Staff voice can bring proper scrutiny of UK higher education meltdown

I completely agree with the sentiments of the article and the proposals for better staff representation in decision making are key to stopping Universities making these mistakes again. I'm sure though that it would only be the yes men ( or women) who would be invited(allowed) to join these groups. If your institution is anything like ours, anybody challenging ridiculous decisions will have their career prospects amended accordingly. I also think UCU leadership should be held accountable for their failure over the same time period - the constant striking for no gain has pretty much rendered the tactic useless which is the last thing needed when fighting for the institutions making staff redundant.

Universities are indeed very poorly governed. What happened was that academics were able to take on many extra students and became a lot more efficient at doing mass education due to technology and learning platforms like moodle and blackboard. The problem is that as the money rolled in the Universities were systematically infected by bureaucrats and over paid and generally useless senior management teams that breed like rabbits and too0k control of the institutions. My solution is simple, Universities needs to be like law firms. The lawyers are the the ones who bring in the money and they employ managers and admin staff as and when required and then pay them accordingly, keeping most of the money for themselves. The same should be applied to Universities, academics bring in the money in the form of teaching and research income and academics should then decide how many managers and admin staff to employ. Things will be much better run, excess senior management teams and their associated empires ended and much better pay for the academics. Simples really. At the moment we have the senior management teams who are often very sub-par telling the academics what to do, and constraining their pay, while paying themselves excessively high salaries.

The bureaucratic bloat in UK HE is mind-blowing. Every simply activity - setting an assignment, admitting a student, conducting a personal tutorial etc. - is now mired in lengthy protocols, guides, record-keeping portals and so on. Let academics teach, talk to students, and write papers, rather than funding this guff.

None of this matters. None of the comments matter. None of the views, evidence, or alternatives provided by the non-VC people included in the article matter. All the constant rantings about senior leader inflated salaries and broken staff means nothing. The past few months at least, if not a year, we've had article after article about the same practices, the same cuts, the same pushbacks. But VCs and their teams just keep rolling out the same decisions and the same soundbytes and justifications regardless of what anyone says, writes, or proves. I realise it's defeatist, but it doesn't matter what any of us say; senior teams won't consider any other playbook, and they will convince their governors it's the only one anyway. I just think we're all too tired to bother fighting anymore. Numbers of voices and volume of reason doesn't make a dent nowadays...

When I was appointed to my first lectureship 30+ years ago, the head of department was elected by the staff and approved by the University admin. There was a written constitution. After a couple of years he was also removed by the professors due to poor performance. Within a few years there was a massive shift, a new VC abolished the election of departmental heads; they were appointed by the University admin to carry out their wishes. Poor performance was blamed on staff. Managers were told quietly that in any dispute, they would be backed over a staff member. Which system worked best? The first more democratic approach, unsurprisingly. The primary reason being. higher education is built on highly motivated staff working longer than their contracted hours for nothing. Cooperation, support and accountability are essential attributes of management in HE.

People just dont understand this. Letting things go is never the answer. The cost of bad decisions will fall disproportionately on staff at the lower levels. Apathy isn't the answer. Saying nothing will change and staying away from asking the difficult questions is not going to help your cause in the long run. Sure, you may be targeted as a trouble maker but there must surely be something things worth standing up for and fighting for. Certainly, there is an issue with so-called managers but there are also the academics who are also part of the problem. The failed academics turned managers, senior professors who never contribute to teaching and are always on admin, the ones who breed and thrive on sycophancy, the bullies, the faux meritocrats, the ones that want to put their names to every grant and paper inspite of not doing anything etc. This will be a difficult swamp to drain.

I agree with all the suggestions in this piece. At one institution I know, a new "Interim Dean" was appointed recently who, in the last 4 years, has had 8 senior jobs at 8 different institutions. Nice work if you can get it. High pay, low accountability. We don't need senior leaders who are businesspeople looking to maximise their bonuses before jumping ship to the next high-paying position at a higher-status organisation. We need leaders who can influence policy and have sensible conversations with the government about sustainable ways forward for the sector. We also need leaders who know what it's like to balance the competing demands of increased student needs (academic, wellbeing, financial etc.) with decreased resources while simultaneously reaching the B3 metrics, improving last year's NSS scores and producing research papers on the weekends!

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