Alastair Hunter, UCU president-elect
UEL, Friday 6th March:		Governance

The report in THE of February 26th 2009 that post-92 institutions are keen to reduce the size of their governing bodies to fewer than twelve, to exclude staff and students, and to ensure a majority of non-university members, brings us one large step closer to Poppleton plc. It beggars belief that, in a sector where abuse and incompetence are already rife, the future should be so cavalierly mortgaged to those whose vision is narrowly commercial, whose responsibility to employees is virtually zero, and whose concern for students goes little beyond the income they generate. I have no idea what is the optimum size for these slimmed-down boards. The theoretical minimum is of course three: the Vice-Chancellor and his two chums from Poppleton Pork Products plc. I suppose in the interests of some kind of accountability none will fall below five. At least it will reduce photocopying costs for protest mail-shots; on the other hand, they are likely to increase significantly in number.
Colleagues, this conference today is timely. The particular circumstances which motivated it are of course the curious goings-on at this very institution and the mystery as to the real reasons for the suspension of the VC. I’m not about to shed crocodile tears for Martin Everett (and fewer still for Simon Lee), but the deeper malaise of governance implied by these events is of concern to us all. The effective exclusion of the voice of the university itself is a sign that the kind of structure indicated by the THE report is already a de facto reality on many governing bodies.
My own direct experience is of the pre-92 sector. I was on the Court of Glasgow University for six years as one of two elected staff reps (one is elected from academic and related, the other from support staff; in general nominees from the relevant unions are elected unopposed). There are also a number of academics elected by Senate, and student representatives. The overall balance is, of course, in favour of lay members, but at present there is no move to slim down numbers or remove democratic members. Changes are, of course, relatively difficult to bring about because these institutions are governed by statutes which are rather difficult to modify. But in reality, the effectiveness of these staff voices is strictly limited, and certainly unlikely to affect strategic decisions. That said, it is important not to underestimate the embarrassment factor, the invaluable privilege of access to information about what is going on, and the power to influence voluntary severance and potential redundancy situations. There is also an important human dimension: the exposure of what are often neo-Thatcherite business people to responsible staff reps makes it just a little bit more difficult for the most egregious sorts of corporate misrule to be perpetrated.
The problems indicated by these introductory observations are not extraneous to the university, nor do they represent an unwelcome imposition on reluctant senior administrations by outside forces. The truth is that they have been actively created by the gradual development of managerialism internally in response to successive government initiatives from the Thatcher period onwards. I needn’t rehearse these factors here: they can, I suppose, be summed up in two mantras – ‘value for money’ and ‘efficiency gains’ – which have combined to drive down the unit of cost per student with concomitant effects on salaries and infrastructure. From the outset, instead of actively challenging the obviously destructive policies of government, VCs and governing bodies rolled over and accepted almost without a murmur the supposed need for crass efficiency gains. Perhaps they were fearful for their Ks, perhaps they were simply incompetent; what they cannot argue is that the consequences were in any way in any kind of doubt.
The trouble with cuts is that they create an internal market of fear and competition, and are destructive of collegiality. When each Dean has to fight his or her own corner, when each Head of Department has to compete for replacement staff and adequate running costs, when each individual academic has to struggle for travel grants, photocopying, and research leave, it is little surprise that the virtues of the old university system rapidly vanish. I do not for a moment want to defend an imaginary golden age, and I am clear that there were abuses in the past both of patronage and of an irresponsibly laissez-faire attitude to the gentleman scholar (gender intended) who rarely graced the department with his presence and whose output since being given his chair consisted of little more than the occasional letter to the Times. But what has come in its place is arguably a far worse thing: the costly disaster of the RAE, the complete abandonment of any pretence that academic values should have priority, the relentless weighing and measuring of everything to find out its cost, and the dirigiste imposition by senior management of whatever is the latest business school fad. By the way, I do not wish to imply that business schools do not do serious work: the problem is that their work is prone to being appropriated by management fashionistas! Every new VC now feels compelled to restructure the institution. Departments give way to Schools, Faculties to Divisions, Schools to Centres, only for Departments and Faculties to be reinvented. Where Deans were once elected academic colleagues they are now upwardly mobile apparatchiks, fully absorbed into the cabal of the Senior Management Team. If you are lucky, the HoD may still be aware of the true purpose of the university – though not if they too are thrusting!! At the heart of this whole dysfunctional process is a lack of trust and an essentially bullying ethos. The footsoldiers cannot be trusted (it is alleged) to understand the harsh realities of the financial and political pressures we are under; as a result they have to be cajoled, bullied, or coerced into collaborating with a top-down agenda increasingly driven by non-practitioners. That this poisonous combination has not proved to be a total disaster is due in no small part to the intelligence, experience, commitment and passion of the staff (at all levels) who actually make the system work, often in the teeth of determined efforts to frustrate them.
This could so easily become anecdotal, so let me pause here and ask a more difficult question: What, if anything, is to be done? There is, unfortunately, no quick fix. I suspect that things will get much worse before those who rule us see how counterproductive their policies are. The current (if perhaps only temporary) collapse of market capitalism should offer an opportunity to challenge prevailing models – though that might best be done through political parties not currently in power, who might have some incentive for exploring alternatives. It is ironic that such a tactic might seem to imply an approach to the Tories, the party of capital, to persuade them to adopt a more constructive approach to university governance. This is not as paradoxical as it appears, for Cameron is not Thatcher, and there is an obvious advantage to them in opening up some distance between themselves and the Leitch-driven skills-based business-facing failure that is the current Labour policy on post-school education. Never underestimate the kind of investment Tory voters have in ‘proper’ universities! UCU’s political liaison department, and officials in HEC, have a continuing brief to lobby both politicians and their civil servants on all matters to do with the sector, and it seems to me that one of the outcomes of today’s event might be to provide direction and specificity to their work.
But there is a role also for lay members like yourselves, many of whom have experience of courts and governing bodies, and whose branches and local associations are perhaps best placed to argue the case locally. I suspect there is no one-size-fits-all remedy, and this is confirmed anecdotally. Manchester, after the merger with UMIST, made attempts to reduce the democratic representation on court which were successfully resisted through local pressure. Ulster, on the other hand, proved more resistant to local arguments, and ended up with a fudge in which four staff members (five if, as they do, you cheekily count the VC as a member of staff) are elected but only after having been vetted for their suitability! Much of this sounds like a return to Victorian values, where the great and the good are trusted to run everything and the rest of us gratefully accept their superior knowledge and tug whatever forelocks we have left. There is no quick fix for this, and we must recognize that once lost, rights to representation are extraordinarily difficult to recover. One firm proposal I would have is the setting up of a network of employee or union reps on courts and boards with a view to sharing best practice, combined with an active branch-level campaign to highlight the worst offenders and to encourage the development of real democracy. Perhaps JNCs or JCCs might be one way to pursue this agenda.
However, even where there are representatives, their scope for action is often limited. They will rarely have access to key committees – finance being the most obvious – and may only have a marginal voice in the appointment of vcs, and none in the appointment of lay members. It is here, I think, that there might be scope for the expression of public concern: courts are in effect self-perpetuating clubs with little, if any, public accountability regarding how vacancies are filled. I believe that student bodies, such as NUS, might have a real interest in shared action – when redundancies or voluntary severance programmes are proposed, their members will be amongst the first to suffer. The short-term nature of student office tends to work against the construction of effective long-term action, but their voice needs to be heard, and in some regards carries more weight than that of staff.
To work effectively we need a set of achievable goals: realistic proposals for the size of courts, workable numbers of staff and student representation, proper guidelines for their election, and guidelines as to what they can do, can have access to, and can share with their constituencies. This last is particularly important, for it is in the papers of governing bodies that early warning signals can be spotted of developments we might wish to question: restructuring; financial problems; deals with INTO, Kaplan and the like; and hints about future strategic directions. Staff representatives need confidence about what they can share and with whom, lest they find themselves accused of breach of confidentiality.
I have said nothing yet about the other arm of governance – the Senate or Academic Board. There may be Freudian reasons for my silence on these, for they have been systematically and on a widespread basis stripped of their powers and generally reduced to talking shops over the last three decades. I recall, when I was first on Senate in Glasgow, how a group of prominent, well-informed, and rumbustious professors could hijack the agenda and reduced even the VC to quivering ineffectiveness. Later, when I served for four years as Dean of my faculty, much had changed. Votes still needed to be won, but the voice of dissent was largely silent. The wider picture in the sector as a whole suggests that now even the appearance of debate has gone, and that Courts and their equivalents routinely dispose of matters rightly of academic concern as though Senates have no role to play. Is this a true trahison des clercs, a selling of the pass by an academic establishment too alienated from politics to care or too worried about their careers to take a risk? Or is it the death by a hundred cuts which has crept up on us when we weren’t looking? It hardly matters, for the result is the same: the hollow appearance of power right at the heart of what the University stands for, masking the reality of power in the hands of those whose interests are driven not by the pursuit of knowledge but the pursuit of wealth, and whose qualifications are not the PhD or the MA, but the Bachelor of Blarney from the University of Life.
Colleagues, forgive me if I have occasionally crossed the line between sober analysis and rhetoric, but I feel strongly that there is a crisis in the governance of our universities, and an urgent need to do what we can to call to account those who have led us to this dangerous pass. I welcome this conference, and look forward to its outcome as a starting point in a much-needed campaign.

Alastair G Hunter
VP HE
5th March 2009