When I started in university administration, one of my former teachers and informal mentors said to me – “Merlin, if your university is growing, you will have a ball, you’ll be able to support new ideas, and work with others. But if your university shrinks, it will be miserable. You will have to say no again and again, and make cuts. It won’t be like pruning plants, it will be like pruning animals. The pain will mean that every governance decision you make will be the wrong one.”
Hearing this, I immediately looked for growth opportunities. Happily, the Demand Driven System was kicking off. More students came to university. Research funding increased too. The Wills Review of health and medical research had recommended doubling funding, and later new schemes under the aegis of Backing Australia’s Ability 1 and 2 under the Coalition, and then a raft of new initiatives under Kim Carr and Labor supported expansion.
I had a ball.
No one actually congratulated me on my adept grasp of governance. Nor should they have. Many decisions were obvious. But fundamentally, the fact we were growing allowed people to get on with new work and many loved it.
How different things in universities seem today.
The sector is not growing (although there is talk of growth). Domestic student numbers are capped. International student numbers are capped. Research funding has not kept up with inflation or international norms.
What’s more, our costs, related to complexity in teaching and research (computer systems and broader student support for teaching, and bigger microscopes for research), and compliance costs, which are added but never taken away, keep growing.
So available funds are shrinking.
The universities that are most affected are making cuts. Pruning. Ouch.
Suddenly, people are saying that our governance – which had actually worked quite well for a long time – is wrong.
Politicians are saying it, the union is saying it, and some staff are saying it.
Is it because of cuts?
It is very hard for managers anywhere to make cuts, and at universities it can be particularly challenging because – believe it or not – most parts of most universities have smart people who are doing important jobs. As soon as you propose a cut, you quickly find out that the people affected can articulately explain why they should not be cut.
It is hardly surprising that university managers are always talking about funding. They would prefer to raise more funds than to make cuts.
The challenges have triggered one particular governance response that I do think requires some thought.
Some people appear to have concluded that managing university budgets is a business activity that can only be done by people from outside the sector with political, public service, or business experience, and that only professional consultants will have enough knowledge and experience to make the right recommendations.
I have worked with such people and found that indeed, they usually are smart enough to make good recommendations. But the actual problem isn’t always finding the right thing to do. There is often enough expertise within the university, so it doesn’t always need an external business expert.
The problem is not the decision, but getting buy-in to a decision that is going to hurt.
Unsurprisingly, at universities the message is sometimes better received if delivered by experienced academics embedded in the sector, although many politicians, business people, and public servants can also deliver messages and get buy-in. I just think it can be harder, so this reflex of going outside into the business world to balance a budget doesn’t always pay off.
Is university governance really the problem? Isn’t it just that resources are now scarce? I guess it’s always going to be a mixture of the two, but I do believe the underlying current problem is resourcing in most cases.
How does one manage a university in the face of shrinking resources?
The best strategy will be to maintain open and transparent communications, to grow revenues judiciously where we can by building on unique university strengths, to carefully balance teaching and research (and not all try to be Harvard in research), and if we do have to shrink, to reduce waste if we can agree on where it is, to pull back on things unrelated to teaching and research, and ultimately come to ground as gently as possible, sometimes by attrition, while acknowledging the pain inherent in that.
I know that politicians hate it when universities ask for resources, but we have to, in order to preserve the important work that is being done. I thus ask that the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) fix research funding – the Accord had some great ideas. It may not be the top of the list but fixing research would buy us the time the sector needs. Easing off on international student caps wouldn’t hurt either, by the way.
Professor Merlin Crossley is DVC Academic Quality at UNSW