How to Scale a University

Regular readers will probably appreciate that I occasionally write to exorcise my managerial angst. This may not make for enthralling reading, but needs must. So, I have been giving thought to the problem of universities and scale.

The problem here is that many of the mechanisms, both formal and informal, by which universities conventionally operate, do not scale. They are built upon institutions that are physically, more or less, in one place. These institutions are constituted of a small number of departments, perhaps loosely clustered in coherent faculties, where the departments are small enough for all the members of staff to know each other and for the Head to be able to both run the department and be a peer to the senior staff. The departments are the primary locus of student engagement and hold the main responsibilties in respect of day-to-day management. The universities are dependent upon broad participation in collective governance and on a shared understanding of a common operating model. They depend too on a straightforward and transparent allocation of financial responsibilities and schemes of delegation.

There are very few universities for which these operational conditions hold. Put simply most research intensive institutions outgrew the established mechanisms and associated organisational models perhaps ten or more years ago. Much of the recent story of university management has been a process of catch-up in which we have sought to transition from a scheme of working that could no longer be sustained to an approach that respects the realities of increased scale. This is the genesis of 'faculties' with executive responsibilities, coordinating 'schools', 'research institutes', 'clusters', 'hubs', 'programmes' and all the varied organisational forms that have emerged.

All very well, but I observe a risk beyond this - leading research intensive universities are continuing to grow. The drive for this is not simply financial but is principally intellectual: the ability to address large-scale interdisciplinary challenges; the capacity to support complex experimental infrastructure; the need to deliver a global presence; the need to maintain diversity to accommodate rapid shifts in the importance of different subjects and areas of study. Some strategies other than growth might work, partnerships for example, but they are difficult to implement and unproven

I am not sure we know what is the right way to organise the super-scale university and I certainly think we do not understand how to maintain a collective and open model of governance in this setting. We could perhaps look to the corporate world and how much more dynamic and federated structures operate but of course, universities are not ultimately commercial entities (although they may contain them). Certainly hierarchy has limits as a means of effective organisation and control. I am not going to present an answer here, though perhaps we could think about going 'back to the future', maybe the federal (read federated) university might be in for a renaissance.

While the first transition in scale is as yet unresolved within universities we are poorly placed to address the challenges of the next jump in scale. We have some difficult questions to answer.