subtext

issue 39

29 May 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, staff survey, working at Lancaster, senate report, alcohol, ciggies and sleep, workplace stress, letters.

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EDITORIAL

As the subtext editors were sitting around enjoying the sun and discussing the contents of issue 39, the matter of the Staff Survey was high on our list (see below). One of the issues to come out of it was the paucity of openness and transparency of decision making by the University. After cries of déjà vu, we realised that, yet again, there are many issues highlighted by the Survey which staff keep emphasising, mainly because they are not competently or adequately addressed by the University. Does this illustrate the issue that 'nothing of significance will change?' It certainly begs the question why key messages seem to have been ignored over the last six years.

The decisions criticised in the Survey are sometimes made by committees and working parties. As addressed by subtext in previous issues, it is important that the University's governing bodies should be representative of a diversity of views. How are the more powerful and influential committees in the University populated? Undoubtedly, there are some which send out open invitations for nominations and volunteers, (the University Equal Opportunities Committee is one such example), however, there are rather too many committees which do not do this. Such examples include the secretive Human Resources Committee (and its even more secretive remuneration sub-committee), chaired by the Pro-Chancellor. You will search in vain for minutes of its meetings on the web site, though at least its membership is declared. Its predecessor, the Employment Policy Committee, had a much broader membership which included representatives of campus unions and faculties. Its deliberations were more open and transparent. All this was swept away in the determination to centralise and control. Likewise, the Nominations Committee. How many times in recent years have you seen the minutes for this Committee or its decisions properly reported? The Nominations Committee had its first meeting for some considerable time on Friday 23rd May. It also is chaired by the Pro-Chancellor, as is University Council. In fairness, the latter two, even after recent restructuring, offer some opportunities for wider access and membership. Overall, however, as one moves up the hierarchy of committees within the University, both representation and opportunity appear to be narrowly circumscribed. This cannot be good for the long term health and vitality of the institution. Though committee work may not be to everyone's taste, opportunities to participate reinforce openness, transparency, effective organisational communications and, crucially, better decision-making - all concerns which appear to be voiced in the current and previous Staff Surveys.

The Senate may be considered unwieldy by some but it does offer younger colleagues the chance of participating at a senior level. For this to work long-term it needs to be accompanied by an effective mechanism to identify and encourage those people who may be keen. The Colleges at Lancaster have long sought to do this. It is unfortunate that senior officers and managers no longer seem to share their view. Serving on Committees is one way for the individual member of staff to further their careers. It is also essential 'good citizenship' which is of value to all. If they are never given the chance to serve, then there are serious questions for the University to face in terms of providing its staff with genuine equality of opportunity. There are equally important issues for all of us in terms of how we are governed.

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NEWS IN BRIEF

Workplace Stress

It seems that the University's occupational health advisers, Health Management Ltd, have provided a range of statistical evidence which indicates that stress is by far the largest contributor to long-term sickness absence at Lancaster. The University's response is likely to be a series of stress awareness workshops, presumably for managerial staff, possibly involving presentations by Professor Cary Cooper, who is acknowledged as a leading authority on stress within the workplace. This might be seen as missing the point. We are only too well aware of the growing stress levels and their impact on individuals and the organization, surely the next steps are to implement stress audits and take steps to reduce levels. Or are we missing something here? It would, of course, entail Human Resources doing something more than pushing the responsibilities onto overworked Heads of Departments.

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DCE

Protests continue regarding the continuing unsatisfactory and demoralising situation in the Department of Continuing Education (DCE). The latest was the leafleting of the Senate meeting (see below) by DCE students, dressed in matching 'Support DCE' T-shirts. subtext is reliably informed that the Vice Chancellor's face could have been a strong entry for the next 'Mr. Angry' competition. Apparently, there is also now a large and growing group on Facebook.com offering their support for DCE and comments on the University's decision, or should we say 'non-decision'. The request for a special meeting of the University Court to discuss events in DCE has been received by the University and the announcement of when it will be held is awaited. It is rumoured that an evening meeting during the week may be likely, which cynics might say is one way of lessening the chances of the meeting being quorate. Meanwhile, the review group chaired by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and now looking in detail at DCE's activities - rather belatedly one might have thought, given what was announced in the March email to staff – was to have met last week. At least one further meeting is planned for early June and staff will remain in limbo until then. More of them continue to seek their futures elsewhere and who can blame them. It means that others pick up the work, of course. One can only wonder what stress levels might be like amongst DCE staff. Now what does the Staff Charter say about obligations towards staff and what of the University's duty of care?

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Spotted

Readers who are curious as to where various campus businesses might be relocated during the extensive alterations planned for Alexandra Square (see subtext 36) might be interested that the Director of Estate Management, Mark Swindlehurst, was spotted by subtext correspondents on Sunday 18 May wandering around the north spine area taking pictures of various commercial offices. Unusual behaviour, perhaps, and all the more so given he had a new-born baby strapped to his chest, in new man fashion. subtext congratulates Mark and his partner on their new arrival. Hopefully, he was able to find someone to take a picture of himself with his son.

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Headline Budget

UMAG observers may have picked up on the following recent snippet of cheery information. Presenting the draft headline budget for 08/09 to his senior colleagues (GAP/2008/0445), the Director of Finance and Resources drew attention to the following: at present there was a gap of £2.7m to be bridged if the University was to achieve its target surplus of 4% of expected gross income. It seems the main adverse variances against the original financial forecasts were (a) a lower than expected HEFCE grant settlement and (b) potential effects on pay arising from an increase in the RPI. It was further noted that potentially higher than expected utilities costs were also a cause for concern, and that the net effect on the budget if the Phase 5 residences project did not proceed would be neutral. As normal, the paper also identified items that might be considered for exclusion and possible additional items. To put this into context such budget gaps are usual at this stage and, in the past, have always managed to be bridged. It does, however, offer an insight into the Director of Finance's thinking behind remarks at Council and elsewhere that a redundancy procedure was important for the future financial health of the institution. You have been warned.

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THE THIRD STAFF SURVEY

For what was termed a Staff Assembly attendance was somewhat thin. An estimated less than 10% of staff attended either of the presentation sessions on Wednesday 14th to hear the Vice-Chancellor (VC) give a presentation on the let's-face-it, not-terribly-exciting results of the recent staff survey. The message was expertly presented and clear; broadly speaking not much has changed, what changes there are are not statistically significant, and the apparent anomalies can be explained without too much difficulty. That was the message, and the headline figures presented largely backed it up.

The statistics are available on the University website, but for those who look to subtext to try and highlight the interesting bits, here goes. 53% of University staff responded (up from 49% in 2005). That's a better response rate than most recent UK general elections. As always, such statistics throw up some interesting narratives. 80% of the respondents reported a high degree of job satisfaction, with the highest satisfaction rate amongst academics and the lowest amongst manual workers. Academics felt that research was heavily rewarded, teaching and administration much less so. Manual workers clearly felt that a lot of the issues identified in the 2005 survey had been addressed. 41% of us were content with our workload, with academics least satisfied and manual workers most content. (So, academics like what they do but not how much they have to do of it, whereas manual workers dislike what they do but like the amount of it...?)

Questions about staff opinion of the management of the University produced some interesting threads, some of them also apparently contradictory. Only 33% felt that leadership was good at Lancaster, but 66% felt that the University was 'well-managed'. One might wonder if respondents were drawing a distinction between leaders and managers, or if, as so often in such surveys, the answers to questions were driven by personal criteria. However, if nothing else, it does seem striking and should give the Vice-Chancellor and UMAG cause for reflection, that the positive score for leadership is less than half the score for job satisfaction and has dipped further, (though not statistically significant). In 2005 it was presented as low at 34% favourable, but improving by 7 percentage points on 2003. What else did the survey reveal about areas by which management might be judged? Fewer than 50% felt that the University had a clear sense of direction; only 44% felt that the organisation was effective. A majority commended the University's progress on the environment, but bullying was still felt to be a substantial problem, as it was in 2003. So what has been done to tackle this? Organisational ethics threw up another paradox; as the VC commented to the biggest laugh of the day, it seems that people are very unsure what the ethics of the organisation are, but nevertheless they overwhelmingly support them.

Significantly, and it's noteworthy that the VC dwelt on this point, only around half of us feel that we are in a position to challenge the University's usual way of doing things. Presumably this is something UMAG might take comfort in! It's worth noting that probably the largest single cause of stress is disempowerment, a lack of control over what you do and how you do it. With stress-related sickness rising steadily and a major stress audit in the offing, this could be something we'll be hearing a lot more about very soon.

The big omission, which the Vice-Chancellor himself highlighted, is about communication: the overall favourable rating is 49%, but behind that there is an encouraging knowledge of departmental plans and performance, but 2 in 5 don't understand faculty plans or university plans and values. It was said that there was a desire for more two-way communications, and that 'communications blockages are apparent in many results category areas', although this last point was not explained. Do readers have any insights?

Subscribers may have been wondering if the DCE shenanigans were going to get an airing, and they did. A questioner at the end noted that 66% of us think that the University has a positive image, 72% felt their jobs were secure, and 80% would recommend Lancaster as a place to work. Did the VC think that, had the survey been held after the email to DCE staff at the end of last term, the results would have been similar? Yes, he did. Let's face it; he was probably ready for that question. He thought that respondents were able to distinguish between long-term and short-term events. Some felt that this reply was both at least partly true (people do often take a long term view) and perhaps a touch blithe (people's opinions are often highly coloured by what's going on outside their front door). It may also underestimate the shock dealt to the University community by the DCE affair; not so much by what happened, but by the way it was handled, which takes us back to leadership and management in a people-based organisation.

What now? The numbers will be further crunched, and an Action Plan produced in June to be discussed at Council on the 13th. Does all this mean anything? Obviously not much can be read with confidence into the fact that almost half of those polled didn't reply. Certainly some feel that it's a waste of time and that the survey makes no difference anyway. Don't vote - it only encourages them, and all that. Others suggest that there is an opportunity here. The VC, to be fair, has set out his stall. He is committed to standing up in front of the community and explaining the survey results. He can't be blamed if there are no real shocks for him to explain, but he rightly can if nothing is done to address important issues identified. If people are dissatisfied (and it may, of course, be that the non-respondents are happy with the way things are), the onus is upon them to make it known. We complain loudly at the lack of opportunities to interrogate and feed into the decision-making process; should we ignore it when, however unsatisfactory we may feel it to be, one comes along?

New Word Watch: the VC twice referred to 'omnibussing' several things together. This is a new one on us and we're only half-sure what it means. We look forward to 'Route-mastering' (bundling things together and making slow progress) and 'pantechniconing' (like omnibussing, but with much larger items). This type of word invention will henceforth be called 'Stobarting', and as with the motorway game, subscribers are encouraged to keep an eye open for it.

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WORKING AT LANCASTER

The author of the following contributed article wishes to remain anonymous. subtext editors felt it offered an (academic) insider's perspective on certain aspects of the staff survey, focusing as it does on one of the key open questions. We hope it will stimulate further debate.

'IN YOUR OPINION, WHAT ARE THE ONE OR TWO KEY THINGS THAT NEED TO BE DONE IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THE UNIVERSITY AS A PLACE TO WORK?'

Workload and Pressure, Organisational Effectiveness

I would like to comment on two issues: committee procedures affecting academic matters, and the quality of centralised administrative support units. Both of these undermine 'organisational effectiveness' and increase 'workloads and pressure' on (especially) academic staff.

In my view - and all external pressures notwithstanding - these are the biggest problems facing the university. Key administrative units and procedures relating to personnel, research support, and 'teaching quality' are not providing the appropriate support. Worse, there has been no discernable improvement in how these units and procedures function in the years I have been here. At the same time, there seems to have been an increasing willingness by senior management to bypass those procedures entirely, not least by imposing fairly momentous policies by central diktat. The recent high-handed and ill-considered policy on student contact hours is one example; the forthcoming moves on personnel procedures and policies another.

Given that the committee structure is so cumbersome and weighed down with minutiae that ought to be dealt with at departmental level, I have some sympathy with senior management in their desire to bypass it. Nonetheless, I consider this an unwise form of activism that neglects the need for more mundane managerial actions, further damages those committees, and undermines the standing of those in positions of leadership.

First, the need for more effective committee practices. Faculty committees (as bypassed by the student contact hours policy, for instance) exist for a purpose. They provide a forum in which the many implications of any policy proposal can be considered. Practical difficulties can be raised and opportunity costs weighed. Our committees currently fail in this for two reasons. First, because such an immense bulk of irrelevant detail comes before them. Second, because key decisions often turn out to have been made elsewhere and the proper information never presented to the committees. Nonetheless, when committees are bypassed on matters of genuinely common concern, the result is inevitably ill-considered. It is very easy to pronounce what is desirable; it is relatively easy to impose measures that will partly - but only partly - institute what is desired. But it is also easy to forget that any requirement imposed must be paid for (the more so, the more inflexible it is) - paid for with time and energy that could be used elsewhere. And it is very difficult to balance a complex set of different priorities. To do this requires the judgment, expertise and commitment of many people working in an organisation. It is not something that the centre can hold.

Second, centralised policy-making is a distraction from one of the key tasks of management, ensuring that administrative support units function effectively. I have come to believe that, by and large, Lancaster's don't support the university's core tasks of teaching and research. This is not because the individuals working in those units are incompetent or unhelpful, but because of the management, culture, policies, and/or staffing levels of those units. I comment on the three units that are - in my obviously limited experience - most problematic.

Personnel (Human Resources): the low level of support that personnel provides to heads of department is one reason why that task is so immensely stressful, and often less well done than it should be. For one, advertising and recruitment are often bungled. Support for other mundane personnel matters is scant. More fundamentally, fairness and organizational effectiveness demand that poor performance and outright misconduct be dealt with. (But dealt with properly, without decent procedural safeguards being sacrificed - as senior management currently proposes). Any head of department who does try to deal with such issues is putting herself in a very vulnerable position, in part because senior management (deans or higher) is unlikely to back them up, but mostly because personnel does not seem to regard helping heads of department as a priority.

Research support: it is understaffed and lacking continuity in staffing. Hardly any support or guidance is given to Principal Investigators. Budgetary information is difficult to access. There seem to be frequent errors in allocating costs. With the introduction of 'full economic costing' huge sums of non-existent money float about on the accounts, to be offset against quite suppositious costs - a recipe for confusion and worse. On top of this, the university has developed a terribly cumbersome way of approving bids for external research funding. It is a classic perverse incentive: don't bother applying for external research funds because you will be made to jump through hoops (often quite irrelevant to your bid), rather than helped to gain those funds.

Teaching quality: increasingly bureaucratic forms and procedures provide another perverse incentive, to alter as little as possible in teaching practices - never mind to experiment or create ad novum. Here the problem seems not to be understaffing but rather the policies that have evolved at institutional level. It is pretty old-hat to complain about the demand for meaningless specifications of aims and outcomes, and ritual, jargonised rationales for anything and everything teaching-related. But the complaint only gains in force so long as the policies and forms are steadily notched-up. I have no doubt that the complexity of approval and scrutiny procedures could be drastically reduced - at hardly any risk to the organisation, to the benefit of our committee structures, and to the benefit of both staff and students.

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SENATE REPORT

And so we reach the last Senate of this academic year. There have been some interesting innovations this year: not least the introduction of the Questions on Notice to the VC. Currently however, this seems to have become an avenue for only one senator, the Head of Politics and IR, to ask questions. Do others senators really have nothing they want to ask? This time Professor May sought to discover whether, following on from the discussion of contact hours at the previous Senate, the University was seeking to examine ways of monitoring attendance. This drew an interesting answer from Gavin Brown, Director of Undergraduate Studies. Firstly, there was a group examining what we might call the moral question - to what use might the data gathered be put? Secondly, there was another group overseeing a pilot in LUMS using library card swiping to monitor attendance. As always there might be questions here of privacy and surveillance, but perhaps the LUSU representatives remained quiet on this issue, realising that to argue for increased contact without supporting the monitoring of student use of such hours would be a difficult position to hold. Interestingly, having already established that the offer of attendance opportunities (contact) does not involve any requirement to attend (at least currently), when discussion later in Senate turned to the issue of the new ordinance concerning the membership of Court, it seems that elsewhere the University's various organs take a different view. We were told that the Court Effectiveness Review group had decided that as College Syndicate representatives did not always turn up, the opportunity for them to attend should also be reduced - from two members of a Syndicate to one. We await with anticipation for a proposal for this sort of action against non-attending students. In the meantime, the Furness College Senate Representative Chris Grocott's amendment to ask the Council to reinstate the second syndicate representative passed with a clear majority, (although not unanimously).

This month's Senate also provided an opportunity for the VC to celebrate our rise up various league tables, while noting (and adopting the position of most VCs) that really these tables do not actually capture much of use; likewise, the PVC Research provided an update on the RAE and the new arrangements which are being piloted, and in response to a question noted that there has still been no attempt by HEFCE to develop a system for measuring the impact of books. OK, you historians, time to abandon the monograph! The University Secretary also reported that due to the withdrawal of UCU from negotiations, the work on Statute 20 and linked issues around the University's conditions of employment remains moribund, with a promise of some resolution in the next academic year. The difficulty is that UCU have made a link between employment policies and the crisis (and in this case, perhaps, this is not too strong a word) in the Department of Continuing Education. It was very clear that the top table was not happy with this link being made; but after all the UCU is an employees' union.

The crisis in DCE led Senators to be confronted by members of the Senior Learners Society on their way in, handing out very well produced leaflets, raising a number of issues about the process by which the difficulties confronted by DCE are being handled by the University. Not only were this group old enough to remember political engagement that works, they also clearly believed that the Senate was powerful enough to represent their concerns. Sadly, as was made clear in the discussion of this item, while Senators might be able to comment on items brought to Senate for informational purposes, only if and when a proposal emerges to actually close down DCE would Senators have the ability to take a decision. At this point, as the Deputy VC and the VC made it clear, Senators would not be asked to contribute decisions to the ongoing process. However, as the Head of the Centre for Training and Development, (CETAD) noted, the Deputy VC's narrative of the difficulties was fair and detailed. Professor Percy, Director of the School of Lifelong Learning and Widening Participation and Head of DCE, also argued that there should be a review of the manner in which the University was reviewing DCE - not least of all as there is widespread disquiet about how communications have been handled, leaving many staff and students both anxious about the future and uninformed about the process by which this future will be decided. Given, even by the Deputy VC's account, part of the problem lies in the University itself not realising the impact of shifts in the HEFCE funding formula that have drastically reduced DCE's income, it might seem a little unfair for the University to now not include the staff and students in deliberations about how to deal with these difficulties.

Once again, and therefore sadly now representing custom and practice, three more departments that had safely navigated the PQR review process were denied the possibility of their HoDs making a thank you speech. Senate now clearly has moved away from the Oscars model, much to the regret of some Senators. Indeed, given the weight of papers arriving before Senate, it is becoming more like a reading marathon. Whoever said the devil was in the detail? And with this much detail, who knows what might sneak through - well we might guess the VC would know! Therefore, given the shortage of time between Senate papers arriving and Senators having to respond to them in Senate, in the case of the QAA Audit document (around 100 pages, and currently very drafty) the Deputy VC invited comments after Senate, and also committed top table to ensuring the final draft, which Senate would be asked to approve, would be circulated well in advance of the first Senate of the new academic year. However, demonstrating that clearly they get up early in the mornings, two Senators did manage to ask questions about issues in the text; a text, which we were assured, that would only ever be read by five (albeit important) people, namely, the QAA audit team. This was followed by far the most vibrant discussion of the day around the proposals for anonymous marking. Having been greatly watered down due to vigorous complaint from faculty teaching committees, Senate was confronted with a document that, as the College Representative for Fylde suggested, while delaying the implementation of anonymous marking, conceded the principle. Educational Research's Catherine Fritz (by her actions gaining the coveted Senator of the Month title) harried Gavin Brown on how the implementation of anonymous marking where it was to be used would be monitored and evaluated. Demonstrating a terrier-like tenacity, she extracted a clear statement from Gavin Brown that the University accepted that anonymous marking should not be made mandatory for coursework - much to the clear annoyance of LUSU. For her repeated interventions on this issue, here at subtext we salute you Dr Fritz, we salute you. Sadly, the debate then lapsed into a more 'angels on pinhead' debate about the difference in interpretation of the words 'above 25%' as related to the threshold for moderating course work – ooops, sorry, did I drop off?

And that was pretty much it. We also learnt that the new School of Health and Medicine has yet to decide quite how Divisional Heads are related to (or not) HoDs in the rest of the University, (let's hope they decide before the poor souls are in post); the Pro-VC for External Relations – oh, you know him, you've heard him on the radio - was reappointed for a year to carry on his excellent networking and profile raising work on behalf of the University; while the notes from the Academic Planning Committee – and, as the VC remarked, they were just notes of issues that came up - included the perennial question: should LU investigate the possibility of expanding from around 75 staff members those on teaching-only contracts. As one Senator pointed out, surely a little odd for a self-proclaimed research led university. So, all in all, not a vintage Senate, but too much excitement at the end of the year might have prompted an emergency July Senate, as now allowed for in next year's planned schedule of meetings. Cancel your summer holidays in 2009 fellow senators, your University needs you.

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ALCOHOL, CIGGIES AND SLEEP

Bright eyed subtext readers may have noticed a story that was reported in THES and the Daily Mail and in the University's very own LU Text. subtext has been advised that whilst the THES was mostly accurate, the Daily Mail got 'most of the story wrong.' Apparently, a concerned parent wrote to the University stating that 'he is now quite addicted to alcohol, smokes and has spent a great deal of time over the last nine months asleep.' The story raises an important issue which is happening more frequently to both academics and support staff - that of parents ringing up and demanding that they are told details of little Johnny and Janey's life. Sometimes the parents are happy to be told that information is confidential to the student, but many staff have experience of conversations which border on the abusive. The less than helpful Daily Mail commented that the parent in this case 'has a particularly clear right to information about her son's university course since she is contributing to his tuition fees.'

Whilst there may indeed be issues concerning the 'rights' of parents and/or their offspring, this detracts from the issues of 'helicopter' parents (an issue raised by subtext in the past), and the 'rights' of staff to work in an environment which is as free from stress and parental harassment as it's possible to get. subtext notes that the University has publicly stated that any breaches of the procedures had been minor, and that it supports the decision of the member of staff to respond to the complaints (LU Text 387). This also raises important issues regarding conflicts of interest and, perhaps, uncomfortable ambiguities created by the new funding situation - it will be interesting to see how Human Resources deal with these issues. Perhaps readers have their own experiences and opinions as to this very common situation.

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