Welcome to higher education in the UK.
Here, an undergraduate degree will cost you £50,000. In exchange, universities’ glossy publicity promises access to ‘world class’ teaching, research, and facilities.
Except when you arrive, that smiling person you spoke to at Open Day is nowhere to be seen.
Your classes are taught by someone on a temporary contract, paid less than the cost of a single term’s tuition fees.
And, it turns out, no-one ever actually read your personal statement.
Take a trip behind the scenes with Ben Richards, a man whose desire for a gentle, low-stakes job providing administrative support somehow led to a career as an HE ‘professional’, via a rocky and circuitous route encompassing numerous moments of personal humiliation.
Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is a humorous account of life inside higher education, told by the least-qualified person in the room, who got fed up of wondering why working in a place of learning, surrounded by supposedly clever people, felt like the stupidest job in the world.
Ben Richards is a former university administrator who over the course of nearly 20 years progressed, at a leisurely pace, to a variety of more senior roles with baffling-sounding job titles.
Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is his first book.