(I wrote this in 2018 for a proposed UCU collection on managerialism in Higher Education, which seems to have been abandoned. In case anyone might be interested, here it is.)
My Lords, If this isn’t a case for HEFCE and the Government to intervene, I don’t know what is.
Lord Andrew Adonis, 13 July, 2017, House of Lords
I’ve noticed that since Bath took this radical action every other vice-chancellor position that’s come up across England has now seen a big cut in these outrageous levels of pay and that would not have happened but for the success of the campaign here in Bath. So Bath has been leading the way in reforming universities and standing up for the cause of social justice in our higher education system.
Lord Andrew Adonis, 28 April, 2019, Bath Chronicle interview
Too kind, My Lord, too kind.
Like many overnight successes, the reform of governance at the University of Bath was many years in the making, ending in a few weeks of excitement. At the start of 2017, the Vice-Chancellor was secure, the authority of management was unchallenged, the peasants were grumbling at the gates of the castle; by the end of the year, it was a tumbril for the Vice-Chancellor and a shower of jammy dodgers.
The story begins in 2001, when Professor Glynis Breakwell took over as Vice-Chancellor at Bath, a reasonably well-regarded university, much like many other pre-92 institutions, though heavier on science and engineering than most, reflecting its origins in the mid-sixties expansion of technical education. It had and has a fairly standard tripartite governance structure: an academic governing body, Senate; an overall governing body, Council; a stakeholders’ body, Court. Senate is made up of academic and student representatives, some elected, some ex officio, has authority over all matters academic, and is chaired by the Vice-Chancellor. Council has a number of staff and student representatives elected by various routes, who are outnumbered by lay (external) members, drawn largely from business, including the Chair and the Treasurer. Court is composed of a mixture of staff and student representatives, of external members such as politicians and members of professional bodies connected to the university’s courses, and a numerically important contingent of emeritus professors. These structures had functioned reasonably well until the start of the century, probably because nobody had ever tried to get round them. Each would turn out to be important.
With hindsight, the signs should have been easy to see. The Vice-Chancellor began a process of concentrating power in the hands of an ad-hoc executive group, with the acquiescence, conscious or otherwise, of the governance structures. When a power grab was excessive and too visible, it was resisted, but over time the culture of governance changed to the point where the structures were little more than shells composed of people who saw it as their role to allow management to manage. Council was central. New lay members are appointed by a nominations committee made up of members of Council. Over time, Council began reproducing itself, resulting in a body dominated by members from business whose first instinct is to let management get on with it, and which had long ceased to question the information made available by senior management. Their second instinct was to pay for performance, and Bath looked to be doing well: first in the country for student satisfaction, high in the REF, Times University of the Year.
The result of shovelling cash into the gullet of a boss to whom nobody would talk back was predictable. Decision-making became arbitrary and opaque, with no regard for correct process. Degrees were closed by the backdoor route of “suspending recruitment” rather than going through proper scrutiny, ending well-established courses in engineering with languages, and in industrial relations. Professors’ salaries were set directly by the Vice-Chancellor, a useful means of demanding obedience. The appointment of emeritus professors practically ceased, weakening their influence on Court. Mismanagement and abuse reached a point where a High Court judge was shocked (McKie v. Swindon College, [2011] EWHC 469 (QB), paragraphs 30–34.) by what passed for a disciplinary process. Staff, and especially trade unions, were held in open contempt. When the first questions were asked about the Living Wage, it was claimed that paying it would cause difficulties for national pay bargaining. When the university as an employer was revealed to be the biggest user of zero-hour contracts in the land, the management response was less than a shrug.
From the point of view of a managerial culture which valued only numbers, however spurious, this was success and, in the view of this culture, all success is the work of the boss. The Vice-Chancellor’s salary was increased year upon year. By the end, including a dozen or so second jobs, Professor Breakwell was being paid half a million pounds a year.
It all unravelled because we asked “why?”: starting a decade ago, a few of us, through such channels as were available, asked “what justifies that salary?”. We were fobbed off or ignored. When some of us were elected to Council, the governing body, we discovered that it took no active part in the setting of the Vice-Chancellor’s pay, but allowed the Remuneration Committee to do so, issuing minutes of telegraphic terseness to report, though not justify, its decision. When I asked, as a member of the governing body and thus responsible in law for these decisions, for the papers supplied to the committee to inform its decisions, I was told I could not have them.
In 2012, the three campus unions, UCU, Unison, and Unite, produced the first Bath High Earners Report, an analysis of pay for management and the rest of us, contrasting the increase in the pay and number of high earners and the relative and absolute decline in pay for most staff. As we said at the time Bath UCU wrote to the Chair of the University Remuneration Committee in June 2011 suggesting there should be staff representation on the committee. There was no reply …
People working at the University of Bath have no idea how the pay of the top earners in the university is decided, and have no influence over how the decision is made.
A culture of contempt and complacency had taken hold, leading our masters to believe that they could treat us as they pleased, and that there was little we could do about it.
In 2014, we issued an updated High Earners Report. The pay of the Vice-Chancellor was now an embarrassment, especially with the increasing focus on casualization and low pay at the university. We continued to run candidates for the governing bodies; we continued to raise the issues of transparency in the fora available to us; we leafletted, we broadcast; we kept saying one thing: “how do you justify this salary?” We counted being lied to an advance because it was better than being ignored. What we found, the further we went, was that the problem was not the money, but the moral and intellectual void at the centre of governance.
In February 2017, the annual meeting of Court was held. One of the few formal functions of Court is to “receive the accounts”. It was proposed from the floor that we receive the accounts “with concern” given the lack of transparency in executive remuneration processes. The executive visibly panicked at the idea. The Chair of the meeting attempted to bully us into withdrawing the motion. Given that the principal actors were all active trade unionists, we were unlikely to be outdone in matters of procedure and standing orders, and we got it to a vote. The vote was lost, 33–30, but as was later noted, about ten people whose pay was set by the Remuneration Committee voted without declaring their interest. If Court had had standing orders, something it had not got around to for fifty years, those members would have been expected to leave the room while the matter was under discussion. The open abuse of process, in particular by the Chair, and the closeness of the vote told us we were moving forward.
Then we hit lucky. In mid 2017, Lord Adonis wanted an example of extravagant executive pay in Higher Education, and Bath was at the top of the list. After his speech in the House of Lords, he received information from across the university about the extent of governance failure. At the same time, a Labour councillor and Unison activist at the university was working with a local journalist to reveal the cost of the Vice-Chancellor’s accommodation, including the famous expenses claim for a £2 packet of biscuits. Lord Adonis made a submission to HEFCE on matters affecting remuneration and then added the issue of the meeting of Court.
HEFCE reported in November 2017. It found that members of senior management had not acted in good faith at the meeting of Court and that the university should have produced standing orders for Court. It noted “with disappointment” that the university “did not respond more proactively” to representations “made in good faith” about the Remuneration Committee and concluded that the work of the committee “should become much more transparent”. There was more. The regulator said we had been right about everything and that management had barely bothered even to show disdain. The three campus unions called joint meetings, attended by hundreds of staff who unanimously voted no-confidence in the Vice-Chancellor and Chair of Council.
The management response was entirely in character. The Vice-Chancellor squeaked through a motion of no-confidence at Senate and seems to have thought she could brazen it out. A protest was called for the next meeting of Council, and at that point it appears some men put on their best grey suits. Two days before the meeting, the terms of departure were announced, provoking massive anger at the pay-off. Professor Breakwell was to be given six months “sabbatical” on full pay at the end of her term of office, and a “loan” she had been given in 2001 to buy a car, some £30,000, of which she had repaid an insignificant amount, would be written off, as had been agreed at the start of her contract.
This was the final cheese straw. Nearly a thousand students and staff turned up at the protest, some flinging biscuits at the windows of the building where the meeting was held.
The rest is becoming history. University management decided to commission an independent review of governance at Bath, and called in the Halpin Partnership, whose report on governance made a number of recommendations which have been, or are being, implemented. This includes staff and student representation on the Remuneration Committee, and the removal of the Vice-Chancellor from its membership, among a number of other changes which should have the effect of ensuring a minimum of correctness.
What have we learned from all of this? First, governance matters, and it matters all the more if you ignore it. Secondly, culture is more important than structures.
For many years matters of governance had been confined to quite small numbers of staff, with most ignoring the structures and decisions which came out of them. Over the last five years, we have collectively come to follow what happens on the governing bodies and taken an interest in who is elected to them. As a union branch, we inform branch members when branch members or officers are running for election to governance positions, with the clear implication that they are fit and proper people for the roles. There is a developing culture of reporting back from meetings of governing bodies and of members of staff asking questions. Management too seem to have absorbed the lesson that neglecting the formalities of proper governance will eventually come back to bite you on the bum: the scandal of executive pay was not the money, but the poor governance associated with it, and it would have taken little to remedy the problem early.
The second lesson is that culture matters. The formal structures of governance changed but not enormously. The failure was the acceptance of a culture of deference to management, where decisions were nodded through once senior management asked for them, all discussion was protest, and any objection was treacherous nuisance. The most formally democratic bodies can prove useless if there is no real debate within them. The problem was not that governing bodies made objectionable decisions, but that they acquiesced in being under- or ill-informed, and abdicated responsibility for proper decision-making. Even within the elected membership of bodies, there are people who condone any abuse as long as formalities are observed, however mechanically, and as long as their own position is protected.
There is one final lesson: it is possible to push back. Other universities have done so in their way, as we have in ours at Bath. In Gramscian terms, it is war of position rather than war of manoeuvre, patient legwork rather than one great roar bringing down the doors of the Winter Palace. But it can be done. In our case it relied on the already good relationship between the three union branches, the active engagement of a councillor and of a local journalist (nominated for Scoop Of The Year 2017), the engagement of retired staff with a concern for the university as a community, and the building of links with student groups who had made the connection between poor governance and their own increasingly shoddy conditions.
If management at Bath had had the wit, they could have headed off the campaign years before it succeeded. Even a few relatively minor concessions would have done the job, but at the expense of a loss of authority, in the authoritarian rather than the authoritative sense. That perhaps is the core of the managerialist culture, the idea that authority is its own justification, and the reason why it can only ever collapse when it is subject to scrutiny.
Lord Adonis may be overstating when he says that “but for the success of the campaign … in Bath” there would not have been action elsewhere to rein in executive pay and reform governance, but Bath was certainly the first of a number of universities where staff, organizing through their unions, have begun to recover some measure of control over the governance of their institutions.
Michael Carley on UCU HEC 