An academic administration is a branch of university or college employees responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the institution and separate from the research and teaching faculty. Such an administration exists at almost all academic institutions, though a few are run exclusively by employees who are also involved in academic or scholarly work.
An academic administrator is member of an academic institution's administrative staff; many administrators are former academics with advanced degrees who no longer teach or research actively.
Academic administrations are structured in various ways at different institutions and in different countries. In the United States a college or university is typically supervised by a president who reports regularly to a Board of Trustees made up of individuals from outside the institution. Deans supervise various more specific aspects of the institution and report to the president. The division of responsibility among deans varies widely between institutions; some are chiefly responsible for clusters of academic fields (such as the humanities or natural sciences) or whole academic units (such as a graduate school or college), while others are responsible for non-academic but campus-wide concerns such as minority affairs. In some cases a provost supervises the institution's entire academic staff, occupying a position generally superior to any dean. Below deans in the administrative hierarchy are heads of individual academic departments and of individual administrative departments from groundskeeping to libraries to registrars of records. These heads then supervise the staff of their individual departments.
Key responsibilities (and thus departments) in many institutions' administrations include:
Supervision of academic affairs, tenure and hiring decisions (deans and provost);
Maintenance of official records (typically supervised by a registrar);
An academicadministration is a branch of university or college employees responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the institution and separate from the faculty or academics, although some personnel may have joint responsibilities.
Some type of separate administrative structure exists at almost all academic institutions, as fewer and fewer schools are governed by employees who are also involved in academic or scholarly work.
The division of responsibility among deans varies widely among institutions; some are chiefly responsible for clusters of academic fields (such as the humanities or natural sciences) or whole academic units (such as a graduate school or college), while others are responsible for non-academic but campus-wide concerns such as minority affairs.
The word administration is from the Old English administracioun, deriving from the French administration, which is itself derived from the Latin administratio: a compounding of ad ("to") and ministratio ("to give service").
Administration is both an art and a science (if an inexact one), and arguably a craft, as administrators are judged ultimately by their performance.
Administration pendente lite, where there is a dispute as to the person entitled to probate or a general grant of letters the court appoints an administrator till the question has been decided.
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