The Tuesday picture
Quote of the day
The Midgie’s week in 200 words
lower case: a poem
A group of university teachers
But then it all changed. What I can only, in a very ugly usage, call the managerialisation of universities from the 1990s created new roles and new problems. Senior members of academic staff had to become ‘managers’. The days when a part-time dean of a faculty was able to spend time looking out slides for a 10am lecture were past: deans became full-time managers (and their office was eventually abolished for something more businesslike).
Those who couldn’t teach went into management. Those who couldn’t even manage were put in charge of spurious indicators of ‘excellence’ (eg, the risible National Student Survey). These people adopted the empty language of management and a curled lip, when dealing with mere academics, to accompany it. I remember one such person ostentatiously patronising, with managerial language, a very senior (and much-loved) professor in a meeting, to his complete bemusement. But then he was merely a very distinguished and humane scholar and teacher.
I was only ever on the fringes of ‘management’, but senior colleagues were whisked away for afternoons or whole days to be ‘trained’ in the arcane arts of ‘management’. Some came back with gleeful tales of how daft it had been while others despaired of its banality. The training courses were mostly run by external consultants who were paid a fat fee for their efforts. Later, a woman was hired on a half-time basis to organise leadership training, 360 degree feedback and all the other things without which the modern university apparently cannot survive.
One external consultant offered an afternoon on ‘How does an understanding of brand and positioning aid the process of postgraduate recruitment?’. This person was from Stamp Consulting. I was puzzled: stamp collecting I knew about, but stamp consulting?
While some layers of management consisted of people who had formerly been full-time academics, new layers – particularly at central level – were formed, usually staffed by people who had a ‘business background’ and certainly staffed by people who had done some kind of business management course. It quickly became painfully evident that these people had little idea of what the purpose of a university was.
So a whole layer of ‘management’ was established where the new language of managers was embedded. I remember being at a meeting about postgraduate recruitment where the person in charge kept talking about ‘capturing’ things (not potential students). At the centre of all of this was ‘HR’, human resources, which used to be known as personnel. I am not sure how HR developed such a stranglehold on university structures and staff, but that is what they have done.
I learned from personal experience that the one thing you do not need to have to be in human resources is any kind of empathy with human beings or understanding of what motivates – and what repels – human beings. Three weeks after I retired from 39 years of full-time, continuous employment in my university, I contacted HR (as instructed) about the process for retaining my office email account, as an honorary fellow. I was told bluntly that they had no records relating to me. HR has decreed that retired members of staff be designated ‘visitors’, in the face of strictures in a senate ordinance that professors emeriti, at least, should be treated as full members of the university community and not as visitors.
A few years ago, HR at Edinburgh University produced a document called ‘Developing a Co-ordinated Leadership Framework across the University’s managerial grades’. This was because: ‘The strong support for a co-ordinated approach to leadership development across the University’s senior managerial grades reinforces the need for an OD approach to identifying and delivering business-focussed leadership development’. OD? More like ODD.
It went on: ‘A key mechanism which will support the overall leadership framework and its objectives will be a competency framework’. A major clue to the orientation envisaged lay in the perceived need to ‘achieve business objectives by motivating and working through staff and colleagues (including recognising and bringing about behavioural change if required)’. Ah! Turn them all into obedient robots. No wonder so many of them are now demoralised.
It may be that those who work in business regard all of this as quite normal. Perhaps they even know what it means. Those of us who have spent decades trying to write – and to get our students to write – in clear, readily comprehensible English have difficulty with the jargon involved in all matters managerial. What is a ‘competency framework’? Who knows? Who cares?
