This is not so much a rant, but a post intended to give some idea of the enormous amount of administrative burden a typical PI at a research university has to deal with every day. For the first 3 days of this week I accomplished absolutely zero science whatsoever – no experiments, no paper writing, no data analysis, nothing. Instead, I spent 3 solid days (8am-5:30pm) trying to rid my email in-box of administrative tasks…

• Wrote a letter of recommendation for someone I’ve only ever met once and who didn’t send me her CV when requesting the letter. Typically do at least 2 such letter a month.
• Submitted 2 animal protocol modifications via what is quite possibly the most arcane online system imaginable (Granite/Topaz – only works in IE, frequently crashes or just doesn’t load at all).
• Submitted protocols again when they came back with questions. Then submitted them a 3rd time just now.
• Bought plane tickets for a visiting lectureship I have to do next week. Admin’ assistant at the other university had left, and her replacement didn’t contact me to arrange anything. Still haven’t received any itinerary or idea of who I’m meeting with during my visit. They want me to take a cab from airport to hotel when I arrive at 1pm (seriously, there’s no-one available to meet with?)
• Complied powerpoint slides for the above.
• Processed paperwork for getting student reimbursed for a trip he made to a collaborator’s lab. Apparently students have to use a different form than the one everyone else uses. Does it say “not for students” on the form we used first time? Like hell it does.
• Drafted 2 thank-you letters for the reviewers and readers of a grant panel that I co-chair for a charity.
• Submitted an NIH progress report via the delightful new RPPR system. This is the replacement for eSNAP, and hey why use a simple 2 page form when 7 pages with multiple tabs will do?
• Related to this, 2 weeks ago I submitted manuscripts via the NIHMS system, to make sure they’re in compliance with the public access mandate. Apparently it takes up to 6 weeks for each manuscript to be assigned a PubMedCentral ID. The business admin’ at my institution contacted me at 5:30pm the night before the progress report deadline, claiming they could not submit the report due to non-compliance. Some advance notice of this might have helped! (Thankfully they submitted anyway, but now there’ll be a delay in issuance of the NOA).  All-told over the past 2 weeks this progress report involved >30 emails back and forth.
• Just to confuse matters further, the NIHMS website, the RPPR site, and the MyNCBI site (used to enter papers into NIHMS), all use the exact same login as NIH eRA commons. As such, at one point I was logged into all 4 websites simultaneously with the same login ID. If this isn’t a major security flaw I don’t know what is. Could they make it any more complicated?
• Had an annual evaluation meeting with my lab’ tech. This year Human Resources replaced the simple 1 page form with a new 6-page PDF, full of really insightful questions (Q. How does the employee behave toward patients and customers? A. They don’t because we’re researchers with no patient contact!  Q. How does the employee add value to the institution’s mission? A. Maybe if the institution didn’t re-write their mission statement every 6 months I’d be able to answer).  The PDF “lost” some information during submission (different versions of Acrobat), so my Dept’ admin’ had to print it out and bring it to me to fill in the missig info’ and sign it manually.
• In addition to the 6 page forms (one each for me and the employee), there was a job description form, an education record, a HIPAA statement, an “ICARE” employee values commitment statement, and an “age specific competency statement”.  6 items in total, more than half of which was about patient care duties, for a research lab’ tech with no patient contact whatsoever.
• To get it out of the way (to make room for more admin!), I mistakenly decided to do my Mandatory In-Service exam. This is something all employees have to do to prove they understand various rules (what “code blue/pink/orange” on the intercom means, etc). The course is administered in BlackBoard (vomit). The first part of the test is an assessment of roles to determine which test you have to take. Despite qualifying as having no patient contact, my test (65 questions, 58 correct required to pass) included questions about wearing lifting gear to transfer heavy patients, how to deal with patients with guns, how to find an interpreter, etc. Who designs these things? I passed, but seriously what a waste of everyone’s time.
• Until recently I was paid 5% off a grant that involved human subjects research, and even though I had no involvement in that part of the project, all members of the team were required to have human subjects protection training. I’m no longer involved with the project, but got a notice to renew my certification last week. The test is administered via a 3rd party (CITI). Given that I hadn’t done the test in about 4 years, the first step was to recover my password for the site.  1st attempt – nothing after 15 minutes. 2nd attempt – nothing. 3rd attempt – bingo there’s the email!  Reset my password and took the test. It was littered with grammatical errors, dead links, obtusely worded questions. I had to stop half-way to attend to something else. At 11pm (6 hours after first logging in), I got 2 more emails for password reset. When I tried logging in the next day it wouldn’t let me (because of the password reset requests – doh!) so I had to reset twice more and then resume the test – quel surprise – some of my answers had been lost.
• Processed paperwork for getting RAP’s professional society membership refunded from a discretionary account. But account was overdrawn…
• Last fall an equipment purchase resulted in the account being charged twice and going $5k overdrawn. Finally (5 months after being requested!) accounts payable got their act together and refunded, so now the account is in the black it can be un-frozen for me to actually spend on.
• Reviewed 2 de novo manuscripts for journals, and a 3rd that was a resubmission.

There was a bunch of other stuff interspersed too – follow ups from lab’ safety inspection, scheduling of June NIH study section and assignment of proposals to review, lots of dealing with journal editors in my ongoing activities in the area of scientific integrity, plus minor stuff like responding to emails, signing bits of paper.

But where’s the science?  During the past 3 days (well actually a week because I was out of town reviewing grants Thu/Fri last week) I’ve done nothing that I’m actually paid to do. No experiments at the bench, no reading papers (except on the bus), no discussing data with my lab, no thinking about future ideas for experiments, no writing exam questions or updating teaching materials.  Just hour after hour of mind-numbing attempts to get my email inbox cleared of this constant barrage of administrative clutter…  If it’s not paper review requests then it’s grant reviews, travel arrangements, departmental paperwork, grant submissions, society work, personnel and HR stuff, committees, legal/compliance/oversight paperwork, newfangled forms, accounting errors, chasing up lost orders, etc. It never ends. Never.

I did it in the end (got down to 3 emails, all of them from collaborators and talking actual science). This catharsis is supposed to make me feel accomplished, serene, refreshed, ready to do and talk science. But instead all I feel is anger at the wasted time, depressed at how this is going to happen all over again in a few days. Administrative bloat is sucking my will to live. It is slowly killing me and everyone around me, one email at a time.

P.S. required reading for anyone enraged by this topic