Professors of accounting

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.