Empowering Others

Presentation to the World Forum of Universities' Presidents
National Taiwan University
November 2005

1. Introduction

It is both a pleasure and an honour to be part of this forum hosted by National Taiwan University and supported by the Ministry of Education. The title of this session concerns "The Dialectics between the Autonomy and Efficiency of University Leadership and Administration". It is tempting to focus on the main dialectic as being between autonomy and efficiency, but I will take a wider view.

Let me explain. "My autonomy leads to efficiency. Everyone else's autonomy leads to inefficiency". That is the control freak's marching song! It is fundamentally wrong. The human interactions which can benefit higher eduction are much more subtle, and my basic argument is that the optimal outcomes are achieved when all the players are committed to empowering others in an appropriate way.

2. Different challengers for different actors

The university president resembles the two-headed Roman god, Janus, for he or she must look both internally and externally and manage both upwards and downwards.

The essential outcomes of a university are in research and teaching – yet to achieve these in a sustainable way the institution must be run in an effective business-like way. The traditional process of collegial decision-making may appear slow and cumbersome but it is appropriate for setting broad academic policy. Matters arrived at in this way have wide ownership and are enacted willingly and in a manner which is largely consistent across the institution. On the other hand many specific decisions made within the context of a broad consensual framework need to be taken quickly and without further consultation. In particular such decisions should not go back to large committees and neither should they work their way up to a log-jam on the president's desk.

Every effective university which I know runs parallel streams for decision making. There is a conventional organisational structure with a system of delegations to managers such as deans, heads of school etc who, ideally, achieve a balance between academic leadership and business realism. There is also a system of consultative committees operating on a less pressured time scale.

Because there is no such thing as pure policy and because no academic decision can be completely insulated from resource considerations there is a constant dynamic tension over how each issue should be categorised and then handled.

Moreover these processes and their outcomes must be monitored by the governing body of the university which, of course, is not a passive spectator but is actively engaged in policy formulation at a still higher level.

In public universities, and I will focus on these, overlaid on all of this is government, which has legitimate expectations of outcomes in return for investment.

It will come as no surprise, therefore, that I believe that every university president is faced with a complex array of dialectics all of which compete for attention. Listening skills are high on the agenda as is firmness of purpose.

In my opinion it is of primary importance to guide the resolution of issues to the correct level of the organisation. One should be unafraid to influence a governing body or a minister but one should respect their powers of determination. One should welcome personal responsibility and be decisive accordingly. One should empower subordinates and back their decisions vigorously.

In order that this is possible I believe that a president should be appointed (not elected) and for a term of, say, five years, with prudent emergency caveats.

Ministers of Education often have shorter terms and are subject to ongoing political pressure. It must be a temptation to engage in projects with quick returns and to modify one's behaviour to further one's future political ambitions. Within pragmatic boundaries, however, the correct moral strategy is almost certainly the most productive also, By this I mean that a Minister, too, should avoid direct intervention and work instead to create a climate of empowerment within which the universities produce desired outcomes through their own efforts.

Because there has been so much exposure of public and private corruption in business and government in countries throughout the world there is, in my view, a tendency for governments to over-regulate public institutions, including universities. Accountability is essential but there is a danger that risk management becomes translated into risk avoidance and that useful creativity is stifled.

Individual members of staff must play their role in securing a university's fortune. Those who are not directly engaged in teaching or research should feel part of the institution's core mission. This is partly the responsibility of the president in communicating an inclusive ethos but it is also an individual responsibility. In particular everyone should be willing to make constructive choices within their sphere of operation, not merely conforming unimaginatively with set protocols and avoiding all possibility of criticism. It is clear that this must be a pervading organisational spirit engendered by a culture of empowerment at every level.

Academic staff often feel their first loyalty to their discipline area at an international level rather than to the institution in which they work. Naturally the greater the sense of empowerment, in the sense of involvement in and influence on the academic policy of their university, the greater is their commitment to its mission. This, however, provides another dialectical opposition: between spending time on personal creative scholarship and sitting through committee deliberations contributing to policy development. Sometimes one feels that the balance becomes distorted and that the loudest voices come from those with least to say – because they are unencumbered by research activity. In this regard I believe it is important that those with formal administrative duties – deans, presidents and such – maintain a visible presence contributing to the development of their academic disciplines.

It is important that university scholarship can provide critical analysis of society and as a consequence the individual must enjoy the protection of academic freedom. Expressing ideas which may be unpopular or inconvenient politically should not lead to discrimination in employment. Unfortunately the mantra of 'academic freedom' can be invoked to justify self-indulgent or malicious behaviour which disrupts the cohesion of the academic community. It is easy to think of examples where one individual's freedom restricts that of another, to envisage situations where an academic’s own radical beliefs can be imposed on students as a form of authoritarian orthodoxy. It is certainly the case that an individual must be scrupulous in identifying personal opinions as just that and not statements on behalf of the university. Moreover no one should use their academic status in one field to add spurious authority to their pronouncements in another.

These complexities imply that 'academic freedom' is a more relativistic concept than the idealist would like to believe. That fact, in turn, imposes discipline on the individual to be responsible and on the administrator to be brave in exercising tolerance where appropriate.

3. International Differences

Having sketched some of the dialectical challenges facing those who work in higher education, I would like to offer some comments on what I have learned about the way these vary from country to country. Although I am discovering more about Taiwan as this forum progresses, I have, perhaps fortunately, no detailed knowledge of the systemic structure here, so I am in no danger of making controversial statements about our host!

The dialectic which gives the fundamental challenge all over the world is between quality and quantity. There is pressure to provide increased access to higher education and a need to contain costs. In some countries, notably the United Kingdom and Australia, there was a move some years ago to remove a binary divide between universities and more vocational colleges by upgrading the latter. There appeared to be a hope that efficiency dividends would allow this process to encourage convergence to an overall high standard but many of us would argue that the inevitable consequence was a redistribution of resources from the leading institutions, accompanied by a lowering of quality at the top end. There have been some more recent moves to correct this slippage in both countries. In England the Research Assessment Exercise moved funds back to high-performing universities and, in Australia, some limited deregulation has encouraged differentiation of university missions.

In other countries, most visibly China, the government has been open in developing a stratified system within which different levels of funding are provided according to a prescribed rank order of universities.

A country which has been known to adapt to changing conditions is Germany although, or perhaps because, this can be regarded as the birthplace of the modern research university. In the late 19th century the powerful principles of Lernfreiheit and Lehrfreiheit provided empowerment for the academic aspirations of the university community. There were however structural corollaries of this approach to the dialectics of autonomy and efficiency. A tradition of open access to students capable of matriculation led to over-crowding and over-use of facilities. Each individual professor, a public servant, was empowered in such a way as to render university-level strategic planning difficult if not close to impossible and presidents (i.e. rectors) were elected for short periods by their peers and disempowered by the prospect of returning to their substantive chairs at the end of their period of service.

Change and adaptation is now occurring but it is a difficult process with many inherent tensions.

The tradition in many Asian countries with which I am familiar – Japan, South Korea, Thailand – has been for Education Ministries to exercise tight control over public universities. There is now a clear trend in which these governments are providing much more freedom to the universities. It is my observation that this is not universally welcomed by the institutions and those who must make them function. This is partly due to a phenomenon noted by George Bernard Shaw when he stated that "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." In fairness to my Asian colleagues, however, I note also that there is a degree of healthy cynicism. They believe that their governments will devolve responsibility but doubt whether liberty will be as generously conferred. Again I emphasise my argument that, when one tackles the balance between autonomy and efficiency, what is essential is that appropriate empowerment is achieved.

My own country, Australia, is fortunate to draw upon both British and American experiences where there is a tradition of government remaining at one remove from the governing bodies of the universities. In one sense we are accustomed to being subject to market forces and resolving the autonomy-efficiency dialectic for ourselves. On the other hand serious resource pressures on both government and universities restrict freedom of manoeuvre.

Although the University of Sydney is a public university existing through an Act of the New South Wales State Government almost all of the public funding we receive comes from the Australian Federal Government. Moreover the guaranteed funding from that Government is less than 16 percent of our annual budget. (I must add that we increase that to approximately 40 percent through competitive grants schemes for which the funds are provided by that Government).

It is partly true that the small percentage of guaranteed state funding confers a form of empowerment and we raise much of our resources from student fees both international and domestic. However the Federal Government imposes tight regulation (and extensive reporting requirements) on the portion we do receive and also attaches further collateral conditions to certain earmarked quanta within that amount. For example we have had to conform with detailed protocols concerning our governance structure and practices for one part and to adopt a detailed set of rules defining our industrial relations framework to qualify for another part. The outcome is that several millions of dollars are at risk until the Minister makes a qualitative judgement as to whether our behaviour is compliant and that decision will not be made until part way through the budget year.

4. Conclusion

My observation of public universities worldwide is that they are increasingly required to act in a more business-like way but that, paradoxically, they face more rules designed to ensure that they do! There is a temptation for everyone involved to increase regulation within their own sphere of influence, but I believe that the correct response is for all the players to concentrate on empowering others.

The dialectic which is the theme of this session is not one clear cut idea but a multi-layered complex of challenges. Equally, it is not a problem which we can resolve, rather it describes issues which we must face bravely and with committed moral purpose.

Gavin Brown
Vice-Chancellor and Principal
The University of Sydney