It’s a thankless job being a university governor at the best of times.
The structures and hierarchies – established over decades, even centuries – feel impenetrable.
You’re overwhelmed with papers and reading, never completely sure what’s going on at meetings.
Statutes and ordinances, rules and regulations, sub-committees and working groups. And all this you’re doing for free?
But during precarious times for the sector, the job gets even harder. Income lags further behind expenditure. The funding model seems loaded against you.
Doubt sets in. Have you really been holding institutional managers robustly to account? Are those course closures and staff redundancies really unavoidable?
Behind the seens
Governing bodies are the highest authorities in most institutions. Structures vary from one university to the next, as does the language of governance.
But in England, all boards are legally accountable to the sector regulator, the Office for Students, and hold significant powers, up to and including the authority to remove the vice chancellor if they so choose.
However, governing bodies remain a reticent and mostly unseen grouping. Students and staff may occasionally glimpse members at award ceremonies or public events, but closer forms of engagement tend to be discouraged (or carefully managed).
On policies that reshaped the sector in recent decades, like the 2012 fee rise, governors had little to say. During Covid, one commentator was moved to ask if anyone had seen the governing body.
Another had previously dismissed governors as “a small cadre talking amongst themselves.” Until a media exposé in 2018, almost all UK vice chancellors were members of the sub-committee that made recommendations on their own pay.
A 2019 investigation found “significant and systemic” failings in one governing body.
Yet many individual governors continue to invest substantial time and effort into their never-more-important role – lay members can bring vital external expertise to a sector that has too often been inward-looking and naïve, and staff and student members can help institutional managers see the campus from a ground-level perspective.
Last year, the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) conducted interviews with current or former governors at over forty English universities.
While most reported enjoying the opportunity to learn how universities operate, the same issues arose time and time again:
- Membership was demographically and ideologically narrow, resulting in “business realist” discourses that privileged the university’s finance and estates over its educational purpose
- Chairs were too close to senior managers to bring meaningful “challenge”;
- Cliques had emerged, leading to some members’ views carrying more weight than others;
- Power dynamics were problematic;
- Meetings of the main board sometimes served as rubber-stamping exercises for decisions already taken;
- Processes were reported to be opaque, with few governors understanding how the agenda was set, or knowing how to have an item added.
More worryingly, as OfS has increased the burden of regulatory and legal compliance, so governing bodies appear to have become more ideologically compliant. The logic of the market goes unchallenged, and the whims of policy-makers and the sector regulator courteously indulged.
Surprisingly, this critique emerged from lay members as strongly as from elected staff and student governors.
Relevant, useable and inclusive
Now the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) has launched a consultation for its new Code of Ethical University Governance. The sector already has a Higher Education Code of Governance, authored by the Committee of University Chairs (CUC Code) – the new Code supplements this, while presenting a vision of university governance that is more relevant, more useable and more inclusive.
Practical advice is offered to all members on what to expect from governance, how to navigate complex organisation structures, and – most crucially – how to impact decision-making processes.
The consultation is necessary so that the Code can be a co-produced document, capturing as many perspectives as possible. So please consider completing this short survey if you’re a current or former governor, a student, a university employee, someone with other connections to the higher education sector, or someone with no connections at all to the higher education sector.
So far, governing bodies have mostly avoided using their potentially formidable powers to intervene as the sector has been politicised and defunded. Over 10,000 campus jobs are currently at risk, and 40 per cent of universities face budget deficits.
But the aim of the Code is not to look backwards, let alone to apportion blame. It is to help give future generations of university governors the confidence and wherewithal to bring genuine, meaningful challenge.
At a time when higher education needs urgently to reclaim its status as a prized public asset, governing bodies have a duty to surpass the Nolan principles, and operate to the very highest standards.
The CDBU’s Code of Ethical University Governance may be the first step towards nudging governors beyond compliance, and empowering them to speak out. The long-term goal is for governing bodies to see their role as standing up for communities of students and staff, and for the value of higher education to everyone.
The draft Code can be found here, and the consultation here.
