PDR in the Disneyfied university

There was a story recently about George Washington University, Washington, DC, and its requirement for senior staff to attend sessions in corporate culture provided at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, by the Disney Institute, the specialist leadership consultancy arm of the Disney corporation. Apparently, the Disney consultants had told managers that there was an absence of culture at the university.

I doubt they found an absence of culture at GWU, rather, the management consultants were keen to promote a change of culture. Academics, of course, have plenty of culture, from a regard for aesthetics, ethics and a common respect for academic values like the pursuit of truth, knowledge and academic freedom. But what they don’t appreciate in large measure is corporate culture. This will need to be imposed. GWU should have forsaken Mickey Mouse in Florida and instead crossed the Atlantic to embrace the full Cruella de Vil experience in the management suites of British universities. Here they could have learned from 30 years of colonizing UK academics within the corporate enclosure.

At GWU, faculty were encouraged to attend the training event. In the UK, participation in corporate culture is inescapable. One prerequisite, of course, is to accept that the university is a corporation. Among managers and human resources, you rarely find the word ‘university’ uttered; for them, it is a ‘business’. The second stage of the project is to engineer the forcible citation of corporate discourse by academics in order to enforce compliance and banish autonomous academic identities. Just as in a Disney film, resemblance to reality is not a requirement.

I offer one example from around 2014. Along with other professors, readers and principal lecturers, I was asked to act as appraiser to more junior colleagues. It didn’t seem to matter that none of us had line management responsibilities nor any ability to affect the opportunities for advancement of those colleagues.

My investiture into the managerial tier took place via a day’s training event entitled ‘Personal Development Review (PDR) Training for Managers’, led by members of the staff development section. The obvious contradiction, that none of the trainees was actually a manager, was pointed out by a colleague. This apparent disqualification was ignored by the facilitators, but it was just the first of the fictions we were invited to inhabit as the internal coherence of the management’s imaginary world dissembled under the force of our critique.

Cascading of the Strategic Plan

It turned out I had a bit of a head start on my fellow learners as my research interest was in university managerial discourse and particularly strategic plans. I had collected and absorbed most of them for the book I was co-authoring, Academic Irregularities. According to the university’s policy, the rationale of PDR was to make sure that all employees’ objectives were in alignment with the university’s strategic plan, and that, consequently, those strategic priorities should cascade down into the objectives delivered by schools, teams and individuals. However, when I asked the other participants, the trainers themselves, the head of department and the dean who were observing the training, if any of them could outline the priorities of the current strategic plan, none could. It looked as if, even at the outset, the system was doomed to fail on fundamental principles.

Not a good start, you’d think. But even this slam dunk was waved away as inadmissible by the trainers and managers even as the participants questioned the scheme’s viability. At this point I read from the policy document which warned, ‘PDR which is ineffective will lack credibility and is damaging to the institution’. Then we were really off to the races.

Imaginary ‘teams’

Next to receive scrutiny were the assumptions around ‘teams,’ an organizing unit preferred by the university over traditional departments. As academics, we saw teams as administrative units but, in all other ways, they were considered superfluous to the ways we conducted our work. They were often comprised of people who were not actually working together in terms of teaching or research. So, to a large extent, the ostensive teams of the school were managerial fictions, and it was hard to see how these imaginary units could have objectives. There were other teams, however, which had formed organically in pursuit of teaching or research collaboration, often organised across disciplines, institutions and even international boundaries. How could our contribution to these endeavours be evaluated, we asked?

SMART objectives

When conducting a PDR, we were told, we should set objectives for our appraisees which were SMART. The first four occupied us for quite some time: Specific, Measurable, Achievable/ Realistic. All were problematic.

Specific – Imagine, I volunteered, your appraisee pledges to write a book which subsequently turns into a series of articles, or vice versa. Or, I may promise to work on diversifying assessment methods, and then the next curriculum review reverses that policy and instead requires a focus on fewer methods (this had happened). Will we be judged to have failed? The very nature of academic work accentuates the unplanned, the unanticipated, the unknown. Requiring specifics ensures that the process becomes an exercise in offering up the tokenistic, already-completed specific task, and is hardly a forcing ground for ‘stretching’.

Measurable – Quantitative or qualitative? If the latter, what methods of evaluation are used? How can we measure work which may extend outside of the university? Even if the measures are quantitative, we all know that the criteria for performance shift frequently: publications: quality, impact, citations; grant capture; external recognition. Trying to keep up with vacillating parameters of academic performance measurement is rather like trying to apprehend a desert mirage. The trainers brightened at the prospect of being able to offer a solution, and we were directed to the university’s Competency Framework. Competencies are described as “a set of behaviour patterns or characteristics which distinguish high performers from average or poor performers in a given role”. I pointed out that this offered little delicacy of scale for distinguishing between levels. The academic role requires a range of disparate competencies: teaching, research, social acumen, leadership, administrative efficiency, pastoral caring, knowledge of the university, careers guidance, fundraising, to name just a few ‘key skills.’ Who is to say my hard-won certificate in Gold Standard Customer Service should be eclipsed by the publication of a prize-winning monograph?

Achievable/Realistic ­– The university had been an early adopter of workload models and we were still being persuaded of their infallibility. It was already apparent that the model underestimated the hours for every single category of the academic workload, and so inevitably provided a poor basis for realistic objective setting or evaluation. When asked to give an example of a SMART objective for an L/SL under my line management, I offered the task of fitting in all your meetings, report writing, emails, exam boards, open days, curriculum development and PDR within the allocation for academic management and administration, for which a token 40 hours were allocated, up to a maximum of 175 hours. The rather flushed facilitator expressed concern that this was probably not an achievable objective. I responded that such a model was going to result in very exhausted, disenchanted, brittle and demotivated lecturers who are unlikely to convey a sense of purposeful aspiration to a PDR reviewee. When there is a dysfunctional workload model which has unattainable objectives sutured into its design, the only thing ‘stretched’ will be their goodwill and mental health.

Personal reflection

At the end of the session, I and several others had reached the conclusion that this PDR model would continue to fail. It was designed to addresses concerns held two decades ago about lack of accountability in universities which have been addressed by the proliferation of tools for monitoring the performance of academics: the National Student Survey, module evaluations, the Research Excellence Framework, internal and external quality audits, and even the hourly ‘tenko’ imposed by the estates office. It was both redundant and ridiculous. It did not meet academics’ realities nor their desires for development opportunities: time to research and develop teaching and opportunities for collaboration and networking.

The training protocol required that the trainee engage with a process of post-event reflection. This I dutifully did, sharing the account above with my manager, staff development and human resources in the hope of promoting dialogue, as requested. There were complaints from the staff development facilitators to my head of department. I had prepared for and fully engaged with the session, but my real crime was that I had exposed the pretence and corporate posturing of the neoliberal university-as-business. I had refused to assimilate to the managerial culture and this was seen as insubordination.

I’m not, generally, opposed to performance review. I have blogged previously about performance monitoring systems hereand here. But at a bare minimum it needs to be developmental, rather than judgmental, and it needs to reflect the experiences and values which obtain in academic workplaces. If it doesn’t, then we might as well all take off for our seminar in Disneyland….or maybe that should be Banksy’s Dismaland. http://dismaland.co.uk/

 

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Frozen, but Solid: #USSstrikes 2018

Thanks to someone on Twitter for supplying the title for this piece. Since the USS strikes began, I have been interested to see which of my Twitter follows has been tweeting strike-related material and which have ignored it. However, it occurred to me that I was yet to offer anything more than a few tweets myself. Some might say I have no ‘skin in the game’ because I am looking forward, in due course, to receiving a government-backed, defined-benefit TPS pension. Such critics are the sort of people who assume everybody else is as exclusively motivated by self-interest as they are. On the contrary, it has always been clear to me that this strike is pivotal; it is higher education’s PATCO moment in that, if the strikes fail to secure defined-benefit pensions for USS members, we may as well all forget holding on to many more of our rights as workers.

I won’t rehearse UCU’s position on the disputed valuation of the scheme. It is sufficient to say that all UCU members, younger and older, are now far more financially literate on pensions than they would otherwise have been. Additionally, we have all been educated that pensions are not ‘perks’ or ‘benefits’; they are deferred wages which should be responsibly stewarded until we claim them at retirement.

There are some other very positive things have come out of this strike, and more will follow. Perhaps the most conspicuous gain is that there has been a mass recognition of the value of solidarity, together with the sheer joy of strikers finding they do indeed belong to a community. As academics and professional staff have stood together in the appalling weather over the last few days, they have rediscovered the fun of academia. If imaginative, energetic, knowledgeable people are given the opportunity to chat to each other, mess around, dance and sing, who knows what brilliant ideas will emerge? Quite a few from the sound of it.

The irony is that so many have pointed out that in the course of a regular day’s work at a university, such productive and unplanned meetings would probably not occur. That alone should concern managers, but what else can they learn from this moment of industrial action?

Academics need the time, head space and physical space that afford optimum conditions for research and thinking to occur. The picket lines have allowed strikers to exchange experiences of university workplaces, and it is clear that one source of discontent is the removal of social spaces where random encounters can take place. In many cases, ‘space utilisation’ surveys have justified the re-appropriation of staff common rooms. Vast, empty atriums with foam sofas in primary colours are not conducive to community and collegiality. As one tweep wrote, without spaces to talk, we are atomized and alienated. I wrote about this a couple of years ago, and mentioned this particular meeting of minds at the University of Nottingham.

It is far less likely that there’s going to be a happy coincidence like the one that brought together an Anglo Saxon scholar and a microbiologist . The former knew of potions and remedies contained in the ancient Leechbook and she wondered whether they would work today as antibacterial agents. The latter decided to give it a go, and as a result, we have one new weapon against MRSA.

But space is not the only factor inhibiting the emergence of new collaborations. For fortuitous meetings to happen, and for imaginations to roam free, there must be spare time. This has become an unpopular idea with university managers who have embraced new workload models and staff dashboards to ensure that every lecturer and professor is fully scheduled up to their contractual maximum. I remember when I was a UCU official on the ‘information and consultation forum’ and this was first proposed at my former workplace. I was thanked, confidentially, by several heads of department, when I pointed out the inevitable consequences of ensuring that every academic was fully timetabled. Now that such practices are widespread, we can see that my fears have been realised. Take a look at this excellent piece of research. The author has made FOI requests on the numbers of staff referrals to occupational health and counselling services at each university. The rises have been dramatic over six years – 64% and 77% respectively, and these figures signify an appalling crisis of staff mental health.

Another issue mentioned by a striker is that actual hours worked increase year on year, while the hours credited to your workload remain the same or even decrease. How does this accounting trick happen? Workloads are divided into categories. It is hard to misrepresent actual class contact time, but you can pour more students into a class by raising the staff-student ratio, which in some university departments would disgrace a 1950s primary school. Then you can reduce the time for teaching-related activities, like tutoring, setting assessments and marking them – at the same time as demanding that formative as well as summative feedback is ‘delivered’ to students with lightning speed after submission. I won’t even start on time allocated for administrative tasks as the mere memory of it all give me vertigo.

And yes, these fictitious workloads have been conjured by the very people who have overseen the valuation of your pension scheme.

Another miscalculation by the employers has been the views of students. Lots of them have expressed fulsome support for their lecturers,  and I’m sure that has kept the strikers buoyant. The myth of the student as truculent and demanding customer has been thoroughly busted as students have joined the picket lines. The great success story has been the inspired provision of teach-outs which have covered everything from modernist poetry to pensions forecasting and risk assessment. They have been occasions for both staff and students to experience what it would be like to teach and learn beyond the shadow of learning outcomes, NSS, TEF, Evasys, Prevent, Panoptico lecture capture and without some clown from space utilisation barging in. Quite a few teach-outs broached the subject of the marketised, consumerised and finacialised academy that has seen vice chancellors abdicate academic leadership and the defence of public universities in favour of a new role in asset management. Students seem satisfied that they have learned something this week, and staff are all the more gratified because they have escaped the unbearable compulsion of audit.

These problems cannot be dismissed – trivialised – as one striking tweep wrote, as ‘failure to communicate’. This is the last refuge of the mediocre manager who thinks the response to every justifiable grievance is a louder megaphone and a larger stick. To the surprise of Universities UK and the vice chancellors who represent universities with USS members, the public seemed to sympathise with workers who were facing vastly reduced pension terms. Perhaps the ground had been softened by a sustained campaign of vilification against VCs by the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and the Observer. It was a good week for Channel 4 to run a Dispatches report on their high salaries and evidence of reckless spending on expenses. In any case, VCs were probably surprised to find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion, and just as astonished to find they had lost control of the narrative that students were getting as well.

There is a new and jubilant tenor to the tweets and blogs I’m seeing. But as UUK and UCU enter talks again, UCU members are building momentum for the next wave of strikes. The delight in camaraderie seems to be outweighing fears of poverty, even for the casualized workers who are being penalized the most. If not exactly shedding their chains, I see workers emboldened to act against the injustice of what employers are proposing. I see workers who have just had enough. And acting in this defiant way is a new experience for a workforce bullied even now by threats of pay docking for working to the limits of their contractual obligations. Younger workers will be formed by this industrial action and they will be less susceptible to coercion in the future.

Many strikers wrote that they have been let down for decades by university leaders. ‘Sold out’ appears in several tweets. They feel vice chancellors have caved in too many times to government demands to the point where universities have conceded all meaningful autonomy. Adam Tickell came in for particular dishonourable mention with several economic geographers perusing the University of Sussex VC’s previous published writings where he wishes to ‘slay the neoliberal beast’ (1995) and praises the value of dependable pensions.

But there are also some commendations to award. At this point the membership of Universities UK is split. First out of the blocks was Stuart Croft of the University of Warwick, followed swiftly by Chris Day of Newcastle University saying he didn’t know “what else they could do to express their concerns about the current situation”. Then one by one some big hitters posted their support for more talks, and specifically support for a defined-benefits element to USS. Strikers were moved by the appearance on picket lines of Sir Anton Muscatelli of the University of Glasgow, Robert Allison of Loughborough University and there were even cups of tea sent round by Chris Day. This will be remembered when it is time to rebuild goodwill. And that is important for the future of universities because strikers are insistent and vociferous that pensions are just the starting point and there are many more grievances to be worked through on their return to work. The pension scheme needs to be on a solid footing and sustainable in the long term, but so do academic and professional careers.

 

In Development

Like a lot of other people, I watched Carrie Gracie give evidence to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on January 31st 2018. Gracie, as you may recall, resigned as the BBC’s China Editor in early January after finding she was paid 50% less than male counterparts.

A review conducted by auditors PwC and published on Tuesday concluded there was “no evidence of gender bias in pay decision-making” at the BBC. Bias in decision-making is not the same as bias exposed by outcomes, of course. Nice side-step. Nice obfuscation. Nevertheless, a group known as BBC Women countered with reports of ‘veiled threats’ if they petitioned for equal pay and “a wider culture of gender discrimination, which can be seen in patterns of promotion, especially after women take maternity leave.”

Carrie Gracie’s evidence was electric. She was passionate, committed and above all outraged. She kept her emotions in check but the hurt of that burning insult was palpable. Gracie had just been informed of the outcome of her grievance with the corporation in which she claimed the reason given for paying her less than her counterparts was that she was ‘in development’. At age 55. After 30 years. And when she was in post as an international editor.

I watched this and wept as my own memories of witnessing similar degradations in academia resurfaced. I recognised the mythologies of HR-bots, of continuous development and improvement. After all, nobody must be granted the conceit of expertise and value, or the sense of having ‘arrived’. That might render them less easy to control.

Gracie spoke about the “strain of being in conflict” and that, in the process, managers had attempted to “to crush your self-esteem about your work”. Other women employed by the BBC confirmed this. Samira Ahmed, quoted in the New York Times had this to say:

“I can only describe the feeling of being kept on much lower pay than male colleagues doing the same jobs for years as feeling as though bosses had naked pictures of you in their office and laughed every time they saw you,” Ms. Ahmed wrote. “It is the humiliation and shame of feeling that they regarded you as second class, because that is what the pay gap means.”

When you have seen managers unite into an impregnable cult, you recognise the manoeuvres. As well as denial of expertise, we see lies, obfuscations, post-hoc justifications, moving of goal posts, minimisation of role, diminishment of contribution and equivocation of responsibility. Here are those instances faced by Gracie and others in BBC Women, together with their academic equivalents.

Just in case the ‘in development’ line failed to get over the credibility hurdle, the Director General, Lord Tony Hall, and the Head of BBC News, Fran Unsworth, devised a post-hoc justification to present the two jobs – North America Editor and China Editor – as not at all equivalent. Lord Hall said: “We will not discriminate on gender between anybody but there are differences in the work, the nature of the work and the amount of work between say North America and China. Fran Unsworth explained that determination of value was nothing to do with geography, or the fact that Gracie had to be fluent in another language, or deal with relentless and intimidatory efforts at censorship. “It’s a different job, the China job. It’s a more features-based agenda, it’s not on the relentless treadmill that something like the North America editor’s job is.” The North America editor was on air “twice as much in peak time – and that is at a busy time in the China story”, she added.

Does this remind you of frequent moving of goal posts in universities, so that finally meeting last year’s criteria for promotion results in just a shrug at this year’s appraisal? And then there is the position of responsibility that always merited a promoted grade, until suddenly it didn’t. Or the promotion that was rescinded when it was – surprise! – revealed to be just a secondment. It is always justified in terms that the role has changed, become less central to the university’s mission, is much less onerous after the last restructure (with no justification) and so that’s why we have regraded the post AND reduced the hours credited to your workload. It always drives a coach and horses through the National Framework Agreement which has been quietly discarded by university managers. And similarly, are you an academic who has built a reputation via the publication of scholarly monographs ? That is so over! The REF has ensured the supremacy of the science model which privileges journal articles supported by metrics of journal impact factors and citation indices. The promised reward seems to continually elude us, and even if confirmed, we understand it is temporary and contingent.

Many women will recognise the next step. As women take over roles, they are likely to be at a downgraded level. This seemed to be confirmed by Ms Unsworth with this line on minimisation of role to BBC News: “Entertainment is a much more competitive market than news is, and has become increasingly competitive”. Good grief. Evidently, she is taking her cue from the kind of cabinet minister who seems set on running down their department, financially and in terms of reputation. Nothing is off limits for crush-the-opposition managerialism. Who cares about news in 2018? We’re only seeing the fall of western democratic institutions.

It is distressing to read the accounts of how many BBC Women were made to feel worthless. We remember the case in 2011 of Miriam O’Reilly who successfully pursued an employment tribunal case against the BBC for ageism and victimisation. Yesterday Victoria Derbyshire retweeted this message she received about herself “To be quite honest you’re nothing special.” Gracie suspected high-level briefing against the merits of her case, and Fran Unsworth, BBC Head of News is alleged to have said that Gracie worked part time. Unsworth denies this.

It is all rather reminiscent of this piece I wrote two-and-a-half years ago about the imposition on academics of unattainable targets, constant surveillance and audit, and the knowledge that any dip in ‘performance’ may see their contracts terminated. Academics, in cultural studies anyway, are sustained by scholarship which theorises their experience. I have often turned to the work of Nick Couldry (2005) who offers us the notion of ‘theatres of cruelty’ legitimised by a society which has taken a socially Darwinian turn. And if Gracie had suffered in such a theatre, she returned the favour yesterday. Much as we envied her the satisfaction of humiliating her seniors in a televised spectacle, we are aware that this must have been at a huge personal cost. We witnessed the ebbing of faith in an institution she had revered, and shuddered at the denigration of her talent. Like the superb Gracie, many academics measure their self-worth and define themselves by their work. Most are intrinsically motivated to do their best work, and a simple expression of thanks is often all that is required to secure their loyalty. Even that was denied. Gracie tells that she received no official appreciation as she stepped down. That is inexcusable incivility.

But on with the insults. Lord Hall proudly equivocated responsibility and boasted “Wherever I can, properly, we have been trying to appoint women to key roles at the BBC – key roles in news, key roles as correspondents and reporters in news” even as he added: “That’s not saying I’m happy with where we are.” The most stunning revelation of wilful non-comprehension emerged when Lord Hall emphasised, “I don’t believe there is an old boys network, I believe in equality of opportunity” and added: “The idea of some old boys club, I abhor. That is not the way I believe that BBC should be or is.” At that point Jo Stevens MP asked Lord Hall how he had obtained his job as Director General.

Although the guilelessness was comical, this comment on Twitter by Esther Webber was perceptive – and Jo Stevens retweeted: “This is why I don’t think the BBC leadership gets it”. #bbcpay #bbcwomen @BBCCarrie @NUJofficial

Some may say that the BBC Women are privileged to work in an organisation which permits them to openly criticize it. That is not the point, however. And it’s also not about the money, it’s about the shabby treatment and above all, it’s about the lies. As Gracie said herself, “We’re not in the business of producing toothpaste or tyres at the BBC. Our business is truth. We can’t operate without the truth”. And I’m sure there will shortly be much disingenuous managerial pontificating about ‘lessons learned’.

Universities have hardly covered themselves in glory when it comes to employee relations or dealing reasonably with scholars who exercise their right to criticize the system they work in. And again here. The Times Higher reported in 2014 that universities were forced to pay out £19 million in employment disputes, and reports of bullying are rising in universities. It is this toxic culture that has seen many late-career women head for the exits.

CNN has a segment with Anderson Cooper titled Keeping them Honest which investigates the seedier side of politics, power and business. What we have all failed to realise is that with implacable liars, shame has no purchase, because they are shameless. I suggest that perhaps our leaders might consider themselves to be ‘in development’. Lessons in humanity, fairness and morality are urgently required to fill this developmental void.

Adonis takes a scalp?

Let the 28th November 2017 stand as a pivotal moment for UK universities. Phil Baty of the Times Higher tweeted, “So Adonis gets a scalp”. That seemed to over-simplify the circumstances surrounding the retirement, announced that day, of Dame Professor Glynis Breakwell, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bath.

It has been a busy few months for Dame Glynis. As well as sustained pressure in the media from Lord Adonis, the academic staff union members had voted unanimously for a motion of no confidence in the Vice Chancellor. She then narrowly escaped another vote of no confidence in the University’s senate and was facing yet another censure from the students’ union later in the week.

The rebellion had built quickly in response to the findings of a Hefce enquiry into governance issues surrounding determination of senior pay at the University of Bath.   This had been initiated by a complaint from Lord Andrew Adonis in July 2017 in which he criticized what he saw as excessive pay for the Vice Chancellor at £451,000, and the lack of restraint on senior salaries in the face of an appeal for such by the Minister for Higher Education. Additionally, Adonis had reservations about the conduct of the remuneration committee which oversees the vice chancellor’s pay increases, and on which Dame Glynis had exercised her right to vote. He raised additional concerns about governance at the university later in August 2017.

Hefce launched an unprecedented enquiry into the University of Bath case. Unprecedented because I cannot remember a similar instance, and the absence of other cases on Hefce’s regulation and assurance website page seems to confirm this was a new venture for them. Nevertheless, the findings are remarkably fearless; perhaps they were belatedly flexing a muscle in order to assert their independence credentials in advance of their impending abolition. Hefce was not pleased with governance at Bath, finding conflict of interest with regard to the remuneration committee and poor governance practice in aspects of the handling of a University Court meeting, declaring “These issues have, in our view, together resulted in damage to the reputation of the university.” The fact that Dame Glynis was heavily implicated may have sealed her fate.

Arguably, this was only partially Adonis’ scalp. He objected to levels of pay among senior staff, and the circumstances of salary increases, but in fact these had been the subject of protest since 2012 by staff at the university. In the last few months they collated a number of other grievances, and they built alliances with local councillors and local MPs. They also kept the story in the local and national media headlines throughout the summer and autumn. According to a Guardian article, “Junior staff complain of job insecurity caused by short-term or zero-hours contracts, of pay held deliberately low, and a “culture of fear” permeating Bath’s campus”.

So on Tuesday 28^th November 2017, it was announced that Dame Glynis had chosen to retire in August 2018. Once again it was felt she had misjudged the changing mood as she will be granted a sabbatical, as I understand it, on full salary and her £31,000 car ‘loan’ will be paid off by the university. It is not a bad package. But many will be asking the question, are vice chancellors worth it? The public perception that they are overpaid has been simmering for several years. Vice chancellors routinely defend their emoluments by maintaining they are possessed of rare and valuable skills, and that they operate in an international market for such expertise. Continued salary competitiveness is essential to ensuring that UK universities remain world class. I have always been sceptical of this line of argument, given that the vast majority of VCs are white, and from the UK, Australia, USA or South Africa. By contrast, at almost any faculty meeting, you would be guaranteed to be sitting among equally distinguished colleagues from a far wider number of countries.

Ironically, it has been revealed that Dame Glynis did not add her voice to claims of exceptional leadership and influence. In a 2010 research article co-authored with Michelle Tytherleigh, entitled ‘University leaders and university performance in the United Kingdom: is it ‘who’ leads, or ‘where’ they lead that matters most?’, they had this to say on the question of whether institutional performance can be related in any way to the characteristics of its leader, “our findings suggest that, whilst the performance of a university may be ‘moulded’ by the characteristics of its’ leader, most of the variability is explained by non-leadership factors”.  I have retained their rogue apostrophe for authenticity.

It is curious that a salary of £450K+ has attracted such opprobrium when there have been higher paid chief executives in recent memory. In 2015, Neil Gorman of Nottingham Trent University topped the league table of salaries with £623,000. It caused such controversy that staff were issued with a script in anticipation of hostile questions at recruitment open days. By contrast, Dame Glynis’ compensation seems almost modest. There were some commentators who suggested that Adonis’ complaints were animated by misogyny and that it was no accident he had targeted a female vice chancellor who just happened to be the most highly paid. A letter in the Guardian on Saturday 25^th November from a group of women senior staff offered their support for their vice chancellor, saying “Being a successful woman seems to attract a disproportionate degree of negative criticism”, and enumerating the successes racked up by the University of Bath during Breakwell’s tenure.  A retort from other female staff indicated that such solidarity had not been entirely reciprocated, and identified one of the largest gender pay gaps in the country, as well as wide use of zero hours contracts.

It will be interesting to follow repercussions from these events. I’m sure the rest of the UK’s vice chancellors will be feeling a little unsettled in the following months. The Bath case sends out a signal to the leaders of the marketized and managed universities of the post-Jarratt era that they have had their wings clipped, cards marked, or to use a current favourite managerial metaphor, they are on a burning platform. Their wealth and power has risen as that of their staff has declined. There has been a league table of vice chancellors’ salaries – denounced by academics but embraced as a bargaining benchmark by those chief executives. It seems unlikely that many of them will wish to occupy the top position now. Lord Adonis continues his campaign, one vice chancellor at a time. In a tweet last night (28^th November) he seemed to focus his ire on the luckless Vice Chancellor of the University of Southampton. Whatever the outcome of that manoeuvre, I predict that the range of salaries will contract to an average of £230K and will increase slightly below the inflation figure (i.e. in line with other academic salary increases). There will be greater efforts towards transparency and accountability for executive salaries and increases. It now seems politically toxic to do otherwise. As a consequence, we may see a new ethos of intrinsic motivation to lead UK universities for the sake of doing a good job. I hope a new breed of vice chancellors will align themselves more openly with the values of universities as public good and democratic necessity, not as engines of economic competitiveness.

Their rising tide of senior executives post-Jarratt has certainly not lifted all boats. Tenure was abolished in the 1980s. Vice chancellors became chief executives and stifled the influence of academics on university senates. They cut expenditure on pay by employing hourly paid lecturers in posts previously held by full time career academics. They now seem to be presiding over the withdrawal of a final salary pension for staff in the USS pension scheme. So far, only one vice chancellor, Stuart Croft of Warwick, has stated his opposition to this move. This is probably the one benefit that academics will vote to strike for because, for one thing, it makes UK universities attractive and competitive to the best researchers from overseas. It does seem odd to demand decent remuneration packages just for senior management, and not for the people who actually make the universities world-leading.

There is a rising tide though – of resistance from the academic ranks. Just as Bath colleagues take inspiration from the successful campaign against Raising the Bar at Newcastle, others are beginning to organise towards restoring democratic governance in our universities. It is important to remember that it is staff and students who form the ‘core business’ of universities; managers are ancillary ‘overheads’ – and expensive ones. It may be misplaced optimism to say that we are seeing a new dawn in universities, but I am nevertheless hopeful.

I end with the final paragraph from the narrative of events at Bath authored by the President of the UCU branch, Michael Carley.

The position now is that Bath staff and students have concluded that the governing body have learned nothing from the HEFCE report or from the publicity surrounding the Vice-Chancellor’s pay and perks. The campus, students and staff, is more politicized than it has been since the glory days of the 1970s. Questions of governance are being discussed as if they mattered. Staff have spoken openly about the “climate of fear” at the university and are beginning to throw it off.

 

Raising the Bar: The Metric Tide That Sinks All Boats

Liz Morrish writes: A longer post than usual, but very relevant if your working life in academia is governed by the insanity of metrics – grant income, PhD students, impact, REf 4* ‘outputs’. You know it is insanity, so read on…..

James Wilsdon may as well not have inveighed against the ‘metric tide’, and Jo Johnson could have saved printers’ ink asking vice-chancellors not to waste academics’ time, and students’ fee money by operating multiple ‘mock’ REFs (BIS Green Paper November 2015 Chapter 2, para 7).

It is time for a critical conversation to take place about the use and abuse of metrics. In July 2015, Hefce published The Metric Tide, the report of a review body chaired by James Wilsdon, professor of science and democracy at the University of Sussex.

Despite the report’s chilling preface, announcing a “new barbarity” in our universities, we continue to witness the misuse of metrics as a tool of management in UK higher education. “Metrics hold real power: they are constitutive of values, identities and livelihoods”, wrote Wilsdon. Universities should proceed with caution, then, lest metrics should spread like a digital Himalayan Balsam and undermine the ethical architecture of universities.

It is ironic, but perhaps fortunate, that students find universities a very different experience than the academic staff who labour in them. For students, the intrusive scrutiny of metrics can at least claim to betoken a therapeutic and supportive institution. Generally speaking, the student ‘dashboard’ does not harbour the disciplinary function of its academic equivalent. 

For academic staff, audit has become a central organizing principle of life in universities (Strathern 2003). Our working lives are structured around the requirement to undergo ‘rituals of verification’ (Power 1997), and there are as many anticipatory audits as there are demands for post-hoc justification. Such is their prevalence that the behaviour of academics has been transformed so that they are interpolated primarily as auditees (Petersen and Davies 2010). Benchmarks, metrics and dashboards are examples of calculative practices (Shore and Wright 2015), used, apparently, to measure and improve the productivity of academics. This imposes a rationality whereby we face a future of ‘algorithmic regulation’ (Morozov 2014), and regimes in which employees are hierarchized according to metrics. University policy documents endeavour to justify these practices as essential, and even empowering to academics.

I have blogged previously about the difference between stewardship and agency approaches to performance management, citing a report from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (Franco-Santos et al. 2014).

Stewardship approaches frame a long term direction of travel which relies on individuals exercising autonomy, while agency approaches address short term goals via monitoring and tight control. While UK universities seem beholden to the short-term, agency approach, stewardship approaches are favoured by Umran Inan, President of Koc University in Turkey. He writes that “that any attempt to pass down norms or procedures” from on high is antithetical to creativity, and that universities must instead “allow unusual [and] inconsistent things to happen” (Parr 2014). At Koc, quality of scholarship is allowed to flourish and internal evaluations take place every five years. By comparison, in the UK, we are in danger of allowing academic freedom and creativity to founder under the distorting constraints of audit.

I am not fond of sports metaphors, but many vice-chancellors are. I understand that what has made the New Zealand All Blacks a great team is a sense that there is a long-term investment in each player’s development, rather than the England team’s reliance on a permanent sense of insecurity and enforced competition for their place on the team.

Raising the Bar is a sports metaphor that will be familiar to academics at Newcastle University, as they have become one of the latest universities to publish their expectations for research performance. All of this was initiated by managerial anxiety, amidst chatter about so-called ‘bottom Russellers,’ that Newcastle has been “lacking in competitiveness compared to other Russell Group institutions”. The Vice-Chancellor, Chris Brink stated in a ‘town hall meeting’ in November 2015 that Newcastle had lacked 4*-ness in the last REF, and that an institutional goal was to be in the top half of the Russell Group. This can be attributed purely to league table-induced status anxiety. But I do wonder when, exactly, did academia become a combat zone? Probably it was at the same time they started awarding stars, like US Army generals. When did the amount of grant money eclipse the actual content of the research? But Raising the Bar is a coercively innocent phrase. It conveniently conceals all the judgement, hostility, pain and pressure that we know will follow it. Academic endeavour is not something that can just be improved by order. Research functions within a context, an ethos and a dynamic.

Now that I have built a reputation for busting managerial myths about performance management, kind Twitterati send me their universities’ policy documents. As a linguist, I feast upon their discursively encoded ideologies. As a human being, a scholar and a friend of many victims, I weep at the cost for these individuals, but also for the future of universities.

This is my analysis of the document (see below): Newcastle University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Research and Innovation Performance Expectations.

First of all, we find that these are expectations, not objectives, not targets, not goals. Expectations are much more finite and concrete, and do not permit that worrying prospect of slippage.

[T]he expectations on research active staff – so by definition if you do not meet them you are not research active, despite any other evidence to the contrary.

This document is focussed on research performance…..as this will determine our ranking in the next REF. And the key to this, we learn, will be increasing the number of 4* outputs. The parameters of ‘performance’ are drawn so rigidly, and amount solely to ‘being REF-able’.  This circumscribes any kind of professional autonomy, or even what should count as academic labour, guaranteeing that much of what academics do will be rendered invisible. What of the early career researcher, or graduate student celebrating their first scholarly publication? This will probably not be a 4*, and any pleasure or sense of fulfilment will be subdued.  How can any of us take pleasure in our work under these conditions?

 [W]e have largely relied on REF 2014 entry as a proxy for reaching the minimum expectations for research outputs. How is this possible? How would a local assessor know if an individual’s outputs were scored as the quoted minimum 3*? Individual REF scores are categorically not available; they have been destroyed (REF FAQ).

A criterion for a chair is: aspires to be in the Top quartile in UoA for income, or aspiring to 4* – how can everyone be in the top quartile? With success rates as low as 12%, then that is an expectation you will probably not meet. And how do you indicate aspiration, if you fall short? Are we now to be judged on the breadth of our imaginations?

Newcastle University is not alone in planning to audit their academic staff on attainment of quantifiable targets, with some, like grant capture, quite outside their control. Nor is the misery confined to the Russell Group; Newcastle joins a long list which now amounts to one in six UK universities, according to the Times Higher: Queens University Belfast, Imperial, Queen Mary University of London, Abertay University, Plymouth University, Robert Gordon University and the universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, East Anglia, Glasgow, Greenwich and Leeds.

If targets are unattainable, this leads to unmanageable levels of stress. This is objective setting 101. Employers have a legal obligation to conduct risk assessments and prevent known causes of stress. “Employers are only in breach of their duty if they have failed to take reasonable steps in the circumstances to prevent the stress”. Notice the word is ‘prevent,’ not alleviate stress. It is not helpful to offer mindfulness workshops, nor aromatherapy. The workplace should be managed in accordance with the law and decent moral conduct.

Of course, Chris Brink alluded to the fact that academics would be ‘supported’ in reaching the new bar; however the inevitable monitoring, reporting and surveillance will only serve to amplify the pressure of the audit. If we need evidence that targets and performance management cause insupportable stress, we should remember the tragic case of Stefan Grimm who took his own life after being threatened with performance management procedures at Imperial College. The coroner found Stefan’s death to be ‘needless’  and Imperial College said that ‘wider lessons’ would be learned. It is now very clear that the nation’s vice-chancellors have been unwilling to face the facts. There is systematic, mass victimization of UK academics.

And it is not confined to the UK; recent research from Australia on the impact of aggressive performance management on early career researchers (Petersen 2016 forthcoming) indicates that stress starts to manifest itself quickly, and has a negative impact on work. Many ECRs “struggled to articulate the value and worth of their work outside the productivity discourse” (2016:12). The constraints of metrics cause the content of the research to change, and researchers attempt to mirror what is ‘hot’ – likely to get funding under shifting priorities of research councils. And I have observed as well that we all tend to discount even solid scholarship – edited volumes or book reviews – if they are not REF-able. And in the same way we will learn to discount any work which is not judged – even by non-expert assessors – as worthy of a 3* or 4* ranking. As Petersen says of her informants, “they and the substance of their work become easier to control”.

Another control technique is to devalue the work of someone who is entirely dedicated to their scholarship, and whose whole identity is enmeshed with their work. Ammunition can easily be found when targets are so numerous and the scope so wide that almost every employee can be found wanting in some dimension. The targets reflect management’s construction of the ideal employee who is ‘compelled never to rest’ (Davies and Petersen 2005: 89). This offers employers the opportunity to apply policies capriciously: poor teaching scores may be overlooked in some cases, but lack of grant income is not. It is a licence for the academically insecure to settle grudges or academic jealousies with their more talented underlings. And so an increasing number of academics are being marched through performance management processes in which their unique contributions are rendered insignificant and their imagined lapses are deemed ‘incapability’. Targets must be attained at each and every period of audit. You may find that international esteem is never arrived at, even though your books – even translations of them – are still on the shelves. Was it achieved and documented in the last six months? That is all that matters. Professorship must be performed in these tightly delimited ways like a horse doing dressage. Threats of demotion are made. It is like rescinding Mark Spitz’s gold medals because he can no longer match Michael Phelps.

I have to question whether these quantifiable targets meet management’s declared aims of encouraging staff retention and offering a structure of support for academics. It is hard to imagine they could work positively in this way when, in some departments, significant numbers of academics are immobilized by emotional and professional breakdown.

In the fictions and contradiction of management Polari, this is returned to the apparently delinquent employee as ‘empowerment’, even as managers arrogate the power to press the detonate button on careers. This mendacious discourse serves to absolve the perpetrators of torture from the shattering incapacitation these procedures invoke.

The Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University portrays the metrics of Raising the Bar as objectivity. It is not, nor is it objective setting; this is objectification. Let us remind ourselves of Martha Nussbaum’s (1995) original seven features of objectification:

• Instrumentality – to be treated as a tool for man’s purposes. At Newcastle, the function of an academic is to raise the bar, increase grant income and raise the university’s position in the league tables.
• Denial of autonomy – activity and what counts as work is tightly defined and controlled.
• Inertness – there are no human agents in the Newcastle documents. Grammatical subjects include ‘this document’, and “this aspect of our academic portfolio”, “a detailed analysis of the results” and “expectations”. There is the passive voice throughout, with just three instances of an unattributed pronoun ‘we’. ‘We’ is an inherently ambiguous pronoun. It can be used either inclusively, or exclusively of the addressee. Looking at the contexts: “we do not expect all staff to have equal strengths”; “we have largely relied on REF 2014”; “We will take early career researcher’ – these usages seem to retain the prerogative of its exclusive attribution.
• Fungibility – interchangeability with other objects of the same type. How often have you heard managers say “we have an open door policy”? And notice that in HR-speak, there are no people, with contributions to make, there are only ‘roles’, and these can have the status of vacant, or filled.
• Violability – something that can be broken, violated, smashed into. Many academics are now looking at ruined careers and broken ambitions. We have ensured that an academic career has become unsustainable in the long term.
• Ownership – something that can be traded or commodified; we now hear about ‘a transfer market’ for ‘4* 4’ professors – professors with four 4* outputs.
• Denial of subjectivity – your feelings need not be taken into account. Indeed, there is no way of expressing them, as we are forced to account for our work in terms of management-defined metrics. This is known as illocutionary silencing (Meyerhoff 2004).

Does this seem familiar? Objectification is the reality behind what we are supposed to believe is ‘empowerment’, a word now taking that slide into the semantic inversion prefigured by ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’. But generations of women have been persuaded that objectification is empowering, so why not try it out on academics?

This is a job creation scheme for HR as more and more academics will find themselves falling short of ‘Raising the Bar’. If we are lucky, they may embroil universities in grievances and libel suits which will chasten managers’ love of ‘robust’ metrical solutions to problems which do not exist. Vice-chancellors use a dip in metrics, or the effects of incapacitation – ‘falling over’ – in their jargon, as an occasion to axe courses, subject, departments and schools. We are about to enter an era of manufactured instability in universities in both staff turnover and academic offering.  

Metrics, then, are unlikely to offer any of the certainties that their champions have promised, and doubly so because of the sheer irrationality that governs their application. The bar must be raised, and raised again. No-one must slip beneath the bar. There is only the bar, the metric that cannot lie. Except it does. There is always a rush to judgement as metrics occlude any other evidence. This is the weak spot, and one that offers a route to resistance. What about content? What about the imagination, passion and risk-taking that animate research? What about bright people having fortuitous conversations?

There has been a hollowing out of the sense of purpose of universities as power is skewed towards the managerial function. Despite vice-chancellors’ assurances that There is No Alternative, it doesn’t have to be like this, and it is our job to take every opportunity to make this clear. Good work cannot be sustained under these conditions of pressure and surveillance. Academics are not servo systems whose online functioning can be monitored and tweaked in response to new demands. Consider this reality; academics with all their strengths and imperfections are the people who attract students. I gift several Saturdays a year to my institution because, it seems, I am able to persuade students to study there. Nobody ever signed up because of the award-winning Human Resources team, or was swayed by the robustness of the Improving Performance Procedure.

So let’s indeed raise the bar. Let’s raise the bar for decency, humanity, respect and trust. Let’s realise that academic staff do not have either the resources or the capacity to keep expanding their workloads and output every year, and please let’s keep in mind the human consequences of systems that push people above, over and beyond. And let’s return to that meaning of ‘we’ and allow ourselves to feel that it includes everyone who works in a university and not allow it to pertain exclusively to management. I hope that, perhaps, one day, vice-chancellors and their senior management teams will wake up and remember they work for universities; they are not the university.

 Video of talk at Newcastle University 25^th November 2015

Newcastle Humanities and Social Sciences RTB doc

 

References

 Davies, B. and Petersen, E.B. 2005. Neo-liberal discourse in the academy: The forestalling of (collective) resistance. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 2 (2): 77-98.

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. 2015.  Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice. November 2015. HMSO.  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/474227/BIS-15-623-fulfilling-our-potential-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.pdf

Franco-Santos, M., Rivera, P. and Bourne, M. 2014. http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/dinamic-content/news/documents/PerformanceManagementinUKHigherEducationInstitutions.pdf

Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2004. Doing and saying: some words on women’s silence. In R.T. Lakoff. Language and Women’s Place: Text and Commentaries (revised and expanded). M. Bucholtz (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 209-215.

Morozov, E. 2014. To Save Everything, Click Here. Penguin.

Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. Objectification, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24 (4), pp. 249–291.

Parr, Chris. 2014. Young universities’ secrets of success, Times Higher. July 17^th.

Power, Michael. 1997. The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.

Petersen, E.B. (forthcoming, 2016) The impact of managerial performance frameworks on research activities among Australian early career researchers, in ed. K. Trimmer Political Pressures on Educational and Social Research. NY: Routledge

Petersen, E.B. and Davies, B. 2010. In/Difference in the neoliberalised university.  Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 3 (2): 92-109.

Shore, C. and Wright, S. 2015. Audit culture revisited. Current Anthropology, 56 (3): 421-444.

Strathern, M. (ed) 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.

Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363

Cheering the Change Champions

I really did enjoy an article in the Times Higher 1^st October 2015. Steve Olivier, a deputy vice-chancellor at Abertay University, offers advice on How to Manage Rapid Change.

Although nowhere near as eminent as a deputy vice-chancellor, I am also a change champion, I have, over the last few years, presented myself for as many management training programs as I can endure. Operating rather like a resistance worker, I attend, take notes and then work with the tools of critical discourse analysis to uncover the discourses, power relations, metaphors and assumptions that are embedded in these programs. I work with a colleague, Helen Sauntson, and this analysis owes much to her expertise.

Change is one of those managerial ‘hooray words’ and, indeed, Olivier reassures us that ‘change initiatives are well-intentioned’. He then announces a litany of fifteen changes that he and the senior management team have introduced in ‘just 18 months’. Ho-hum. I wouldn’t mind betting most academics have undergone something very similar in the last three years. I could certainly check off half of Olivier’s list. Better than that, I am now looking forward to the fifth iteration of the semesters to year-long back-and-forth in my career. At Abertay, we learn that “No initiative could proceed without our first agreeing to no more than 10 principles to guide it”. That was the part I didn’t entirely recognise. Ten? Crikey, I’d be happy with one. If we can flip-flop so many times, how can we be asked to believe in any underlying principles? I am not so much a change champion as a change veteran. Change is a kind of dysfunctional academic circadian rhythm designed to make sure no process ever fully cements itself. The only response it evokes in me is resignation and thoughts of all the productive work about to be erased while I Do, I Undo and I Redo – in the way of the Louise Bourgeois sculptures.

So what do the documents of managerial training schemes reveal? Firstly, the constant references to ‘change management’ presuppose that change is something that must be managed and cannot simply be allowed to occur organically or naturally. This helps to create a discourse of change as something which must be ‘controlled’ by those in powerful positions within an institution (referred to in training documents as ‘change leaders’, ‘change masters’ and ‘change agents’). It is presented as an indicator of competence, regardless of judgements favouring the status quo, or alternative changes. Resisting change is presented as a ‘negative behaviour’.

Invoking change as a universal good to be embraced, presupposes that there will be resistance and ‘barriers’ to change, and that change is something that will not be wanted by staff working in HEIs. Academics, of course, are often the initiators of change (particularly in their subject areas), but this meaning of change is notably absent from training documents leaving a clear presupposition that change is ‘top-down’ and can only be initiated and directed by those in the most powerful positions within an institution. A discourse is created that any change that is desired by those in less powerful positions must be suppressed and controlled by those higher up.

Parker (2014) documents a convincing case study of change management at its most strident as ‘a project which attempts to ensure that all parts of an organization ‘share’ values. Or, to put it a different way, to ensure that there is no disagreement with the corporate line, and that academics and students know their places and their ‘best interests’’ (2014: 283). Apparent resistance to change was often characterised as a problem of communication (2014: 285), and unhappiness discounted as ‘inevitable in times of rapid change’.

Our documents indicate that managers see all change as revolutionary and self-evidently a good thing, often presented as ‘shaking things up’. However, change is decontextualized from any previous history. Parker comments on the strange process of legitimation: ‘[I]t was necessary to ensure that the past was not available as a valid position from which to criticize the present. In other words, the past needs to be articulated as a problem, as something that needs to be escaped from’ (2014: 287). Resistance from those with institutional memory (who are often in a position to identify the futility of the change, or its circularity) is framed in terms of their self-interest and intransigence. Those who leave are recast as not sharing the vice-chancellor’s vision. The discourse creates binary options of compliance or exit; zero: sum; entrepreneur or whiner hankering for the ‘good old days’. Indeed, as Parker points out, the very fact of staff leaving, retiring or falling ill with stress is often, in this managerial fiction of change, will be defended by the institution as evidence that change is both necessary and effective (2014: 288).

A final strong presupposition underlying the uses and meanings of change in the documents is that all change will ultimately be successful. Despite reservations that covertly may be held, the discourse is relentlessly positive; there are never any ‘problems’, only ‘challenges’, and problems are solved, challenges are overcome, ruthlessly, just like resistance. The ideology created in the text prevents academics from interrogating the legitimacy of change are being imposed – to technology, to working conditions, to ‘performance management’ or to redundancy criteria. One of the absences in the documents is the possibility of academics participating in democratic structures to agree change. Indeed, if resistance fails, and the employee finds themselves stressed or their work impeded by change, then there are institutional means by which the institution attempts to manage the dissatisfied self. Docherty (2014b) writes that “everything, including dissent, is managed and circumscribed to keep existing authority in power. Institutionally, it’s called ‘change management’”.

References

Thomas Docherty (2011). The unseen academy. Times Higher. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418076&c=2

Parker, Martin. 2014. University, Ltd: Changing a business school. Organization. 21(2) 281–292.

Are ‘critters’ taking over your university management?

It may be because it’s August, but I am feeling a little more optimistic about the future of university management.

The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE) is a company which runs training programs for university senior managers, and aspirants to those roles. Their website states that, “The Leadership Foundation is committed to developing and improving the management and leadership skills of existing and future leaders of higher education”.

I ‘m ready to confess a skeptical, though ghoulish, fascination with higher education management, but I don’t usually get warm, fuzzy feelings when reading material on strategic management, succession planning and governance reviews. But that is changing; more recently on the LFHE website, there seem to have been contributions from ‘critters’, that is advocates of critical management approaches. On the CMS portal (highly recommended) we find that approach portrayed as:

“a largely left-wing and theoretically informed approach to management and organisation studies. It challenges the prevailing conventional understanding of management and organisations. CMS provides a platform for debating radical alternatives whilst interrogating the established relations of power, control, domination and ideology as well as the relations among organisations, society and people”.

Critical Management Studies arose in the 1990s and 2000s. Butler and Spoelstra (2014: 540), citing Fournier and Grey (2000:17) characterize critical management studies approaches as exhibiting:

• an ethos of non-performativity, rejecting the usual work of improving efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation, but instead exploring issues of power, control and inequality at work,
• an ethos of denaturalization: critical scholars do not accept management knowledge at face value but actively seek to expose – and challenge – its ideological underpinnings,
• an ethos of reflexivity: critical scholars tend to reflect on their epistemological, ontological and methodological assumptions far more explicitly than their non-critical (especially positivist) counterparts who may practise an ethos of scientific disinterestedness.

There have been a few recently- commissioned reports for the LFHE that, while I don’t think I’m quite ready to say that they tick all the boxes, I do detect sympathetic echoes of the values stated above. Take, for instance, a report on the future of performance management (Franco-Santos, M., Rivera, P. and Bourne, M. 2014.) The report distinguishes between stewardship and agency approaches to performance management, and urges universities to consider a more flexible application of these. Stewardship approaches “focus on long-term outcomes through people’s knowledge and values, autonomy and shared leadership within a high trust environment”. By contrast, “agency approaches focus on short-term results or outputs through greater monitoring and control”. The authors find that institutions with a mission that is focused on “long-term and highly complex goals, which are difficult or very costly to measure (e.g., research excellence, contribution to society)” are more likely to benefit from incorporating a stewardship approach to performance management. I can probably guess which model seems more familiar to most academics, for whom autonomy, shared leadership and high trust working environments reside in the folklore of a previous generation.

The next piece which cheered me was pitched as a ‘stimulus paper’ by Richard Bolden, Sandra Jones, Heather Davis and Paul Gentle, “Developing and sustaining shared leadership in higher education”. I hope to read the entire report next week when I’m on proper holiday, but the executive summary drew my interest.

“Within higher education, shared leadership offers a compelling alternative to the discourse of managerialism (based on principles of new public management), which has become increasingly prevalent within the sector. In a context where many are sceptical of traditional influence and authority, it has been suggested that shared leadership may offer a means of reconnecting academics with a sense of collegiality, citizenship and community”.

There are those of us who are more used to expecting university senior managers to be among the more insistent adherents of command-and-control managerialism.  However, even within that grouping, there may be a growing appetite for the kind of reflexivity and exploration of power and control that underpin critical approaches to management. Janet Beer, the newly appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool, bemoans a masculinist narrative of heroism in the job descriptions and ethos of vice-chancellors (Morgan 2015) . She accuses universities of overlooking other attributes which also sustain good leadership, such as ‘consensus-building and collaborative and partnership working at all levels. Job specifications, she continued, can often emphasise qualities that aren’t necessarily about leadership in a well-balanced way’. Similarly, Keith Burnett of Sheffield University signaled a desire to loosen the thumbscrews a little: “Great teaching is not inconsistent with academic freedom, it depends upon it. It demands the unshackled possibility to question and seek knowledge wherever it is to be found, and to convey this to students without fear of intervention or sanction by the state. A value that is globally understood to be a prerequisite for scholarship”.

It is a little premature to predict the overthrow of New Public Management, and, as George Eliot taught us “signs are small, measurable things; interpretations are illimitable”. But let’s hope this heralds a new, critical ‘direction of travel’ for the LFHE. I’ll certainly keep on checking the website.

References

Bolden, R., Jones, S., Davis, H and Gentle, P. 2015. ,  Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, London. https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/sites/default/files/breaking_news_files/developing_and_sustaining_shared_leadership_in_higher_education.pdf

Burnett, K. 2015. Want to raise the quality of teaching? Begin with academic freedom. Times Higher.  August 3^rd. https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/blog/want-raise-quality-teaching-begin-academic-freedom#comment-3565

Butler, Nick and Spoelstra, Sverre. 2014. The regime of excellence and the erosion of ethos in critical management studies. British Journal of Management, Vol. 25, 538–550.

Critical Management Studies portal: http://www.criticalmanagement.org/node/2

Fournier, V. and Grey, C. 2000. ‘At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies’, Human Relations, 53, pp. 7–32.

Franco-Santos, M., Rivera, P. and Bourne, M. 2014. Performance Management in UK Higher Education Institutions. Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, London. http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/dinamic-content/news/documents/PerformanceManagementinUKHigherEducationInstitutions.pdf

Leadership Foundation for Higher Education: http://www.lfhe.ac.uk/

Morgan, J. 2015. Janet Beer on leadership diversity: don’t hold out for a hero. Times Higher. March 12th. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/janet-beer-on-leadership-diversity-dont-hold-out-for-a-hero/2019009.article