The irresistible growth of bureaucracy

Some bits and pieces that you can interpolate, and that - in my opinion - are part of a trajectory that you might see as well.

First of all, I have just received a mail message from the Ministry of University and Research, that is, my employer. It states that:

the Ministerial Decree n. 639/2024 of 02/05/2024 determined and introduced the scientific-disciplinary groups (“GSD”) in place of the competitive sectors and updated the scientific-disciplinary sectors (“SSD”). The new classification for each professor and researcher in service will be effective only following the adoption of the relevant rectoral decree. With this e-mail, we anticipate what your new position will be, uniquely determined.

Your current SSD, as known, is: INF/01 - COMPUTER SCIENCE belonging to the competition sector: 01/B1 - COMPUTER SCIENCE

Your new SSD will be: INFO-01/A - Computer science belonging to the GSD 01/INFO-01 - COMPUTER SCIENCE

A few weeks ago, my Department has undergone an internal evaluation procedure by a (semi independent: partly composed of personnel from my university, partly from external people) evaluation group (Nucleo di Valutazione), preceded by a preliminary meeting with another group deciding quality management procedures related to teaching (Presidio di Qualità in Ateneo - ramo didattica, all people from my university) to prepare for this evaluation. Of course we preliminarily had to prepare a set of documents, describing our internal procedures. We often have the feeling that the documents are more important than the substance of the activities: basically, these forms of evaluation have the tenet “if it is not documented I will not consider it”, which is dramatically close to “if it is not documented it doesn’t exist”.

At the beginning of each month I have to fill in timesheets, in which I report time spent on funded research projects, as well as any other work related activity. Of course, I must separately fill in a register for my lessons, and there is currently no way to have information about my class activities flow from one system to the other, or (God forbid!) from my calendar to any of these systems.

Now, sorry, but I must get ready to select the publications to indicate in an internal funding allocation which will grant me money sufficient (hopefully) for a mission to attend a conference (unless it’s too far away), and they need to be selected based on the Scimago journal rankings (by the way, Scimago is asking me to allow ads from its website! Hilarious!) or CORE rankings (pardon me, now it is iCORE).

Well, you probably have a clue on why I have not posted anything since February…