MGG - 6.11 - Gloria - admin

I have been a management consultant, and therefore understand the importance, and necessity, for administration.  Administration is also very important to the field of information security.  The largest single class of security practitioners is likely that of security administrators: those who maintain the rights and permissions for users and resources.  Therefore, yes, I know that administration is important.

However, while I know that it is important, and I can do it, and I can, and have, set up administrative systems in various situations, doing administration itself is, for me, pure, hard, boring work.

Gloria worked as an administrator.  She did this both professionally, and personally, on a volunteer basis.  She was always supremely organized, and was very good at organizing others.  I'm not sure that I actually know how she *felt* about administration, but there is absolutely no question that she was far more skilled at it than I was, and that she had far more natural aptitude for it than I did.

I am a scholar.  Of the old school.  The old time scholars loved to learn, and to write, and to teach.  This isn't necessarily the case anymore.  Scholarship, these days, relies much much more on administration.  When you do your research for a doctorate, or for a scholarly book, these days, you are required much more to cite, accurately, and at great length, a great many sources supporting your work.  It is much more important to build the citations, then it is to actually produce a result that might be useful to anyone.  Therefore, these days, scholarship is much more about administration then it used to be.  This is not, necessarily, entirely a bad thing.  Much of the research of days gone by may have been flawed because a scholar remembered, or thought he remembered, reading something somewhere once, and expressed that idea as fixed and valid, when that citation may not have said exactly what he thought it said, and may, possibly, never have existed at all.  Thus the importance of administration.  But we may have gone overboard, these days, and requiring much more administration, than thought.

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