1.1 - Introduction
The principle of nonmaleficence in university management
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any affiliated institutions unless explicitly stated.
Nobody thinks running a university is easy. Universities are complex beasts. Running one is hard. Running one well is even harder. Every day there are challenging decisions to be made involving a diverse set of stakeholders, dynamic hard-to-predict systems and trade-offs between a range of objectives and values. As a result, even the ‘right’ decision can leave some folk unhappy and, occasionally, even capable managers will just get it plain wrong.
What, then, does it look like for a university to be run well versus poorly? How could we tell? A common approach is to appeal to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that provide information on the current status and trajectory of the university, like student numbers, research income, and international rankings. But KPIs come with caveats that are both widely accepted and yet frequently ignored. Too much focus on a few choice metrics can be counterproductive, creating perverse incentives to ‘chase the numbers’ rather than actually work towards the higher-level goals they attempt to measure1. And KPIs can be particularly misleading in a university context. The idiosyncrasies and long lags inherent to university systems mean indicators often reflect past decisions and factors beyond the control of current management. The rankings trajectory and financial performance of my university, for example, may have more to do with the current Auckland housing and labour market, rates of immigration, and past strategic decisions or government policy going back years or even decades, than with the decisions of current management. As a result, focussing on what particular KPIs are doing today can mean good managers are pilloried for the sins of their predecessors, while bad managers are protected by market forces and past decisions in which they had no role, the measurable impact of their own handiwork often felt long after they have moved on, perhaps to take command of another unsuspecting institution.
Here, I take a different strategy, essentially lowering the bar for senior management and benchmarking against the lowest possible standard. In particular, it seems reasonable that, at a bare minimum, senior management should not systematically and rigidly pursue a philosophy and policies that harm the institution and the community who make it up. This is a sort of managerial equivalent to the principle of nonmaleficence in the Hippocratic Oath for medical professionals. Whatever the complexities of running a university, failing to pass this most basic standard would be an example of just how not to run a university and is something we can reasonably expect senior management to avoid. Indeed, as in the medical case, a failure to avoid doing harm (whether intentional or unintentional) may be unethical.
In what follows, I’ll argue that, in fact, there is good reason to think this is precisely how my university is being run. We are subjected to a set of highly questionable management practices that, far from avoiding, our senior management team seems to have adopted as a modus operandi. As one frustrated colleague put it to me ‘the fact that we continue to function at all is not because of the decisions of senior management, but despite them.’2 I’ll focus here, in particular, on a predictable pattern to university management that I call the ‘change management programme’ - a relentless barrage of sweeping, doctrinaire, top-down change, typically involving increased centralisation and standardisation. I focus on the change management programme, not because it encompasses every aspect of poor management practice, but because it covers a lot and because it is emblematic of a more general management philosophy that I believe is doing our university community and our core mission real harm. Furthermore, rather than slowing down and scaling back, our senior leadership team appear to be ramping up, administering the change management programme at increasing speed, intensity and scale.
In Part I, I’ll outline what the change management programme is and try to give a sense of the harm I think it is doing. I’ll begin by describing the core features of the programme and their impact on my university. I’ll mostly draw on my own experience, as well as conversations with affected colleagues. To back this up, I’ll then briefly review a decade of staff survey results (at least, the results I was allowed to access), which support my argument and I hope counter the concern that I have simply cherry-picked evidence of dysfunctionality at an otherwise well-run University full of contented staff. I’ll conclude Part I with a discussion of the recent expansion of the change management programme to the academic domain, in the form of our ‘Curriculum Framework Transformation’ - a new initiative that subjects teaching to the same harmful management practices that have proved so problematic elsewhere in the university.
In Part II, I’ll step back to consider the underlying causes of our current managerial malaise and what we can do about it. I’ll work my way back up the causal hierarchy from the individual decisions made by senior leaders, to the quality of information on which those decisions are based, to perverse incentives and managerialism, to changes in university governance, to the chronic lack of funding in the sector, and, ultimately, to what we think a university is or ought to be.
See Goodhart’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law), often expressed as ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’, or the Cobra Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive).
I quote all sources in this piece anonymously, using the ‘they’ pronoun. This is in response to widespread reluctance among those I talked to to be identified when critiquing university management - this applies to both academic and administrative staff, and seems a particular concern for more junior staff.