A brilliant, if wincingly accurate, diagnostic tool. I suspect many of us across the sector are currently calculating our institutional ‘Dundee’ scores with a mounting sense of dread.
Reading this prompted a rather curious reflection on the peculiar ecosystem of university leadership. Is it not a fascinating paradox that we routinely see academic colleagues successfully spinning out ventures and navigating the cut-throat world of enterprise, yet the reverse trajectory seems virtually mythic? Where are the legendary corporate dynamos transforming our administrative blocks into engines of lean, supportive efficiency?
Instead, one is forced to ask: why does the modern university executive suite so often feel like a gentle pasture for those who found the actual private sector a trifle too demanding? We seem to have imported all the jargon of the corporate world—the 'agile frameworks', the 'strategic pivots', the myriad 'stakeholder synergies'—without any of the concomitant efficiency or market accountability.
The issue, of course, is not the individuals themselves, but the sprawling architecture we have allowed to flourish. Why do we construct vast administrative hierarchies whose primary output appears to be the generation of compliance exercises for the very people trying to conduct the research and teaching? When a workload allocation model requires its own dedicated bureaucracy just to operate, have we not completely lost the plot?
Perhaps it is time to ask a fundamental question of our institutions: what might happen if we stripped away the corporate cosplay, dismantled the administrative bloat, and returned to the truly radical idea of simply trusting and equipping our academic staff to excel?
Thank you for such an eloquent, clear-eyed, and substantive assessment of the sector. Reading your thoughts, it strikes me that we are undoubtedly diagnosing the same patient and agreeing entirely on the severity of the symptoms. The external pressures you describe—massification, severe financial constraints, and the complex new reality of our operating environment—are undeniable. I share your conviction that nostalgia is a psychological comfort blanket, not a strategy. We both agree that radical, disruptive change is not just necessary; it is overdue.
Where we diverge, and perhaps not, is not on the need for this change, but on its origins and the exact nature of the disease.
You rightly point out the external pressures forcing our hand. However, I would argue that these pressures are merely the stress test that has exposed a deeper, internal failure. The crisis we face is fundamentally one of values and leadership, not merely of changing external weather. For too long, academic leadership has attempted to survive by trying to be everything to everyone. When the moment demands authentic intellectual bravery and profound social responsibility, we have too often seen a retreat into politically correct, risk-averse management.
We must, of course, distinguish between the enduring ideal of "academia" and the actions of some academics and administrators. Just as the private sector has its share of unscrupulous executives and poor managers, so do we. But why is the proposed solution to our current malaise a doubling-down on the very corporate management mentality that caused the administrative bloat and collapsing morale we both lament?
You speak of "business process reengineering" and a "service-business" model. But is it wise to hijack our institutions with a corporate framework that still has a great deal to prove regarding its efficacy in its own natural habitat?
The genuine academic genius can, and absolutely must, adapt to the modern world. However, this radical change must come from profound introspection and a rediscovery of our mission, rooted securely in our founding values: academic freedom, rigorous truth-seeking, the fearless dissemination of knowledge, meaningful collegiality, and true institutional autonomy.
To surrender our transformation to a corporate management playbook is to cede our most vital academic faculty: our ability to reflect, assess objective evidence, and reinvent our institutions to serve society and our students.
If we agree that the status quo is fundamentally broken, perhaps we can ponder a different route forward:
If we must become leaner and more sustainable, how do we achieve this by stripping away the suffocating layers of compliance, rather than imposing new frameworks of "strategic management"?
How might we redesign our institutions to actively empower the scholarly community, rather than demanding that academics continually reshape themselves to serve an expanding administrative superstructure?
Ultimately, are we brave enough to trust the academic professionals who actually deliver the research and education upon which our societal value rests?
I believe strongly in academic leadership and in organisations that are led by teams with broad experience of the delivery of education, research and impact (broadly construed). But ... our operating context is highly complex. The scale we operate at has changed, and the range of expectations we must meet has expanded vastly. We need to operate safely and efficiently, with a high degree of assurance and accountability. Accountability is critical here, "stripping away the suffocating layers of compliance" seems to me to be a misplaced prescription. To operate we need to draw broadly on different models. There is a great deal to learn from business. One feature of your analysis that I reject is the notion of administrative bloat. To the extent that professional services in academic institutions have expanded, much of this is in student-facing services delivering to the increased expectations in areas such as counselling, careers etc. You ask "are we brave enough to trust the academic professionals [...]" The response is whether we act in such a way as to merit the trust of society.
I'm curious - when did "Chief Operating Officer (COO)" started being a thing in UK universities? And how many with a title COO should a university have? One? One per school? One per department? One per square meter?
Do these positions exist in EU universities? Or are their tasks performed by academics and secretaries?
(I don't know, it's just that I get the feeling that UK universities are trying to present themselves as "running as businesses", when in fact they're just doing what to me looks like cargo cult, just using the same titles and positions without the actual business part, e.g., have actual costs for any initiative, costs that include staff time, which it usually seems to be assumed is infinite. Remuneration committes definitely doing cargo business cult by the way.)
I guess when we started running highly regulated businesses with 1000s of employees and 100s of millions of turnover, complicated estates, high-risk activities and no safety net!
The problem in my view is that quite a few view universities as "businesses" ("highly regulated _businesses_").
Why not view them as "towns"? (since unlike businesses, and like towns, universities are not in for a profit)
Towns also highly regulated, with 1000s of employees and millions of turnover, complicated estates, etc. Some of them have gone bankrupt, so not that much of a safety net either.
Nevertheless, town mayors don't often announce that they're building new suburbs to help the town grow even more, or that they're taking over some nearby town. Town "expansion" is rarely discussed (why? maybe because expansion in itself is not necessarily a good thing). Instead they focus more on improving the life of the people who live in the town - in theory all of them, not just some of them.
Then again town mayors don't get paid as much as business CEOs - that's an issue that I cannot solve. And of course they're elected by the people of the town, not imposed upon them - democracy and all that jazz.
An interesting analogy. I guess the difference is that 'towns' serve their residents, whereas universities exist for a 'charitable purpose' beyond the benefit of the people who work in them.
The charitable purpose of universities the way I see it (possibly wrong) is mainly to serve the people who work/study at the university, because without them there can be no research and no education of scholars, which is the ultimate goal. If my understanding of their goal/purpose is wrong/incomplete, I'd love to hear your view of what it is because I think that this is the main issue in UK academia - what are we here for?
But in any way, we cannot have scholarship/research without serving scholars/researchers - until AGI takes over, these things don't happen on their own in a vacuum just by wishing they take place (by whom?). And we see already the bad effect of poor salaries in academia - lots of extremely promising scholars leave and some don't even bother with further studies, they can earn more than double in the industry. And have far less "compliance"/"quality" checks on top of it.
In London, in particular, a starting salary of around 45K for a Lecturer means that they'll have to take an oath of poverty (we're talking about highly trained individuals, usually starting their academic career after the age of 33 - training till then, usually on an income that's quite lower than 45K). They'd earn more if they'd trained as electricians/plumbers. How can I advise a young student to stick around for a PhD given this situation?
And how many of these businesses would be in the black if they had kept increasing the salaries according to the inflation?
I'm asking because it looks to me that any non Dundee points have been paid by staff.
And given that inflation will once more go up, I'd expect strikes again in the near future.
Universities that have taken out loans to get even more buildings and expand furthermore (why is that a good thing?), are going to find themselves in real trouble. And it'll be entirely due to (highly paid) bad management. Because there's just the appearance of "business best practices". Maybe it'll work out if they hire a few more COOs.
A brilliant, if wincingly accurate, diagnostic tool. I suspect many of us across the sector are currently calculating our institutional ‘Dundee’ scores with a mounting sense of dread.
Reading this prompted a rather curious reflection on the peculiar ecosystem of university leadership. Is it not a fascinating paradox that we routinely see academic colleagues successfully spinning out ventures and navigating the cut-throat world of enterprise, yet the reverse trajectory seems virtually mythic? Where are the legendary corporate dynamos transforming our administrative blocks into engines of lean, supportive efficiency?
Instead, one is forced to ask: why does the modern university executive suite so often feel like a gentle pasture for those who found the actual private sector a trifle too demanding? We seem to have imported all the jargon of the corporate world—the 'agile frameworks', the 'strategic pivots', the myriad 'stakeholder synergies'—without any of the concomitant efficiency or market accountability.
The issue, of course, is not the individuals themselves, but the sprawling architecture we have allowed to flourish. Why do we construct vast administrative hierarchies whose primary output appears to be the generation of compliance exercises for the very people trying to conduct the research and teaching? When a workload allocation model requires its own dedicated bureaucracy just to operate, have we not completely lost the plot?
Perhaps it is time to ask a fundamental question of our institutions: what might happen if we stripped away the corporate cosplay, dismantled the administrative bloat, and returned to the truly radical idea of simply trusting and equipping our academic staff to excel?
Many thanks ... I guess my response is very much captured by https://profserious.substack.com/p/for-everything-to-stay-the-same-everything
Thank you for such an eloquent, clear-eyed, and substantive assessment of the sector. Reading your thoughts, it strikes me that we are undoubtedly diagnosing the same patient and agreeing entirely on the severity of the symptoms. The external pressures you describe—massification, severe financial constraints, and the complex new reality of our operating environment—are undeniable. I share your conviction that nostalgia is a psychological comfort blanket, not a strategy. We both agree that radical, disruptive change is not just necessary; it is overdue.
Where we diverge, and perhaps not, is not on the need for this change, but on its origins and the exact nature of the disease.
You rightly point out the external pressures forcing our hand. However, I would argue that these pressures are merely the stress test that has exposed a deeper, internal failure. The crisis we face is fundamentally one of values and leadership, not merely of changing external weather. For too long, academic leadership has attempted to survive by trying to be everything to everyone. When the moment demands authentic intellectual bravery and profound social responsibility, we have too often seen a retreat into politically correct, risk-averse management.
We must, of course, distinguish between the enduring ideal of "academia" and the actions of some academics and administrators. Just as the private sector has its share of unscrupulous executives and poor managers, so do we. But why is the proposed solution to our current malaise a doubling-down on the very corporate management mentality that caused the administrative bloat and collapsing morale we both lament?
You speak of "business process reengineering" and a "service-business" model. But is it wise to hijack our institutions with a corporate framework that still has a great deal to prove regarding its efficacy in its own natural habitat?
The genuine academic genius can, and absolutely must, adapt to the modern world. However, this radical change must come from profound introspection and a rediscovery of our mission, rooted securely in our founding values: academic freedom, rigorous truth-seeking, the fearless dissemination of knowledge, meaningful collegiality, and true institutional autonomy.
To surrender our transformation to a corporate management playbook is to cede our most vital academic faculty: our ability to reflect, assess objective evidence, and reinvent our institutions to serve society and our students.
If we agree that the status quo is fundamentally broken, perhaps we can ponder a different route forward:
If we must become leaner and more sustainable, how do we achieve this by stripping away the suffocating layers of compliance, rather than imposing new frameworks of "strategic management"?
How might we redesign our institutions to actively empower the scholarly community, rather than demanding that academics continually reshape themselves to serve an expanding administrative superstructure?
Ultimately, are we brave enough to trust the academic professionals who actually deliver the research and education upon which our societal value rests?
I look forward to continuing the conversation.
I believe strongly in academic leadership and in organisations that are led by teams with broad experience of the delivery of education, research and impact (broadly construed). But ... our operating context is highly complex. The scale we operate at has changed, and the range of expectations we must meet has expanded vastly. We need to operate safely and efficiently, with a high degree of assurance and accountability. Accountability is critical here, "stripping away the suffocating layers of compliance" seems to me to be a misplaced prescription. To operate we need to draw broadly on different models. There is a great deal to learn from business. One feature of your analysis that I reject is the notion of administrative bloat. To the extent that professional services in academic institutions have expanded, much of this is in student-facing services delivering to the increased expectations in areas such as counselling, careers etc. You ask "are we brave enough to trust the academic professionals [...]" The response is whether we act in such a way as to merit the trust of society.
I'm curious - when did "Chief Operating Officer (COO)" started being a thing in UK universities? And how many with a title COO should a university have? One? One per school? One per department? One per square meter?
Do these positions exist in EU universities? Or are their tasks performed by academics and secretaries?
(I don't know, it's just that I get the feeling that UK universities are trying to present themselves as "running as businesses", when in fact they're just doing what to me looks like cargo cult, just using the same titles and positions without the actual business part, e.g., have actual costs for any initiative, costs that include staff time, which it usually seems to be assumed is infinite. Remuneration committes definitely doing cargo business cult by the way.)
I guess when we started running highly regulated businesses with 1000s of employees and 100s of millions of turnover, complicated estates, high-risk activities and no safety net!
The problem in my view is that quite a few view universities as "businesses" ("highly regulated _businesses_").
Why not view them as "towns"? (since unlike businesses, and like towns, universities are not in for a profit)
Towns also highly regulated, with 1000s of employees and millions of turnover, complicated estates, etc. Some of them have gone bankrupt, so not that much of a safety net either.
Nevertheless, town mayors don't often announce that they're building new suburbs to help the town grow even more, or that they're taking over some nearby town. Town "expansion" is rarely discussed (why? maybe because expansion in itself is not necessarily a good thing). Instead they focus more on improving the life of the people who live in the town - in theory all of them, not just some of them.
Then again town mayors don't get paid as much as business CEOs - that's an issue that I cannot solve. And of course they're elected by the people of the town, not imposed upon them - democracy and all that jazz.
An interesting analogy. I guess the difference is that 'towns' serve their residents, whereas universities exist for a 'charitable purpose' beyond the benefit of the people who work in them.
The charitable purpose of universities the way I see it (possibly wrong) is mainly to serve the people who work/study at the university, because without them there can be no research and no education of scholars, which is the ultimate goal. If my understanding of their goal/purpose is wrong/incomplete, I'd love to hear your view of what it is because I think that this is the main issue in UK academia - what are we here for?
But in any way, we cannot have scholarship/research without serving scholars/researchers - until AGI takes over, these things don't happen on their own in a vacuum just by wishing they take place (by whom?). And we see already the bad effect of poor salaries in academia - lots of extremely promising scholars leave and some don't even bother with further studies, they can earn more than double in the industry. And have far less "compliance"/"quality" checks on top of it.
In London, in particular, a starting salary of around 45K for a Lecturer means that they'll have to take an oath of poverty (we're talking about highly trained individuals, usually starting their academic career after the age of 33 - training till then, usually on an income that's quite lower than 45K). They'd earn more if they'd trained as electricians/plumbers. How can I advise a young student to stick around for a PhD given this situation?
And how many of these businesses would be in the black if they had kept increasing the salaries according to the inflation?
I'm asking because it looks to me that any non Dundee points have been paid by staff.
And given that inflation will once more go up, I'd expect strikes again in the near future.
Universities that have taken out loans to get even more buildings and expand furthermore (why is that a good thing?), are going to find themselves in real trouble. And it'll be entirely due to (highly paid) bad management. Because there's just the appearance of "business best practices". Maybe it'll work out if they hire a few more COOs.