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.
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Except when you arrive, that smiling person you spoke to at Open Day is nowhere to be seen.
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Your classes are taught by someone on a temporary contract, paid less than the cost of a single term’s tuition fees.
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And, it turns out, no-one ever actually read your personal statement.
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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.
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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.
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Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is his first book.