 |
| David Mills and a room of para-academics |
The annual conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators took place in Brighton at the beginning of June. The event, and the association itself, has mushroomed in recent years. I’ve written before about this exponential growth. At the turn of the millennium ARMA’s forerunner, RAGnet, had 350 members; fifteen years later the Brighton conference, which was attended by only a fraction of ARMA's membership, had 750 delegates.
Part of me is proud of this, and part of me is shocked. Who are all these people? Seeing the delegate list was a moment of existential angst. Why do we exist? Who are we? What are we? The sociologist Laurie Taylor recently wrote in the Times Higher Education about this new ‘tribe’: "Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics."
