How does management work in academia?
Generally speaking &quot;management&quot; in a university takes a different role and faculty are generally expected to know what to do and to do it to a high standard. In a certain sense, every faculty member is an independent entity and they only need to coordinate on a few things. Those things, such as curriculum and grading policy, are normally handled by committees of faculty, not handed down from above.
Typically a department will have monthly faculty meetings in which things are communicated and new opportunities and directions are discussed. Solutions are normally by consensus. The meetings may be mandatory or not, but the mandate can be pretty loose.
There are few situations in which a tenured professor is told what to do by &quot;management&quot;. And some of the layers of management, such as department heads and even deans may actually be chosen by vote of the faculty.
So, in a forty year career, I seldom &quot;reported&quot; to anyone in the traditional sense and no one &quot;managed&quot; me and my work. True, I submitted an annual report of my activities and said there how I worked toward the three traditional goals of the university: teaching, research, and service. The department head or dean would respond to that report, perhaps making suggestions, usually minor, on things I might do in the coming year.
Even it times of conflict, such as when a student complains, the complaint often is handled by faculty rather than by &quot;management.&quot;
Faculty normally self organize into seminars and such, and normally worry about their funding. There may be some pressure about that in top universities.
In the traditional (Medieval) university, the faculty IS the university and it would hire &quot;managers&quot; to do those tasks that they found unsatisfying. It is still somewhat similar in many places, but less so in large R1 and State Universities.
There is a story about Rockefeller Columbia University (if I remember correctly) that when ex-president Dwight Eisenhower became the university president, he held a meeting and told the faculty all the &quot;wonderful things the university would do for the faculty.&quot; The head of the faculty (an elected position) stood up and said something to the effect that the university couldn't do anything FOR the faculty. The university WAS the faculty.
There are, however, many support offices in a university that are managed in a traditional sense. There is often a funding support office, an enrollment office, a counseling office, etc. It can be very extensive. But they don't manage faculty. Instead, they provide support services to faculty and others, though internally they may be traditionally managed. A &quot;student recruiter&quot; would probably answer to a &quot;boss&quot;.