Depending on the department or school you are working within, there is an extremely toxic work environment. Managers that question the sexuality of students, making inappropriate remarks about employees calling out to attend funerals, and when reported face nearly no repercussions. Every day working there caused degrees of anxiety among many staff members. Essentially if you didn't have a Ph.D. you didn't matter in the eyes of senior management and faculty, and it was hammered into you on a regular basis that you didn't matter.
Very outdated management and senior leadership at most academic arms of the school. It follows very traditional 70's-80's office styles of management with differing levels of culpability when it comes to staff vs faculty. (eg. Staff were expected to dress in a business professional manner despite having nearly no public facing roles, however faculty are allowed to wear shorts, sandals, and t-shirts despite being in front of parents, students, donors, and the public in general on a regular basis, even within labs where such dress is absolutely against safety policy).
Refusal to accept any new developments or technologies creating vast amounts of inefficiencies across the board.
No acceptance of recommendations from subject matter experts, decisions overridden by other individuals, then blame falls on the SME for decisions that bypassed their approval.
Depending on the unit/department, no acceptance of responsibility for bad decision making. Blame is often issued to other individuals or "elements outside our control".
The word "Strategic" is used often, however nearly everything is done tactically, with no measures of how successful something was, no idea if something actually worked or not due to poor planning and power struggles among school leaders within a department.
Individuals schools and departments within the university are often competitive to one another, but to a degree that it is unhealthy and absolutely detrimental to the university as a whole.
Almost no means of career progression or improvements. There have been employees working there full-time for years that have not seen a raise or potential for promotion. It's to be expected in a public sector position, but it is an insanely hard battle to get any kind of improved compensation. The only employees that get regular increases to wages or benefits are senior leaders and management.
Incompetence when it comes to usage of budgets or funds available. The purchase of a night club for over 3 million dollars, when the market value is around 800k, and while there are classrooms literally falling apart is absolutely abhorrent.
