[Robin McAlpine Blog] Why Scotland’s universities are facing their worst crisis in centuries

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Why Scotland's universities are facing their worst crisis in centuries

First published by The Herald

Scotland has had universities for more than 600 years. In that time there has never been such a sector-wide crisis, there is no recorded period where staff morale was so low or students were so cynical about their education, and there was certainly never a point where the leaders of universities rewarded themselves so generously.

Over the last 30 years there has been a quiet revolution in how universities are led. I would argue that it is more accurately described as a coup. You can look as hard as you like but you won’t find any politician who said they were going to create the system we have and there is no legislation which explains how we got here.

It just… happened. Understanding how and why this happened and why it has been such a disaster is crucial not only if we want to save the higher education sector in Scotland but also if we want to save the public realm more generally. So let’s have a look at this whole unedifying mess.

But before we do we need to understand how this started. In the 1980s and 1990s a religion-like ideological mania gripped the entire public sector – New Public Management.

So what is New Public Management? It is a theory introduced during the Thatcher years which has grown and grown and got entirely out of hand. The theory is simple; systems work not because of the people who deliver them but because of the people who manage them.

This was part of the economic revolution of that era which believed that the processes which are used in the private sector are inherently more efficient and so if the public sector was run in the same way it too would be more efficient. This is what led to the rise of the Public Management Class (as it is known in social theory).

But there are problems with applying private sector management approaches to the public sector. Fundamentally, the public sector is just much more complex. Take something like the NHS; everything it does is complex and difficult. Healthcare is not one ‘product’ and the people managing it cannot understand everything which is going on.

More than that, they broadly can’t understand anything that is going on. Almost everything in the NHS is a complex specialism that takes years to learn. How is a business studies or marketing or HR graduate supposed to manage that?

The truth is they don’t, because they can’t. So they do something else instead, they turn the ‘business’ of a hospital into a spreadsheet of abstract numbers which are supposed to describe what is happening. You know these as performance indicators.

Now the managers aren’t managing a hospital, they’re managing a load of abstract numbers they invented to tell them what they think is happening in a hospital. They have successfully cut everyone who knows what they are doing out of the governing processes. Now they are in complete charge of a system they barely understand.

In the health service I think the classic example of that is occupancy rates. The management class looked at how many empty beds they had in their hospital ‘on average’. They decided it was ‘too many’, so they cut the number of beds.

Unfortunately, healthcare is not consistent; a full hospital in July is a collapsing hospital in January. We have been living with this performance indicator-driven failure ever since, to the annual cry of despair from medics who could have told you this was a bad idea.

This is exactly what has happened in universities. These used to be communities of thinkers and learners which self-governed in a collegiate manner. The university principal was a first among equals, the senate a democratic body that made decisions on academic matters and the court a body mainly elected by staff and students which oversaw the running of the university.

Indeed this is pretty well how the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge still work. In Scotland however universities are now the preserve of a management class. They truly believe themselves to be the leaders of ‘international businesses’.

Good university leadership isn’t about risk or eternal expansion or diversification, it is about custodianship, looking after great institutions for now and for the future

They behave accordingly – universities have become portfolios of assets, a property empire from which they must ‘release the value’. To do that they need to provide ‘teaching services’ and preferably as cheaply as possible.

So they have come to see staff as hired labour and students as customers. And like every corporate leader they believe that casualisation will reduce the bargaining power of academics and thus push down pay bills and increase ‘profits’.

And if you actually think you’re a global corporation then you have to grow, right? But how? Because in truth a university is most certainly not a growth-focussed institution. More students isn’t a ‘better’ university. Universities should be driven not by volume but quality.

But a handy growth opportunity was at hand, because this period coincided with the economic rise of a number of nations which themselves didn’t have such strong university systems, particularly in Asia.

But how to attract these international students? This is how we get into the vanity project phase. To make the international prospectus more attractive the university gambled heavily on building shiny new buildings. Then, having mortgages to pay on these flash new buildings, they were stuck in a doom loop – more international students, so more vanity projects, requiring more international students.

Except universities don’t succeed by looking like the corporate headquarters of a financial consultancy. Go and have a look at photos of the working environment of Francis Crick and James Watson (who discovered DNA); not a hint of marble to be found, no aspirational thinking pods or thought avenues or discovery zones.

Nope, they were just given a lab, a salary and left to get on with it without having to fill in endless forms to create the data from which performance indicators are derived so some finance director could ‘manage’ them.

Because good university leadership isn’t about risk or eternal expansion or diversification, it is about custodianship, looking after great institutions for now and for the future. Business start-ups can be allowed to go out of business. Universities cannot.

This is the driving force behind the mess of higher education, a management class high on their own supply and convinced of their entrepreneurial genius creating a giant Ponzi scheme which requires a never-ended increase in overseas students not to fall down.

Yet even in the 2000s we knew that this wasn’t a permanently-expanding market. Ten years ago there were 600 universities in India, now there are 1,113. For a while China was building an average of one new university every week, and they were impressive. We were ahead on academic quality, but that wasn’t going to last forever.

So the market is drying up, the Ponzi scheme has crumbled and what we are left with is a demoralised sector with major financial difficulties. It is notable that it is the ambitious, prestigious institutions which appear to be in the most trouble now, and it is because they gambled with the greatest abandon back then.

But how did this happen? Which government in Holyrood’s history came to power saying ‘we’re going to strip democracy from universities, create an all-powerful management class and turn academics into day labourers’? The answer is none of them.

The only way you’ll ever run a public service effectively is to trust the frontline staff who know what they’re doing and measure them against outputs, not makey-uppy indicators

To understand what happened you need to look at the management class’s management class – the quango-ocracy. Another aspect of New Public Management was the belief in technocratic government. Policy isn’t a string of decisions which require value judgements (they thought) but a scientific process carried out on a spreadsheet.

And crucially that means you don’t need democracy, you need ‘arms length management’ which operates largely outside the democratic framework; the quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation. The quango for universities is the Scottish Funding Council.

Until 2005 it had mainly just distributed funding on a simple formula basis, but then an innocuous-sounding half-sentence was included in the largely pointless 2005 Education Act. It said the funding council could now "require the institution to comply with any principles of governance which appear to the Council to constitute good practice in relation to higher education institutions".

Suddenly this unelected quango could tell universities how to run themselves, and they could do it almost explicitly on an whim. "…Which appears to…". To a dozen people who answer to no-one? Is this really a sufficient evidence base for a revolution?

The result was pretty immediate. It became established as a principle that universities should be anything but self-governing communities of learners and thinkers. Instead they would be overseen by a committee of ‘the great and the good’ appointed by themselves in perpetuity.

By the early-2010s I was campaigning to try and restore at least a little democracy to universities. The SNP administration had committed to having at least the chair of the university court elected by staff and students.

That the university management class resisted this with such ferocity was revealing. So far gone were they in their self regard that the actually thought that if they weren’t in control of everything all the time forever then chaos would reign. They lost; chairs of court are elected, chaos didn’t follow.

There is much more to this collapse in a highly-distinguished university sector than this, but it illustrates the primary problem. It is very seldom said in public life in Scotland, but the ideology of New Public Management has failed abysmally.

Since it conquered all, virtually all public services have edged closer and closer to crisis. Have a look at Historic Environment Scotland’s current mess (if you can bring yourself) – a management class out of control was overseen by a management class that did nothing about it

It is the frontline staff who suffer from all this. They spend inordinate amounts of time creating management data so managers can manage them when they should really be delivering services to the public. They have no control over their work, their expertise does not shape the way their service is run. They are completely disempowered.

It is also insanely wasteful – another feature of this revolution is ‘the consultant’, now another part of the governing class, there to help managers manage what they don’t understand. It is lucrative for all concerned.

And here is the awful, sordid truth of it all – this is corrupt. It is not in the public interest. And it doesn’t work. Performance indicators are largely a waste of time. The only way you’ll ever run a public service effectively is to trust the frontline staff who know what they’re doing and measure them against outputs, not makey-uppy indicators.

It would let teachers teach. It would let doctors heal. We’d restore the oversight of hospital wards to ‘Matrons’ (trained medical professionals) not a 20-something HR graduate. We’d let social workers help people with mental health difficulties.

We would realise we don’t need quangos at all and abolish them. We would stop accepting rock-star salaries for mundane bureaucrats (the Principal of Edinburgh University now gets a half-million pound salary package). And we would return universities to being the community of learners and thinkers they always were.

I truly believe we may be on the cusp of finally slaying this dragon. For 30 years we have taken the management class at their word that they are the best people for the job.

But between CalMac and about three health boards which are currently embroiled in serious trouble to the mad salaries of the Water Industry Commission to the Historic Environment Scotland debacle, the near-bankruptcy of Dundee University, the despised SQA and its endless errors and much more besides, people are finally questioning the idea that the management class knows best.

Good administration matters, but it should never believe it is ‘running’ frontline services, it should be supporting them. It should trust frontline staff and do everything it can to stay out of their way when they’re busy. Restoring that mindset (and democracy) is our best chance of rescuing public services – and our only chance of rescuing our universities.

Source: Why Scotland's universities are facing their worst crisis in centuries