A Practical Guide to University and College Management

Beyond Bureaucracy

Steve Denton, Sally Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415997171
• eBook ISBN: 9781135283230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written for Higher Education managers and administrators, A Practical Guide to University and College Management is a highly accessible text that offers practical guidance on how to manage the day-to-day life of universities. The authors take a proactive approach and offer a range of good practice examples and solutions, designed to resolve the dilemmas that arise in today's rapidly changing higher education environment.

Drawing on a wealth of management experience, this edited collection pulls together advice and practical guidance from expert managers working in the field of Higher Education. Each chapter is underpinned by theoretical perspectives to support invaluable pragmatic hints, mini-case studies, practical examples, and sample guidelines. The book covers four main areas:

• Selecting and inducting students: This section outlines the essential process for targeting, attracting, recruiting and inducting students
• Managing throughout the university year: Advice on the student experience, from the admissions process right up to graduation
• Assuring the quality of the student learning experience: How to manage course administration, student learning through assessment, student complaints and issues of quality assurance
• Maximising staff and student engagement: This section looks at how to maximise commitment and involvement by both staff and students, and includes approaches and examples of engagement implementation at other universities

A Practical Guide to College and University Management will be of interest to Higher Education managers, administrators, and anyone looking for a pragmatic "how to" navigational guide that informs the working life of a university, from attracting students through to graduation. It offers managers and administrators essential training and support required to promote highly successful and efficient Higher Education Institutions, and is essential reading for anyone who works in university administration or aspires to do so.

Sally Brown is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Assessment, Learning and Teaching at Leeds Metropolitan University. She has published widely on innovations in teaching, learning and particularly assessment.

Steve Denton is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Registrar and Secretary at Leeds Metropolitan University bringing together University-wide student administrative and support services, including governance and legal matters, the academic registry, planning, student services, communication and marketing and widening access and participation.

CHAPTER 1
Beyond Bureaucracy

Managing the University Year

STEVE DENTON with SALLY BROWN
Leeds Metropolitan University

Introduction

For almost as long as there have been universities, there have been those who taught, and those who supported those who taught and were being taught. However, university administrators have historically been associated with some of the more negative aspects of managerialism, in what Ramsden characterises as ‘The Bureaucracy’:

Its focus is on regulation, consistency and rules. Its managerial style is formal-rational. A cohort of senior administrators wields considerable power. Standards are related to regulatory bodies and external references: evaluation is based on the audit of procedures. Decision making is rule-based and students are statistics.

(Ramsden, 1998: 349)

This book aims to rehabilitate the work of the university administrator, reframing it in terms of the positive contribution our work can make to universities becoming successful, high-achieving and efficient organisations where academic practices are at the heart of all we do but where high standards are the sine qua non of our existence. As Baldwin (2009) suggests, ‘Universities need great academic staff to deliver the research and teaching that are core to their mission. But if their talent is to thrive, it needs to be underpinned and supported by an effective organisational structure’.

Administration, the art of successfully managing the university year, has a long and proud heritage. Many would acknowledge that Cambridge is one of the world’s oldest universities. Much can be learned from the lessons of the history of the administration of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge was established as a university in 1209, and there is evidence of early forms of ‘administration’ being established to support academia from around 1226. Many of the executive office holders still recognised today were established. Shortly after formation, the university had a chancellor and vice-chancellor. Other administrative office holders drew on universities’ early connections with the church: bedells, who preside over ceremonies, chaplains and deans (University of Cambridge, 2008).

Administrative systems were established to identify and authenticate persons to whom degrees had been granted through enrolment with a licensed master, to moderate and supervise examinations, and to mark progress by admission (graduation) to different grades, or degrees of membership of the university. Authorities were also established to keep accounts (the first finance directors!). In 1506, Robert Hobys became the first registrary of Cambridge. He was responsible for matriculation and enrolment, admission to degrees, recording decisions of Regent Masters (the teachers) and adoption of statutes (University of Cambridge, 2008).

Five hundred years on, the current registrary in 2009, Jonathan Nicholls, still performs these vital functions of ensuring that students are properly admitted, that records are kept of the terms of their admittance, that their examinations and assessments are properly conducted and recorded, and that the university has a common system of rules and regulations. As a profession, administration and management have a sustained value and importance, and are a necessary condition for the success of institutions.

Definitions

The terms ‘administrator’ and ‘manager’ are often used interchangeably (even in chapters of this book), with an increasing preference to use the term ‘manager’ in the United Kingdom to designate senior staff (vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors of British universities are sometimes surprised to find themselves described as administrators when they visit US universities!). While, as this book demonstrates, management of the university year is increasingly complex, with a growth of specific professional functions, this is happening alongside a growing crisis of identity and also a potential lack of confidence in the profession of administration.

We use the term ‘administration’ in its broadest sense, to include a range of administrative and professional functions, including:

• Registry: which traditionally includes the admission and registration of students, the administration of examinations and the authentification and conferment of awards. It also now commonly includes strategic and operational planning, data management and the formulation of statutory returns, student systems support and management, timetabling, fee management and quality assurance, enhancement and audit.

• Human resources: which includes attracting, recruiting and supporting staff, supporting appraisal and performance management, staff development, and the management of discipline and grievances.

• Finance: including keeping track of various sources of income (fees, grants, contracts, endowments) and expenditure (staff, buildings, facilities and infrastructure, pensions) and ensuring that they comply with internal and external audit and accounting standards.

• Marketing: including publicity and promotion, reputation and crisis management, but also intelligence-gathering on the higher education market, and may also include fund-raising, particularly seeking income from benefactors.

• Estates, facilities and infrastructure: including buildings, plant, maintenance, furniture and equipment, and the information technology necessary to support activity across the university.

• Student services and pastoral support services to students: health and welfare, counselling, disability support, careers.

• Alumni: including maintaining relationships and affinities with graduates for a variety of purposes, including alumni events, fund-raising and sponsorship.

• Faculty, school and corporate services: many administrative functions, such as course administration, are carried out in academic units close to teaching and research activity, for instance in subject groups, schools and faculties. Others are undertaken as pan-university functions, often described as the ‘centre’ (sometimes with derogatory overtones). What is undertaken in academic-related organisational units and what will be undertaken in pan-university organisational units will vary from institution to institution, dependent on the particular university’s history, culture, size and leadership preference.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘administration’ as ‘the organisation and running of a business or system’ and the verb ‘to manage’ as ‘to be in charge of’, ‘to supervise’ or ‘to administer and regulate’. Interestingly, it also has among the definitions ‘to succeed despite difficulties’, which will resonate with many university administrators.

The term ‘professional’ as an adjective is defined by the OED as being ‘engaged in activity as a professional occupation rather than as an amateur’ or ‘competent’ and as a noun as ‘a person having competence in a particular activity’. We therefore describe ourselves as professional administrators and managers since:

• We have particular abilities and skills, increasingly the subject of various accredited awards and subject to the oversight of professional bodies; therefore we have acknowledged competence.

• We are involved in and integral to the organisation and running of a business or system.

• We administer and regulate.

• Many of us are in charge of or supervise staff.

The term ‘professional administration’ should therefore, we argue, be applied to those who:

• attract and recruit students, support them in their learning and research, and in their experience as a student;

• support staff in the delivery of teaching, learning and research;

• provide assurance to governors and external stakeholders on the organisation and running of universities.

Why is Focus on Competence Important?

We argue that competence is important so that we have confident individuals who can work across disciplines, at all levels, within and between institutions. What is required is a professional administrators’ cadre who have what Baldwin (2009) calls the ‘Warwick way’ of doing things: ‘It is most visible in the short lines of communication between administrative and academic staff, the high degree of mutual respect, and the can-do spirit that is shared by administrators, academics and students’.

Elsewhere in this book are descriptions of some particular approaches to staff development (see Chapter 14). These can include development of both generic and skills-specific knowledge, the acquisition of diverse experience and values through both internal and external development opportunities, and personal growth through coaching, mentoring and professional training.

In the United Kingdom there has been much progress in recent years in the provision of external development opportunities, through the Association of University Administrators (AUA) and other organisations such as the Leadership Foundation and the Higher Education Academy and their antecedents, including the Universities’ and Colleges’ Staff Development Agency (UCoSDA) and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), as well as voluntary bodies including the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) in the United Kingdom and the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA). While these have been welcome developments, such organisations largely offer, by their very nature, broad-brush approaches, and can often be relatively expensive, particularly in many universities, where administrative staff have traditionally been given a low priority in the allocation of departmental training budgets. Such organisations can offer fairly well-established ways of developing competence through programmes of training and courses, but we suggest that we could learn much from other sectors about making better use of development opportunities such as internal and external sabbaticals and secondments, to enable professional administrative staff to experience work in higher education and/or other organisations.

There can, however, be barriers to such development: continuing professional development (CPD) is, regrettably, not always seen as a high priority for professional administrative staff. Secondments and sabbaticals for university administrative staff have in the past been rare by comparison with those offered to academics, usually because of the differences between administrative organisational structures in diverse universities previously described, but also because of perceived competition between institutions, and sometimes actual competition within institutions, for resources and staff. Those who see such competition in negative terms are regrettably shortsighted. Baldwin (2009), using a football transfer analogy, would argue that for staff to move on from universities where they have experienced outstanding professional development and support is a manifestation of organisational maturity and renewal that is to be welcomed rather than regretted.

Warwick’s ambition was laid down in the 1960s. High expectations were established, leadership was strong and learning was rapid. That baton has been handed to the generation that followed. But there has been constant and continual refreshment of the university’s culture and its way of working and behaving that appears normal to all concerned.

(Baldwin, 2009: 28)

Internal Staff Development

The Civil Service and local government have for many years used secondments and attachments widely and to great effect in developing individual competencies and to achieve organisational goals. ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• CHAPTER 1 Beyond Bureaucracy
• PART I Selecting and Inducting Students
• PART II Managing Throughout the University Year
• PART III Assuring the Quality of the Student Learning Experience
• PART IV Maximising Student and Staff Engagement
• Contributors
• Index