How can we fix UK higher education? – part two

Again failure to address the amount of useless bureaucrats in UK Universities. Someone needs to seriously look at how much the cost of bureaucracy has gone up per student. Much of the fees are not to pay the academics but to pay for administrative bloat. With all the technology available today you could get rid of 50% of UK University bureaucrats.

Judging by my own experiences and contacts over the years, there is now no accountability in the system for academics. It is dominated by mediocre managers, and poor administrators (with the very occasional brilliant one if you are lucky). They have combined have undermine the relationship between academics, research, teaching, and students, shifting it from a public and necessary good, to a marketing exercise to pay the bills for bureaucratic institutions. I would say that British universities are no longer 'the envy of the world' I'm afraid, as I have observed over the last 5 years and more. You can see this in the difficultly of attracting leading scholars and the best international students. Most have been going in the other direction.

The discussion has been heavily predicated on an assumption of keeping the existing system afloat. A pertinent starting pint is: how many unis does he UK need, how many can it afford and what should they then be charged with doing. A comparison of nr of unis per $GDP, per population with other countries would be revealing.Although research is a knee-jerk response, it should be noted that universities are not the only structure that undertake research. Looking more widely you'll find: national labs, specialist agencies, and private industry. The Q then become where do universities fit and who does what and at what cost. The answer might be that some universities have to merge or go entirely or become something else. This is happening anyway. the choice s between controlled implosion or catastrophic deconstruction. There us a difference between planned

All too often, academics are promoted specifically because of their ability to fill out forms on time. When bureaucracy is the goal, serious research and teaching fall by the wayside. And bureaucrats move up to administration. It is not just non-academic administrators who love bureaucracy - academia is all too often dominated by mediocre academic bureaucrats. Brilliant and inspired academics succeed not due to uni administration but despite it. Meanwhile nothing works as efficiently as the private sector.

None of the six essays mentioned universities cutting the costs of education. Yet there are obvious opportunities to do so. How many "research and teaching" staff are doing little research, or research that is of little value? Probably at least 20%, judging from my experience. This wasted research time could be better used for teaching. More teaching resources at no cost, what's not to like?

Most UK Universities have degenerated into badly behaved organisations. They often fail on the most basic of employment functions like paying people their wages. They waste public resources paying people for the consequences of the grossly negligent employment practices. They repeat the same mistakes over and over again because they don’t fix the organisational faults generating the difficult situations. The significant unnecessary stress arising from the same grossly negligent employment practices is a significant public health risk. Universities in the UK vomit HR, EDI and wellbeing policies on their staff but when it comes to applying those same policies to actively manage a difficult situation the ability is not there. When a typical UK university makes a mistake generating a very difficult situation for an individual there are no limits to the amount of public resources it is willing to spend and the amount of unnecessary stress it is willing to put an individual through to ‘vigorously defend’ the gross organisational negligence that generated the case in the first place.

The former Secretary of State for work and pensions makes good points about the need to sustainably finance higher education since at the moment universities just let the enormous organisational pressure of that financial gap to rest on smalls numbers of individuals within the organisation in the form of overwork. There is a bigger problem however, all rights in education (students) and work (staff) rely on strong protections in the event of an unfair termination by the organisation of the relationship with the individual but in the UK there is no legal backstop. As the post office case showed and what is currently happening in higher education shows organisations can behave as badly as they like, there are no limits as to what an organisation can put an individual through with their bad organisational behaviour.