Reporter 3/2/99: Report of Discussion

Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 19 January 1999, and Tuesday, 26 January 1999. A Discussion was held in the Council Room of the following Reports:

The Annual Report of the Council (Special No. 8).

Professor G. WHITTINGTON:

Mr Deputy-Vice Chancellor, the Council's Report shows the University to be in a strong financial position.

I therefore wish to express my deep concern about the recent financial cuts which have been imposed, in my view, unnecessarily and arbitrarily, across the Faculties and Departments of the University. Although I shall speak from the perspective of my own Faculty, I believe that these matters are of serious general concern.

I have used two strong adverbs, 'unnecessarily' and 'arbitrarily', but I believe that they are precisely correct, and shall now attempt to explain why.

With regard to the necessity of the cuts, the University's recently published Abstract of Accounts (Reporter, 18 December, p. 7) shows a surplus for the year 1997-98 of £10.7m. This is whittled down to a 'bottom line' of only £0.9m, but this is after transfers to reserves which, for the most part, are what, in company accounts, would be regarded as retained profits rather than expenses. For example, the £7.5m increase in departmental reserves (Accounts, p. 28) cannot sensibly be regarded as a cost to the University.

Thus, the University's most recently published operating statements show a healthy surplus. Moreover, the balance sheet (Accounts, p. 8) shows healthy reserves (in excess of £100m). There is therefore no urgent need for expenditure cuts which might damage the effective academic operation of Faculties (which I believe to be a possibility in my Faculty and in others). The Council's own Report admits as much (Annual Report of the Council, Reporter, 16 December 1998, p. 3): 'The Council emphasize the University's sound financial health.'

The main motivation for the savings exercise appears to be the new academic pay structure which will create an additional recurrent financial burden (albeit amounting to less than half of last year's surplus). This has led the Council to implement what it describes as 'a modest savings exercise' intended to save £2.5m a year which, according to the Council, 'represents only approximately 1% of annual Chest expenditure' and which 'can be achieved without damage to the University' (Annual Report of the Council, p. 3).

The question then is: how does this modest savings exercise which 'can be achieved without damage' bear so heavily on my Faculty and School? The answer lies in my second strong statement, that the application of the cuts is arbitrary.

The first arbitrary element is that the 'modest' 1 per cent cut is allocated on the basis of a sub-set of Chest expenditure, namely the University Education Fund (UEF) payroll (stipends and wages) (stated in a letter to the Council for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences from the Deputy Secretary General on 4 August). This will obviously bear relatively heavily on 'classroom-based' areas of the University, where non-pay budgets are low and tenured academics comprise a high proportion of the pay budget (there being few technicians or other support staff). This increases the modest general 1 per cent to 2.5 per cent of the category of expenditure selected.

This element is compounded by the fact that the savings targets allocated to Schools are 'adjusted in accordance with the group's % under/over-funding in the 1997-98 disaggregation analysis'. After many years of being a substantial 'surplus' area of the University, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences had, by 1997-98, become a 'deficit' area (which is another source of arbitrariness that I shall address in a moment). As a result of allowing for this deficit, the School has a target saving of 3.0 per cent.

The net result of this is that a School with relatively little non-stipend expenditure is being asked to save 3 per cent, which would amount to 1 in 33 members of the academic staff taking early retirement, if no other savings are possible.

The use of the disaggregation exercise as a weighting device is particularly unwelcome. This exercise has produced useful information in the past, particularly in informing the School in its ranking of priorities, but it has never before been used by the General Board as a mechanical allocation device. Thus, a new precedent has been created, and I am not convinced that the disaggregation exercise is appropriate for this new use.

My anxieties about the disaggregation exercise are best illustrated by the alarming instability in the figures between years. The dramatic changes in its outcome have shown a striking decline in the 'profitability' of the classroom-based Schools and a remarkable improvement in some of the lab-based Schools (notably Biological Sciences). Of course, I run the risk of objecting to the exercise merely because it shows my part of the University in a bad light, but I think that it is reasonable to reply that there was resistance from other parts of the University to using the disaggregation exercise earlier when they were shown in an apparently bad light. Furthermore, one only has to look at the time series of surpluses and deficits for individual Schools, presented with the 1998-99 exercise, to realize that something strange must be happening, because the underlying academic output of Schools has not changed in a way which would justify these dramatic changes. If we look at my own School, we have three very large Faculties (Economics, History, and Law) which are operating on student/staff ratios above 15:1 and have excellent research ratings (one 5 and two 5*), yet they are apparently struggling to cover their costs. If the University extends the practice of using the disaggregation exercise as a mechanical allocation device, perhaps it should close them down completely.

The reason for the current instability in the disaggregation exercise is twofold.

First, as the School and the University have already recognized, the prices or 'quanta' given by HEFCE to classroom-based subjects have declined (and are continuing to decline) very rapidly. This needs to be dealt with on a university-wide, and indeed on a national, level. It should not be used by the University as a stick with which to beat classroom-based subjects. From an economic perspective, it is not obvious that the 'losses' represent real opportunities anyway; for example would the central administration or the University Library really shrink to save the amount allocated to us, if the Faculty were to be closed down? However, if the costs allocated do represent avoidable expenses associated with these activities, HEFCE needs to be asked whether it really wants to fund first-rate economics, history, or law faculties: if not, I am sure that we could easily meet the University's financial needs by going private and charging full fees (as does the Judge Institute for its M.B.A. Degree). Of course, the University's current policy, based on a commendable commitment to the widest possible access to undergraduate courses, relies on public funding, but this policy requires a degree of cross-subsidy within the University if public funding is generous for some subject areas but inadequate for others.

A second (less important) source of instability in the disaggregation exercise, but one which is more in the University's control, seems to be cost allocation. There has been a movement from 'top-slicing' of certain central overheads (notably central administration) towards allocation to individual Departments. (In the case of central administration, this is done by using 'cost drivers' whose precise use is opaque.) This naturally tends to transfer costs from the lab-based subjects (which tend to have higher budgets per student or staff member and therefore pay more 'tax' to pay for the 'top-sliced' fund) and towards the classroom-based areas, compounding the problems created by HEFCE's changes of 'quanta'.

A final, more parochial, illustration of the dangers of taking the disaggregation exercise too literally relates to my own Faculty. The teaching income, T, of the Faculty has been allocated arbitrarily, one half to the Faculty, which does most of the teaching, and one half to the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), which is primarily a research institution. This is clearly tilted strongly in favour of the DAE, so that the Faculty's deficit on disaggregation is over-stated. Yet, for the purposes of the cost-saving exercise, I understand that the DAE was treated separately on this basis, despite the clear warning in the notes to the 1996-97 disaggregation exercise that the disaggregation of the teaching income of the Faculty and the DAE 'is not meaningful'. No doubt, there are many similar anomalies in the exercise: this just happens to be one which local knowledge reveals.

In summary:

1.	I question the need for the present savings exercise.
2.	Still more, I question the way in which the proposed saving is allocated between Schools.
3.	I am particularly disturbed by what I see as a mis-use of the disaggregation exercise.
4.	I would like to see the University develop a proper policy on how it proposes to react to future changes in the HEFCE quanta.

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I speak, of course, not as a member of the Council, but in a personal capacity. I want to concentrate chiefly on the governance questions touched on in the Council's Report.

Governance and freedom of information
'Involving full consultation throughout the University' (Reporter, Special No 8, p. 4). The Vice-Chancellor raised in his speech of 1 October 1998 the question of improving communication within the University. Telling us the good news is important. But there is another and profounder need, which is to allow access to the paper trail, the information and preparatory documents which lie behind the recommendations which are put to us in Reports and the statements which are published to us as Notices. I hope the Vice-Chancellor will also back what I am about to suggest, and have already mooted on the Council.

More than one of those who gave evidence to the Public Service Committee in the aftermath of the Scott Report stressed the need for such a 'policy-record'. Sir Douglas Wass, who chaired our Wass Syndicate, commented in the late 1980s upon the dangers which arise when the alternatives to a proposed policy are not freely made available before the policy decision is taken. I suspect that many members of the Regent House share the concern which a number express to me that we ought to be able to take an active and informed part in shaping of policy on the basis of a right to access to the working papers.

'The Council have been concerned for some time about the quality and the frequency of financial information available to Heads of Institutions and to the Council's Finance Committee' (Reporter, Special No. 8. p. 3). That does not go far enough. This member of the Council has been concerned about the lack of a presumption that there will be freedom of information in the University on a great many other matters, and is certainly not satisfied that improved communication is intended to go only to Heads of Institutions.

It is time, in an age when it is easy to post things on a Web page, for the Regent House to have far fuller access to the information upon which decisions taken behind the scenes purport to be based. We should also be given sight of working documents, not necessarily in their first draft, but before they go beyond any realistic possibility of reconstruction. Even the Government puts out Green Papers, at an appropriate stage. The presentation in the middle of the Michaelmas Term of an attempted fait accompli on the revised promotions procedures at a stage when it was too late for sensible discussion to enable the remaining problems to be addressed was disgraceful. We ought to have had an opportunity to consider what was proposed. Suddenly we were faced with the doctrine of 'continuous assessment' and various other new policy decisions, with no consultation at all.

I really do not see why we should not move to an internal routine freedom of information on the Swedish model. Sweden survives that degree of openness, and we ought not to live here with the paradox that everything said in this forum goes straight into the public domain, indeed onto the Web, when the members of the Regent House are kept in ignorance of what their officers and the central bodies are up to until the alternatives to the preferred policy option have been safely stowed away in cupboards. Knowledge is power. That is why they do not want us to have it.

Remarks made earlier on how the Daily Telegraph was ahead of our own academic staff on plans for the Computer Laboratory are in point. And I am very interested in the content of that 'coffee room' clause on intellectual property rights.

Another matter which needs attention is the tone of Notices and Reports. There should be a presumption of respect for the Regent House. That is not incompatible with tough talking on both sides. But 'We shall ignore you' is not an acceptable blanket response to points put in Discussion. Notices should not resound with the language of 'threat'. No-one calls a ballot lightly, but a General Board which will not listen and be receptive and flexible and courteous to the Regent House may leave us with no alternative. The crowded Senate-House Notice Board of late December is a serious criticism of the present impaired working of our structures of governance.

The governance issues which face us are serious. We must not lose sight of the value of the principle (in which only Oxford retains an equivalent freedom) that the Regent House is our governing body. But we must devise better strategies for calling to account. A flood of ballots is not only unnecessarily adversarial; it is also a crude and uncertain way of addressing disputed issues. We may inadvertently create legislation in that way which is unworkable or imperfectly thought through as to its consequences. The problems which have arisen in assessing the 'effectiveness' of teaching in this year's promotions process are a case in point. The amendment which added that to the Grace had the good purpose of ensuring that we take teaching seriously. But it had the unfortunate consequence of obliging the committees to make evaluations without evidence, as they admitted they had done.

Ballots are called only when informal consultation and discussion have broken down. A change of attitude in the Old Schools and upon the central bodies may come about naturally with the change of membership from January. But it is essential that we all get back to talking and listening. The Council have at last begun to make time on their agenda for serious consideration of policy issues (obliquely referred to at p. 5). That is good news. But it ought to be possible for the Regent House to be allowed in on the task, perhaps by publication of the Council's new 'topic of the month' in the Reporter, and by the setting up of an interactive Web page.

I turn briefly to the headings of the Report.

Teaching and research and lifelong learning
We need to keep an eye on the implications of allowing the University to recognize credit for work undertaken at another university and its concomitant provision of credit to that other university (p. 5). The Board of Continuing Education has working partnerships with other institutions, too (p. 5). It has well in mind, I know, the difficulties of keeping distinct our degree-awarding powers and our giving of Cambridge's name to a variety of qualifications other than degrees. But that is a ball we must not take our eye off for a moment.

Links with industry
Links with industry are pregnant with alien life-forms. The only advantage to the University of such links is financial - and perhaps the opportunity of making contact with a larger body of researchers; but that can be done in the usual way through the machinery of the community of scholarship. The disadvantages are legion, especially by way of frustration of the independence of research and the risk that we may inadvertently get ourselves into compromising positions. The proviso about safeguards in 'the Council welcome such partnerships which, with appropriate academic safeguards, can only serve to strengthen Cambridge's performance and its reputation' (p. 5) needs an enormous amount of reflection and, to my knowledge, we do not have that work in hand except piecemeal and at the level of the taking of decisions about individual projects and proposals. An earlier speaker raised real concerns in this area. We stand to get ourselves into serious trouble if we do not draw up and repeatedly rework a code of practice for ourselves as we learn from experience.

Personnel matters
I hope members of the Regent House will note (p. 6) that incentive payments to incoming and specially favoured academic staff are given a higher priority than fair rewards for all those already here; and that we are meekly going along (to the tune of the sizeable sum we are paying Hay Consultants) with the suggestion that our jobs should be evaluated and defined. One fears that the eccentric scholar will be edited out of the University and with him much of our most exciting work. Conformity is a managerial good because it allows for increased control.

At p. 7 we welcome - as indeed we do - the appointment of the President of New Hall as a new Pro-Vice-Chancellor. But I have raised a concern that this increasingly well-paid (an addition to salary of £24,000) and influential office should continue to be filled on the personal nomination of the Vice-Chancellor. This is a very different matter from the creation of deputies to preside at Discussions and to do other odd jobs. We may land ourselves with a power- broker and worse if we do not go through a proper appointments procedure with safeguards in the creation of our Pro-Vice-Chancellors.

It does not end there, financially, for each has a secretary and an office and no doubt in time it will turn out that those secretaries need secretaries too. (Look at the Network Telephone Book year by year, to get a picture of this rapid expansion of the full-time Vice-Chancellorship proposed by the Wass Syndicate.)

Complaints and whistleblowing
I have provided a position paper for the consideration of the committee which is charged with looking at matters arising from the Second Nolan Report. Any member of the Regent House may have a copy for the asking. I suggested that we ought to take as conjoint questions a series of matters on our agenda: the need for a student complaints procedure (as distinct from, but as well as, appeal; the difference appears to have got lost in the Report, p. 4); and the need for all the categories of staff to have proper avenues for complaint and realistic hope of redress so as to keep us out of the courts. Many complaints will inevitably involve both students and staff.

We must also tackle the problem (arising out of our employment structures) that Statute U covers only certain categories of University Officers, and so we have the absurdity that College Officers cannot complain about University Officers and University Officers cannot complain about College Officers under the grievance procedure.

Short-term contract research staff are doubly disadvantaged, for they can too easily be got rid of if they raise concerns and they have no standing to complain under Statute U.

The reform of Statute K, 5, and the making of provisions under the new enlarged Data Protection Act are urgent. In the Notice of 9 December I was accused of making calls I had made before. But what is one to do if things already urgent when they are first said are not being attended to? It was in February 1998 that I first pressed for reform of Statute K, 5. That is nearly a year ago. I am having difficulty in getting our 'Nolan Committee' even to meet, although I am now a member of it. It does not appear that a worried member of a committee has any means of bringing about a meeting under our constitution.

And then there is our code for whistleblowing, which we have not agreed, though we are obliged to have one now that the Public Interest Disclosure Act is in force. I need not say that I have a keen interest in the contents of that.

Professor M. SCHOFIELD:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, readers of the Times Higher Education Supplement have already had an opportunity to see what claimed to be a preview of at least one speech to be made on the topic of today's Discussion. In the issue dated 22 January 1999, Phil Baty wrote (p. 60): 'At Cambridge University, defiant dons are preparing a series of attacks on the university's unelected administrative officers'. Charming. Very civilized.

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, an examiners' meeting calls me away from the rest of this afternoon's proceedings, and I didn't make last week's Discussion, so I have no idea whether Mr Baty's predictions about what has been said or is to be said will prove accurate. But a journalist can usually recognize an attack when he sees it. And members of the Regent House are now used to expecting the institution of Discussions to be abused by the making of attacks on officers of the Old Schools. 'Nobody's personal integrity is being questioned', we are told; 'but when officers exceed their authority whistles have to be blown.' This is humbug: not because it is straightforwardly false (although 'crying wolf' more accurately describes what is going on); but because it conceals a more important truth - that there is something bearing a disturbing resemblance to a deliberate campaign, lacking all Christian charity, and sustained week after week, month after month, year after year, to make the officers' life hell. If someone kept kicking their dog like this, the RSPCA would take them to court, and they would not be allowed to keep animals any more. Much has lately been made of the comparison between administrative officers and civil servants. It is not, however, parliamentary ethics to attack civil servants: the Minister or the Government takes the rap. In its concern with constitutional questions (cf. the Council's Report, §13) the Council - and I speak with some embarrassment as one of its members - surely needs to address its mind as to how similar decencies may be restored to the conduct of affairs in the University.

Professor D. N. DUMVILLE:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, 1997-98 was a bad year for the Council and therefore for the University. The eirenic tone of the Annual Report fails to capture this. There has been reason to remark on more than one occasion that the Council has not managed to act in such a way as to hold the confidence of members of the Regent House. There is perhaps a structural or constitutional problem: it is not clear that, since the Wass reforms, the Council has found a role for itself; too often it appears sleepy or uncertain of its role or merely the handmaiden of the General Board. Yet this is an elected body which should feel confident of its mandate and purpose: is the uncertainty a result of its members being elected from at best a 30% turnout of the electorate? It needs to develop a relationship of creative tension with the General Board, a process which would reinvigorate government and attract the attention of the electorate.

Such tension as there has been with the General Board - and indeed within the ranks of the Council itself during the year under review - exploded into the open in a decidedly uncreative, indeed unseemly, and unproductive way in the Discussion of 12 May (Reporter, 1997-98, pp. 658-70).

The University at large might have expected the Council, as its superior governing body, to have looked more closely at issues which affect major aspects of the running of the institution as a whole. I offer as an example the upheaval now taking place before our eyes in preparation for the introduction of Senior Lectureships. I have called for, and then welcomed, proposals to introduce a better career structure for academic staff. On this occasion last year I drew attention to a warning sign that all was not well in the financial planning (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 345) but there was no public reaction to the point. Now we are in the middle of a cost-cutting exercise at least partly consequent upon the plans for structural reform of career progression: I sense that support for this change is slipping away as a result. Here is an instance where the Council could have played a more active and creative role; but, divided against itself, it could not argue forcefully for a Syndicate which could have given mature consideration to this issue (among others).

Complacency also seems to be a problem. In the Discussion of 17 November last, a member of Council, a newly appointed Professor, rose to deliver a speech on a text which might have been provided by the title of a famous book of the 1930s, Custom is king. In respect of current controversy about our promotions procedures, he referred to our shared good fortune at that particular roulette-wheel. His philosophical message was in effect twofold: those who have emerged successful from the process should not challenge the quality of the process; and 'since I've been promoted, the system must be working well'. Such an attitude of course fails to consider how the results might seem to anyone else or what the source of good fortune was for those emerging successful. The twin evils lurking in the promotions process, patronage and prejudice, have not yet been tamed to the point of harmlessness. The Council could be doing more, much more, to represent the interests of the Regent House in working out a rational strategy to give UTOs and CTOs a reasonable career structure. Let us hope that this year the new Council will feel able to act creatively in that regard.

The Annual Report of the General Board (Special No. 8)

Dr D. R. J. LAMING:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I wish to comment on the General Board's brief paragraph on personal promotions. I speak this afternoon entirely in my private capacity, not as a member of the Council.

To judge from the Board's previous rejoinders to repeated criticism of its proposals, it does not yet understand what those criticisms are about. The present Report speaks of 'opposition to these further revisions' as though last year's procedure was acceptable. That was not so. Last year's procedure introduced an appeal for the first time and that appeal was widely seen as a means of rectifying errors of evaluation at the Faculty stage. But, after the event, it was revealed that the Board had privately restricted the remit of the Appeals Committee to procedural matters only. Personally, I felt deceived. But it would be unfair to suggest that the Board intended to deceive. I think it more likely that it did not, and still does not, understand why an appeal procedure is needed and why that procedure needs to be a real appeal, not just a cosmetic one. I take this opportunity to explain.

Not many years ago the promotion round began with Heads of Departments putting names before a Faculty Committee for consideration. If your Head of Department did not put your name forward, you did not get promoted. What is ultimately wrong with the present (revised) procedure is that rather little has changed. To be sure, it is now for the individual officer to make application. But last year it was prescribed that the case for promotion should be made out by the candidate's Chairman of Faculty Board or Head of Department. If your Head of Department does not choose to highlight the referees' most extravagant eulogies and hide their caveats, your name does not go forward. It is as though there is an additional criterion, implicit in the procedure, but not otherwise included in the General Board's list.

But Heads of Department cannot be expert, or even knowledgeable, in all of the subject-areas in which their subordinates research. They inevitably have plans for the development of their Departments and some subordinates are less important to those plans than others. Heads of Department are human like everyone else and the nature of personal relationships, especially those fostered by shared professional interests, also enters in. Irrespective of how conscientiously a member of a Faculty Promotions Committee may seek to discharge responsibilities with respect to an applicant from some other Department, any doubts expressed will always be subordinate to the opinion of the applicant's own Head of Department on the ground that the applicant's own Head knows far more about the applicant than any other member of the committee. If a candidate is not endorsed by his or her Head of Department, he or she is not promoted.

There is another defect besides. Promotions Committees do not examine a candidate's work directly, but only at second hand, through the opinions of referees. Different referees view the candidate's work from different standpoints and say different things in consequence. They are variously ready to express admiration for a candidate's work and the Promotions Committee is not to know how ready. That second-hand evaluation amounts to a borrowing of opinions by Committee members who are not themselves able to tell whether the opinions thus borrowed are sound or fair or whatever. It simply increases the effect of the bias already exercised by Heads of Departments.

To put the matter succinctly, the newly revised procedure is admirably even-handed as between different Heads of Departments rooting in committee for their favoured nominees. Those who are not favoured simply do not get promoted, notwithstanding the originality of their research, the nature of their contribution to knowledge, the significance of their work for others, and so on.

With a view to putting this contentious issue onto an acceptable footing, I want to consider, ab initio, how we might have promotion on strictly academic criteria, free from managerial patronage and bias. What would a fair promotions procedure look like? My suggestions fall into two distinct groups.

In the first place Promotions Committees need to be informed as fully and accurately as possible about the claims of each applicant for promotion, subject only to the restriction that the demands on members' time must be kept within reasonable bounds. I therefore suggest that:

(a) The case for promotion be made out by the applicant in person (within guidelines and with assistance, if needed, provided in a manner that I shall describe shortly). This is appropriate because the applicant knows more, much more, about his or her work than any other person.

(b) The applicant's case will be biased in some degree by self-interest. Accordingly, it is shown to referees who are asked, not whether they support the case, but whether they agree with it - specifically, whether they agree with the arguments and evaluation contained therein. If they do not agree, why not? What other evaluation would they suggest instead?

(c) In a university as prestigious as this one, it is not to be expected that all referees will be expert with respect to the applicant him or herself. The first task of a Promotions Committee is therefore to survey the referees' comments, discarding those which are unjustified, and amending the applicant's case for promotion in respect of those which remain.

(d) A critical survey of referees' comments requires the Promotions Committee to have at least one member competent to speak about each applicant's work. This may be achieved in this way:

Each applicant is assigned to an advocate of suitable seniority and expertise. To preclude conflicts of interest, no advocate represents more than one applicant. A Promotions Committee consists of just the advocates for those applicants who are to be considered, under a neutral chairman.

In the second place - I now come to my second group of suggestions - there will be a potential advantage to some candidates in receipt of private advice from colleagues in the know, how to prepare their applications. To level this particular playing field I suggest that such private advice be made freely available to all.

(a) Suppose there is a corps of observers - these observers would need to have no other connection whatsoever with the promotion round. Two observers sit in on every meeting of a Promotions Committee; they receive the committee papers but do no more than observe, taking no part in the deliberations.

(b) In the light of experience gained in this way, the observers offer advice to applicants, confidential advice, face-to-face if requested, on how to prepare their applications.

(c) The observers also provide feedback to applicants following each meeting of a Promotions Committee, again face-to-face if requested.

(d) The observers will recommend to the General Board that any candidate who is deemed to have been inadequately considered or otherwise unfairly treated in committee shall have his or her case re-examined in a repechage meeting of a Promotions Committee. A few other candidates who only narrowly missed out are also reconsidered in that way. Repechage Committees replace the present appeals procedure.

(e) The observers also monitor the impartiality and thoroughness of each Promotions Committee's deliberations, informing the Board if the conduct of any meeting gives serious cause for concern.

(f) The fairness and acceptability of these suggestions depends critically on the independence and impartiality of the corps of observers. So, at the end of each Promotions round the observers report, not to the General Board, but to the Council.

These suggestions amount to no more than a skeleton on which a fair and reliable promotions procedure might be based. Different officers will want it fleshed out in slightly different ways, depending especially on their discipline, and I do not attempt any greater detail here. But I emphasize that this skeleton differs at a structural level from existing procedure. It separates the consideration of applications for promotion from the management of Faculties and Departments and that, in my judgement, is an idea which the General Board will have to accept if there is to be agreement over the matter of personal promotions.

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, three years ago the annual round began in May; that was seventeen months before the promotions were to take effect. We have now slipped to the following January. The schedule for personal promotions has slipped behind in this way because the General Board has repeatedly disregarded the legitimate concerns of a significant minority of the Regent House. Even further delay is now threatened. Very recently the Secretary General issued a circular (GBO.9901.0211) which stated that 'if the Graces [Graces 7 and 8 of 9 December 1998, Reporter, p. 244] are not approved unamended there will be no 1999 exercise.' That is a refusal to implement any amendments that the Regent House might see fit to approve. It is not for the Secretary General to threaten to defy the Regent House in that way. It must not go on like this!

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Schofield appears to have been shown my speech made last week, although he did not hear it and the proofs do not yet exist. He was called to speak first today by prior arrangement with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Was this fixed?, we ask ourselves. If we are speaking of attacks I think he is sitting in a glass house.

The General Board speak in their Report of their 'continual review of the effectiveness of decision-making' (Reporter, Special No. 8, p. 8). I do not think decision-making can be deemed to be 'effective' on any construction when there are calls for ballots on Grace after Grace until there is no more room on the Senate-House Notice-board.

The General Board go on to speak of 'improving their decision-making'. There is, it is true, a willingness to consult 'institutions'. 'To allow the views of academic institutions to influence more directly the content of the Allocations Report'; 'institutions will be consulted annually to establish views on priorities' (p. 13, para. 58). 'Institutions' are also going to be consulted about the next Research Assessment Exercise. That is not good enough. The Regent House is the Governing Body of this University and we must watch very carefully the powers which are getting into the hands of Heads of Departments as a result of talking to them instead of directly to us.

A case in point is the naturalness with which Professors Mellor and Needham sent their flysheet for the current ballot out to Heads of Departments for onward transmission to their subordinates for signature. The flysheets initiated by mere members of the Regent House were sent directly to colleagues in their own right. That makes a point of some importance if you think about it.

The most recent example of the General Board's decision-making was the sending out to the same potentiaries of a circular about this year's promotions on 7 January asserting that 'if the Graces are not approved unamended there will be no 1999 exercise' (GBO.9901.0211). A timetable has now been drawn up and circulated in the form of a note to Heads of Departments, not published as a Notice in the Reporter.

The booklet on the proposed procedure for the 1999 exercise is going to be circulated to eligible officers during the exact period when they are voting on the amendments. Does that not sound to you, members of the Regent House, like a ploy extremely likely to be effective? Candidates panting for their long-delayed promotion are going to say, 'To hell with it; let's just get on with it, even if the procedures are unfair!' Then the General Board will be telling us that the democratic will has made itself felt and the Regent House has voted for an ineffective appeal procedure and inadequate feedback and all the rest of it. And from now on they will have total control of the process and no suggestions for improvement will be listened to.

I want the Council to explain to us in their reply how this ballot can be considered to have been conducted as a free vote of the Regent House. It is clearly improper that the outcome of the ballot should be prejudiced by any action or statement which might influence members of the Regent House to vote against the amendments not because they disagree with them, but because they think that otherwise they will not have an opportunity to be considered for promotion this year.

If the amendments are voted down, the ballot will have to be declared invalid, although it is hard to see what provision our constitution makes for dealing with this kind of blatant arm-twisting by the General Board in the interests of the success of their own proposals. I think you are voting for the survival of our democracy, my friends, at a level far deeper than the questions about the amendments. My statement today will stand in the record, as an indictment.

No attempt appears to be being made to create alternative pieces of legislation to fit into the slots if any of the amendments succeed, although it has been known since 18 December what the proposed amendments were. The General Board do not need to think them through, if they are determined to block them by any means.

The timetable is a sham. So long as promotions are ratified by March 2000 there is no constitutional difficulty with their being backdated to October 1999. Remember, it was the General Board which lost us a month in November. We still have fourteen months. It is all a matter of the will of the General Board to get on with it. Or we could make a double batch of promotions.

I want to enter an objection to the statement at paragraph 11, on grounds of its inaccuracy. The further revisions in the published procedures for this year which we discussed on 10 November were not 'opposed'. In many respects they were welcomed. It was merely pointed out, by a substantial list of speakers who had taken time and trouble over their analysis, that they needed to be taken a little further still and at some points reconsidered, in the interests of fairness. It is not edifying to read this kind of childish 'politician's misleading point-scoring' in an official statement of one of the central bodies. We ought to be able to rise above the schoolboy level of Parliament in our exchanges in this University.

I have withdrawn the victimization case. I now read my reasons into the record so that there may be no doubt about them. This is the letter I wrote to the Employment Tribunal on 17 December: 'The respondent has already addressed some of my concerns, particularly about the exclusion I have suffered, and the Vice-Chancellor has now agreed to meet me to discuss the way forward about my situation, the mending of working relationships and the form and conduct of procedures for promotion.'

I added: 'I am also anxious to save the University the expense of about £50,000 in fighting this case since it has at no time been my wish that it should run up large legal bills when matters could be addressed by informal consultation and discussion'. The University would not have been able to get that £50,000 back, for in an Employment Tribunal each side bears its own costs.

Before we reached this understanding on 17 December, the University had been required to disclose to me a good deal of documentation, including the Minutes and Reports and other documents of the General Board, the General Board's Committee, the Appeal Committee, and the History Faculty Committee, together with some of the references, with the names of their authors protected. Details of the committees' discussion of candidates other than myself in the promotions documentation have not of course been disclosed, but numbers of candidates and the patterns of the evaluations, and the record of the ways in which it was all muddled through are in my hands.

I have prepared an analysis for the use of the central bodies and the Promotions Committees of the respects in which they appear to have put the University in breach of the duty of care it owes to its employees.

This material is dynamite. It reveals a towering degree of carelessness and cock-up in the operation of a process of huge importance to the 200 who applied and to the shadowy legion who stand behind them, a number of whom have told me they are simply unwilling to expose themselves yet again to the distress of another rejection. It is not irrelevant that many have told me they supported the points in the flysheets but did not dare let their names appear at the beginning of another promotions round.

Members of the Regent House should be asking whether within the category of the 146 cases directly considered by the General Board's Committee there were any academic grounds for promoting so few; whether it was not expressly admitted in the documentation that the evaluations were pretty rough and ready and that Faculties did not all create the same profile in their evaluations; how many missed promotion because they had not got one 'four' to replace a 'three', when the committees had admitted that the evaluations could not be relied on; whether it was recognized in the documentation that cronyism and prejudice was going unchecked among the referees; that the documentation solicited from candidates was almost entirely (and unlawfully) ignored and only the references used, and used crudely at that, as raw data, on which to base the evaluations; that some of these references were merely tabled at Faculty meetings and no one had even read them in advance; that three of the General Board's Committee absented themselves from the first meeting and one from the second; that the General Board's Committee can have spent no more than seven minutes on average in deciding the fate of each candidate; that no method was devised, or even attempted, for comparing candidates in different disciplines, except by pretending that the evaluations were marks, not value-judgements, and doing some rough 'scaling'; that the secretariat wrote everything up unmonitored and unchecked at the final crucial stage and the General Board and its Committee did not check up on what was going out in their name.

We must not accept the continuance of a method of considering candidates for senior academic offices which is impressionistic, amateurish, and fails to display the characteristics of intellectual rigour and clarity of thought and control of their material that we exact from the candidates themselves. Candidates of sharp mind will resent that.

I quote one text in particular: 'The role of the Appeals Committee was not to consider fresh evidence in support of an officer's case unless relating to a default on the part of the Faculty Promotions Committee, nor was the role of the Appeals Committee to re-evaluate an officer's application.' If the General Board is not prepared now to come clean and make available for inspection the rest of the general portions of the Reports and Minutes of the Promotions Committees which acted under our delegated authority, I think the Regent House should call for its collective resignation. I point them to Statute K, 9, (b)(ii), 'members of the delegating body [the Regent House] shall have the right of access to all papers considered by such committees'.

I think we are entitled to insist that, if we make rules, they are not cast aside if they prove inconvenient; that those who consent to serve on our Promotions Committees should make that their priority on meeting days, and that candidates are given a properly focused consideration as individuals.

May we also have, please, an explanation of p. 9, paragraph 12 in the Report we are discussing today? 'Twenty other senior offices were established for the personal promotion of individual officers'. Are these 'temporary upgradings'? If twenty individuals had the magic of 'establishment of a senior University office for a named individual' performed for them, may we have a list and an explanation of how that fits in with the promotions process? It would be another excellent way of catching up with the delayed timetable simply to allow this year's unsuccessful candidates to ask to be considered for such 'temporary upgradings'.

Something has disappeared in a rather sinister way from the text of the General Board's Report which we saw on the Council and passed for publication as having been ratified by the General Board. On p. 8, paragraph 10, it was to have said, after the reference to the 'recently revised arrangements for promotion to personal Readerships and Professorships', that 'detailed proposals for implementing them will be made'. It does not say that now. Are you going to have procedures forced upon you, prospective Senior Lecturers, as though you were an inferior breed? Now you know about the cock-up and confusion over the procedures for Chairs and Readerships I hope you will tremble.

Our short-term contract staff will continue to get a raw deal (p. 9, paras. 13-15). Both the Council and the General Board have been reluctant to go along with the Fairness at Work White Paper and abandon waiver clauses. 'Redeployment opportunities' are a laughable device when we are speaking of senior and highly specialized scientists. It is not acceptable that the University should be able to get itself off the hook by offering some of its rarest birds the opportunity to become sparrows and pigeons.

Some of those confronted with the new contracts tell me that they have begun to see why I am so concerned about them. The assertions in paragraph 16 are defensive attempts to blunt the force of the concerns I have raised on the Council and in previous Discussions. It is now being conceded that we may have to revise the confidentiality clause. So perhaps I was right. Paragraph 16 is inaccurate and I think that should be acknowledged.

The General Board says that Professor Skinner will 'lead RAE 2001 for the University'. I am unclear about our new Pro-Vice-Chancellor's authority in this matter, and of course we have no way of knowing yet what will be the tendency of his deployment of his political skills outside the comparatively confining arenas of the History Faculty and his College. Last time, a vast sum, five times the annual promotions budget, was spent on buying in individuals to beef up the weaker Departments and Faculties and it has not been established that that was cost-effective. If Cambridge decides to go down the same road as last time, the media will spot it at once and we shall deserve all the cat-calls we shall get.

I am not sure, looking back over this Report, that it is not the General Board, in its previous incarnation, which ought to get those. I hope that the new General Board, like the new Council, will make a fresh start and that we can get back to the 'basics' of the running of a great University collegially and with genuine openness so that we do not need to fight for obvious reforms and the good practice which ought to be natural among us.

I wonder whether we should not revisit the idea of a Syndicate in the very near future, perhaps putting it to the Regent House in a new form, to make possible a radical review of our crisis of governance as well as the career prospects of our staff and the University's duty of care to them as an employer. For the forthcoming ballot is developing into a naked war between those who would dictate to us for our own good and those who continue to live by an idea of the University in which our predecessors over many centuries would still recognize their own community of equality and mutual respect in free, courageous, and generous scholarship.

Professor D. N. DUMVILLE:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, if 1997-98 was a bad year for the Council, what kind of a year was it for the General Board? I have passed under review all the Reports and Notices issued during the year in the name of the General Board. As a corpus, these do not make happy reading. The tone of individual Reports and Notices has repeatedly been criticized in Discussions: serial reading of these documents confirms the impression that something is amiss. Some years ago, when I was preparing my Inaugural Lecture, I had occasion (in researching the history of appointments in my subject) to read a series of General Board Reports issued in the closing years of the last century and the first quarter of this. I remarked in my Lecture (Three Men in a Boat…, p. 5) that 'What strikes me most forcefully in reading these reports is their friendly, gentle, and sometimes even apologetic tone'. The difference is not merely that offered by a less hurried age. What can be achieved was briefly - and, given the experience of the year whose Report we are discussing today, very surprisingly - illustrated by the Notice on the 'Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on arrangements for the early retirement of University officers and University assistants', dated 23 November last and published two days later (Reporter, pp. 178-9). I commend that document as a model of how to respond to a Discussion.

However, the glimpses which we gain of the temper of the Board provide a rather different and more disturbing picture. On 17 November last, a member of the General Board, speaking in what was evidently one of his more philosophical moments, offered it as his opinion that those who disagreed with his point of view either were mad or had an axe to grind (Reporter, p. 195). One would gladly not think that this represents the standard of discussion at the General Board, but then one recalls that on that day of infamy, 12 May 1998, the same General Board member, in a less philosophical moment, rose to denounce the Council in decidedly intemperate language, to imply indeed that 'improper pressure' had 'been exercised on the Council's members or officers' (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 662).

Is then the mood of the General Board, at least in its 1998 manifestation, intemperate? I wonder. It has often been remarked in Discussions, and it is a matter of frequent comment around the University, that the General Board cannot bear to admit that it may have been wrong, made a mistake, or simply not have found the best way forward. An anecdote may serve to elucidate mentalities. Some months ago, a colleague, who had some while since in a Discussion directed some criticism at the functioning of the promotions process, told me that he had been approached by a member of the Administration who told him that his concerns had been noted, that he should now pipe down, and that when his criticism no longer appeared current the points would be met. Only yesterday week, another colleague reported to me a very similar encounter. How is it that a body as powerful as the General Board cannot conduct an open and intelligent dialogue with its colleagues on matters of concern? Has its very power rendered it (or its servants) arrogant, or is it rather the case that it feels beleaguered, or (worse) do we see a combination of the two?

In its latest Annual Report (§11) the Board has commented that 'The first round of promotions to personal Professorships and Readerships under the revised procedure was successfully completed' (with the peculiar coda, 'without significant disruption of the annual timetable'). It is doubtful that there is general assent to that adverb 'successfully'. How is it that at one extreme a distinguished scholar can get no promotion, only vilification, and that at the other many have had to slink quietly away to lick their wounds once again, some with those wounds made deeper by having feedback which in effect told them not to come back for a decade? Does the Board's word 'successfully' mean that the published criteria were fully and fairly applied and seen by all participants to have been so? I doubt it. The procedural revisions proposed 'in the light of experience of the 1998 exercise' suggest that the Board doubted it too. But it is difficult to be clear, for reasons were not given, and when these were sought they were still not provided. When suggestions were put forward, to increase fairness and openness and therefore confidence in the procedures, these were all rejected without discussion. Is it likely that all the suggestions put forward, by persons who have made themselves closely familiar with the procedures, are of no value? What is the matter with an Administration which cannot show evidence of thought or discussion, much less offer an apology to the Regent House where that was clearly needed? When challenged to consider what were hardly revolutionary suggestions (Reporter, pp. 169-70), the central bodies have drawn their wagons into a circle and viscerally hurled back the imagined flaming arrows of the 'radical Regent House democrats' (Reporter, p. 195).

The methods of communication between the central bodies (particularly the General Board) and the Regent House have over the last seventy-five years become increasingly ineffective. The problem seems to have intensified since the Wass reforms. Communication on matters big and small has come to be largely by Notice. In spite of the exemplary Notice of 23 November 1998 (to which I have already referred), the style has generally become snappy but the reasoning too often flaccid. My diagnosis at the time of the last Discussion was a lack of respect for the Regent House. What has happened since then seems to me to confirm that judgement. The trouble is that such disrespect will tend to be reciprocated.

I have had occasion to comment before on the remarkable capacity of the General Board to express its views in terms of belief, thus suggesting that thought and discussion are at a minimum. Right down to the last Notice of 1998 and the Annual Report, this remained the case. Yet it is hard to see that all these expressions amount to a coherent belief system. Perhaps the Secretary General should be appointed to post a dogma a day on the Senate-House noticeboard (if he can find room) so that the community may the more easily know what the General Board thinks that it should believe. We shall soon need our own Aquinas to make a summa and explain to us what it all means.

How can it be that a body of twelve persons, in whose name careers can be destroyed (as, for example, Dr William Griffin has discovered) or (in the case of the promotions exercise) left unfulfilled and without hope, a body of such great power in the University, reacts as though it were beleaguered? The unhappy answer (as any student of political history will recognize at once) is that it is behaving like a tyranny. How so? It fears that its actions lack justification, do not enjoy support, and that its authority will be eroded if it admits to any weakness. Is this a result of the way in which the General Board is appointed? Is it the outcome (by an unhappy circularity) of the continuing attenuation of lines of communication with the Regent House?

My hope is that the new General Board now assuming office, perhaps assisted by the revised decision-making processes envisaged in the Annual Report (§2), can take stock of the way in which business is conducted. The crushing workload which is the lot of a member of the General Board does not encourage pauses for reflection. To ensure that they are entirely comfortable with everything published in their name, whatever delays amendment to that end may involve, must be the way forward. If mistakes are made (as surely they must be - and have been - from time to time), these would be best admitted and apologized for: nothing is lost thereby. If there is controversy, that does not need to be seen as threatening to the Board's authority. Mutual respect between the Board and the Regent House is what will cure current difficulties and chart a happier course.

The alternative is that increasing numbers of members of the Regent House will become radicalized. Already there is a steady block of 200-250 votes for change. There is no reason to think that this will diminish, and the Secretary General's recent circular is a desperate attempt to halt by fear the spread of contagion. One has only to read Dr Roger Griffin's manifesto for the last Council election to see how colleagues can be radicalized: his shocking account of the University Administration's behaviour in one recent matter is exemplary of a breakdown of trust. There are of course other examples before us.

I propose to conclude by reflecting on my own experience in this regard. Some years ago, as a result of my varied interactions with the promotions process, and after much thought, I put forward suggestions for comprehensive reform. On the face of it, my analysis of the problem was not accepted by the Board (although some of the moves to emasculate the Faculty Committees give pause for thought); certainly, the positive suggestions were not accepted. As a democrat I accepted the changes put through and turned my attention to making constructive suggestions for improvement of the new procedures, even though I was very doubtful that the new system could or would work fairly. Now that it is clear that detailed suggestions are all likely to be unacceptable to the Board and rejected without discussion, that course of action seems unprofitable. Perhaps, therefore, what I should do is instead to campaign hard for radical reform of the procedures. Another Report, another Notice, another radical: it's a peculiar way to run a university.

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