bureaucracy was as close as they felt they could get to their dreams. Some just enjoy being ‘close to greatness’.
At the very least, all of this makes for interesting watercooler conversation around the lab. With a little more imagination, previously invisible paper-pushers could be saving the world from their cubicles, five days a week.
(Someday I’ll write a story like that…just as soon as I finish processing this tower of grants.)
As a researcher, I’ve had good, bad, and indifferent administrators. Luckily for me, I had good ones early in my career when I didn’t know what I was doing. Unfortunately my current workplace tends to shuffle administrators frequently, so I have to (sigh) retrain them again. I do appreciate their work, and it’s important to remember that by treating people like administrators nicely they are more likely to work hard for me. (Surprising how many don’t realize this.)
One of the best “regulators running the world” stories isn’t SF. It’s in Mark Helprin’s pointlessly brilliant A Soldier of the Great War. It’s about a young Italian man and his experiences during WW1, which are more surreal and bizarre than anything I’ve read since, and which illustrate the way the great machinery of The State is completely blind to the needs and wants of its ordinary citizens.
One of Helprin’s culprits in this is a mad little man who becomes chief scribe of orders, taking them from central command and passing them to the Italian front. He works in a nondescript library-like building in Rome, and deliberately scrambles the messages as they’re heading out in little ways– so that a requisition for 1000 eggs becomes 100000, or moving troops back and forth over the same ground without rhyme or reason.
The protagonist’s discovery of this, and his quest for revenge, make for hilarious and poignant reading.
I concur with both you and Calvin that 1) good administrators are worth their weight in gold, they help hold up the sky; 2) administrators come in all shapes (wonderful, quotidian and horrific) and 3) if university admins dislike you it’s permanent hell, since their positions, unlike that of faculty, are permanent and rarely contingent on grants (except for those who are funded from a specific project).
In my case, unlike Calvin’s, the situation during my career start was so bad that I had to teach myself how to do everything both pre-award (budgets, personnel justification, cover letter) and post-award (keeping track of the grants financially, in addition to the progress reports and the multiple layers of approvals, to say nothing of radiation safety, chemical and environmental safety, animal protocols…).
I had 1) an entire year’s budget disappear because an accountant lost the credit letter from the NIH only to find it a scant two months before the grant expired in the bottom of her drawer, 2) another budget messed up for two years because another accountant miskeyed the numbers of a multi-part grant and insisted that she was right, not the five scientists pulling their hair and 3) payroll pay one of my lab members an extra 2K and insist that, although they were wrong, the software formula was sacrosanct. Even today, when the admins who surround me are decent at minimum and often better than that, I still break into a cold sweat when I see a grant sheet from Accounting.
I was also twice offered a position of Branch Administrator at the NIH twice. These officers, as you mention, were scientists themselves and can start or stop scientific trends. They can make or break someone’s research by determining which of several equally scored grants to fund, when money is tight — as it has increasingly become in the last decade.
Unfortunately I do most of my own admin stuff – very frustrating and time-consuming. Add government paperwork on top of the usual grant paperwork… shudder.
I’m reading Charlie Stross’s Atrocity Archive books right now. There’s a strong bureaucratic element, though it isn’t usually portrayed favorable. And many of them do have guns!