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INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

New Managerialism in British Higher Education—a Vice-Chancellor's Perspective

Roger Brown
Roger Brown is vice-chancellor and professor of higher education policy at Southampton Solent University. Address: East Park Terrace, Southampton, SO14 0YN, UK. E-mail: roger.brown@solvent.ac.uk.

This article sets out a vice-chancellor's perspective on "new managerialism." It begins by defining what is meant by the term and then considers how it affects my university and UK higher education in general. It is incidentally very much a vice-chancellor's perspective, though it also draws on my experience as a former government official and chief operating officer of a national quality assurance agency.

The Meaning of New Managerialism
I am not aware of a common definition. I am using the term to indicate that a more conscious and systematic effort is made by the authorities at a university—the vice-chancellor and the academic and administrative leadership—to manage the affairs of the institution, including the activities of the academic staff, and to fulfill certain overall organizational objectives rather than leaving outcomes to be determined simply by the interplay of the various interests within the institution. The shift reflects the increased external stakeholder interest in higher education that has accompanied massification and the knowledge economy with the central role for universities as producers of knowledge. Higher education is now too expensive and too important to be left to the academy.

New Managerialism and My University
My institution is subject to a bewildering array of accountabilities to the state. The maximum fees we charge for home undergraduate tuition, the bursaries (scholarships) we offer impecunious students, and the numbers of state-funded students we recruit are all closely controlled. Our governance and management, particularly financial management, are regularly and closely scrutinized. The Quality Assurance Agency periodically audits and issues public reports on our mainstream teaching provision; it also looks from time to time at our collaborative programs, including those with overseas partners. Its reports are published and attract wide publicity. A government-sponsored Web site contains publicly endorsed information about quality and standards at each institution.

As in the United States, professional and statutory bodies accredit programs leading to professional qualifications in areas such as teacher education and health education. Our staff research effort is periodically assessed through the nationwide Research Assessment Exercise, which determines how much (if any) state funding we might receive for such activity and what is the single most important allocator of institutional and departmental prestige. Finally, the other services we provide for local businesses and communities are also subject to a good deal of external scrutiny.

However, there is also an appreciable degree of self-regulation. The academic community remains essentially self-governing. Individual faculty are still largely responsible for what they focus on for teaching and research and, to a very large extent, how, when, and indeed where they do their work. My institution cannot be unusual in its Jekyll and Hyde character. Huge numbers of students arrive at the start of October. They remain there (with one or two breaks) until about the middle of May. Staff disappear about a month later, and the university is largely empty—apart from young revenue-generating students from southern or eastern Europe—until October. Moreover, staff are clearly accountable as much to the invisible subject armies as to their employing institutions. I know that this phenomenon is not confined to the United Kingdom.

This position is, however, beginning to change. State initiatives on things like access are beginning to affect previous "black box" areas such as student admissions, desired learning outcomes, student assessments, and even choice of research topics. The introduction (through variable fees and bursaries) of a greater degree of competition in the home undergraduate market and the increasingly sharp concentration of state research funding—10 institutions have over 30 percent and 4 institutions nearly 20 percent of Funding Council research funding—are also beginning to shape institutional missions. There is, of course, already fierce competition in the markets for overseas and postgraduate students and in gaining research funding and donations from business, private donors, and government agencies. Also as in America, increasing amounts of institutional resources are going into areas like marketing, enrollments, and fundraising that would previously have been used for teaching and research. These trends affect all institutions, and there is little sign that institutions receiving a lower proportion of state funding are significantly better off in terms of freedom from regulation.

The Threat of the Market
The position is about to change as we move into a new era of price competition in the main undergraduate market, with the introduction in fall 2007 of variable fees and bursaries.

In the long run it is these market forces, as much as state action, that will determine the quality and relevance of what my institution will offer or even whether it (and the kind of learning experience it tries to provide) will survive. What view do my faculty take on this? Nearly every survey shows that academic staff are generally hostile to these forces. Already many of them feel alienated from what they see as increased bureaucratization and a reduced academic control as a result of state initiatives. Some of these perspectives but by no means all of them are justified.

Similarly, institutional heads are fond of complaining about the accountability "burden." But every independent study has shown that the direct costs are at least tiny in relation to the overall level of public and private expenditure now committed to higher education. What worries me far more is the increasing volume of student complaints and appeals, the declining level of trust between institutions and students, the increased levels of cheating, the increasing characterization of higher education as a private rather than a public good, and the view that ultimately it is the customer who should determine the appropriateness of program and research outcomes. In my view this growing marketization represents a much greater threat to the academic enterprise than any number of government initiatives. I hope I am wrong.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number47/p22_Brown.htm