I spent a couple of days in late February in the UK at a meeting of the Higher Education Strategic Planning Association (HESPA). I found it interesting, not just because of the sessions themselves but because I actually got to understand something pretty important about how UK universities work. And friends, they do not work the way they do over here in our neck of the woods.

I had noted from the outset that there wasn’t really any organization like HESPA in Canada. To the extent that its mandate covers certain parts of human resource management and financial planning, it seemed to partly overlap with areas covered by the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO). To the extent that it was about data collection of various kinds, it seemed to partly overlap with the Canadian Institutional Research and Planning Association (CIRPA), which despite the name doesn’t contain a lot of people who do planning and is closer to the being the Canadian version of the US-based Association for Institutional Research (AIR). It also seemed to be some things that you would see at meetings of the US-based Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), which in the States is a group large enough and distinct enough from AIR to have its own grouping. 

At first I thought this was nothing more than a quirk, just a minor difference in the way that professionals choose to associate in different countries. But then I asked one delegate how she would characterize the attendees of the conference, and she said “well, it’s the people who do the work that allow universities to function, isn’t it?” At which point it dawned on me that many of the attendees’ job descriptions didn’t seem to fit neatly into any employment category that I recognized from our side of the pond, and there actually is a significant difference in the way UK and Canadian institutions are staffed. These conference attendees were actually doing a set of tasks that don’t really exist in Canada or at least are not consciously organized in such a way as to require a set of staff with a distinct professional identity.

Let’s be clear here: despite this group’s title, I don’t get the sense that strategic planning, per se, gets any more attention from institutions than it does over here. I went through about 30 institutional strategic plans, and like Canadian ones, they are a mix of intriguing ideas and vague banalities, though to the UK’s credit it does seem that there are a lot more institutions focusing creatively on the digitalization of education delivery is the case over here. Rather, UK universities have a lot more planners. Which is to say, they do a lot more minute planning of things like staff workloads, and—this is the interesting thing—they do it centrally.

One thing about Canadian universities which is both lovable and infuriating is the fact that planning is mostly recognizable by its absence. Stuff just kind of happens. Obviously, units do just enough planning to make sure classes happen, grades get submitted and key services are staffed properly and delivering more or less what was intended. But after that we kind of rely on norms of professional responsibility to get things done. Plans? We don’t need no stinkin’ plans! We just do stuff. Mainly off the side of someone’s desk. But that doesn’t seem to be the way things go in the UK. Hence, I suspect, the more-or-less continuous stream of complaints about “managerialization” of UK universities that you always hear about if you read the Times Higher or the Grauniad, or whatever. 

Why the difference, you ask? UK universities have not always been like this. If you go back to novels like Lucky Jim or David Lodge’s campus trilogy, there’s not much evidence that university campuses in the UK were overrun with planners. In fact, at the time, I’d bet that bureaucratization was more advanced in North America simply because the size of the average campus was much bigger. Rather, I suspect rather that the expansion of planning is a response to the peculiar combination of marketization and regulation that the UK has chosen to pursue over the past 40 years.

I know people like to just blame “marketization” but that’s clearly not the reason. The higher education market in places like the US, Chile, Japan and Taiwan are at least as marketized as the UK but as far as I know none of them have the kind of institutional staffing patterns seen in the UK. No, I would argue that it is the various forms of external regulation that have been imposed on the sector—the details of which I outlined in some detail a few months ago when I attended WonkHE’s Festival of Higher Education – that have required institutions to collect reams of data which is the bigger influence here. To some extent, the mere act of collecting this much data required institutions to manage their institutions differently, but also once collected this data probably provided institutions with both the information and inclination to attempt to manage institutions more in the name of efficiency. Either way, the greater use of planning and planners was the result. 

Even if this path was not inevitable one can see the logic behind the path of development. What this larger number of planners primarily gives a university is an enhanced ability to behave like a strategic actor which can make strong commitments about institutional action. That is, unlike North American universities, where important priorities sometimes get lost in the flurry of the day-to-day, UK universities have enough centralized direction  to make sure that short-term priorities actually get done. I suspect, for instance, that this explains UK universities’ ability to get foreign campuses up and running quickly, in comparison to Canadian institutions, which are for the most part useless at this kind of thing. 

This doesn’t necessarily give UK universities a strategic advantage. Strategy, as Henry Mintzberg has convincingly argued, does not emerge spontaneously from planning; rather, it is about having a convincing path to success, however that is defined. Obviously, if you have both good strategy and good planners—that is, people who actually know how to get shit done—that’s a big bonus. The ideal, in fact. But as I said, I don’t get the sense that UK universities are any better at long-term strategy than ours.

Though if they ever do…watch out.