Financing education
Max Beloff
Planning and Management in Universities: A Study of British Universities John Fielde and Geoffrey Lockwood. (Chatto and Wind as for Sussex University Press, £5 hardbacg, £2.50 paperback.) It is unusual to come across a book which is clearly well-intentioned, thorough in execU; tion, likely to be of great use to a variety 'Dci potential readers and yet deeply depressing.,` is the product of a joint team representing tr''' University of Sussex and a well-known firrilt of management consultants, and it sets oU, the ways in which what the team regards the average British University might be Ma"' aged with due regard to its academic object; ives, and the considerations of resource-us; that should prevail. That University the tell' regards as containing in the mid-'seventies
about six thousand students with an income of about six million pounds and a capital investment of some twenty million pounds. It is clear that an enterprise of this size is Indeed a large-scale affair, and that much of What is suggested and illustrated in the various charts and appendices about budgeting, .planning, the flow of information, the calendar of decision-making and so forth could not well be avoided.
It is also clear that an additional factor in favour of a more managerial approach to the Problem is necessitated by the fact that the vast bulk of the University's resources will Come from public funds, that the pressure to lower unit-costs per student is likely to go on being a feature of the present period, and that the relative freedom to make errors available in a period of generous expansion is now over. While the authors claim that their proposals would not much increase the burden of administrative as against academic ex penditure, they clearly accept the fact that One result of a period of austerity is to make it necessary for more and more money to be Spent on managerial and monitoring functions rather than on the primary purposes of institutions of higher learning. When in an article in 1967, I pointed to the dangers inherent in the increasing domi nation of the Universities by state finance and its controls, and to the likelihood that it would in the end have the effect of reducing university autonomy, the whole argument was dismissed as without serious foundation by so eminent a spokesman for the British academic establishment as Sir Eric Ashby. The present writers, who are certainly no re bels against that establishment, implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, take my case tor granted: "The national system within which universities operate" thy write "has strong standardising effects." They do not discuss "major changes," they tell us (e.g. four-term Years, incentive salary schemes) because these can only be adopted "at the national level." How then is serious innovation to be attempted?
It is not even as though the authors admired the system of state finance itself. It does not even provide, they tell us, incentives for efficient operation; it cannot work except by treating. all Universities equally, or concentrating extra resources on "repair-work " for the weakest. Its capriciousness, of which there have been recent examples enough, makes serious budgeting and planning by the different institutions almost impossible:
Yet, the team found it impossible to escape from the basic attitudes of the educational establishment, and in particular from the view that the growth which has brought about these mega-Universities was in itself totally desirable. "It is generally recognised," they say "by all but the misguided minority of Spokesmen in favour of the "more means worse argument ", that the efficiency of Universities has increased during the past decade of substantial expansion ". But they give no reason for dismissing the formidable and increasing body of evidence, varying from educational surveys to the comments of emPloyers and the different forms taken by student dissatisfaction, which does go to show that while in principle more need not mean worse, in practice it almost certainly does. Any senior academic knows perfectly well that the profession has recruited large numbers of teachers who would not before the war have been thought suitable for it.
It is indeed curious that men who pride themselves on their command of records, statistics, hard facts make assertions that are 9utte unsubstantiated. They question the Judgment of those who would restrict student membership of Senates to a mere 10 per cent (which some people would think itself dangerously high); and they assert that students have in the main " proved very effective committee members " in those University corn mittees in which they have taken part. One wonders what they have made of the not unfamiliar complaint that either students don't bother to attend once they have made their point of being entitled to, or that having attended they merely prolong discussion by dwelling on matters where they are unlikely to gain satisfaction for perfectly good reasons, thus wasting their own time (which might better be spent in study or recreation), the time of academics (which might better be devoted to teaching or research) and the time of administrators (which might be better devoted to carying out some of the team's admirable suggestions in other branches of their activity): Given that we have what we have, and that the kind of University here described is the norm and will continue to be the norm, it is obvious that only some much more radical changes will enable administration and management to be, as they ought, the totally unobtrusive handmaidens of scholarship as was the case in British Universities not so long ago. At Buckingham, outside the state system, we hope to show that if one moderates one's ambitions and makes full use of the advantages of a limited objective sought in in dependence, we can do what the authors of this book clearly think impossible — give more satisfaction to the student body and a better return for the resources invested.
Max Beloff is Principal-Designate of the University College at Buckingham and Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration at Oxford.
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