This year I’ve spent a lot of time travelling around the country talking about what’s been going on at Policy.Partners and the different ways to think about university governance.
One of the things that I’ve been struck by is the unbelievable interest in good governance. Although I am of course a funny, charismatic, and engaging presenter it is not normal for over 500 people to zoom in to listen to a talk on financial governance. Every university leader I have met has been deeply reflective on what their institutional governance is for, and whether it is working.
It is understandable why. The Gillies Report, although almost a year old, still haunts the discussions of many university boards with a petrification that it could be them next. The OfS remains an interventionist regulator albeit a touch less than the boots on the ground days. Perhaps more than anything, it feels like the decisions that boards are making now have greater jeopardy than they did only a few years ago. There is very little room for error when resources are tight.
For a significant period of time the challenge facing many universities was how to grow. How to capture more of a growing student market. How to expand bottom lines to invest back into ever sprawling estates. How to build branches, businesses, schools, and better halls of residence to attract even more students. Universities did not have to choose this but every incentive suggested they should. After all, this was a period when even a government committed to deep austerity would still plough more public funding into universities.
Expansion
The moment of expansion is over for the time being. There could be a government who again sees a vast comprehensive university system as something which should receive ever increasing amounts of real-terms public funding with a more flexible immigration system. That is not this government where any real-terms increases in spending will be in research, and the visa regime is getting stricter, not more flexible.
It is also not clear what else universities might have done. The economics of universities do not reward the providers that remain intentionally small. An entirely supply led system left, and continues to leave, universities with the choice of either teaching where there is student demand or teaching programmes at a loss. There is not only no incentive but it is increasingly hard to be a provider that chooses to be intentionally small. Costs continually go up, fees are capped, and uncapped sources of income are increasingly competitive.
University leaders and governors are now faced with the dual challenges of unpicking decisions that were premised on continual growth, and reshaping their operations to match their current financial realities. In only a decade, governing bodies have gone from making decisions about strategic growth to now making ones about strategic consolidation. The same institution, faced with wildly different challenges, cannot govern themselves out of a crisis using the same tools they used to make themselves big to now make themselves small.
There is a limitation to how much the governance process alone can support leaders out of the current moment. Of course, papers being on time, committees meeting properly, and everything running smoothly is important, but it isn’t the full picture of what is needed now. In talking to leaders across the country distinct themes have started to emerge.
Capacity, capabilities and people
The first is information which is framed around strategic decisions and includes contextual advice. Increasingly, the things which destabilise universities whether that is finances, the political weather, or international conflict, do not occur within the institution. The ability for leaders to make good decisions is not about presenting all of the information all of the time but recognising that with limited time effective governance will bring just the right amount of information, with appropriate context, and a clear range of options to go forward. Too little information will lead to partial decisions. Too much information obscures the important stuff.
The second is that leadership is an increasing part of effective governance. The least charitable view of university boards is that for a long time they existed to wave through decisions that had already been made. In an age of ever increasing scrutiny and ever increasing jeopardy governors are forced to confront that they are in fact not only the legal guardians of institutions of national importance but they are also required to make decisions of sometimes enormous consequence.
The third is that governance remains a deeply human endeavour. It is of course about papers and processes but it is really about people and their capacity. Increasingly, the role of being a university board member looks unappealing. It is unremunerated, it is time-consuming, pressure is high, and the thanks are low. University secretaries, registrars, and governance staff, have an unenviable task of not only keeping the information flowing but knowing how to present it, where to push back on what is being presented, where to ask for more, where to ask for less, how to manage inter-personal relationships, all the while anticipating where the most important business will land. Good people having the space to make good decision is the only route out of the sector’s polycrisis.
The attention on governance is as a result of the moment universities are in but it is a moment to also reflect on how governance can be better. If governance is about the architecture of choices its designers from boards, to managers, to the people that make the system work, have an opportunity to relay its foundations. The opportunity is not only to redesign processes but reevaluat in order to place capacity building at the heart of the system to get the most out of the capabilities of people.
