http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6977577.ece

Emma

I've been meaning to compose a reply to this thread, Emma - but every time I start I just get depressed and give up!

R x

God, that is truly depressing!

I remember an academic friend - a senior lecturer at the time - at one of the new universities saying that all staff had had their photocopying/printing allowance capped - so much a month and no more, never mind that you can't actually run a writing workshop without copies - on the same day that the vice-chancellor told him they'd got a £30m 'war-chest' for a proposed merger with another university. To cover re-printing the letterhead and changing the signs round the campus, presumably.

I've never seen anyone so angry this side of an actual road-rage incident.

Emma

Oh, that used to happen all the time when I taught at Cambridge Regional College. It was a joke!

I loved the verve, audacity & sheer nervous brilliance of the language used by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex in the quoted passages:

“Our aim is to continue to invest in successful areas in the University and grow our income where possible”. “In some areas”, the VC says, “there are no opportunities for sustainable growth and we need to make targeted reductions in those areas while continuing to develop our Univer-sity as a broad and balanced research-intensive institution across the arts and social sciences.”

The horror! (etc)

Businessy-type people were brought in to run universities to get away from ivory-tower thinking, but it always seems to me that businessy thinking is just as narrow-minded, although it's a different narrow-mindedness.

So, what's business's equivalent of an ivory tower? A steel shed? A plastic office? A profit-oriented long-term work-facilitating personnel unit?

Emma

A cubicle, Emma. See Dilbert.

<Added>

Alas, the cubicle is even smaller and has less of a view than the ivory tower...

This bit got me:

“In a number of schools we are now seeking financial savings, including Engineering and design; English; History, Art History and Philosophy; Informatics; and Life Sciences” ... “In academic schools with recent growth and good prospects for the future, we are pressing ahead with our growth and development plans, including the schools of Business, Management and Economics; Global Studies; and Media, Film and Music”.

The idea that any successfully-run business can't make money out of engineering, design and informatics (IT to you and me) is so crass as to completely undermine the credibility of this wannabe managing director. And if they can make money out of media, film and music, then they should perhaps make a blockbuster musical film to eke out the pennies in their kitty. (But what on Earth is "Global Studies"? I hate these meaningless course names; they're completely uninformative as to the content of the courses.)

To answer the question posed, universities are supposed to be primarily seats of learning. Unfortunately, the accountants who are running this country (into the ground, on present evidence) have turned them, and every other national institution, into money-chasing pseudo-businesses led by third-rate chief executives and financial directors.

I don't think it's business thinking in general that is blinkered; just the rather half-baked 'irrationale' that exists within the public sector. Another example of this would be the deplorable situation that was happening in Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust until fairly recently. I'm afraid that, until someone reads the riot act to the bunch of klutzes who run many of our public sector institutions, and gives the lot of them their marching orders, nothing is going to change. Short-termism and myopic cost-cutting is going to continue running our institutions down, while simultaneously storing up huge costs for rectifying the situation in the future.

I'm with Leila. The whole world often seems to be trapped inside a Dilbert cartoon. Except our pointy-haired bosses carry pitchforks.

Alex

Universities are under so much pressure to generate an income, it is little wonder that they are suffering an identity crisis. They don't know what they're there for any more. And they are made up of so many conflicting sides; all wrapped up in their own agendas, playing political games and wasting endless time scheduling pre-meeting-meetings so that at least they look like they're doing something about it. And all the while spouting rhetoric in an attempt to rally their staff and expecting them to produce the impossible on their behalf.

To summarise: Grrr and argh!

Joolz

You've just neatly summarised the typical public-sector 'manager', Joolz: someone who is desperately seeking justification for their job, and who therefore performs random acts of management (to borrow Scott Adams' phrase).

My late wife was subject to such a random management act, while she was under the care of a cardiac specialist. One of her hospital appointments got 'postponed' by 7 months, supposedly because they couldn't fit her in within the 3 months timescale that her specialist had suggested. When I queried this (rather irately, and in writing) with the specialist, it turned out no one had consulted him about the matter. Apparently, hospital managers were in the habit of doing this kind of rescheduling, without consulting the medical people, purely to suit the convenience of their myopic little 'system'. The cardiologist thanked me for taking the trouble to write the letter, because it gave him ammunition to go and kick a few arses.

Alex