Parking Enforcement at the University of Texas at Austin

From 11 September 2023 until 16 January 2026, I was employed as a parking enforcement officer at the University of Texas (Austin). 

The absolute best part of the job was the occasional postings to the Pickle Research Center because the food was excellent; I worked alone; and the population there was even a little smarter than the community at the main campus. They made it easy to be lenient, helpful, and informative; and I could still issue ten citations on any day. 

On the main campus, I enjoyed the outreach tables
to give insulated drink mugs along with other merch and swag
to anyone who came up and asked a question.

This was my longest run of W-2 employment since 1991-1993 at Kawasaki Robotics USA, following 1973-1975 with Montgomery Ward & Co; both of those lasting 1 year and 50 weeks. My theory of labor value was informed by Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975). My time at Kawasaki, where I taught robot operations and programming, derived from having read (in 1989) William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Job Description Summary

• Provides university parking services by enforcing University rules and regulations. 
• Ensures that parking regulations are enforced and assists the public with information, such as directions to buildings and offices. 
• Provides assistance to the public by giving parking directions and checking parking permits on vehicles entering the parking lots. 
• Directs flow of traffic and parking of cars. 
• Issues pass-through or visitor's permits when needed. Issues traffic and parking violation citations. 
• Acts as Relief Guard to perform a combination of kiosk guard duties and parking enforcement assistant (PEA) or ticket writer functions. 
• Performs preventative maintenance checks on vehicles. 
• Installs and removes immobilization devices. 
• Controls parking access to surface lots during special events and other university sponsored activities. 
• Resolves or refers parking issues as appropriate. 
• May provide security functions at Pickle Research Center (PRC) to include patrolling buildings and grounds on foot or in vehicles to check for prowlers, fires, water leaks, and general building security.  
• May report all irregularities, emergencies, or suspicious activity to the University Police Office. 
• May be required to rotate locations across campus, including satellite locations.  Other duties as assigned.
• WORKING CONDITIONS: Exposure to variable weather conditions and shift work with varying days off, occasional weekend and overtime.

Despite claiming to be a major research university and even after then-UT president Jay Hatzell declared academic year 2024-25 to be “The Year of AI” the societal dominance of the UT sports cartel is one of the reasons that I left. In our department, we wore UT blood orange tops on Fridays. It was allowed on other days but basic blue was always encouraged. During the football season, we were allowed to wear team jerseys and other UT-branded tops. I wore a “Texas Economics” t-shirt and was told that it did not meet standards because it had no collar. On a following Friday, I put a “Texas Science” t-shirt over a collared blood orange top and was told flat out by the manager who encouraged the football jerseys that this was not within the guidelines for dress. I replied, “It’s spirit day. We can wear UT gear.” His reply: “There are no spirit days.” The diminution of spirit was a constant problem for me.

I found people with a good sense of life at UT, for example at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum and the College of Fine Arts. I enjoyed interacting with them, even when writing citations for the students at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. When I volunteered at the Museum of Science everyone on the staff was enthusiastic, even when acknowledging the existence of unsolved problems at their desk. However, in the parking department eudaimonia was scarce.

This is how student athletes, especially football players, spend their NIL money. 

See recent college athlete valuations at Fox Sports here. 

Parking is like any other game: there are rules and penalties and everyone knows

what they are. The athletes enjoy being able to scoff at the fines 

so that in a community of 55,000 students and 22,000 staff and faculty

served by 13,000 parking spaces they can park wherever they want.

Athletes are given garage parking spaces as part of their scholarship payments. 

As one coach told me, "We don't have a parking problem. We have a walking problem." 

Contract buses take the football players from their lockers

at Moncrief Neuhaus to the Denius practice field less than a mile away and bring them back. 

I believe that it is why they have a hard time winning: they lack a competitive edge.

In 1982, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg moved from Harvard to UT. In 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. [In 2023], coach Steve Sarkisian was paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earned $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. (NecessaryFacts; January 21, 2025.) 

Ahead of the 2025 playing seaon, Arch Manning’s NIL payments were tallied at $6.8 million. (https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/top-25-college-athletes-highest-nil-valuations) That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

[I believe that Stanford science and Harvard economics put into proper context their very successful footballers. See “Stanford Alumni in the NFL Playoffs” here and football at Harvard here.  

See also Harvard Players Health Study ]

These performing arts students called in a complaint
on a professor who parked in the wrong space.
The citation is on the windshield.

The Human Resources department sent me a questionnaire about my separation. “On a scale of 1 to 10…” Most of it was for academics and managers. Some was for me and mine. At the end were two short essay questions. 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely am I to recommend UT as a place to work. I gave it a 3. 

• About a decade before I came to the University of Texas, I was earning my degrees while working part time for a multinational corporation headquartered in Europe. I knew that no one there knew who I was or cared. What mattered most was my boss, my co-workers, and our clients and their customers. The University of Texas is like that: 55,000 students; 22,000 staff and faculty; deep in the Heart of Texas. All that mattered was the supervisors I could talk to on a first name basis, my team, and the community which we served. 

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience at the University?

• I loved the museums and I really will miss the libraries. The semester-long checkouts made both research and casual reading very easy, whether writing about the history of physical science and its intersection with the fine arts or catching up on nineteenth century essayists. Occasionally, my daily work let me chat with students and faculty in the performing arts; they are always so interesting. All of that can be hard to find in one place in the private sector. But in the free market, I can make my own opportunities. Here, the paths were fewer and somewhat tangled with undergrowth.

Signage often provided an opportunity
to discuss semantics and sociology. 

I applied for eight other openings on campus, three of them in my own department, and I never got an interview. I adhere to Maslow's Hierarchy. I work for (1) transcendence and (2) self-actualization, (3) my team and (4) our clients, and then I consider (5) the money. This was not the best environment for me and there is more money elsewhere.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed

AFK: Parking Enforcement 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

Westrum’s “Three Cultures” Organizational Typology

Ronald Mark Westrum’s typology of organizations is an investigation of information flow in order to understand how groups thrive, survive, or fail. He finds that generative organizations get the right information to the right people in the right context. Bureaucratic organizations do this when the environment is conducive to stability, but they fail to perform under stressful new challenges. Pathological organizations have no concern for their outcomes and are defined only by how successful their leaders are at hoarding and controlling information for personal gain.

He writes: "I created a typology in 1988 to compare the way that organisations processed information. … The idea was to characterise general ways of coping with information, especially information that suggests anomaly. Failures in information flow figure prominently in many major accidents, but information flow is also a type marker for organisational culture. In some organisations, information flows well, and elicits prompt and appropriate responses. In others it is hoarded for political reasons or it languishes due to bureaucratic barriers. This typology has proven useful in a variety of safety related fields, such as aviation, nuclear power, and, increasingly, medicine. 

"The underlying idea is that leaders, by their preoccupations, shape a unit’s culture. … These preferences then become the preoccupation of the organisation’s workforce, because rewards, punishments, and resources follow the leader’s preferences.

"Generative organisations get the needed information to the right person in the right form and in the right time frame. This behaviour is based on the leader’s emphasis that the most important goal is to accomplish the mission.

"By contrast, pathological circles tend to view information as a personal resource, to be used in political power struggles. It will be withheld, doled out, or used as a weapon to advance particular parties within the organisation. 

"When bureaucratic organisations need to get information to the right recipient, they are likely to use the standard channels or procedures. These standard channels and procedures are often insufficient in a crisis. They failed, for instance, in communications between New York police and fire departments on 11 September 2001. The police knew that the World Trade Center north tower was about to collapse, but failed to communicate this to the firefighters inside the tower, many of whom died. By contrast, in the same circumstances many generative organisations would cross departmental lines or use a back channel to get the information to where it was needed. The Apollo 13 space crisis shows an excellent example of a generative response. By contrast, the fumbling that led to the demise of Columbia space shuttle shows bureaucracy at its worst."

 “A typology of organisational cultures,” BMJ Quality and Safety, 2004;13:ii22-ii27. https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22

 Ron Westrum was my professor for five of eight sociology classes at Eastern Michigan University 2005-2010 as I completed a BS in criminology and an MA in social science. Among those courses were Complex Organizations and the Sociology of Technology. He wrote Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake (Naval Institute Press, 1999), which was my introduction to the U.S. Naval Institute of which I have been a member since 2015.

Studying information flow in airline cockpits, Westrum applied his reseach to hospital operating rooms. From there, his theories gained even wider acceptance. You can find the full text of the paper in many places online. “A Typology of Organisational Cultures” by R. Westrum. Quality and Safety in Health Care 13 Suppl 2 (suppl_2):ii22-7 January 2005 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8150380_A_Typology_of_Organisational_Cultures  This work is widely cited. See “DevOps culture: Westrum organizational culture,” at 

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-culture-westrum-organizational-culture He has a stub in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Westrum

 

Dr. Westrum’s typology pinpoints the failure mode for a bureaucracy. However, in our class in complex organizations, we also examined its strengths. Bureaucracy is a pre-requisite to democracy, especially for a complex society. In a functioning bureaucracy, each piece of paper moves from desk to desk on its own merits regardless of the tribe, family, caste, religion, class, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, age, or wealth of its originator. America’s failure to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is attributable to the lack of functioning indigenous bureaucracies. A functioning bureaucracy does not necessarily bring democracy. We studied the Ottoman empire as a case in point. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

 

Our model for rescuing a bureaucracy was Capt. D. Michael Abrashoff’s It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (Warner, 2002). Since then, I believe that Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by Capt. David L. Marquet (Steven R. Covey, 2012) took the lesson even farther. Proof of this is the fact that Marquet’s Santa Fe and its people continued to thrive after he left, whereas the USS Benfold did not continue the journey charted by its captain.

 

 PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Team of Teams

Centralization and the Inverse-Square Law

A Good Place with Inadequate Philosophy

Not Less Grammar Errors

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops