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Masters in admin
Universities can take some steps to change management systems as easily as they switch curriculums.
Glyn Davis interviewed by James Wells
While hosting the recent Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis spoke of the importance of managing both curriculum and administrative change.
Davis sat down with Campus Review education editor James Wells to discuss some of the ways his university – which consolidated its place as Australia’ s leading institution by placing 33rd overall in THE’ s world university rankings – is working to maintain its place at the forefront of higher education.
CR: Your speech focused on change management. Where do universities succeed and fail when taking on these kinds of challenges?
GD: We do two types of change in universities. We change curriculum and we change administrative systems. We’ re good at changing curriculum – we do it well in all of our universities. It comes naturally to academics, we’ re trained to do it; we think about teaching, we think about delivery mechanisms. It’ s our core business. [ But ] when it comes to thinking about management change – how we make sure the lights are on, the IT system works and so on – we’ re not so good. We’ re not so good, in part, because there’ s no natural fit between what we do as academics and what we have to do as a large organisation, like any other.
There isn’ t an academic theory about how you should organise faculties, what the role of HR should be, and so on.
This is harder territory for us, and not helped by the fact that most people find questions of management and administration not exactly how they want to spend their time. Yet, we have to think about this.
One of the points you made was that universities were once small institutions trying to become larger ones. Have management styles evolved to sustain such growth? In the 19th century in Australia, with the institutions we had, there were small student numbers – 2000 to 4000. An institution that small is very good at governing itself. It has a handful of administrative staff, and they serve the handful of academic staff, who look after the small group of students. Historically, we’ ve organised that in a structure we imported from the UK, with a governing council and so on. All of which made sense.
But we’ ve assumed we can stretch that system to airy thinness, that we can make it work for institutions that are now 50,000 students or larger, as though nothing else had changed.
We can still profess all the values of self-governance and collegial management, all of which all of us buy into; these are absolutely the right attributes. But how do you organise the logistics of a big organisation?
What role can public funding play in helping universities manage themselves? There’ s no doubt that in Australia, as in the US, as public funding has fallen, universities have had to pay more attention to questions of management than they would like. What we’ ve seen in the US over the last decade, and we’ re now beginning to see in Australia and elsewhere, is a move toward shared services – taking [ functions ] out of small academic units and putting them together into professional groups that support the whole university.
That is driven, in large part, by the need to find savings in the light of cuts to public funding. But also, in some part, by recognition that
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