left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

The parallels between running a government, and running a university, can easily be overdone.  Clearly, one of these is far more complex, much more complicated and involves much more intractable and consequential decisions.  Nevertheless the analogies often come to mind, sometimes offering interesting insights.

The last week or two have seen one such instance: the recent article by Glen O’Hara (£) on the use and impact of management consultants in UK universities, and the post in response by Patrick Parkinson, as the higher education sector seeks its way through the current challenges it faces.

is it a big number? hang on, do we even have a number?

One of the ways in which this was interesting was O’Hara’s statement that, while acknowledging that definitive data was difficult to come by, universities’ ‘spending on consultancy is rising rapidly’ particularly on restructurings where they were ‘throwing money at external advice’.  I’m not clear whether, or at least how far, this is the case

Just as many universities have borrowed the political line of ‘front line first’ to justify far bigger cuts in professional services budgets than in academic areas, many have also adopted in their cost saving measures the type of ‘reduce the excessive use of consultants’ commitment beloved of opposition political parties and incoming governments.  And the parallel is quite a close one, given that this is one of the lines taken in the Labour Party’s 2024 election manifesto.

The issue that surrounds this, of course, is lack of transparency.  There is no easy way of ascertaining levels of spend on external consultancy by universities: its level, whether it is shrinking/growing or its nature.  We’re left in the position of exchanging stories/anecdotes, trying in our judgments to avoid the bear trap of confirmation bias – and not always succeeding.

To return to the parallel with government, the Public Accounts Committee recently shredded the government’s stated methodology for measuring its use of external consultants.  No doubt all fair comment, but the data on government use of external consultancy exceeds the quantity and quality available to us on the UK higher education sector.

capacity and capability

Moving to a second interesting parallel with wider debates, both O’Hara and Parkinson are critical of the increase in universities’ use of external consultants (if the claimed rise is accepted).

For O’Hara the sector is being blighted by external consultancy: ‘locusts’ with no understanding of universities, resulting in what O’Hara describes as ‘“cookie cutter” standardised advice from consultancies’.  Effectively the sector is being sold capacity and capability, when all its getting is generic advice that may as well have been spat out of an LLM given the complete lack of understanding on which it is based.  Sector specific knowledge and experience matter, and most of the large external consultancies (i.e. excluding the more ‘boutique’ higher education specialist consultants) don’t have this.

Parkinson agrees about the problem (‘hiring consultants who do not understand the context, implement generic frameworks, and leave’), but his emphasis is different: ‘the locusts … aren’t the cause of the harvest failure.  They’re the signal that the farm has stopped tending its fields’.  Universities are calling on external consultants as they no longer have the capability for the type of strategic development needed in the face of current challenges.  It’s therefore a rational response, even if self-harming; and if universities do want to develop this capability themselves, the capacity to do this exists among their own staff ‘but it needs to be structurally rewarded, not treated as discretionary goodwill’.

This has strong echoes of the book published in 2023 by Marianna Mazzucato and Rosie Collington The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilises our Governments and Warps Our Economies.  This is one of those polemics whose full title almost removes the need for any summary of its contents, but it’s worth amplifying this at least a little by quoting an article published in the New Statesman (£) around the publication of the book:

After decades of relying on consultants for everything from crafting policy to handling crises and streamlining functions, governments have been drained of any faith in their own ability to actually govern.

Mazzucato and Collington’s answers to the broader malaise they identify echo many of the points made by Parkinson, such as investing in developing internal capabilities to build the competence and capacity.  But they also highlight another approach, which is one I’m not convinced is a strength of UK universities: new types of consultancy partnerships that increase transparency, include knowledge transfer and thereby rebuild the capacity of the organisation buying in the external consultancy.

So sitting alongside internal work to develop and deploy strategic development and implementation capability and capacity, when a university does choose to employ external consultants (as while this needs to be done less often than now may be the case, there will always be some need for this) it needs to meaningfully and materially use this to develop broader strategic development and implementation capability and capacity at that university.  Currently it feels that too often this aspect of partnership working with external consultants is either entirely overlooked, or tokenistic.

I’m not convinced that the sector’s strategic capability is as attenuated as Robinson suggests for higher education, or as Mazzucato and Collington argue for the public sector more widely.  However, even if this is more this capability and capacity available than some suggest what’s also true is that the current extent of this are not sufficient to the current challenges that UK higher education faces.  And to present this as a binary choice between developing internal capability and capacity, and buying this in, is a false choice.

What will be needed is both.  What will also be essential is better judgment on when and who to call on when universities employ external consultants (there are enough accounts of the type of failed and failing uses of external consultants on which O’Hara’s piece is based, as well as the broader issues relating to such consultants, to highlight the need for this better judgment); and on designing such partnerships so that they genuinely build internal capability and capacity.  The premium on judgment, or to draw on something in my post from last week practical wisdom, in the decision-making in universities gets ever higher.