workforce
campusreview.com.au
The ‘snake oil’ behind shared services
The rise of centralised shared services is leading
to drastic changes in universities.
Philip Darbyshire and Linda Shields
T
he fashion in universities and other public sector
organisations for ‘shared services’ did not spring from
nowhere. Yes, Minister in the 1980s featured an episode
about a hospital that had 500 administration staff, but could not afford
to employ nurses and doctors, so could take no patients. But it did
win the Florence Nightingale Award for Most Hygienic Hospital.
If one replaces ‘patients’ with ‘students’ and ‘nurses and doctors’
with ‘academics’, we could be talking about a modern university.
In many countries, the managerialist juggernaut has hit the
academy. We all understand that universities – at least public ones
– are subject to the political caprices, whims and fancies of various
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education and employment ministers, and so budgets shrink
while grandiose aspirations rise. Universities in many countries are
embracing the shared services model (it has other names), and
centralising administration. There can be no-one, even among
shared services’ staunchest supporters, who denies that the
impetus for such services is financial, with saving money being
a key rationale. As Joseph Grasso from Cornell University in the
US noted: “The financial challenges in higher education in general,
I think, are accelerating the use of shared services.”
Universities were once places of highest learning, whose raison
d’être was the generation and promulgation of new knowledge.
Few purse-holding politicians these days would cherish, let alone
promote, such ideals. Rather, education ministers are more likely
to demand that graduates be ‘job ready’ and trained as square or
round pegs for particular jobs, rather than have developed the
ability to think and reason. To keep these ‘skills and employment’
institutions functioning and compliant, huge administration
empires have grown up around them.
HOW SHARED SERVICES WORK
In an attempt to cut burgeoning administrative costs, centralised
shared services are the new poster children of university
bureaucrats everywhere.
Here’s how they work: anyone employed to support the
administration of the work of the university – the teaching and
research and knowledge generation of the academics – have
been taken out of schools, faculties and units (if not from the