Committees and IT departments have captured the university

Yes. You think this is bad: Try making a change to an existing module such as modifying the assessment plans. You'd think the sky was falling in. As a juniour academic I once tried to change the plan on a module that I'd just been handed, I was hauled over hot coals and informed that no you cannot do that. " students must know what to expect"...... why? It is a compulsory module. The amazing thing isn't that universities are in as deep a hole as the are but that they have actually managed to get some good things done despite the tendencies noted in the article. on the other hand aortosclerosis is often associated with age.

I think the big mistake here, which reveals that the authors has not been in UK academia long, its to describe these trends as increasing, or in any way new. I've seen versions of this article my entire career. Outside scrunty of modules and programs has been a part of UK acadmia at least as long as my father was lecturing in the 1980s. The idea of work being marked by two assessors become popular in the mid 20th century, and that idea of an external examiner in undergraduate degrees goes all the way back to the 1830s. Obviously in the best world this is all done by other academics. I also recognise the complaints about IT, and find infuriating. But then I'm reminded that one university in the UK recently had to function entirely without computers for a month after they were hacked into. Suddenly asking me to do 2FA doesn't seem so bad. Combine that with GDPR complaince and I can understand a lot of ITs rules. The problem is not too many resources for these things, its too little. Does it make sense to have 2FA for a spreadsheet with no confidential information on it? Of course not. But having seperate systems for different types of information adds to the resources required. Better just to have one system, and if you are going to do that, better make it secure. In the end, IT used to be run by specialists. Our IT folks had mostly been academic IT folks most or all of their careers. We had departmental IT folk who understood our local special needs. They also knew who could and who counldn't be trusted with the keys to the system. In an age of reduced resources for things like IT, we are left with IT systems run using off-the-shelf approaches you might find in a standard corporation, where everyone has the same laptop, and uses the same 2 or 3 pieces of software. The same is true of program oversight. When there were sufficient academics to spend hours at committee meetings debating the pros and cons of each question on every exam paper in the department (yes, we used to do this, and yes, my exams were much better for it), that was great, but who has time for that these days, with only half the number of staff per student we had 10 years ago? So everything is reduced to ticking boxes that can be understood by people outside the academic faulty.

My student wants to perform an ultra simple bird feeder experiment to test food preferences and response times. Sure it is not astrophysics, but it offers quite some nice insights into animal decision making etc. Not any manual handling of birds involved. The ethics is 17 pages, risk assessment is another 10. Plus getting all the permits from the campus groundsmen. This all goes through multiple panels and has multiple rounds of peer review. Now consider that one has to run 5 different projects. Is having a dozen of individuals going through 135 pages of text really what we should all be doing? For uni outreach, I want to get some sticklebacks or frogspawn from a pond, put it in a tub and show it to school kids for an hour. Then carefully back in the pond it all goes. Quite a few kids absolutely love seeing that stuff and it creates quite an impression about nature and life in a pond, particularly as any school trip to somewhere outside has already been cut ages ago. Uni barred us from doing this, telling us we need a full home office licensed person to continuously supervise us plus regular visits by a vet, and state-of-the-art aquatic facilities in a truck if we ever want to do this stuff. I think we have gone a bit nuts.

Where have you been for the last 50 years. And expansion of undefined, duplicative administrators should be listed first. And then unnecessary paperwork. Committees should be listed far lower.

Excellent article - spot on. A bloated cadre of middle managers now run much of UK HE in their own interests, with students and academic staff often peripheral.

I think it was John Locke who said that (paraphrasing) if rules and instruction replace judgement then people who are obliged to follow instruction become as dumb as it is possible to be and still complete their work.