Exeter 2020: A Collective Vision
This document offers a UCU perspective on the development of Exeter University until 2020. It is
intended to inform a number of current reviews of University policy, including the Council and
Senate effectiveness reviews, the various working groups addressing the recommendations of the
‘Britten’ report, and the new ‘Reward and Recognition’ strategy being developed by HR, as well as
the Academic Progression Task and Finish Group. We consider it essential that all of these
reviews retain a holistic view of the University and what will make it thrive. We are also concerned
that, in the absence of an explicit debate at this widest level, an unsustainable vision of the
university (as a management-driven university, where staff are performance managed as
individuals whose only motivation will be the pursuit of competitive individual career goals, largely
based on increasingly unequal financial rewards) will be used as the basis (acknowledged or not)
for future changes. We argue that an alternative collective vision of Exeter University is not only
much more in line with the values and aspirations of university staff, but also much more likely to
deliver sustainable success to the university, given the challenges that we face.
What are those challenges? Following Exeter’s success in reaching the ‘top 10’ nationally, and
the top ‘150’ internationally, we need to sustain or improve these positions. Furthermore, we have
to do so without large endowments, already heavily indebted for previous and current capital
spend, and based in a region of the country and with a subject mix which makes industrial and
other non-research/teaching income very difficult to achieve. We have benefited enormously from
the NSS (the major driver in our league table rises), but face heavy competition to sustain our top
10 status in this, especially with student number growth. Our very rapid research income growth
will be hard to sustain given the shrinking national research budget, and we are still small players
in the key areas of medical and physical science research, although we are successfully exploiting
regional collaborative networks to punch above our weight. Our relative concentration in HASS
subjects (the greatest of any Russell Group university with a broad portfolio) has been
advantageous in the initial phase of 9K fees, but could become a problem if fees are frozen or
reduced. Furthermore, the relationship between research grant success and teaching capacity,
which can often be positive in science subjects, tends to be negative in HASS subjects (grants
buying out staff time and hence destabilising teaching programmes). The 2015 lifting of the cap on
student numbers might allow further expansion, but this would only exacerbate our position as the
leading university with the worst student: staff ratios (even allowing for subject mix) unless we
invest heavily in extra staff numbers, which would highlight problems with our capital stock. While
private investment will build student accommodation, it cannot provide teaching and research
space for staff, but heavy investment in this will divert revenue away from addressing the staff
shortage. We are now heavily exposed to the international student market, and in particular to East
Asian demand for business-related subjects, and face classic quality/quantity dilemmas in this
area, especially if the Business School is also to intensify research and third-leg activity.
Further challenges (though also opportunities) are provided by shifts in the character of how
teaching and research are delivered. Increasingly these are moving away from individuals
teaching or researching within clearly defined subjects. Instead, we have team-based teaching,
relying heavily on IT and other learning resources developed over time, and research grants
requiring collaboration (often interdisciplinary and/or cross-institutional, frequently international) to
put together large-scale bids. The research environment, as measured in the REF, is increasingly
a collective one, measured by grant capture and ‘impact’, not individual publication, and these
increasingly require joint effort between academic and support teams, as well as outreach with
partner institutions. However, all these still depend fundamentally on the expertise of academic
staff who are increasingly required to be internationally-recognised experts in their own field,
able to draw on their own networks of peer collaboration and recognition across the world. Exeter’s
staff are now completely cosmopolitan, most often recruited internationally and measuring their
careers against the standards of top 150 universities in the world.
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So, we need team performance from (flexible) groups made up of outstandingly talented
and entrepreneurial individuals. We need to sustain excellent student satisfaction and grow
student numbers, while at the same time further improving research income, with very limited
scope for infrastructure investment. These challenges will not be met simply by driving staff harder
and harder to meet externally imposed targets, while allocating disproportionate rewards to a small
minority, whose contribution to the overall achievement is not recognised as distinctive by the
majority.
In considering how we can achieve this, we wish to argue that the university should draw on the
collective wisdom of university experience, as well as on the research expertise of Exeter
colleagues in fields such as leadership 1, management and social psychology 2. All of this, we would
suggest, points to the organisational advantages of investing in a secure and satisfying collective
identity for staff, in ways which recognise and reward the importance of team effort and
achievement. Furthermore, it requires recognition of the importance of collective governance,
both allowing staff to feel empowered and harnessing their superior knowledge of the opportunities
and requirements in their specific areas of expertise. The current crisis in staff morale, as identified
in the last two staff surveys, reflects the lack of such investment, through a focus on top-down and
line management, placing of decision-making at the wrong levels of organisational structure, and
attempts at individual performance management and reward which are not experienced by staff as
appropriate and supportive even to their individual expertise and career ambitions, much less their
work as part of teams. Whether or not this has helped Exeter in its recent improvements (and we
would argue that these improvements have occurred despite, not because of, these
developments, largely through staff effort), we maintain that such an emphasis is definitely
inappropriate to meeting the challenges Exeter now faces.
By contrast, more collective approaches can underpin the cultural changes necessary for the
emerging world of collaborative learning, interdisciplinary research, international partnerships and
public engagement. Collective approaches must address the following key issues:
1) Academic governance. The need to organise academic life around working groups of a
size and with the information to make well-informed collective decisions. The current focus
on Colleges and the current Senate/dual assurance model achieves neither of these ends,
as staff do not identify with either, and both are perceived as top-down methods of
governance, not places for decision-making based on broad input. Although elected heads
etc. had their problems, their replacement with managerial appointments (now not even
graced with ‘consultation’ but merely appointed, often from outside) has left staff feeling
disempowered. Some departments still maintain an internal collectivity, but many do not;
Colleges have failed to establish any shared sense of collective enterprise and trust.
Similarly, Senate has struggled to find a role since the creation of SMG/faculties and then
the abolition of committees, leaving it with little role and no source of information outside
management-provided briefings. These forms of governance not only prevent input of ideas
and analysis from the wider academic community, but they also fail to generate training in
university issues which could nurture the next generation of leaders, leaving most
academics less and less likely to be willing to take on leadership roles (which in turn,
perpetuates the cycle of top-down/external appointments).
1
Bolden, R., O’Brien, A. and Gosling, J. (2012) Emerging Concepts of Academic Leadership, for Leadership
Foundation for HE (76 pages)
Bolden, R., Petrov, G. and Gosling, J. (2007) Developing Collective Leadership in Higher Education, for
Leadership Foundation for HE (82 pages)
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Haslam S. A., Eggins R. A., Reynolds K. J. (2003). The ASPIRe model: Actualizing social and personal
identities resources to enhance organizational outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational
Psychology, 76, 83-113
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2) Organisational Culture. Staff are increasingly alienated by a culture of hierarchalism,
distrust/hostility towards criticism of ‘management’ and growing differentials of both pay and
status, without transparency about the bases of any of these differentials. This must
replaced with an emphasis on the essential equality of staff (both academic and in
professional services) as highly skilled professionals, all with valuable knowledge of the
academic sector, who are to be ‘lead’, not managed, by colleagues from the same
background (with academic leaders who still participate in academic work and expect to
return to it) who share the same values, in particular the value of open
communication/debate and the right of all to give their opinion 3. Differentials of pay/status
should be kept to a minimum, and certainly should not exceed public sector norms (for
example, the highest and lowest pay rates should not be more than 16 times different), and
should be based on transparent criteria.
3) Pay. In reviewing recognition/reward, the university should recognise the value of
incremental pay scales and standard job descriptions and reverse the tendency towards
individual performance/reward packages, which replace increments with individually
‘bargained’ pay. Indeed, now that so many academic staff are professsors we should
extend the incremental principle into professorial pay, where individualised bargaining has
resulted in gross differentials without any clear rationale. We should recognise that most
academics are seeking long-term security and decent pay (and pension), and do not wish
to have to bargain individually, and that we will be more attractive on the international
market by offering a predictable progression of pay over the long term, not individualised
packages. Furthermore, individualised models discourage team working and encourage
‘games playing’ by mobile individuals whose tenure here is often short, so causing
substantial disruption (to both teaching and research) and heavy replacement costs, further
sapping the morale of loyal colleagues.
4) Academic careers. We should move the PDR and promotion criteria away from
‘performance management’ models, which require the individual to match their activity
against ‘university targets’ (often meaningless in their generic quality and proneness to
fluctuate with the current managerial fashion), towards the achievement of those wellestablished academic goals in teaching and research which form the basis of a successful
long term academic career and which are recognised both by the staff themselves and by
potential peer reviewers both within and outside the institution. Research in this area is
unanimous: sustained high performance is achieved when it is salient to the social identity
of the group: what it is to be ‘one of us’ (although, in academic life, there will be a range of
alternative models of that identity, with agreement on the value of diversity and tolerance of
different visions of excellence). Enhancing social norms, rather than managerial sanctions,
should be the aim of so-called performance management. 4 Academic leads should regard
their roles as that of peer reviewers/mentors and be trained accordingly. Transparency for
new staff in their progress towards confirmation/promotion (whether or not we keep the
current PDP model) should be paramount, as also in later promotion systems, with heavy
emphasis on peer review both internally and externally (requiring proper input from
colleagues, especially regarding teaching and organisational achievements, not merely a
top-down judgement).
3
Bolden, R., Gosling, J. & O’Brien, A. (2013) ‘Citizens of Academia: a societal perspective on leadership in
UK Higher Education‘ in Studies in Higher Education 1-17 DOI:10.1080/03075079.2012.754855
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Peters, K., Haslam, S.A., Ryan, M., Fonseca, M. (2013) Working With Subgroup Identities to Build
Organizational Identification and Support for Organizational Strategy: A Test of the ASPIRe Model. Group
Organization Management vol. 38 no. 1 128-144
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5) Organisational structure and planning. The case for Colleges as budgetary units
capable of absorbing financial fluctuations and planning in the long term is a strong one, but
this must be balanced by internal transparency regarding income/expenditure flows, and
strong departmental input into College decisions. The current university finance/planning
model does not, in practice, deliver the necessary information for any longer-term planning
and leaves departments at the mercy of last-minute appointments, so rendering it very hard
to plan teaching provision in any coherent pattern, or to establish workload models. This
prevents those leading departments from being able to share meaningful information with
their colleagues, making it harder to establish working relationships and preventing
departments from feeling that they are meaningful groupings with effective control of their
futures, which weakens their willingness to cooperate to deliver shared ends, and further
discourages most academics from taking on leadership at this crucial level.
6) Workload. Workload planning and monitoring should be made amenable to collective
input/judgement by establishment of a fully functioning model (whether SWARM or another)
which can be applied in advance as a planning tool and also operate across years and
within each academic year in order to ensure fair distribution of work and avoid excessive
bunching of work. Both proposed allocations and actual outcomes should be open to all
colleagues and considered at meetings, to strengthen collective ownership of teaching aims
and shared decisions about how to meet them 5.
7) CapEx strategy. At university level, we need a proper debate to achieve consensus about
the strategy for long-term spending, in particular the balance of expenditure between
physical and human capital, and, within the latter, between different categories of staff and
between forms of pay common to all and those differentiated by ‘performance’. This could,
in turn, be tied in with the questioning of ‘local bargaining’ – if the university could offer a
satisfactory long-term model of pay budgeting, then this could potentially form the basis for
an agreement with the unions.
UCU looks forward to contributing more detailed proposals, fleshing out these general points, in
each of the review processes, but urges each specific review to maintain this wider vision of what
kind of a university Exeter needs to become by 2020.
Exeter University and College Union
January 2014
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Gosling, J., Adarves-Yorno, I., Bolden, R., Burgoyne, J. and Roe, K. (2006) High Performance Leadership
Report to CELEX consortium. Exeter: Centre for Leadership Studies (35 pages)
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