The Higher Education Manager's Handbook

Effective Leadership and Management in Universities and Colleges

Peter McCaffery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351249720
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on professional experience from university innovators and a wealth of international case studies, The Higher Education Manager's Handbook offers practical advice and guidance on all aspects of university management. An engaging, comprehensive and highly accessible practitioner's guide, the book tackles all the key areas central to the job of managing in higher education, from understanding the culture of your university and the role it plays, to providing effective leadership and managing change. Now in a thoroughly updated third edition, the book is written from the unique perspective of the higher education manager, offering advice that can be implemented immediately by leaders at all levels.

The book is organised into four pre-requisites that any prospective higher education manager must master if they are to be an effective university leader:

• Knowing your environment
• Knowing your university
• Knowing your department
• Knowing yourself

Each of the chapters within these sections provides commentary and analysis of the particular role aspect under review, and offers advice and guidance on good practice, including case study examples and self-assessment tools. New topics include:

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• The new higher education landscape

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• The first 100 days

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• Avoiding cognitive bias and developing a flexible mindset

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• Strategic planning and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)

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• Reviewing course portfolios and subject areas

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• Improving student outcomes and staff experience

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• Assessing and mitigating risk

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• Project management and managing up

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• Widening participation and social mobility

Vice chancellors, university presidents, provosts and deans, heads of academic departments and university services, subject leaders, course directors and others in management positions within the field of higher education will find this book to be an irreplaceable resource that they will use time and time again.

1 Knowing your environment

Of all mere human institutions there is none so important and mighty in their influence as universities.

Henry P. Tappon, first President, University of Michigan, 1858

The university is dead; long live the university.

Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 February, 2000

If higher education was a regulated market we would be raising the question of mis-selling.

Head of the UK National Audit Office (NAO), 8 December, 2017

The new higher education landscape

‘What are the world’s five largest business corporations in terms of market value?’ Headed by Apple, of course, with a market value in excess of $900 billion, the others do not include, as management guru Peter Senge has suggested, the ones you might readily suppose. Not Exxon Mobil, or Coca Cola, or IBM, or General Motors. Indeed all of the top five are, for the very first time, derivative of new technology; the tech-giants that are Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Such is the growth indeed of the so-called FANG – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google – they are now collectively valued at $1.5 trillion, about the same as the Russian economy (Hern and Fletcher, 2017). Along with technology there has also been innovation in the way that some businesses are organised. For example: in financial services, that of Visa International. As Senge explains, Visa International is a member-owned, non-stock corporation incorporated in the State of Delaware. Governed by the principle of subsidiarity, it has only 3,000 employees – approximately the same number as that of Selfridge’s department store in London’s Oxford Street. Yet it has a stock-market value in excess of $500 billion. In other words, Visa International ‘is a business but unlike Microsoft which has an Industrial Age model of organisation it doesn’t feel like or look like a conventional business’ (Owen, 2008; Hock, 2005; Senge, 1998). And while Bill Gates has fallen victim to the same (Sherman) anti-trust legislation which thwarted John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, Visa International is a conspicuous exception. It is indeed a novel phenomenon.

Senge’s purpose in posing this simple question was threefold: to draw our attention to the significant changes taking place in the nature and organisation of business corporations; to remind us that the present may not be an accurate guide to the future; and, equally fundamental, to illustrate that the first prerequisite of effective management is an awareness of one’s external environment.

His vignette also highlights the difference in perception between the business world and the academic world. In higher education the prevailing consensus is that we do not really face the same changes as those which confront business. After all, the conventional wisdom maintains universities have a history stretching back centuries, and they have proved themselves to be extremely durable institutions, capable of adjusting to different circumstances while still upholding their traditional ideals. They have, moreover, shown that they can accommodate themselves to the new realities of more recent times – principally, the (negative) governmental economic imperative to do ‘more’ (teach more students) with ‘less’ (resources) while still maintaining ‘quality’ and the (positive) pedagogical imperative to cater to employers expectations of graduate competence, and students desire for flexible provision. There is then no compelling reason, the argument runs, why universities cannot continue in the same vein in the future.

The problem with this argument, however, is that it ignores both the historical and the contemporary reality of the circumstances facing universities. In the case of the latter, for example, it overlooks the fact that the university is no longer the only type of institution capable of fulfilling the role that it has played in the past – namely that of providing access to knowledge, creating knowledge, and fostering learning in students to enable them to use knowledge. And in the case of the former, it overstates the ancient pedigree of universities, for in truth very few of them are old. In Europe, their ancient heartland, four out of five only came into being in the last century and in the UK fully three-quarters have been established in the course of the past four decades; and thirty of them (the former polytechnics) in a single stroke as recently as 1992. In essence, the bulk of universities are very modern institutions and those that can trace an ancient lineage have survived only because they have changed so much. To such an extent, indeed, that today, universities seek to present themselves as useful to all comers, from international students to local enterprise partnerships. Embracing ‘mission stretch’ they have acquired ‘multiple callings’: to broaden student access, enhance student employability, promote lifelong learning, meet quality benchmarks, diversify income streams, improve research rankings and so on. In consequence they have become so diverse, so fractured and differentiated that it seems they are no longer bound by any overarching principles or unitary idea. So much so, as some have argued, that the university as a concept or ‘Idea’ has in fact been rendered meaningless (Barnett 2015, 2000; HEPI, 2009; Scott, 2008). All at a time when universities stand accused of ‘not really pulling their weight’ and of being complacent about the quality of their teaching, the value of their degrees and the experience they offer students (Seldon, 2016; Wolf, 2016; Johnson, 2015; Rich, 2015; Edge Foundation, 2017; NAO, 2017).

Table 1.1 Traditional higher education and the new HE

It is perhaps not surprising then that many staff in HE have become alienated, and that the prevailing mentality within the sector is survivalist – one of endurance rather than enjoyment; a frustration over a perceived lack of resources, excessive accountability and the erosion of traditional university values (Finkelstein and Altbach, 2016; Moran, 2010; Watson and Amoah, 2007). Some even go further and have suggested that too many universities are imbued with a ‘welfarist’ mentality; an outlook of ‘whingeing and whining’ and ultimately one of dependence upon – and equally, subservience to – the public purse (Bell, 2017; Lucas, 2017; Million+, 2015; Forsyth, 2014). Either way, the most common reaction within the sector has not been to address the broader issue concerning the raison d’être of HE other than to constantly reiterate the narrowly instrumental defence line stressing the usefulness of universities to government and industry. Rather it has often been to engage in mutual recrimination and penny-pinching within institutions on the one hand, and a common railing against government and the wider community for failing to appreciate the self-evident value of universities on the other.

The difficulty with this approach, however, is that this outpouring is often matched by a deafening silence outside the sector. Lacking in self-confidence, reluctant to articulate an overriding motivating purpose, and contending in a world where hardly anyone is listening, universities, it would seem to appear, are enfeebled institutions facing an uncertain future. Yet, the prospect is not nearly so bleak. Viewed from a long-term, rather than short-term, perspective it is apparent that HE is in transition: that the traditional university model that emerged in the late nineteenth century and dominated throughout the twentieth century is – as a consequence of the unprecedented changes outlined above – having to adapt to a fundamentally new environment characterised by significant changes in the role and practice of HE as well as in the marketplace (see Table 1.1). Higher Education is also a growth industry – the student population at UK HEIs, for example, grew from fewer than 1.5 million to 2.3 million between 1998–99 and 2015–16 with a further 700,000 students studying offshore – and the education-driven economy of the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ is likely to keep it this way in the foreseeable future, Brexit notwithstanding. Between 2015 and 2022, for example, UUK estimate that there will be two million additional jobs in occupations requiring higherlevel skills, with total employment share set to increase from 42 per cent to 46 per cent of all those in employment. (Hillman, 2017; UUK 2015; HEFCE, 2009). We also arguably need an ‘Idea’ of the university more than ever, to, as Barnett (2015) puts it, make sense of ‘the craziness of the world of supercomplexity’ in which we now live. The tripling of the fee cap from £3,000 to £9,000 in 2012–13 and the relaxation and then the removal of the student number control (SNC) in 2015–16, along with the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 too – for all the controversy over the linking of tuition fees to the quality of teaching as assessed through the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF); the creation of a new regulatory body (the Office for Students: OfS) and easier market entry for new providers – all presage a setting in which universities are encouraged to play to their strengths.

Box 1.1 UK higher education (EU) resources at risk through Brexit

EU research funding – c.£730M or 16% of total UK university research income

Freedom of movement of staff – 31,635 EU nationals or 16% of university academic staff*

Recruitment of EU students – c.127,440 or 6% of the UK university student population

Facility to exchange students – c.15,000 UK students per year through the Erasmus programme.

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And their disproportionate impact on:

Subjects:

• 13 of the 15 disciplines most dependent on funding from the EU are in the arts, humanities and social sciences with Archaeology (38%), Classics (33%) and IT (30%) the most vulnerable.

• Clinical medicine is potentially the single biggest loser in absolute terms: c.£120M a year.

Institutions

• The biggest recipients like Oxford and Cambridge are dependent on EU funding for c.18 per cent of their annual research income or c. £60M each per year.

*Should be protected under the terms of ‘the divorce bill’ agreed between the UK and the EU on 8 December, 2017 subject to the final agreement on Brexit.

Source: Royal Society, 2017; UKCISA, 2017.

There are of course threats, not least the implications of Brexit for the future security of EU research funding and collaboration – principally the ‘Framework’ and Horizon 2020 programmes to which the UK has been the second-largest EU net contributor – the tenure of EU nationals working in UK universities, the recruitment of EU students and the exchange of students through the Erasmus programme (see Box 1.1). The politicisation of (non-EU) international student numbers, and whether or not they are included in the government’s net migration target (even though they contribute a net benefit of £20.3 billion a year to the British economy) has also led to a levelling-off in (non-EU) international student recruitment at 310,775 or 14% of the UK university student population in 2015–16 (UKCISA, 2017; London Economics, 2018). Even so, the alignment of universities with business, innovation and skills in successive government departments over the last decade, does suggest that universities have indeed moved from the periphery to the centre of the government’s drive to meet the social and economic challenges of the twenty-first century. Overdue recognition, in fact, of the role UK universities play as anchor institutions in their region and as one of the nation’s biggest earners of foreign currency, bringing in more than £10.7 billion a year in tuition fees, transnational enterprises and other activities (UUK, 2017; 2015). As such, universities have a tremendous opportunity to reassert their importance in the life of the country. Whether or not it is fully taken or spurned will, of course, be dependent on their willingness to practice flexibility on the one hand, while simultaneously maintaining their fundamental values on the other.

This first chapter, then, examines the broader context or nature of the external environment in which HEIs, and individual managers alike, have to operate. It explains, as a means of understanding the pressures on modern universities and the reasons why they respond the way they do, how universities have come to be where they are today, and includes an analysis of the role of HE and of the key influences or change drivers – globalisation, IT, the ‘Knowledge Society’, the contractual State, the postmodern challenge – currently affecting HEIs. It also examines the nature of the university identity crisis; the university as an idea; the case for universities and finally the key strategic challenges facing universities.

The role of universities

Universities are both ancient and modern institutions. Ancient in the sense that today’s universities can trace their first beginnings to those universities – Bologna, Paris and Oxford – founded in the late Middle Ages, and are the heirs to this medieval heritage, and the traditions and values that goes with it. Modern in the sense that it was only in relatively recent times – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – that universities developed into the form recognisable today, and it was not until a generation or so ago that the bulk of Britain’s universities were established. Their evolution, moreover, bears witness to a remarkable series of changes in the role that universities have played: one which is reflective of a close association with (and not, as is often held to be the case, separation or aloofness from) wider developments in society. The ancient institutions of Oxford and Cambridge for instance – the only established universities in England 200 years ago – were founded as Church universities, whose main concern was the training of clergymen and teachers and with it the sustenance of the established Anglican Church. They did not originally seek to encourage progressive science or provide a liberal education – nor research either for that matter. The former role was undertaken by the Dissenting Academies such as the ‘godless’ University College of London, which was established in 1826 and provided a practical education with an emphasis on science, medicine and engineering (Watson et al., 2011; Bolton and Lucas, 2008; Coaldrake and Stedman, 1998).

It was the Industrial Revolution, and with it the progressive extension of the franchise, and the rise of professional society, which were to be the three key factors in creating the demand for, as well as shaping the development of, a more elaborate university system in nineteenth-century Britain. And it was the civic universities – Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol and so on (akin to the Land Grant universities in the USA such as Michigan State, Penn State and Texas A&M universities who played a similar role) – along with the technical colleges and the mechanics’ institutes (that were later to develop into the technological universities and the former polytechnics) which were established to meet it. These three forces, albeit radically extended – to embrace the ever-increasing specialisation of labour, the universal access to mass entitlement, and the ceaseless march of professional ‘credentialism’ – have continued to mould and shape higher education down to the present day. So much so that the modern university has come to undertake four conventional roles, those of:

• finishing school; the last stage of general education;

• professional school; the training of elite workers;

• knowledge factory; the production of science, technology and ideology;

• cultural institution; the expression of our individual and collective sense of being.

It was the State, though, which was the critical driver in bringing together the different institutions – church, voluntary and public sector – into a coherent higher education system. This development drew on two interrelated processes: the subordination of the autonomous universities on the one hand, and the takeover by the state (or nationalisation, if you will) of responsibility for other advanced institutions, on the other. The subsequent abolition of the binary divide between universities and former polytechnics in 1992, along with the tripling of student numbers in the last 25 years, set in motion a social and political revolution in British higher education; one which has left the system with far more in common with its counterparts in Europe and North America than it had a generation ago.

This transition from an elite to a mass system – or loss of British exceptionalism depending on your perspective – has been neither smooth nor uncontested and is still also curiously incomplete. For example, in terms of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Higher Education Manager’s Handbook
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Challenge for he Managers
• 1 Knowing Your Environment
• 2 Knowing Your Institution
• 3 Leading Your Department
• 4 Leading By Example
• 5 Managing for High Performance
• 6 Developing Staff
• 7 Leading and Celebrating Diversity
• 8 Enhancing The Student Experience
• 9 Managing Change
• 10 Managing Up and Managing The ‘Downside’
• 11 Managing Yourself
• Appendices
• 2 Annual Evaluation of Department Contributions
• References
• Index