Managerial Empowerment

Comments

• 7 November 2012 at 4:11pm
  davidwlkr0 says:
  Sadly, this litany of complaint has all the characteristics of the genre of 'academic hurt' - a subjective, unquantified cry, which might sit well in a literary journal but is unlikely to (re)shape policy.
  If universities are as managerialist as BP says, why do they have a general reputation for administrative inefficiency? To answer that, we'd need some figures, comparing staff and office costs against some benchmark. We'd also need (BP and his colleagues tend to blench) some intellectually robust statement about what it is universities do so we could at least see the relationship between their costs and their output. If that's deemed unacceptable (because what universities do is ineffable), you've lost at once lost the argument. The 'life of mind' may be hard to quantify, but it's surely not incapable of rigorous description.
  And so on: BP and his like need to get their act together and instead of bleating get together a sustained critique - of vicecancellarial ineptitude, inflated costs or whatever the thrust of the complaint might be...because it's not clear just what his problem is. And that muddiness of argument about the institutions they inhabit is both a reflection on academics and part of the reason they are in a predicament.

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  • 8 November 2012 at 12:46pm
    Robert Hanks says: @ davidwlkr0
    "If universities are as managerialist as BP says, why do they have a general reputation for administrative inefficiency?"
    
    You're assuming that managerialism = greater efficiency? Seriously?

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• 7 November 2012 at 5:39pm
  R I Moore says:
  Sadly, this arrogant and blustering response has all the hallmarks of the managerial complacency of which BP complains. It is perfectly clear what his problem was: the proliferation of meaningless jargon in place of clear, and therefore effective communication. The solution is equally clear: to insist that people in responsible positions learn and use the English language. In our dreams.
  
  No doubt some intellectually robust and rigorous critique lies behind the assertion that universities have a general (and by implication justified) reputation for administrative inefficiency. If so growing managerialism has not diminished it. There's a surprise. What they do, or at any rate should do is simple enough: teaching and research. Hard to get the managerial head round that I know. But success in both has been regularly measured for many years by a variety of international comparisons, all of which show that British universities offer remarkably good value for money. Regrettably none of these, so far as I know, has measured the relationship between performance in these respects and the number of administrative staff employed or the proportion of the salary bill they consume. Maybe the sustained critique recommended by davidwlkro might start there.

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• 7 November 2012 at 7:53pm
  streetsj says:
  Was the VC being witty/ironic when he referred to "empowerment"? It made me smile.

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• 8 November 2012 at 8:26am
  R Jay says:
  University administration seems to have been demonised by academics to no end. There may be more jargons than necessary in some areas, but think about the offices academics sit in; think about the reams of paper they print on; think about the electronic journals at their fingertips. These things don't just exist. They need to be managed. They are there to facilitate research and teaching.
  
  The real problem is why academics are asked to 'manage' non-academic aspects in the first place. It puzzles me. But I suspect that it's some academics' ambitious idea to 'empower' themselves.
  
  And the real problem is that because many academic heads are so uninterested and inept in management that their poor performance is having negative impacts on the efficiency of universities.

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• 8 November 2012 at 10:10am
  ander says:
  A little investigation would would have revealed that the administration of prof. Porter's university got infiltraded by an alumnus of a Master of Business Administration programme. These consumate yes-men specialize in the sort of ghastly lingo he quotes. Fluency in this horror is prerequisite to the upward mobility in the corporate world and, now it seems, in academia.

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• 8 November 2012 at 11:26am
  Harry Stopes says:
  That was from the agenda of one meeting? Must have been a long meeting.

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• 8 November 2012 at 12:12pm
  Bernard Porter says:
  Some answers. Yes, it was one meeting. Yes, the VC was serious about ‘empowering’. The theory is, I think, that if you have to do something yourself you have more control over it. I must remember that when I’m tempted to buy a new pullover rather than growing my own sheep. Lastly, I’ve never been against university administrators – some have been my best friends. But I preferred it when administration was called that, rather than ‘management’. Just as I preferred staff being called ‘personnel’ rather than ‘human resources’. The new terms give off different vibes entirely. Apart from that, RI Moore’s response to the first pseudonymous comment says it all, I think.

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• 8 November 2012 at 2:22pm
  A.J.P. Crown says:
  When you're discussing inefficient management, it's a bit much to refer to Bernard Porter as BP.

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• 8 November 2012 at 3:20pm
  David Gordon says:
  Fascinating. Unimportant subjects such as, say, climate change or Latin American "disappearances" (the previous two entries in the LRB blog) get sparse discussion, but touch on the way universities are run, and the comments flutter down like confetti. It shows what really matters to us.
  
  First, no-one, in any walk of life, should write some of the obscure jargon Bernard Porter quotes. But surely he is overdoing it? "Principal investigator" defines itself quite clearly, and is on the front page of any Research Council grant application form. Similarly "resource allocation model" is quite clear.
  
  Also, some of the abbreviations do not deserve a complaint. Your tax return will ask you about electronic payments through the BACS and CHAPS systems. HESA are the guys who collect statistics on us, an abbreviation that any head of department could reasonably be expected to know. If the university's computer software was provided by SAP (the most likely of the possible meanings of this acronym) then to write SAP is more sensible than writing "Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung".
  
  Second, despite the bricks that have been thrown at davidwlkr0, his (her?) main point is correct. Public money pays for universities, and we have an obligation to explain what we are doing with that money, and to show that we are not wasting it.
  
  Third, a small point. R I Moore says that universities just do "teaching and research". They do much more. In particular, they provide services. The best example is in medicine, where the staff of a medical faculty provide care for patients, as an essential concomitant of their duties in teaching and research. Clinical services delivered by university staff probably provide about a tenth of all NHS hospital medicine.

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• 8 November 2012 at 3:54pm
  Bernard Porter says:
  Once and for all, none of us is saying that universities don't need administering, or don't have a public duty to be good and efficient. The latter is best achieved however by encouraging academics to do what they're best at, rather than to master skills (and a language) that others are far better at. As I told my VC: I bet Bill Gates doesn't waste the time of his most brilliant programmers by making them check their plugs.

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  • 8 November 2012 at 4:30pm
    ander says: @ Bernard Porter
    The aforementioned alumnus should have recognized this as the principle of comparative advantage. Alas.

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• 9 November 2012 at 11:30am
  John Beattie says:
  On its face, 'managerial' means something like "this place needs administrators" with the implication of "better administrators".
  
  I think this strangeness is resolved if I read 'managerial' as a codeword with the meaning "We want to treat this place as a profit centre".
  
  Universities are cost centres, not profit centres.

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  • 17 November 2012 at 8:58am
    John Cowan says: @ John Beattie
    Insofar as it makes any sense to treat a whole enterprise as any kind of center, which is not much, universities are investment centers, and to be judged on their appropriate use of capital, rather than their costs or profits.

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• 16 November 2012 at 10:42am
  houhynym says:
  You people still in British universities don't know how lucky you are. Back in the USS Oz, we have ultra managerialism, where all quality and all qualities are wholly and exclusively defined by position on a meretricious league table, where "performance" is as adjudicated by little Putins and Putinas occupying DVC(Admin) posts under the spell of half digested neoliberal market worship and short termism, where collegiality is often mentioned in propaganda but never exercised to make any significant decisions, where cronyism is a common basis for appointment to high office and where the separation of fact from opinion as a skill to develop in staff or students alike is seen as dangerously subversive. Some of us stay on because we hope for a dialectical opposition amongst the lumpenprofessoriat to manifest as the above oppressions steadily and irreversibly mount.

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  • 17 November 2012 at 10:04pm
    David Gordon says: @ houhynym
    Well, we have had some experience of what might be found in the Oz that houhynym describes. Alan Gilbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Gilbert_%28academic%29) was imported from Melbourne in 2004 to be the VC of the new University of Manchester. Manchester observed the “economic rationalism” for which Gilbert had become well known in Australia.

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