Academic Bureaucracy Survey

Everyone I know in academia complains about bureaucracy. But many researchers only work at a couple of institutions at most. This makes it hard to know whether the bureaucracy at your institution is better or worse than average.

I created the ABS to provide some quantitative data to back up all the complaining. Now, when you and your peers get together at a conference, you'll know who really is dealing with the most academic BS.

I completed a PhD at Virginia Tech and a postdoc at NYU. Between these two universities, I detected some significant differences in amount of process required to get things done. Even more revealing experiences occurred when I was handling grant contracts at a nonprofit. A few universities were able to turn around countersigned contracts within a couple of weeks. But many took months to get to the point where we could actually send the money.

As far as I'm aware, no one published this information in a way that can be attributed to a specific institution. That creates little incentive for universities to improve. So I decided to try to address this by ranking universities, using actual quantitative information about processes.

Hi, I'm Mal. I spent a few years in academia and more working with academic institutions from within the nonprofit world. I currently work at Renaissance Philanthropy, but this project is a total side thing and not affiliated with my work. I still make grants to academic institutions and I still wonder why some are so much easier to work with than others.

The ABS opened to responses on 09 September 2026. Results will be published in a table once enough institutions clear the reporting threshold: at least ten usable responses for a given institution, and at least five institutions ready before the first release. Institutions with five to nine responses will be listed separately as having provisional data.

The table will update periodically as new responses come in.

Right now I'm focusing on gathering responses from universities in the USA.

If I get enough interest and this appears to be useful to people, I'll probably make a push for more responses or try to get updated data every few years, and sunset old data that may no longer be representative. I will also probably update the questions based on feedback, and open it to more countries.

We use emails to verify that respondents actually work at the institution they name, and to prevent accidental multiple responses. After that check, the address is replaced with an anonymized identifier that cannot be turned back into your address.

Nothing you submit is published at the individual level. Results are reported as institution-level medians, and a figure is only published once the institution clears the reporting threshold, so no single response is ever identifiable from the table. Free-text comments are read by me and will not be shared publicly.

I do not sell, share, or license the data, and I will not disclose responses to any institution, including yours.

Thanks to Claude (the LLM) for feedback on the wording and selection of some questions, and for coding the website. Thanks to Abraham Rowe, Bob Fischer, David Moss, and Zack Li for feedback on the survey. Their feedback does not imply endorsement of this project.