You're Fired. Enjoy your summer.

Hi all. It's Friday afternoon and it's been a mixed week, to put it politely.

Last weekend was rather glorious: a trip to The Globe for a matinee performance of As You Like It with my students (and ex-students, and their kids) and colleagues. I have to confess to having a heart of stone when it comes to Shakespearian comedy, despite being well aware (before you all write in) that comedy = happy endings in those days. However, this performance was a triumph. It was already ahead of last year's Antony and Cleopatra because lightning and thunder were conspicuously absent. All the coincidences and unconvincing doubling were played up and the knob gags and so on were done like panto, which I thought really worked. The actors from star to bit part were seriously impressive, doing everything from saucy bits to tenderness so well: I could even see a few people wiping away tears as the couples got hitched and Rosalind was reunited with her father (sorry to ruin the ending for you). I definitely wasn't one of them. Not at all.

So that was good: fine theatre, Greek food with friends, catching up with our graduates and then driving home past Walsall Stadium in the rain where – I found out later – Elton John was performing to the more tasteless of some other friends. I wasn't sure whom to feel sorriest for: them for preferring Elton John to – for example – rolling around in shattered glass, or Elton John for going from private jets and global fame to standing in the rain next to a motorway in the shabbiest, tiniest football stadia for miles. It's no dignified way to end a career.

After that, the week nosedived quite significantly. There were high points - presenting a preliminary version of the politicians' novels project to our staff conference and seeing other colleagues' research (one paper on Victorian prisoners was called Pros and Cons: I do love a good pun), and meeting our external examiners, who think we do a marvellous job. If only our management would say the same. Sadly, however, and with some truly wonderful exceptions, it's beginning to feel like there's nothing we can say or do which would persuade them not to treat us as some kind of incomprehensible enemy. There's an awful lot I can't say in public, but it's been one of those weeks in which jobs.ac.uk has been refreshed constantly.

My own worries aside, most of the week was taken up by preparing for and representing my professorial colleagues, 19 of whom have been shortlisted for redundancy. Why 19? Because 20 triggers a range of legal responsibilities which might impede management's (ahem) 'determined' style. It's been a long time since this institution felt or behaved like a collegiate body united by a set of educational values. Instead we get corporate platitudes and a 'leadership' (they love that word, and attend seminars on what it means) which derives its tactics and sense of self-worth from episodes of The Apprentice.



This time some of the professors are in line for the sack and others are up for bonus payments (as are lots of the senior management team, who consume lots of carrots but never catch sight of a stick). I have bored a lot of them with my views on this, and intend to carry on (what's the point of being a governor otherwise?) but I may as well rehearse the arguments here. Why stop at boring those around me when I can do it to The Internet?

In the corporate world, ordinary employees receive a salary for doing their jobs well, and get sacked for not doing them well (or, thanks to the Tories, for pretty much any non-existent infringement). The senior executives get massive salaries but can't be expected to do their jobs well without even more massive bonus payments. These are supposedly performance-linked, which has led to – inter alia – the banking crash. If you're offered a bonus for hitting targets, you're going to suggest short-term ones which are easy to fix rather than ones which are good for the organisation. Nor, if you're a bonus recipient, should you ever mention your sneaking suspicion that success is rarely attributable to individuals.

However, if you temporarily forget that corporate stupidity affects the wider economy and society, you might just about justify this on free-market capitalist grounds. My problem is that academia has been invaded by these corporate blackmailers, in person or in spirit. Fewer and fewer senior educational managers are academics, and those who are have sold out to the discourse of leadership and reward. It's below-inflation pay settlements for the workforce, and retainers and performance bonuses for themselves. These are, of course, in case they take their talent elsewhere. Personally I would invite anyone making such veiled threats to try their luck, but I'm heavily outnumbered on the board and the decisions are made in private sub-committees by people who speak the same language.

What is success in relation to a Higher Education institution? Is it increased recruitment? We could pack them in - but we might not be able to serve their needs successfully. Is is 'student satisfaction'? We have the National Student Survey, invoked in hushed terms at every meeting. We could ace that: just give everyone high grades and replace the library with a corporately-branded coffee area (this is why in the US the American Football coach is more highly-paid than the vice-chancellor). Is it attainment? We can fiddle with the grading algorithm like all the other universities. For every Key Performance Indicator, there's a way to fiddle the result so that someone gets a fat cheque at the end, as though any achievement – meaningful or not – is the result of one go-getting Leader.

So far, so seedily familiar. That boat has sailed. We all expect academic executives to behave (dress, speak) like those they see as their peers in the private sector. Whenever I say anything like this to them you can see the eyes roll as they wonder if I've just arrived from a WEA class circa 1937. But even though I'm not and never expect to be a professor, I want to weep at this extension of corporate amorality from administration to education (and oh yes, my appraisal includes the category 'appearance' but not 'intellect'):

In fact it's worse: the executives find ways to blame everybody for failure, while jealously guarding the rewards of success. With the professors, they're getting both carrot and stick. Nobody here doubts that some the profs may be exhausted, burned out or distracted (some might even just be plain lazy), but the management's decision to arbitrarily select a couple of appraisal points without any critical judgement smacks of contempt. It implies that professors are educational colossi, striding across the pedagogical landscape without any involvement with the rest of the place. It suggests that their achievements are the result of heroic solo labour, and their failures are purely personal. Never mind that the benchmarks are artificial, that research funding is not distributed fairly either here or in the sector as a whole, that other duties other than grant income or REF-able research is valuable and essential. Never mind that giving a Prof all the time needed for those papers requires everyone else to do their teaching and pastoral work, and diverts resources from collective effort to the Heroic model.

No: let's treat them as isolated demigods, masters of their own fates, regardless of local or wider conditions: educational, financial or emotional.

I'm reminded of a cheap TV show from some years back: Pets Win Prizes. This is what bothers me most about the Night of the Long Professorial Knives. Despite the protestations of fair play and impartial criteria, it seems to me that the twin approaches of the sack for some and cash rewards for others is the final power-play by an administration (not just here) that has got above itself. In theory – very much in theory, sadly – the Professors are the academic conscience of a university, particular one that isn't run by the academic staff. Their reputations and body of work enables them to contribute to the fundamental values and direction of the institution, informed by long experience and critical abilities. The title of 'professor' contains within itself a statement that what they do is more than a job: they profess a set of beliefs or values which transcend their formal terms of employment.

All this goes out of the window once the professor is left wondering whether the next phone call is to had her the price of a good holiday or summon her to an exit interview. Who will challenge (constructively or not) anything that happens when their are such serious consequences? You'd have to be hard as nails to resist the tide in this way or – like me – resigned to finding fulfilment in my small but steady academic niche rather than in the warm glow of management's regard. It's not good enough. My colleagues and I are summarily dismissed as union hacks: we would say this, wouldn't we? We no longer have any impact because the academic staff, like all the others, are no longer colleagues of the executive but work for it and should just shut up. This is why some of the executive refers to 'the university' when they mean themselves. I was always under the impression that 'the university' includes students, academics, support staff, the executive and all sorts of other people. The point of having a confident, self-critical and autonomous professoriate is that they can keep a check on the executive's schemes without being dismissed – as I and my UCU colleagues are – of being the 'usual suspects'. They might not always live up to this role, but they never will if they can be fired at will or be handed tips by an avuncular VC.

Last night, I went to Symphony Hall to see Andris Nelsons' last performance as conductor or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Between the pieces, members of the orchestra spoke movingly of their relationship with him, and afterwards Nelsons gave a lovely speech about them, and the value of music and the arts to society. It was blindingly obvious that to him, the old model of the conductor as some sort of musical Mussolini bending the orchestral peons to his will was completely outdated. Instead, Nelsons built on the existing skills of the orchestra and introduced them to new ways of seeing music, to new repertoires, to new horizons. With collective goodwill, both he and the members of the CBSO part company improved by the experience.

I think it's time university executives shook off the embarrassing management models of Enron and Lehman Brothers. Universities have been around a hell of a lot longer than these corporate monsters, and contain enough collective wisdom to succeed on their own terms. These fads come and go, and we should rise above them. Let's learn from the orchestra, the convent, the commune rather than fall for every airport self-help huckster breezing through.

Last night was a transcendent experience. This morning I sat next to a dignified and professional man as he begged for his job, his livelihood and his personal and professional pride, watched across the table by a man in a suit who kept saying that he didn't have time for this. For all the abstract points I've outlined above, this is what it comes down too: sleek bonus-seeking sharks forcing honest people to justify their existence in the most reductive terms.

Progress, eh? Anyway, I'm off to a funeral, which in this context seems about the right way to end the week.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

Hello all. Voley's feeling a little bit fragile today, having gone for a quiet pint with colleagues and ended up drinking into the small hours with a select group of newly-minted English graduates. It's so long since I drank to excess that I'd forgotten about the inevitable consequences. A mouse farting next door echoes through my brain like a cannon. 


Anyway, through the pain, I remember a conversation with one of my managers before the carnage commenced. He is a man of massive integrity, total dedication to the students, to the staff and to the ideals of the institution. He also possesses a restless intellectual curiosity. 


This man objected quite strongly to my occasional dismissive attitude towards management here on Vole and elsewhere. I'm not too proud to admit that I was wrong. I have been imprecise and therefore hurtful. I should refer to the very distant elements of the hierarchy, and to the poor decision-making and management style of some of the service departments. I didn't even stop to think that my immediate line-managers would see themselves included, because my mental definition of 'management' derives from my union activities: we deal constantly with the aggression and failures of distant leadership which rarely consults, explains or sympathises, though this may be changing. But in relation to the affronted individual, I personally - and literally hundreds of my students - have been helped, protected and encouraged by this individual and others. 


So I'm sorry, and I'll refine my ranting in future. One of the blogs I read regularly is Music for Deckchairs, written by an Australian academic specialising in 'strategic planning, policy formation and shared governance'. It's witty, thoughtful, thought-provoking and erudite. In the course of a longer post about academics' willingness to moan about administration and reluctance to contribute (guilty), she has this to say, which I think applies very well to people like my aggrieved reader:

as as proportion of the total workforce, there’s a really small number of academics who are willing to do this sort of backstage work.

Given our love of heroics generally, we seem pretty indifferent to the year round work they do to ensure we stay in step with our legislation, our budget, the goals we set for ourselves, and the whole blither of our strategic vision. 

Here’s how this uneven bargain works out: for someone to enjoy the bling of a teaching award, presented at an occasion that has a string quartet, potted plants, waiters serving canapes, and the Vice Chancellor’s firm handshake, there has to be a teaching award committee. 

But above all, each of them has to have made the decision that it’s meaningful and important in the context of their own careers that they contribute this time away from their research to develop and maintain good process for these awards. They’ll spend the year reflecting on feedback, making changes, updating policy, so that next year’s champions can make their sprint for the line in a timely fashion.  At which point it will be down to these unsung domestiques again, to find time to read, rank, and re-read the whole pile of applications. 

They’re practical, well-organised, and sympathetic. They’re very effective at raising critical issues, and keeping these on the agenda until some measurable action occurs. They’re talented researchers, and they produce careful, evidence-based arguments. They understand how the matter under consideration is framed by the other policy stuff because they looked it up before the meeting, so they don’t waste your time. They know the difference between targets, objectives, strategies, and goals.  They’re not strangers to Foucault’s critique of governmentality, but they can still get on with governance. They can amend a resolution and pass it in its amended form. They write beautifully. They’re funny, in a sort of dry, trench-humorous way.  They’re naturally curious, and they like working across the disciplines.  They know people outside the Faculty where they work. And they don’t roll their eyes at the mention of administration.

But above all, and this is the revolutionary bit in the current higher education context, they don’t do any of this because they think it looks good for them. Almost all of them have at some point been told that this is not how the career game is played, and they’ve kept doing it anyway.

So, two practical suggestions for adjusting the simple unfairness of the bargain.  First, we need to watch our language. Liz Bare at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, at the University of Melbourne suggests that when we describe all tasks necessary to the survival of universities except research in the language of drudgery (in other words, when we talk about teaching “load” and administrative “burden”), we make it hard to develop an appreciation of why these opportunities might attract stellar thinkers.  Committee service needs some really simple PR, and university marketing departments—who love something new to spruik—need to get on the case. 

She's right. We should also add that taking an academic management post involves not just a massive pay rise, but substantial sacrifices too. No more classes. Many more meetings, many fewer books and journals read. A degree of separation from your friends and colleagues: a line is crossed. You become 'them' rather than 'us' to a degree, which can be - is, to judge by the way I've expressed myself and been understood - perceptually dehumanised. The manager becomes an expression of the institution's power structure, whether s/he agrees with decisions or not. Harsh decisions are passed down for execution and loyalties are pulled in different directions. I know very well that my reader argues passionately for his students and staff without being afraid of the consequences. This is why he deserves this public acknowledgement of error.


Normal sarcasm and sniping will resume later, but for now, humble apologies. 

News from Nowhere

The good news is…
The Hegemon is going to be in profit!

The bad news is:
staff will still suffer.
A pay rise of 0.5% and inflation of around 3% = significant pay cut.
Increased employee pension contribution = even more significant pay cut.

Apparently pay is what put us millions of pounds in deficit - never mind the £multimillion clawback for misleading the government about student numbers. Oh, and the university's investments have tanked.

VC says her salary is 95th in the VC league tables but VC's salaries are 'quite high'. Shame we're much lower than that on the educational league tables.

I also asked about our carbon management plan. They intend to reduce our emissions by 25% over five years. Our position at the moment is 'hugely disappointing'. Several of us want to contribute - there are experts in the academic body.

There's a university 'green league table'. Well done the University of Gloucester! Meanwhile, The Hegemon is in the 'Third Class - poor environmental performance' section, rated 'awful' for ethical investments, fair trade policy, waste recycling, 'poor' and 'getting worse' for energy use and water use, and 'could do better' on environmental policy and carbon emissions. We score 26 out of 60.

Still, there is a plan (put together by someone who doesn't know how to use apostrophes), and it involves a CHP plant, which is brilliant.

Good questions about Executive car/public transport use. Response includes a suggestion that we discourage car use in future, which is promising. Another colleague asks about the Cycle to Work scheme, which would be really good.

How management works

Having endured another encounter with the Maximum Leaders of The Hegemon, I have no words.

I merely point you in the direction of these clips on management values. Go from 4.53 of the first clip and the first two minutes of the second one.

Our relations with management

interpreted through the medium of contemporary RAWK METAL!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

While poor Lou is lying awake in agony down in the Land of the Long White Cloud, I've been undergoing painful experiences of my own: another Negotiating Committee while we try to work out how to resist the Triumph of the Managerialists (they've upped the redundancy offer by 40%, so they're clearly getting desperate), then my mother dropped off some household goods. In the time it took her to limp up the stairs (she's 65 and broke her ankle a while back), the parking people gave her a ticket, which I'm appealing.

Mum was bringing a load of crockery I'd bought in Stoke. It's good stuff, but virtually none of it is made in the town of Doulton, Wedgwood, Spode except for Moorcroft - more victims of capitalism. Stoke City FC is nicknamed The Potters. You can get a mug with the shield and The Potters. Despite virtually every fan having a family member who worked in the potbanks, the mug's made overseas…

This book sounds quite useful for dealing with The Managers: it's called Death March and explains what happens in institutions with inhumane strategies:

The symptoms are obvious: The project schedule, budget, and staff are about half of what is necessary for completion. The planned feature set is unrealistic. People are working 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and stress is taking its toll. The project has a high risk of failure, yet management is either blind to the situation or has no alternative. Why do these irrational projects happen, and what, other than pure idiocy, leads people to get involved in them?

Edward Yourdon has produced a wise and highly readable book on the entire death march phenomenon and the best way to steer through one. He takes a close look at the types of projects that often become death marches and the corporate politics and culture that typically produce them; Yourdon helps you examine your own motivations and those of corporate managers who enable death marches to take shape.

Much of Death March is about the human element of highly stressful projects. The author's plain-spoken observations on the dysfunctional organization--the Machiavellian politics, naive optimism, lust for power, fear, and sheer managerial stupidity that guide so many death marches--make for a refreshing change from other project management books. You'll also find much practical advice to help you survive, everything from negotiating with upper management to breathing life into faltering projects. He'll even help you determine if you should look for another job.

If you've ever worked in a death march situation or been a client of a company addicted to death march management, this book will help you understand what happened. More importantly, it will help you prepare for future encounters with death marches.

Anyway, time to do some actual work - a quick refresher on Henry V and some Welsh literature theory.

Definition of a meeting

An event which starts gloomily and ends in misery. Every time I sit round a table at the moment, I get up even more despairing. I get the sense now that the university management is making things up as it goes along. The latest joy is the announcement that the new degree programme should be proposed by next Friday…

Do thrusting V-C's wreck their universities?

There's been a trend in vice-chancellor appointments over the past couple of decades to go for supposed go-ahead, business-oriented, ambitious yuppy types, often akin to David Brent but on much, much, higher salaries. Now some research discussed in the Times Higher Education (27th August 2009, pp. 6-7) magazine suggests that they may be damaging their universities. I make no further comment!

Flamboyant, arrogant vice-chancellors who are initially perceived as 'heroic' or 'visionary' may end up damaging their universities in the long term.

A Study by Malcolm Higgs… found that, in business, the domineering behaviour of narcissistic managers often damage long-term performance.

Professor Higgs told THE that his findings were also likely to apply to universities.

'What's interesting is that damage doesn't occur immediately… When you have a narcissistic leader, the culture of the organisation slowly changes, so problems come up mid-term'.

…as well as possessing charisma and a strong sense of vision, narcissistic types are grandiose, intolerant of criticism, unwilling to compromise, arrogant, self-absorbed and have a sense of entitlement and a need to be admired.

His paper… warns that these traits may have a negative effect on the 'internal climate' of an organisation, and may prevent others challenging the party line.

Professor Higgs said that working cultures become really toxic when senior managers begin to collude with the narcissist's behaviour.

'People start thinking that they need to protect the boss from hearing anything nasty– that's when the culture starts to shift. Staff adapt their behaviour towards keeping the boss happy. From the top to the bottom, people are covering things up rather than admitting things are going wrong'.

He told THE that other research had found that chief executives who are successful in the long term often tend to be 'quiet people with a great deal of humility'. Despite this, in difficult times… organisations are more likely to turn to leaders who are perceived as 'strong' to 'shake up' the business, he said.

Why my job is really exciting

I've just spent 1 hour and 45 minutes in a small, hot room with 6 other people, discussing the word 'and', and the difference between 'less likely' and 'unlikely'. The meanings impact on whether a large group of people get a backdated pay rise or no pay rise at all.

Have I learned much? That management are gits, and that facts are less important than your place in the hierarchy.

Insult to injury

While 250 of us are losing our jobs, the Executive level are getting 30% pay rises, according to a very senior individual… They really want to rub our faces in it. Presumably their heroes are the banking fraternity

And so farewell, everybody else

Thanks Vice-Chancellor. Your pay leaped from £145,000 five years ago to £212,000 the year before last (and we suspect you've had a decent raise last year too). You've called in expensive 'consultants' from McCann Erickson, and you've expanded the upper tier of management.

Meanwhile, down here where we do the, y'know, teaching, you've repeatedly told us that we're no good, and now you're sacking 250 staff. Or rather, not sacking but 'repositioning', 'achieving savings' and 'losing' staff, as though we're spare change down the back of the sofa.

Oddly, you don't find room to mention, in your list of financial pressures, management's failure to honestly and accurately record student numbers for the government - leading to having to give back several million pounds. Not a word of apology, no suggestion that you and your top table mates will take a pay cut, let alone a resignation.

Shame on you.

How modern education works

We're not a university, we have an 'academic business model'.

We're not sacking people, we're instituting 'impending efficiency savings'.

Of course, given the current economic climate, we could have made the decision to freeze an Executive post and make the savings. We did consider that but felt, and Governors agreed, that the new post was necessary to help us work more effectively in the new economic climate.

This last, of course, means that teachers, technicians, porters, academic support staff and the like who are going to be dumped overboard can just go fuck themselves, if the alternative is to reduce the troughers in sharp suits who 'manage' us. 'Manage', in this context, means 'sink us with a minimum debt of £5.5 million, possibly rising to £10-12 million'. Way to go, you selfish, greedy bastards.

Relax, we're in safe hands

…because my institution has set up a pig flu committee ('Pandemic Flu Management Team'). Let's hope they don't catch it first, or we'll all die of management failure. The advice seems to consist of 'stay in your homes and surf the web'. The question is, will it be a short fat pandemic or a long thin one (that's an obscure institutional joke that only colleagues will get).