Every university says its people are its greatest asset. Then strategy-making begins, and the people disappear. What gets counted is dollars, EFTSL, rankings, publications and research income, because those are the measures that compare, aggregate and survive council scrutiny. People return at the end as hoped-for beneficiaries, with wellbeing treated as a product of getting the numbers right.
This is the wrong way round. The conditions for people to do their best work should be the lens through which strategy starts, not a dividend it might one day pay. The first question in any university strategy should be: why would someone come here to do their best work? Every significant choice should be tested against the answer.
The sector's humane language mostly points outwards: to students, to communities, to the people who benefit from research. These people matter; they're essential to the purpose of universities. But the current discourse says much less about the academic and professional staff whose work creates that value. Students will benefit from a more humane university, as a consequence rather than the starting point: we're unlikely to offer a humane education from inside an inhumane machine.
The dollar wins for a reason. It lets a council compare a chemistry department with a student services team with a capital project. Human experience doesn't aggregate that way; it is rich, specific, evolving and resistant to comparison. Strategists have dealt with the problem by turning people into numbers too. Universities run staff surveys with Likert scales and report the share who agree they feel valued. They ask people to score their experience because it has been too expensive to read what they had to say about it.
AI has changed that. This year at ANU, the codesign of the University's strategy (on which I worked) gathered around 85,000 words of free-text submissions from hundreds of staff. People were keen to be heard. They wrote about their work, their colleagues, what got in the way and what kept them there. Not long ago, synthesising that properly would have taken a team weeks. With AI tools, it was a manageable task.
There is an irony in a machine being what lets a university listen to its people at scale. I'm comfortable with that. Last year, writing for the UK's Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) about AI in professional services, I argued that these tools work best as an input to human judgement rather than a substitute for it. This is that argument at institutional scale: the machine does the reading so that people's own words, rather than their scores, can shape the decisions.
Staff voices informed the ANU strategy; as in most strategy processes, they weren't what decided it. Strategy-making is a sequence of compromises. A strategy has to speak to government, to council, to the financial position and to the institution's standing in the world, and each of those audiences arrives with its own currency. At the decision points, the familiar measures carried more weight than the rich material gathered through codesign. I understand why those trade-offs fell as they did. Gathering rich human insight is now the easy part; giving it weight when strategic choices are made remains the hard part.
A human lens is a way of making choices, not avoiding them. If the test is whether someone would come here to do their best work, it has to be applied area by area. Do people have the colleagues, the time, the facilities and systems, the partners and the support that good work needs? Where a university can sustain those conditions, it should fund them as the inputs they are. Where it can't, it should consolidate, and say so honestly. Spreading thin resources across everything is often the least humane option available: it leaves people everywhere working in conditions where their best work is improbable.
In that HEPI essay, I also argued that the university exists not to serve its staff but to educate students and to produce research that matters. That line drew the most pushback, and I still stand by it. Taking the conditions for staff seriously is how a university does both. It is also why honesty about where those conditions can't be sustained belongs in a humane process, even when not everyone celebrates the outcome.
For vice-chancellors and senior leaders across universities, this approach is mostly a change in what gets asked and how it is said. Read what staff write, not only what they score; the tools now make that affordable. Give that material weight at the decision points, not just at consultation. Define the good work the university is trying to build or sustain, and test each strategic choice against the conditions for good work. And when a university can't enable those conditions somewhere, explain the decision in those terms. People will accept a hard choice made for reasons they recognise far more readily than one justified in a currency they don't share.
Universities have always been made by the people who work in them. Their strategies should start there too.
Dr Ant Bagshaw is a Principal Consultant at Research Strategies Australia and a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education