Customers? Universities and the market ethic

I remembered something that happened a couple of years ago. A colleague returned from a meeting about Freshers' Week* in which students were referred to as customers. If we continue the absurdity of calling students "customers", where do we end up? For a start, the Students' Union becomes the Customers' Union. Lecturers and Professors become Sales Assistants or Sales Staff. The IT Dept become Sales Assistants. The Library staff become Sales Assistants. Everyone in the University is simply divided into buyers and sellers. The whole complex institution of the University becomes a simple market, but a deeply dysfunctional one that lacks the opportunity of switching. Once you walk into this particular market, you pay over your fee, and you are more or less stuck, unless you cancel everything and walk away, which is your right. Indeed, before you choose a University, you are faced with a more or less uniform offering as every University is desperately comparing and measuring itself in relation to the others; never in relation to carving out a distinctive offering. Indeed, they are generally terrified of being different. This fear of being distinctive seems to be the first and most damaging consequence of the market metaphor. It works along the lines of worrying about "losing" customers to a "competitor". In principle, then, the market metaphor means that choosing a university has a lot in common with choosing a car park. It is a space you can occupy for a finite amount of time. In parallel with car parking vis-a-vis customers, the only way of exercising my rights in this marketplace ethic is to leave the employment of the University. If we extend the market metaphor, it falls apart. For example, why do we not refer to passengers, patients, prisoners, pupils, clients, voters, jurors, teachers, police, soldiers, tourists, migrants, refugees, drivers and cyclists, as customers? What is lost when all this glorious richness of the fabric of society is reduced to a series of mere transactions? The truth is that this has never been a zero sum game. The distinction between, say, Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University is real and important. They are not competing with each other.

 

*Fresher's Week, like everything else, has had themarketing airbrush applied and is now called Welcome Week. Where it was once a process of becoming a student

SCME PhD Conference

Our annual PhD Conference was particularly enjoyable this year. Graeme Larsen and Katie Saxelby-Smith introduced some new features, notable a poster presentation session in the afternoon, over a buffet lunch. In the morning, eight of our PhD student presented their work in varying states of completion, mostly early stage researchers, and the audience provided feedback and probing questions. The room was full, and there was good representation from Professors to Research Students, and the whole thing ran as smooth as clockwork. I think this was the eighth year that we have run this, but it is certainly the most successful one to date. Graeme and Katie did us proud.

Three year operating plan

Each year, Heads of School have to prepare a rolling three year plan. This year was particularly difficult, for two reasons. First, the University is continuing to refine the process, and this year, although the once-separate teaching and learning plan was simply rolled up as part of the main document, a research plan was prepared earlier in the year, for the first time, with a view to the feedback from that informing this operating plan, and a risk register was requested in order to demonstrate to our auditors that we are managing our risks adequately. Second. a combination of events has resulted in our need to request lots of new academic posts. Basically, this is a combination of a spate of retirements plus the massive recent expansion of our activities. We have just about doubled the size of the School in the last four years, in every aspect of our work. This is why I have to make a case for a crop of new posts. And each one has to be carefully rationalized in line with our strategy for the next few years. It was a real relief to get it submitted today, just on the deadline. Over the next few weeks, senior management of the university will read all the plans from the different Schools. In January, a group of senior staff tour the Schools, interviewing the Heads, to be sure that they understand the aims, priorities and risks. Then they can rank order a master list of all the posts requested, so that when we find out from the Higher Education Funding Council how much grant the University is to receive this year from government, the final piece of the jigsaw will be in place in terms of next year's overall financial planning. At that point, they can determine how far down the list they can go in terms of the posts requested across the University. So it is a serious business as it affects how many new staff we get to appoint next year, if any. And it takes a lot of consultation and conversations to be sure about our relative priorities within the School before we put the plan before senior management. I was pleased to have got the document drafted, edited down toe the requisite length, and then submitted. Now I wonder how far down our list of priorities we'll get, given the dreadful ever-worsening situation.