Synergising our core products

I'm still deep in writing gloom, as I'm sure my co-writer will be overjoyed to learn. In the meantime, I suspect Weird Al Yankovic has been hiding behind the curtains during university meetings:

The internal market… FFS

The insane and discredited idea of 'internal markets' has reached us. If you're not sure what it is, here's how it works. Different departments in an organisation no longer work together, but are given budgets to spend within the organisation. 


So in the NHS, a dermatology department would 'pay' a ward for a patient's bed. It was imaginary of course - the hospital's money stayed in the bank the whole time. The idea was that these virtual budgets would make departments efficient, e.g. by not booking a bed for a dermatology patient if there was any way around it. The virtual nature of the system only lasted until the dermatologists wanted an emergency bed for an extra patient, and was told to get lost by the ward, even though the beds, nurses and buildings were all there.


It's insane. It replaces institutional planning with a free-for-all based on a concept ('efficiency') which may well have nothing to do with the organisation's - or user's - needs. 


Now it's being applied to the university's timetable:

This year the School will be subject to a fine for each module change made after the 15^th of August (even if we are giving rooms back).  Therefore, please check your timetable carefully, and read the two attached PDF documents together with P. T’s email which explains in more detail about potential fines and the reasoning behind the new system.

As part of the drive to change behaviour at the planning stage of timetabling, financial penalties will be applied to Schools that cancel teaching events after the publication of the timetable.

The following penalties will be applied where rooms are booked to modules pre-publication, and later cancelled.

Lecture theatres and PC Labs: £200 per hour

Other spaces: £100 per hour

PENALTIES FOR OBSERVED NON-USE OF A BOOKED TEACHING ROOM WILL BE APPLIED IN ALL CASES IDENTIFIED. THERE WILL BE NO EXCEPTIONS. 

Bonkers. It's not my money, so I won't care about one part of the university 'fining' another part of the university. If they fine us for offering back rooms we find we don't need, I'll just keep the room unused, leading to a loss of amenity. If I decide that a class needs to walk outside to illustrate a point, we'll be fined. 

Some decisions show us where the institution's priorities lie:

Learning Pod 2 will be opened up as social learning space to encourage students to stay within the building between teaching events and to improve use of the Go Eat facility 

Nice. So classes are now 'teaching events' and students are now captive customers. We lure them in with degrees and sell them fizzy drinks. 

Emergencies will be chargeable too:

If notification of the cancellation is received via the helpdesk at least two working hours before the event is due to take place, a 20% discount will be applied if any cancellation penalty is to be incurred. 

Fascinating. So some money is moved from the school's budget to… where, exactly? What's it spent on? Will it benefit the students? Will departments charge staff? How do I avoid the 2 hour cutoff if I'm teaching at 9? There certainly won't be anyone in their office at 7 a.m. What's the point anyway? It's not as if another class can be given that room - there aren't crowds of lecturers and students cruising the campus in the hope of commandeering a classroom for guerrilla teaching.

I see. So we're to be subject to discipline, rather than offered guidance and explanation (or indeed more - and more suitable - classrooms so that we can cater for the huge number of students we recruit. 

This, readers, is the way that universities will all be coping from next year: reduced space, increased class sizes, fewer staff, managerial pressure on academic standards, and 'retail opportunities' deployed to capture whatever spare cash the students have. 

This is management gone mad: they've forgotten that we're people, not work units to be moved around on a chess board.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-change management

Exciting, isn't it. At my place, there's always something being fiddled with, usually by an incompetent executive on an £100,000+ salary intent on putting 'change management expertise' on their VCs so they can inflict more of the same Year Zero nonsense on any institution stupid enough to hire them.

For instance: we now have two timetables: year long modules and single semester modules. They start at different times of the year and finish at different times of the year. Assessments differ too. The idea is that students (already reduced) workload is spread out more. The result is that they're always writing assignments and we're marking all the time we're teaching. The two systems have different teaching patterns, so it's hard to know from one week to the next what you're doing, where and when.

The real reasons are to cut down on contact time, staff and rooms. And it works: attendance is massively down.

Needless to say, the genius who thought this up departed shortly afterwards to spread the magic. So I read this article by Jonathan Wolff with a considerable degree of recognition.

 Ignore everything. If it actually needs to be done you'll be reminded, and then do it immediately. But mostly, someone wants you to fill in a form because they have a form to fill in themselves, and by the time they have processed all the responses the person who ordered the whole thing has moved on, passed on, or forgotten.

Change is so important that a few years ago my university brought in a change management strategy. The main message was that before you change you must consult. Very good. And so, I asked, why wasn't I consulted on this policy? That held it up for a day or two. Not sure, though, that anyone has remembered to use it since. 

We have achieved – in one way at least – something like Trotsky's vision of world communism: permanent revolution.

Why do we have to keep changing? Obviously because we are not teaching properly. Or researching the right things. Or bringing in enough cash from business or alumni. Or embedding ourselves deeply enough into the community. Or exchanging knowledge with the right partners. Or having sufficient impact. Or widening participation. Or ensuring that every student has the right visa. By way of penance we need to run round and round with bits of paper in our hands, and then fire off lots of emails. 

Here's a cautionary tale.Last year, Middlesex University, in the face of an international outcry, decided to close its philosophy department. Why? One of the arguments was that philosophy was funded in band D – getting the lowest government subsidy – and so it made more sense for the university to switch to taking more social science students who were funded at a higher rate in band C.

As a bit of proactive management, it seems to make financial sense. Except, as I noted at the time, this reasoning depends on the future resembling the past. Rather a rash assumption. It appears the coalition government has decided to withdraw all funding from most band C and D courses. Now, if the reason why band C received higher funding was that the courses are more expensive to teach, Middlesex made a spectacular miscalculation. 

If the background environment keeps changing, you cannot predict the consequences of your actions. What looks like a smart move one year may leave you smarting the next. What do you do? Masterful inactivity, of course. It has two advantages. First, it doesn't waste your time. Second, if you cannot sensibly plan on other grounds, you should at least make sure that what you do is sound in intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical terms. 

I really need to send this to all my managers.