Despite any appearance to the contrary, when I write a post I try to voice perspectives that I think are in one way or another valid, right. Sometimes that works out for me; other times not so much. But it’s always my starting point.
This blog is a little different, as I’m going to use it to articulate something that I know possibly, even probably, isn’t valid or right. Nevertheless I’m going to plough on, as even though I may be wrong I think on this occasion being wrong helps draw out something important. So what’s the erroneous claim that I’m going to write about?
The current focus on governance in the ongoing debates about the current state and future of UK higher education is overstated and potentially damaging.
Never mind the dangers universities indulging in the appearance of governance rather than effective governance (i.e. governance theatre), we’re at risk of a debate on developments in university governance that misses the mark and itself becomes performative.
As I say, I’m probably wrong but hear me out.
act one
What’s undeniable is the extent of the current attention being paid to the issue as evidenced by the serious, informed and substantive recent publications on university governance. If not overwhelming, then this is undeniably voluminous.
AdvanceHE’s Shaping the Future of HE Governance; the Council for the Defence of British Universities Code of Ethical University Governance; HEPI’s Rethinking Student Voice: How Can Higher Education Design Effective Governance. And to add to that list the Committee of University Chairs’ Review of the Higher Education Code of Governance has brought forth weighty responses from bodies such as UniversitiesUK and AdvanceHE.
This is all swelling towards a crescendo later this year when, presumably following consultation on a draft, CUC will publish a revised Higher Education Code of Governance. And even more consequentially following this we’ll get the thundering climactic chord, as OfS looks at whether the new Code meets the regulator’s commitment ‘to improving governance standards’ [p.10] – including consideration of potential new ongoing registration conditions on governance.
[As a sidenote, one can only hope that when it encounters OfS, the fate of CUC’s new Code is less gory than that endured by the UK Quality Code when the latter had a similar meeting with destiny in 2018].
So the significant amount of commentary and opinion on university governance is anything but sound and fury, signifying nothing. There’s much of substance on which to comment. If that’s the case why am I arguing, even tendentiously, that this is overstated and potentially damaging?
Two reasons, which are really one: the risk of the debate masking other, important issues.
act two
The first of these relates to the way that the government is choosing to use this issue.
As Minister of State, Jacqui Smith has made significant play of the autonomy of higher education providers in order to create at least some distance between the government and the unfolding financial crisis in higher education. And this has been extended into criticism of higher education governance, with Smith being reported by the THE as saying to the Independent Higher Education conference last November that ‘governance failures contributed to financial challenges’ (£) faced by the sector.
Of course there is some truth in this: most notoriously those universities that chose not to treat the flood of post-pandemic international students as the windfall it was; but instead to view it as the new normal and build this increase into their baseline budgets (and extrapolate further increases in international students from these new baselines). However, the impact of this, and the explicit criticism of governance effectiveness, is significantly overstated.
The original sin is not that mistake. Instead it lies in the fundamentally flawed funding model for home undergraduate provision introduced in England in 2012 (with knock-on effects for the other three jurisdictions in the UK). A model based on the fiction that the hugely expanded student loan debt could be parked ‘off-balance sheet’ was always going to end badly. There’s a reason why ‘if it looks too good to be true, it is’ is one of life’s most reliable heuristics’. The failure of government ministers and the sector to realise this at the time, with the subsequent painful implications for sector finances, is why we now have a model that is inflicting such pain on all involved: students, universities and government. Essentially, this model works for no-one.
So one of the reasons for the currently extremely fashionable focus on university governance is that for a government under pressure it offers what, from its perspective, is a pretty robust part of its defence against having to address the fundamental issue of the current higher education funding model. And while it’s tempting, given the calls for a fundamental review of higher education (£) and the rising tide of graduate anger on tuition fee debt, to think that the government’s defence won’t hold it’s far more likely that it will. (And even if the government were to yield and take a fundamental look at this issue, there are no easy answers to the challenge; there is no cavalry coming over the hill to preserve the sector as it has existed until recently).
So for government the focus on university is in large part performative, an act to distract from the fundamental issue it won’t (perhaps can’t) address.
act three
There’s also an aspect of the current exaggerated concern for university governance that can be drawn out at sector and institutional (rather than the government/political) level.
Whenever there’s talk of the problems with university governance, what has happened at Dundee University is usually either invoked; or is the unnamed spectre at the feast.
What has happened at Dundee is a tragedy in many ways, with its huge impacts for students, staff and region. But is it really a failure of governance? Or is it actually a failure of leadership and management? Dundee has become established as the cautionary example of governance failure, but a more accurate reading of the Gillies Report is that this was an executive failure. While institutional governance should have been more effective in preventing / identifying / addressing these problems, the original sin lay in the decisions and actions in the other two elements of the organisational holy trinity: leadership and management, not governance.
So there’s a danger for the sector in over-focusing on governance, when often what are described as governance failures are actually failures of leadership and management. As universities, as a sector, there is a need for us to focus as much if not more on leadership and management as on governance; on how to ensure our university communities collectively, and those with specific responsibilities in these areas, ensure the quality and effectiveness of leadership and management that is needed to match the challenges we now face. And for us to what is required of our decision-making is approached as a first order issue for leaders and managers themselves, not merely as things to be imposed and monitored by governors and governance.
Over-focussing on governance risks (either accidentally, or deliberately in order to sidestep the broader challenge) losing sight of more fundamental systemic issues. By focusing too much on governance, there is a danger that we lose sight on the critical issue: i.e. decision-making; which extends across all three domains of leadership and governance; and which if not of high-quality is a guarantee of institutional/sector decline.
dénouement
So to go back to the start, does my suggestion that we are over-doing the focus on governance in higher education stand up?
I’m not sure. Clearly effective governance is crucial, and will remain so. And there is undeniably a need for the current raft of reviews and activity. So maybe the current focus isn’t over-done and my original contention is wrong.
Nevertheless, there are real dangers that, whether consciously or unconsciously, in good faith or bad faith, that the current debate risks distracting us from equally critical issues. That it narrows the debate and distracts us from taking wider, systems perspectives. And if this happens, the sector will pay a price.
left to my own devices - occasional thoughts on higher education 
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