It’s always difficult to make accurate observations about differences in national higher education cultures. But one thing I can tell you that is absolutely not true is the perception that Canadian universities are suffering under some kind of unprecedented managerialist regime. If anything, Canadian academics are among the least managed employees in the entire world;
When academics complain of over-management, they aren’t using that term in a way that workers in other fields would recognize. They are not, for instance, required to be in any one place other than the six to nine hours per week they are teaching: it is simply understood that they are working and being efficient at a place of their choosing. The content of their work largely escapes scrutiny: no one checks-in on their classes to see what is being taught (though Queen’s university may be wishing they had a bit more hands-on management after revelations of anti-vaxxing material in a health class last week). Research topics are largely left to the individual researchers’ interests. In other words, subject to contractual obligations around teaching, they mostly do what they want. In most respects, they resemble a loosely connected set of independent contractors rather than actual employees.
Rather, what academics in Canada are actually complaining about when they talk about managerialism is three things:
1) The existence (and growth) at universities of a class of managers that are almost as well paid as senior academics. The fact that these people rarely impact the working life of academics is irrelevant; their mere presence is evidence of “managerialism”.
2) The existence of apparently pointless bureaucracy around purchasing, reimbursement, and travel. This annoyance is easy to understand, but it’s not clear to me that this problem is any worse at universities than it is at other organization of similar size.
3) Meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. Yet the thing about meetings in universities is that they are rarely decision-making affairs. More often than not, in fact, they are decision-retarding events (or possibly even decision-preventing events), whose purpose is more about consultation than administration.
In a real managerial university, courses would be ruthlessly overseen, if for no other reason than to ensure that classes met minimum enrolment counts. In a real managerial university, individual professors’ research programs would be reviewed continuously in order to ensure that it was attracting maximum funding. In a real managerial university, the managers would know where employees were from 9-5 every day. But almost none of that exists in Canada. To really see that stuff you need to go to the UK or – to a lesser extent – Australia.
Professors are, of course, right to worry about managerialism, because UK universities sound pretty horrid. But a dose of actual managerialism (as opposed to just having more meetings) probably wouldn’t hurt in Canadian universities – particularly when it comes to ensuring curriculum coherence and enforcing class-size minima.
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Neither Canadian nor an academic, but still quite sure this is spot on.
This is to me a manifestation of a broader source of dissatisfaction within the professional classes across the developed world, which can perhaps be summarised as “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For”. Most professionals had the choice of a number of different professional careers, and made the decision they did at least as much so as to avoid what they saw as negative or unpleasant aspects of certain careers as they did to take advantage of what they saw as their chosen path’s positive aspects. So, lawyers (much like academics) tend to recoil from anything that carries a whiff of “management”, while claiming that “If I wanted to do that, I would have gone to business school.” A similar dynamic is increasingly apparent among the medical profession in the US, and there is even a version among those who DID chose to go to business schools, who find it unpleasant to operate in a world in which there are legal and regulatory restraints on their “creativity”, which generally wasn’t part of their dear case studies back at the old pile of bricks.
Alex – great article today. I am curious if you have any suggestions or advice for improving meetings. Can we move towards more decision-making? Or is the cycle of consultation so deeply rooted that it will always be there?
Hi Stephen.
Man, if I was smart enough to know how to do that, I probably wouldn’t be writing a blog
I once participated in a series of meetings devoted to making our meetings more productive.
The initiative failed, perhaps because it most closely resembled an Ionesco parody of management.
But “consultation” is fundamentally managerial: it’s a way of asking academics’ opinions, without actually deferring to their wishes. It can be not only pointless, but actively insulting.
As for doing whatever we like, this is true, but only to a point. The pressure is on to do not only what’s publishable, but also what’s fundable, and justify oneself. We haven’t (thank God) arrived at the micro-managed level of British academics, but calls for “accountability” are certainly driving us in that direction.
The one area where I feel having a coordinated approach could actually yield some results is on curricular coordination. I think it is necessary to have profs hashing out a joint vision of curricular progression for students re which courses to take and why. Many professional programs do it so why not non-professional departments? There’s a clear line, I think, between telling people what to think and having all instructors develop a reasonably common understanding as to their teaching goals and methods. Yes, there’s people who might call that managerialism. There will always be resistance from some to just about anything. Still, there are things that can be done to improve the overall skills of students who are, in the final analysis, the group that is most affected by having an atomized approach to course teaching, preparation and delivery.