I share all of your concerns about the costs of bureaucracy and rule-following in place of broadly accepted principles for guiding decisions making. What confuses me is when the demands for rules come from the bottom, upward through the administrative hierarchy. The discussion on my campus about mask mandates in the classroom has seen many faculty demanding that the administration scold the students into complying. Faculty are comfortable with exercising total authority over the content of their course, but become very reluctant to exercise any control over the behavior of their students. I'm not trying to be nostalgic for a time when teachers were unquestioned authorities, but it seems like the balance has been thrown off. The same thing happened among the staff who wanted rigid rules about returning to physical work around schedules, etc. I argued that middle managers, like myself, should be able to make that decision based on our judgment. In that case, the rules were avoided but there was still the oddity of people lower on the power hierarchy requesting more regulation of their own behaviors. Is this a matter of individual psychology and how people deal with ambiguity? Or is there a cultural trend at large that pushes us toward greater regulation? Your recent comments on decriminalization seem appropriate in some way.
I share all of your concerns about the costs of bureaucracy and rule-following in place of broadly accepted principles for guiding decisions making. What confuses me is when the demands for rules come from the bottom, upward through the administrative hierarchy. The discussion on my campus about mask mandates in the classroom has seen many faculty demanding that the administration scold the students into complying. Faculty are comfortable with exercising total authority over the content of their course, but become very reluctant to exercise any control over the behavior of their students. I'm not trying to be nostalgic for a time when teachers were unquestioned authorities, but it seems like the balance has been thrown off. The same thing happened among the staff who wanted rigid rules about returning to physical work around schedules, etc. I argued that middle managers, like myself, should be able to make that decision based on our judgment. In that case, the rules were avoided but there was still the oddity of people lower on the power hierarchy requesting more regulation of their own behaviors. Is this a matter of individual psychology and how people deal with ambiguity? Or is there a cultural trend at large that pushes us toward greater regulation? Your recent comments on decriminalization seem appropriate in some way.