The administration has sent out another “survey” by Nous to assess shared services. The survey is very similar to the first one and asks us to evaluate service relevance and performance. The only difference is that it’s even more incompetent than the last one (if you can believe it). For example, one section asks if wi-fi, email, or toilets are “critical” to our work. That the administration has paid more than $325,440 for this garbage tells us everything we need to know about just how much senior administrators care about the academic mission.1

Like the last survey, it’s a trap, and there is no good way of answering it. If you are concerned that your participation might be used to legitimize layoffs (it will), don’t answer the survey. Alternatively, you can simply answer “critical” and “very satisfied” to every question and use the comment section to make some suggestions for more effective budget cuts to the administration: that senior administrators (Principal, Vice-Principals, Provost) put their money where their mouth is and take a 10% pay cut. After all, their salaries account for more than 18% of the shared service budget, despite representing only 1% of the non-academic staff. Against this backdrop, our “senior administration effectiveness” report determined the most irrelevant senior administrative positions – why not start there? Alternatively, the administration could start putting the university’s considerable investment income into education rather than buildings.

For those who do want to answer the survey, we have one important plea: some of the questions ask about your satisfaction with things that objectively don’t work at all. Please still check “very satisfied”. Here’s why: each question is associated with staff positions, and in Nous’ “methodology”,  positions with the lowest ratings will be considered for the chopping block. Because poor performance is typically tied to understaffing rather than the competence of the workers delivering these services, checking anything other than “very satisfied” risks punishing our overworked colleagues and worsening service delivery. Take the following example: the bathrooms in Mac-Corry are disgusting. Absolutely embarrassing. The reason for the state of cleanliness is that the administration isn’t paying workers enough hours to actually keep them clean – it has nothing to do with the workers themselves, who are already underpaid and overworked for the critical jobs they are doing. But the poor grade for facilities workers may lead to further layoffs, punishing staff for the administration’s incompetence, while worsening the already embarrassing state of cleanliness in Mac-Corry. So, please check “very satisfied” regardless of how you truly feel about the service performance. As you can see, it really is a trap. 

The survey responses are due November 17. For a more in-depth critique of the poor methodology of the Nous survey and an explanation of what it’s actually measuring, see our post on the first survey.

  1. Known cumulative value of Nous contracts with Queen’s obtained through Freedom of Information requests. The actual number has likely increased, since the business model of consulting agencies is a parasitic exploitation of the main structural problem – provincial underfunding – at the expense of the public. ↩︎

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