University governance is not broken – but it does need to change.
There are places where governance is not working very well. There are places where it is working exceptionally well. And in most cases the governance system works in the same way it always has but with a different and deeper set of issues.
It may be that the resilience of “business as usual” is not a sign of stability – but a sign of a wider dysfunction.
University governance is built with committees, a senate (usually), and a council. Information can flow up and down the chain with no more urgency than a stream trickling down a hill. The idea of a university being a deliberate (or slow) decision maker is not a design fault – but the entire purpose of the system.
The challenge is that the moment we are working in is highly unpredictable. This means that the slowness inherent in the governance of universities is a barrier to making timely decisions. In turn, the lack of speed kills. If universities cannot make decisions quickly then they will be forever fighting yesterday’s battles as even bigger challenges come over the horizon.
It is true that university governance can be slow. It is also the case that governance is no more than the collective will of people, accepted practice, navigating within a system which is continually changing because of the people and practices within it.
It is not that governance is fundamentally broken – but that in places, it has not caught up with the world we are in or the issues we are dealing with. The institutional governance memory has largely been about growth, and now it is about changing shape, and in some cases contraction.
And it is struggling to catch up for three main reasons. Intra-organisational dynamics, regulatory pressure, and a lack of experience and guidance in responding to this particular crisis.
People
The relationship between the vice chancellor and the chair of council is a critical one and one that can make or break the quality of governance. Usually, not a policy is passed, a major programme commenced, or in the most detail orientated a contract signed, without the permission of one of these two people.
That critical relationship cannot be to act, consciously or otherwise, as gatekeepers – and instead needs to work to sharpen the focus of the wider discussion and decision making on the art of the possible in responding to the greatest aspirations and the most sizable threats.
Sometimes the funnel of chair and vice chancellor contracts the necessary information, context and ambition rather than flipping the funnel around to allow a wider and richer understanding of the specific problem and the potential answers to it.
A trend across the sector is that the strain placed on organisations is placing significant pressure on this relationship. Sometimes this pressure is forcing the chair and vice chancellor ever closer together and making them engage like never before. On the other hand, this pressure can spill into real disagreements and arguments.
Neither excessive closeness nor distance is helpful for good decision making. One allows governance by relationship above process which can lead to decisions being too narrow or having considered too few sides. The distance makes issues fraught and honest conversations difficult.
The role of the registrar has never been more crucial in this dynamic. They are the third leg of the stool that can facilitate private conversation but crucially, particularly now, can turn debates into issues that can be fed into the university governance system with a structure and purpose that reaches beyond the vice chancellor and chair in isolation. The registrar, or equivalent, is too often perceived as clerking or secretariat – rather than a function and role that can influence culture.
The idea isn’t that governance should be conflict free, but that systems are robust enough to turn conflict into decision. In times like these strongly held disagreement is inevitable, sometimes it is even good as it shows things are being deeply felt, but governance cannot function where personal relationships dominate a governance system. The future is one which – as you might expect us to say – ever more deeply engages the registrar as the translator of discussion into decision.
Regulators and regulation
Governments and regulators have not been helpful in enabling the evolution needed in university governance. On the one hand, there is a reflexive defence to non-intervention because universities are autonomous institutions. And to be fair, when regulators and governments do something universities do not like it is also a defence they reach for. Autonomy is true at an institutional level but regulators seek to impede institutional autonomy all of the time through sector wide regulation.
Taking Covid as an example, the Office for Students introduced a range of temporary market stabilisation measures which covered, amongst a range of other matters, “matters that may affect or distort decision making by prospective or current students in respect of their choice of higher education provider or course.” It isn’t enormously helpful that the regulatory environment can sometimes feel like either no intervention or extreme intervention.
The space that is interesting is what does regulatory stewardship look like – neither the laissez faire of institutional failure nor the clunking foot of, well, boots on the ground.
The overriding temptation is to introduce more regulation in a period where the sector is struggling. The logic is that universities are exposed to greater risk and the way to protect students from risk is to build boundaries around what universities can and cannot do.
The problem is that universities do not have the resources to cope with any more regulatory burden. In fact, owing to the financial pressures they are under, universities have less resources than ever to deal with new regulatory burdens. This isn’t about the bonfire of the redtape, or a chainsaw as some world leaders prefer, but it is about an informed debate about how to sharpen the focus of an enormous regulatory burden.
Introducing new regulation increases the chances that universities will fall foul of new regulations but that hardly seems like the point. There should be as much energy in reducing red-tape as there is in creating it in order to give universities the space to breathe. The sector is having to reduce its size and it can’t function with a regulatory burden designed for a time when it was much bigger.
The effect of this would also be to free up the regulators time to focus on a narrower range of issues. The obvious rebuke is which things should any regulator spend less time on. The question, though helpful, misses the wider point that regulatory burden is created as much by approach as by the areas regulators choose to spend their time on. OfS Chief Executive Susan Lapworth made the case back in 2022:
Your autonomy shouldn’t be a theoretical idea that you mobilise defensively to ward off regulation. It should be a living, active practice that you use to make your own decisions with confidence. So I’m encouraging you to think about whether the idea of self-directed autonomy might be a useful way to think about how you respond to regulation.
Three years on, it’s fair to say that governing bodies often do not feel like they have sufficient insight into what the regulator believes to be the appropriate exercise of that autonomy. For example, it would be enormously useful for the OfS to provide an annual summary of the key issues they are dealing with – a bit like the OIA’s annual report on trends and outcomes.
Reducing regulation, revealing potholes, and more clearly differentiating between issues of governance and those of leadership will help. It is also important to be clear that at times the sector has been caught in a trap of doing the same activity and expecting different results.
Partners
Even in the most extreme circumstances the sector now finds itself in radical discussions couched in terms of partnerships with the people that the sector has always worked with. It might be that some of the answers to the current crisis are not within the sector.
There is an opportunity to explore partnerships with different kinds of public and private organisations. Traditionally, in universities, these have grown up within schools and faculties as research or teaching partnerships. It’s less frequent that senior leaders and their governing bodies seek out partnerships of mutual convenience to address a challenge.
Now would seem to be the time to look at whether there may be partnerships with private providers on pre-degree teaching, PBSAs on addressing housing shortages, local authorities on a place-based marketing campaign, the local chambers of commerce on brokering land assets, and so on.
Again, the challenge in realising this work is a governing one. Universities just have less muscle memory of trying to building these kinds of strategic partnerships – more imaginative partnerships require a different set of approaches.
The first is absolute clarity from governing bodies regarding the problems they are trying to solve – and the discipline to stay within those core priorities. It is not enough to say that the problem is cash shortage caused by recruitment challenges. The deeper question is which qualifications are recruited to, the types of programmes on offer, and how clearly the link between income and programmes can be defined. Only then is it possible to look at which partners might be worth working with.
The other challenge is that the regulatory environment is not always amenable to partnership. There is the issue of CMA compliance, where providers are reluctant to enter sensible conversations for fear of falling foul of regulations. A simple guide on the framework for who universities can work with in what circumstances would go far. Clearly, the current situation where the CMA is obligated to maintain the rules of a market which isn’t functioning properly is far from ideal.
Breaking not broken
People, regulation, and new partners are the three ingredients to move the university governance cycle on. It is easy to say universities need outside direction and internal commitment to meet the moment we’re in – but harder to pull off in practice.
What universities have in their favour is that they have structures and processes that have been tried and tested. Now is the moment to adapt them.
