issue 35

10 March 2008

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'Truth: lies open to all'

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Every fortnight.

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CONTENTS: editorial, news in brief, people strategy, speed dating, academic planning, senate report.

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EDITORIAL

Most staff will have received an invitation to participate in the recent Staff Survey, which once again boldly proclaims that 'Your Views Count'. At various times, members of the senior management team have endorsed the view that this is a 'people–based' organisation and that our staff are our biggest asset. Quite so. It thus might seem somewhat incongruous that at this point in time the University is seeking to introduce a policy and set of guidelines with regard to redundancy, one consequence of which is that it will give the University much greater flexibility should it need to declare staff compulsorily redundant. Of course, it might be remarked that there is never a good time to introduce this kind of policy, but it would seem deeply ironic that at a time of considerable and much trumpeted financial strength (we currently have cash reserves of £60.5 million, for example), the University is choosing to pursue what can only be perceived as negative staffing policies. Should we be concerned about this? subtext would emphatically say 'yes'.

So what has brought this about? The answer would appear to be perceptions of future risks and the need to be seen to be managing these - to be engaging in prudent contingency planning. It helps to ensure high credit ratings from firms such as Standard and Poors, and to reassure lenders that we have the necessary mechanisms in place to reduce costs should we run into financial difficulties. The risks may stem from ambitious financial borrowing strategies, such as the one now being proposed (see the previous issue), or they may arise from personnel practices with regard to the treatment of staff on fixed term contracts, many of whom find themselves facing redundancy at the end of their contracts. Exploitative the latter may be but it has been permissible under the law, though this may now be subject to challenge, hence the risk to the University.

Circumstances have also changed. We now have a (secretive) Human Resources Committee and a People Strategy, both of which seem to argue for staff to be managed as a resource. We are encouraged to be dependable and committed to the organisation but have also to be disposable, if circumstances require it. Thus risk is partly managed by displacing it onto employees – along with higher workloads and other pressures, if the 2005 Staff Survey is to be believed. We also have a Vice-Chancellor and a senior management team who appear to act in ways markedly different from the past. subtext has long criticised the top down managerial approach which has been increasingly evidenced, but what we are seeing now perhaps goes further than this. In doing so it puts at risk the values of collegiality, openness and involvement, commitment and loyalty which have been key characteristics of working at Lancaster. It will be interesting to see if our concerns are reflected in the current survey. In a very real sense, then, your views may count ... to help sustain what many regard as important values for Lancaster's future.

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NEWS IN BRIEF

HEFCE recurrent grant

Colleagues may have been rather surprised to see in the revamped Times Higher Education that Lancaster is listed as having a 0.4% drop in its recurrent funding for 2008-09, while neighbouring institutions enjoyed significant increases. subtext understands the problem to be about the first stage of implementing the Government's policy on funding for students aiming for equivalent or lower qualifications, in respect of which Lancaster has made important contributions in the School of Lifelong Learning and Widening Participation, and to a lesser extent in parts of the Management School.

There was a further disappointment in a new ranking about quality of life. We tend to think of Lancaster as being well-off in this regard, partly because of the proximity to the Lake District, but also because of our high staff retention rate. A position of 69th, albeit only one behind Oxford, may come as rather a shock. Close attention to the elements that make up the ranking, including average weekly hours of sunshine (!), the percentage of the local population with five GCSEs, and average academic salaries, offers some explanation. At least Lancaster comes out favourably on traffic flows per km2, demonstrating that actually we suffer very lightly by comparison with other places in terms of congestion.

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Health and Safety

The University was paid a visit by the HSE Inspectorate on 7th February, the first for some considerable time. A variety of issues were discussed, including our progress with regard to the management of stress. One conclusion seems to be that the University is only in the early stages of implementing its Stress Management Policy, which subtext would interpret as diplomatic language for 'to date, very little seems to have been done'. In other words, whilst there has been some detailed work since 2006, within ISS and Research and Enterprise Services, the policy seems to remain a largely paper exercise and is not being implemented or properly publicized. A follow up visit is provisionally planned for November when further progress will be assessed. In the meantime, Heads of Department/Sections might be well advised to consult the policy which can be found on the Human Resources web pages (http://tinyurl.com/2dfb77).

There they'll be reminded should they need it that even more responsibility is placed on their shoulders, with Human Resources seeming to have a less proactive role than one might reasonably expect.

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Mental Health and Equal Opportunities ...

A Student Support Mental Health Advisor is to be appointed. It is understood that the new person will be in post from the beginning of April and the role will involve casework with students, and health promotion. Whilst it is to be applauded that the University has finally decided to have a dedicated post to care for the mental health of students, it is noted with interest that no such 'dedicated' care is being offered to staff – this is despite concerns voiced at the continuing increase in stress at work being reported by members of staff (maybe this is why the Health and Safety Executive are making a return visit to the University).

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Postgraduate Statistics Centre

Thursday 21 February saw the official opening of our latest showpiece building. Professor Sir David Cox, a former President of the Royal Statistical Society, did the honours (see http://tinyurl.com/2zznpy).

As the good and the great toured the building in the afternoon some might have been startled by the presence of an uninvited onlooker. It seems a streaker took it upon himself to offer a little distraction to the guests. Starting his routine on what is now the grassed area, he was pushed into the very expensive water feature alongside the glazed front of the building, where he pranced around centre stage. Rumour has it that, cheered on by friends, his version of Flashdance lasted for some ten minutes before boredom (or cold) set in and he trudged away. Social networking sites doubtless will be searched for the phone video. The reaction of the guests is not known.

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Mystery Surrounds Campus Shop with No Name

It seems that legal notices appeared on the door of the former glasses/opticians outlet on campus - the shop never seems to have had a name but it occupied the space of what was Furness College launderette. They indicated that the University had seized the goods (fixtures and fittings along with displays of designer frames and sun glasses) and was threatening to sell them off, presumably in lieu of unpaid rent or simply to regain control of the space. The notices apparently disappeared within a short time of being posted but why is not clear. There is now a note on the shop door informing us that it is closed due to unforeseen circumstances. subtext wonders whether seized designer sunglasses will be distributed around University employees, to go with the Blackberries that some on D Floor are arguing for. Diesel for Engineering, perhaps? Rip Curl at the Sports Centre? Prada for LICA? Police for Security? And FCUK for everyone else?

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LUSU Sabbatical Elections

Last week saw the student body voting for the six sabbatical officer posts. subtext congratulates Michael Payne (President), Janie Coleman (General Secretary), Sara Dunn (Women's Officer), Dan Ratcliffe (Ed and Welfare) Gareth Coleman (A.U. President) and Dan Hogan (Scan Editor). All will take up office at the beginning of July. It is understood that turn out may not have been as high as we have become used to in recent years. The SCAN issue which gave details of the candidates was out late because of production problems and the design of much of the new accommodation inhibits canvassing within the kitchens/flats. In wishing them well subtext is all too aware of the challenges they will face in the year ahead.

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Nominations Committee

Congratulations must also go to Marion McClintock, former Academic Registrar, now Honorary University Archivist and well known campus figure, who was successful in the ballot for the Court appointment to the Nominations Committee. She is elected to the position with immediate effect until 2011.

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PEOPLE STRATEGY

Readers will recall that (after industrial action), a three-year pay settlement was reached in 2006. subtext notes that this settlement comes to an end in 2009, and wonders whether there may be any link between this and the current discussion about changing the quoracy rules concerning Exam boards? Is the University worried that further industrial action might affect the ability of the University to grant degrees in summer 2009? The University 'People Strategy' says that the three year gap between 2006 and 2009 will allow for the University 'to plan for the possibility of cessation of national pay bargaining'. The recent national ballot of UCU members which voted against proposed further changes to national bargaining arrangements and procedures may mean that the University's plans might be put to the test.

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SPEED DATING

Visitors to the University's Human Resources website have been delighted to discover that key strategic documents are being updated on a continuous basis. Key documents such as the Stress Management Policy (downloadable from http://tinyurl.com/2dfb77) and the People Strategy (http://tinyurl.com/ypxpco) proudly display at the foot of every page the legend, 'Updated:', followed by whatever happens to be the current date.

Grateful University employees have been sharing with us their visions of teams of HR Assistants working day and night to absorb and distil cutting-edge thinking in the management and nurturing of human capital; our noble HR Advisors working tirelessly to revise the strategic documents accordingly, blushing with shame that they were ever satisfied with the earlier versions; daily extraordinary meetings of Council and Senate to approve, ratify and endorse the changes, with loud cries of 'huzzah', and mortar boards, caps (and not a few toupees) flying into the air in joy; and armies of HR Partners disseminating the marvellous news across the grateful Faculties of our University.

But closer inspection by a member of subtext's technical staff has revealed a simpler explanation. Lying on one of those car-creeper things used by car mechanics, he slid himself under the code used in the document footers. After a few moments he let out a long whistle and a series of tuts. Deftly pulling himself out and shaking his head in disbelief, he explained what was going on.

It appears that both documents are simply using the 'Date' field, which rather than showing the date the document was last revised, as intended, simply displays the current date - without any intervention by human hand, or indeed Human Resources.

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ACADEMIC PLANNING

At long last it seems the Academic Planning Committee (APC) has met. Though now a pale imitation of its former self, subtext understands it gathered for a two day 'strategy' session last Thursday and Friday. Apparently the business was divided into three parts: research impact post-2008 (Trevor McMillan); growth strategy (Bob McKinlay); and flexibility and productivity (Andrew Neal). Symptomatic of its attenuated status, it seems there were no prior papers but merely a list of topics that might be covered. The Director of Resources' included governance and organisational structures (though why is not clear, but it is perhaps symbolic of where power and decision making seems to lie); implementation of finance and people strategies; faculty support and role of deans and heads of departments; staff retention and succession planning; and efficiency of business processes. All good stuff, no doubt, but essentially these are (important) underpinnings of an academic strategy for the institution as a whole. So, is the latter ever discussed and if so where? Senate? Regrettably, the answer is all too evident. The Finance Strategy (see the last issue) informs us that our priorities apparently are: growing the Management School (effectively aiming to double it in 5 years); developing Health and Medicine; establishing the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts (LICA), and improving campus facilities by building a new sports centre. The last three are well known, though have never been widely discussed and agreed. However, the first would appear to be new, significant and risky. Just where has this been reviewed and agreed, particularly against other possible academic priorities? What might it mean for the future shape of the University and is it appropriate? These are the kinds of questions APC and Senate should be discussing, recommending –or not - and approving.

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SENATE REPORT.

So what did we learn from February's meeting of the Senate? An individual Senator reports that the meeting covered a number of difficult, contentious issues, which prompted some lively discussion. But first, the big news: Mark Swindlehurst, the ever popular Director of Estate Management, during his show and tell about the new Estates Masterplan, suggested that the University's position was that in the future car parking charges should be at the same level as bus fares (if you are reaching for your calculator, this might imply new outer zone parking charges of over £300). There was also some debate about the changes to PhD registration proposed by Chris Park, Director of the Graduate School, which mainly concerned the new formal limit of four years for study. While generally welcomed, Senators noted that while the document was long on new commitments for Departments, once again the consultation process had seemed to bypass Heads of Departments (who, as will be revealed below, are in the main increasingly aggrieved and willing to say something about it at Senate). There was also some discussion of the University's e-press depository, with a clear call from the Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) for academics to start to think about open access implications of where they publish. This was met by an intervention for one Senator suggesting that the best way to maximise citations was to choose a journal with a high impact rating, not merely get things onto e-press. The Pro Vice Chancellor suggested a pluralist approach was best, and order was regained. The Director of Research and Enterprise Services, Roderick O'Brien, presented a relatively lacklustre report on the Sainsbury report on innovation and its implications for Lancaster, prompting the Vice Chancellor to point out, before any Senators got the chance, that the Senate report contained a table of data with no headings. A new and innovative way of obscuring data reporting, perhaps? This was a theme taken up in the discussion of contact hours.

Having already been the subject of an extended and not always good humoured debate at the previous Senate, this month's Senate was presented with the impact assessment requested as part of the process of accepting the commitments in the first place. The Vice Chancellor did not, as some expected, wield a firm guillotine on the discussion, but rather allowed a wide-ranging and at times heated discussion to proceed, despite this being only an information item on the agenda. Heads of Departments took turns to identify shortcomings in the data collection exercise on which the impact assessment was built, with the Head of Economics noting that the assessment not only did not represent reliable data, but also in the most part was an inadequate answer to the wrong question. The Deputy Vice Chancellor, standing in for the report's compilers, Gavin Brown and Mandy Chetwynd, who were conspicuous by their absence, vigorously defended the assessment and seemed to entertain the view that most academics had time on their hands to expand their teaching load. The Deputy VC also peppered his answers with references to the increased socio-economic power of fee-paying students, supported of course by the representatives of LUSU. This prompted the Head of Politics to argue that it was difficult to be sympathetic to the demanded increase of contact hours when extensive absenteeism meant that the offered hours were often not being taken advantage of. A LUSU sabbatical officer then seemed to imply that this was the fault of academics not the students - continuing a theme that has emerged over recent Senates that the customer must always be right.

During this debate one of two contenders for a new subtext award (Senator of the Month), emerged when the FASS Associate Dean for resources, Gordon Hands, revealed terrier-like qualities while setting out and defending the position that apparently had been discussed in the previous day's FASS PRC. He pointed out it was not clear that the Senate's top table had much idea of the difficulties entailed in the transition to the new commitments. Did they realise, for instance, that exams started three weeks into the summer term, when it seemed the proposed extended contact hours might take place? While the LUSU representatives see delay as prevarication, for academic staff, in a view expressed by a number of HoDs, there are significant quality issues here, not least how the transition period would feed into imminent future PQR visits. Refusing to be brow beaten by the VC or his Deputy, Gordon Hands argued stridently for more time for the transition in a way that made some FASS HoDs realise (in a post-match discussion reported to this Senator), what a poor job the out-going Dean had made of presenting the Faculty's position at Senate. Finally, in response to a question from another Senator, the Deputy VC, looking by this time just a little rattled, agreed to share with Senators the detailed space allocation data that underpinned the impact assessment's conclusion that the new commitments would have no meaningful impact on the organisation and availability of teaching space. This individual Senator is among many who await the presentation of this data with interest, and perhaps a touch of incredulity.

The other big issue kicked around at Senate was the change in arrangements for exam boards. A number of Senators were intrigued at why two changes were being made to the regulations: a formalisation of the ex-officio members of exam boards, to include the VC and University Directors (of undergraduate or postgraduate programmes, as appropriate); and a declaration (previously unformulated) of what would constitute a quorate board. A number of Senators were intrigued by the notion that there were exceptional circumstances when it might be necessary to have an exam board where no member of the Department was present. Under a series of questions, the somewhat hapless Academic Registrar, Lesley Wareing (who it soon became apparent was the messenger not the originator of these formalisations of previous practice), would not be drawn on what these exceptional circumstances might be. Finally, she cracked and responded, 'you need to ask Bob' (our well-loved Deputy VC). Still receiving no clear examples of such situations, the Head of Educational Research quietly but effectively suggested an amendment which would require any board, even in exceptional circumstances, to have at least one member present from the programme with which the Board was concerned. This amendment easily passed, and reveals our runner up for Senator of the Month - we salute you Professor Mary Hamilton. This leaves the question: what were those exceptional circumstances? You might say strike action, but this individual Senator could not possibly comment.

So that was pretty much it. All the debates and discussions did rob the Heads of Management Learning and Leadership (MLL), and of Politics, of the chance of following the new practice, initiated by the Head of Religious Studies, for an Oscars-type acceptance speech after a successful PQR result, although this might have involved a statement from MLL about the delay in reporting the successful result and its possible link with contact hours-related issues. Who knows? At the end of the Senate, the appointment of the new Dean of FASS, popularly becoming known as McTony (to differentiate him from his predecessor), was affirmed, while the vote to reappoint the Deputy VC included a surprising number of abstentions. Oh yes, and the University Secretary's project to bring Statute 20 into line with current employment legislation continues, currently grappling with how we might define 'academic staff' - well, if we don't know, who does?

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The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order) of: Sarah Beresford, George Green, Gavin Hyman, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Alan Whitaker.