Sphinx

If I had the artistic talent, I would actually have a go at drawing the H.M. Bateman-style cartoon: a gathering of sleek, well-fed people in sharp business suits, enjoying lavish corporate hospitality in a shiny modern building, variously shocked, horrified, apoplectic and overcome with laughter at one of their number who is blushing awkwardly in the centre. The title? ‘The Vice Chancellor Who Admitted He Was Not Currently Planning A Gratuitous Institutional Restructuring Strategy In Pursuance aof A Transformative Ten-Year Strategy’.

(Obviously this thought is prompted solely by the University of Sydney’s proposal to abolish arts and social sciences departments, and the various UK universities seizing the opportunities presented by the plague to invest in redundancy payments and consultancy fees, and not at all by any vague rumours about what my own institution may be planning).

Why do they always do this? The official justification is invariably a lot of boilerplate twaddle about adaptation to an ever-changing world with new challenges, needing to change in order to stay the same, embracing the opportunities of global and tech and becoming truly world-leading in international competitiveness metrics, generally with a rather snide paragraph about addressing academic cultures of complacency and change resistance. Yadda yadda. But one can accept the reality of major challenges to universities in the twenty-first century, even if put in rather more down-to-earth terms, and still think that getting everyone to devote limited supplies of time, energy and patience to adapting to new institutional structures which will inevitably require significant modification over a period of years may not be the best way of facing those challenges. Why not get everyone to focus on them, for example, rather than focusing on how their individual working conditions are being turned upside down?

Well, I guess you don’t get very far in VC appointment processes if you suggest that the university in question is basically fine; the core message needs to be that the institution is full of exciting potential but is currently failing to realise it to the full, and anything else indicates a lack of ambition and courage. But it would be nice to imagine that, having made this pitch to the interviewing panel, a newly-appointed VC might take a few months to get to know their domain and then say, You know what? This place is actually working pretty well. We could do better in various areas, so let’s focus a bit more energy there, but otherwise carry on as you are. Good job, everyone.

Yeah, right. Obviously I’m looking at this from the wrong end. What would be the point of a VC who didn’t unleash a massive programme of structural transformation? It’s either than or lots of shiny buildings (or both, admittedly), and the thing about the buildings is that they need to be paid for, whereas apart from the management consultant fees the costs of structural transformation are assumed to be covered by normal operational budgets (or perhaps assumed to be negligible).

Academics are generally pretty good at self-organisation; as seen in the last eighteen months, they get the teaching done, however adverse the circumstances; they get the research written and the grant applications submitted, because it’s what they want to do. Academic administrators likewise; we are all highly practised at keeping the show on the road. To a significant degree you can issue high-level instructions and leave people to get on with it, adapting them to local circumstances; it’s when there’s an insistence on micro-management and uniformity for its own sake that the problems turn up.

This doesn’t mean that the VC role is actually just reduced to shaking a lot of hands and delivery the same terrible speech multiple times at graduation. There are hard decisions to be made all the time, that need someone to make them – but they are mundane, keeping the show on the road so everyone else can get on with their thing decisions. They are not glamorous. They are not “this is why I deserve my high six-figure salary” decisions.

And, insofar as the modern VC thinks of her/himself as the CEO of a dynamic business, there is a distinct lack of the sorts of KPIs that most CEOs appeal to as justifications for salary and bonuses. No share price. No market share. No profits. No meaningful measure of productivity, and giving every academic an annually-increasing quota of first-class degrees to award led to such terrible publicity. Holding VCs responsible for changes in league table position would be grossly unfair, as clearly they’re skewed and almost random unless you go up. To much of the university’s business depends on people over whom you have relatively little control. But you do have control over the structures within which they work…

One optimistically imagines that VCs genuinely believe they will be making a contribution to the success of the whole university by messing about with things which they have the power to mess with, rather than these endless reorganisations being merely a solipsistic struggle to prove and justify their existence. Who would thank or praise or reward a VC who just kept the show on the road for a decade? Well, most of the staff, but they don’t count.