On Friday I attended the annual Conference of Professors of
Accounting and Finance where there were two speakers who have recently written
books which may be of interest.
Linda Evans is Professor of Education at the University of
Manchester and her book is “Professors as Academic Leaders: Expectations,
Enacted Professionalism and Evolving Roles”.
This is based on four extensive studies that
she has undertaken, exploring the role of professors across all disciplines.
Her conclusion is that the definition of “academic leadership” which underpins
the role is poorly defined and thus problematic, leading to professors being
stretched too thinly over a range of scholarly and administrative roles. She
suggests that the professoriate in a university should be treated as a team
with specialisms allowing all requirements across the university to be
fulfilled but with professors able to contribute according to their strengths,
in a manner similar to the canons at Westminster Abbey. This could then
preserve space for research and scholarly activity which, she suggested, was
under grave threat.
Michael Shattock has for many years
been the guru of university governance and his new book is “Governance of British Higher
Education: The Impact of Governmental, Financial
and Market Pressures”. He presented an interesting historical analysis of university governance,
arguing that boards of governors comprised of lay people cannot fulfil
governance accountability requirements and that academics have been
progressively side-lined from any influence on university strategy and need to
take back control. The audience was a bit sceptical about this, having already
spent the day listening to speakers who had painted a gloomy picture of the
overstretched professoriate: Michael’s somewhat unsatisfactory response to this
scepticism was to point to the enduring success of Oxbridge where senior
academics take an active part in strategy development and manage to do
everything very effectively. No Oxbridge
academics were present to comment on this.
I was particularly interested in the
parallels with corporate governance in the private sector: the adoption in
public sector institutions of mechanisms developed in the private sector has
not been very successful in improving accountability – indeed, such mechanisms
have largely failed in the private sector, too, where non-executive boards have
been unable to deal effectively with issues such as CEO pay. The Shattock
solution of including more academics on boards of governors is remarkably
similar to Labour policy proposals to put employees on corporate boards.
