My Book

Our Teaching's Great, The Admin Sucks: Tales from Inside Higher Education

The Book

Welcome to higher education in the UK, where a degree will cost you £50,000, and universities’ glossy corporate publicity promises access to ‘world class’ teaching, research, and facilities in exchange.

Except, when you arrive, that smiling person you spoke to at Open Day is nowhere to be seen.

Your classes are taught by someone on a temporary contract, paid less than the cost of a single term’s tuition fees.

And, it turns out, no-one ever actually read your personal statement.

Take a trip behind the scenes with Ben Richards, a man whose desire for a gentle, low-stakes job providing administrative support somehow led to a career as an HE ‘professional’, via a rocky and circuitous route encompassing numerous moments of personal humiliation.

Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is a humorous account of life inside higher education, told by the least-qualified person in the room, who got fed up of wondering why working in a place of learning, surrounded by supposedly clever people, felt like the stupidest job in the world.

You can buy it via Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play and Kobo.

The Author

Ben Richards is a former university administrator who over the course of nearly 20 years progressed, at a leisurely pace, to a variety of more senior roles with baffling-sounding job titles.

​Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is his first book.

Extracts