Three Types

Appeared in Volume 6/1, February 1993

In bygone eras, when ivory towers outnumbered office blocks, the leisured academic could relax in his wood-panelled rooms, sip a glass of port and contemplate his bust of Byron without concerning himself with the squabbles of the lower classes. The august professor assumed that business people kept themselves busy making steam engine values or ribbed cotton undergarments. Back then, administrators could still be conversed with socially, having gone to the right school, and could be relied upon to do nothing that was disagreeable to the status quo.

It seemed that natural selection had finessed the Human Race into three, mercifully, distinct types. Unfortunately, we now know that view to be depressingly wrong. Money links the three classes: academics spend it, business men make it, and administrators manage it. We understand this because of the `Collaborative Project' mania of the 80's, a dissolute fad which looks like becoming a fashion.

Just as the no-strings funding of the 60's and 70's started to dry up, it reappeared under the collaborative project heading. The Faustian deal was simple - the cosy academic life style would only continue if a pact was made with business, a pact managed by the administrators. The bitter pill was sugar-coated by the fact that the typical business man was now an executive. Engine widget manufacture had been replaced by the coding of productivity-oriented software tools. The fact that an executive could not recite tracks of `Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' hardly mattered, since neither could the academic. However, conversations could still present difficulties, as the executive elaborated his theory that object-oriented neural network technology, combined with the vigilance of an expert system-driven natural language interface, would generate more efficient COBOL code. This drivel was reminiscent of a Masters student's first report, but the academic had to listen with a semblance of politeness, or no more money.

An essential component of these collaborate ventures is the six monthly meeting. The academic sees them as a chance for a holiday in an exotic location, to stock up on those little champagne bottles given away on international flights, and to buy a bit of duty-free for next Christmas. However, such events are the life-blood of the administrator - he can sit at the head of a round table, correlate the minutes of the meetings, and dispatch requests for tea and biscuits. He will listen sagely to the presentations and then expound on the implications for the future. He may slap a few wrists, and congratulate the business men on their vision.

It was obvious that tensions would arise from this heady mix of academia, business and administration. The nadir was a meeting held at an unnamed institution in Brussels in 1990, where a computer scientist from a minor English university went berserk with a sub-machine gun. A faulty (British) design meant that the firing mechanism jammed, and so no one was hurt. The event was hushed up, but changes in the collaborative structure were initiated. The first result of this was the COMPULOG project, where participants at international meetings are frisked before being allowed into the building.

Andrew Davison

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