Reporter 19/6/02: Report of Discussion

Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 11 June 2002. A Discussion was held in the Council Room of the following Reports:

The Report of the Board of Scrutiny, dated 9 May 2002, on CAPSA (p. 835).

Dr S. LINTOTT:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, it is now over eight months since the reports commissioned by the Board of Scrutiny and the Audit Committee were published; twenty months since the implementation of CAPSA was first discussed at the Senate-House; and almost two years since CAPSA went live. That is a long time to be considering causes and drawing conclusions. However, given that CAPSA/CUFS is still a long way off from delivering on its original specification, the University needs to be assured that lessons have been learnt.

We take this opportunity to remind the Regent House of some conclusions that have been common to the various reports that have been made on CAPSA. The CAPSA project revealed mistakes in tendering, purchasing, and commissioning; mistakes in recruitment; and mistakes in oversight. It identified a lack of ownership and responsibility, of receptiveness to warnings, and failures in communication. It showed up deficiencies in the system of committees; a lack of clarity in their remits; a lack of definition in their responsibilities; and a governance structure in which shared responsibility has meant that nobody is responsible. It confronted the Regent House with an absence of cost control or accountability.

In pointing all of this out again, however, the Board is well aware that the subject of its Report is an incident which is already yesterday's news. The key question is no longer the details of the CAPSA/CUFS affair, but whether lessons have been learnt from it. The Board is happy to accept that, in some important ways, they have.

There have been positive developments over the last two years. Those in charge of administration and policy have been busy: substantial parts of CAPSA/CUFS are working adequately, though it is not clear that CAPSA/CUFS will ever deliver on its original specification despite continuing significant expenditure and valiant efforts by many officers and members of staff. Changes in governance have been discussed (or not), new appointments made, and a structure of directorates established. The Board has also been assured that morale has improved. Nevertheless, the Board remains concerned that the causes of the CAPSA fiasco have not been sufficiently addressed. Does our committee structure yet have clear remits? Can it respond urgently and effectively to emergencies? Is there ownership and responsibility? Has communication improved?

We have already seen that mismanagement of a financial system installation can lead to chaos. A more important matter is the finances which the financial system is designed to manage. We are aware of a growing problem in the University's finances, which have now gone badly into the red. If the questions we now raise cannot be answered in the affirmative, we may discover that mismanagement of finances can result not just in chaos but in disaster.

Dr D. R. J. LAMING:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, we should all thank the Board of Scrutiny, not only for their labour in producing this Report, but for the fact of the Report itself. Their task has not been an easy one, nor popular; but it contributes much in support of our tradition of academic self-government. When things have visibly gone wrong, it is the habit of managements of all kinds to close ranks and share out the responsibility as widely as possible. The Board are quite right when they say that 'the Council took what was virtually the first opportunity that presented itself to announce that it intended to absolve [the principal officers concerned]'.

That kind of criticism is not pleasant from management's point of view. But - and this is the point I emphasize - it makes an important contribution to the continuing good health of this University as an academic institution. The Board have performed a service for which we should all be grateful. The Board has the right to make enquiry of the University officers and to see any document that is relevant to its enquiry. It has the right to report to the University, and its Reports are much more careful researched and considered than any single speech at Discussion. The Board is the nearest body we have to a 'Her Majesty's Opposition'. We should pay careful attention to what it says, lest we lapse into 'cosiness', complacency, and cover-up.

But this does not mean that I agree with all that the Board reports. In paragraph 17 the Board talks of 'a breakdown of relations between the lower levels of the University administration and the top'. This reads like an inference from the observation that 'many … in the lower ranks … who would have to operate the new system [CAPSA] foresaw what would happen, tried to warn against it, and were unable to make their voices heard.' I think that a simpler, more limited, inference will suffice.

Imagine a departmental accounts clerk trying the new system in advance of 'go-live'. She reports to her superior that the new system is clumsy/tedious/time-consuming/error-prone/'all but impossible to operate'. If her superior then spends two hours or so inputting accounts data himself, he will know what his accounts clerk is complaining about and that CAPSA cannot possibly be allowed to go live in its then present state. But if, because of pressure of other work or as a matter of preserving his dignity, he merely says 'I'll see to it!', that is the one thing he will not do. He will not 'see to it' because he has not discovered what the defects are that need to be 'seen to'.

Earlier in paragraph 13 the Board observes that 'half the senior members [of Council] were already members at the time the CAPSA fiasco occurred, and hence [are] in some sense responsible for it themselves.' This raises a profound issue that I wish the Board had pursued further.

I am one of those senior members of Council. The first occasion on which Council was briefed about CAPSA was at its meeting of 25 September 2000 - after the disaster of 'go-live'. As a matter of technical responsibility, Council received the minutes of the Finance Committee at its meeting on 24 July 2000 and Finance Committee Minute 981 announced that CAPSA would go live on 1 August 2000. That minute amounted to four lines in a pile of papers, printed on both sides, about two inches thick. It was not drawn to the Council's attention and would not have evoked any comment if it had been. A similar situation obtained at the Council's meeting of 12 June 2000. Finance Committee Minute 969, put before Council at that meeting, ran to 18 lines and mentioned 'considerable problems' with the implementation of CAPSA. While two minutes of the Finance Committee were drawn to the Council's attention for that meeting, Minute 969 was not one of them.

To put the matter bluntly, Council can only deliberate on the basis of the information put before it. An individual member of Council who happened by chance to know of the difficulties faced by CAPSA could, of course, have raised those problems in person. Such individual initiatives are not generally welcomed. I have seen it happen. The answer in this case would simply have been to refer the matter to the Finance Committee. In short, while Council is technically responsible, it cannot exercise that technical responsibility unless it is well informed of the matters it has to deliberate about, and a four-line minute, unflagged, in a two-inch thick pile of papers does not, to my mind, equate to 'well informed'. Have all the members of Council resign and the outcome would have been just the same.

That is why the Board of Scrutiny are right to complain that there has been no enquiry, more detailed than the reports by Professors Finkelstein and Shattock. That is why we need a body like the Board of Scrutiny to pick up on our 'cosiness', our complacency, and our cover-up. That is why we should all be thanking the Board for their courageous Report.

Dr O. RACKHAM:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am a member of the Board of Scrutiny. These remarks are based on my researches while on the Board; but they are mine, and do not necessarily represent the Board's views.

Cambridge is the world's leading University, or so we like to think. Much of the hardware that made CAPSA possible was the result of research done at Cambridge. We have excellent Departments in relevant fields: computing, economics, business administration, and social anthropology. Other Departments have highly professional Computer Officers. But we made little use of our own professionals. They were not brought in to guide the development of CAPSA, and when they offered advice it was either rejected or got lost on the way.

In the event we, Cambridge University, fared no better than if we had been a bunch of petty bureaucrats. We went down the same ignominious and well-trodden road to disaster as the London ambulance administrators or the Passport Office. We had already been down that road in the 1960s, when we switched on a computerized accounting system and it didn't work. The then Treasurer of the Botany School tells me that at one point he could not pay the cleaners because the system failed to produce any ten-shilling notes.

The original purpose of computers seems to have been lost sight of. Were they not invented in order to make life easier, to save labour on repetitive operations? I have corresponded extensively with users of CAPSA. None of my informants says it works better than the previous system, or even than pen and paper, and most say it is far more labour-intensive. That is what we have got for spending money that might have kept us out of the red or have paid for a large number of assistant staff posts.

Professor Shattock refers to the University's 'lack of respect for the professional and preference for the amateur approach' (his report, paragraph 10.3). In accepting this I find it difficult, in the context of CAPSA, to tell which is which. Much of the advice that we paid for seems to have been decidedly amateurish. From experience in my College I can reconstruct what may have happened. Consultants propose expensive and over-optimistic schemes; and their employers dare not press their own doubts, thinking the professionals are paid to know better. One function of amateurs is to curb the enthusiasm of professionals, and on this occasion they didn't do it.

The three great blunders that wrecked CAPSA were not abstruse matters that only professionals could have understood. They should be part of every educated person's culture.

(1) Lack of a contingency plan. Everyone concerned should have known that systems of this kind have a habit of not working first time. There were plenty of precedents, including in this University. There would have been at least a 50% chance that CAPSA would not work, however well organized. Why was this not provided against?

(2) Switching on a complex system all at once.

'The worst mistake, however, was to start large instead of small. The pain of any of the other mistakes would have been bearable and would have yielded useful instruction had it occurred on a small scale.'

Those are the words of an American businessman, not a professional, with whom I discussed the matter. If he knew this, why didn't the CAPSA steering committee or the Principal Officers?

(3) Sticking to a prearranged timetable in defiance of warnings. It takes no advanced professional qualification not to switch on a complex new machine until it has been thoroughly tested and every part agreed to be in working order. If the Computer Officers tell you it will probably crash,¹ you don't overrule them, even if they haven't told you through the right channels.

I am appalled to find that so many of the anthropological howlers over CAPSA are already there in the works of Northcote Parkinson forty years ago. Does nobody still read Parkinson? Or do they think that what he said somehow doesn't apply to them?

For example, Parkinson's vision of the spaceship:

'Now, about November 15', says the Information Officer. 'I understand that the Minister is to be there for the launching. The reception afterwards has all been arranged but there is a problem about the massed bands. Will the music be audible above the rocket noises? …'

'But, look, Smoothleigh, we never guaranteed completion by November 15 …'

'Really, Thoroughgood, I hardly know whether to take you seriously. The whole thing is arranged now. Do you realize what a postponement will mean? What a blow to our prestige? And do you realize what it will mean if the Russians have their space ship launched before ours?'²

Parkinson's satire was published in 1960. It was performed as tragic reality with a real spaceship 26 years later, as Dr Laming reminded us in the Discussion of a month ago.³ We performed it again as amateur farce with CAPSA 14 years after that. Does even Cambridge University never learn?

There has been a tendency to confuse the CAPSA issue with the matters of governance now before the University. I agree with my colleagues on the Board that the particular proposals on which the University has recently been consulted would have made little difference to CAPSA, other than making it more difficult to demand why the Finance Committee and Principal Officers failed to intervene. Mere governance will not compensate for individuals' lack of common-sense. We delude ourselves if we think that even the best organization could have brought the risk of failure much below 50%, or done away with the need for a back-up plan.

To quote Parkinson again, published in 1962:

After more than fifty years of tightening control, with all initiative killed at the circumference and all leisure abolished at the top, some people have begun to ask whether much that is now technically possible is, always and everywhere, practically wise. Some newly formed commercial empires, the result of mergers, have preferred to avoid centralization except for purposes of raising capital …⁴

CAPSA was a fine rich example of the perils of the Us and Them culture which Professor Finkelstein deplored (his report, paragraph 6.6): authoritarianism and incompetence at the centre, combined with lack of response to the people at the periphery on whom the system was foisted. That culture took a stride forward when, for example, departmental staff were commanded to go to training sessions in June, as if they had nothing else to do.

Some will say that - to coin a phrase - we should draw a line under the past and move on to the future. I believe this to be wrong: 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'. Not recording and publicizing the details of why something failed is a recipe for repeating the failure. The Cambridge débacle of the 1960s was just too long enough ago to be remembered. Had we remembered it we might have avoided re-running it. There will be plenty more opportunities of re-running it in the future: the Student Records System will be the first. Must Cambridge in the twenty-first century go on repeating the mistakes of the twentieth?

Dr G. A. REID:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I wish to comment briefly on paragraphs 11 to 15 of the Board of Scrutiny Report: the section headed Governance in action. The Board say, briefly put, that Professors Shattock and Finkelstein identify serious failings of both management and governance. The Board, last November, had stated their belief that in consequence the Council owed a duty to the University to satisfy themselves that the principal officers concerned were competent to do the jobs they hold. Yet far from conducting a detailed enquiry, the Council absolved the officers before even the Discussion of the Shattock-Finkelstein report had taken place. The Council (half of whom were members at the time the CAPSA fiasco occurred) failed in their duty to the University in their rush to judgment and acquittal.

As a member of the Council I should respond to those charges, which it is the Board's duty to make, though of course I respond in a personal capacity only and not in any sense on behalf of my colleagues.

After the section of the Board's Report on Governance in action comes the final section of their Report, on Doing things differently. In paragraphs 16 and 17 there we find reference to trust and confidence: trust and confidence between the central administration and the Faculties and Departments; and trust and confidence between the lower levels of the University administration and the top. Those values have application to the Council too.

The responsibility of the Council, and of each of the members of the Council, is to carry forward to the best of their judgement and ability the business and administration of the University. Professors Shattock and Finkelstein did the University a great service in their penetrating and lucid report. Their instructions are set out in Appendix I to Professor Shattock's report. In short, their task was to examine and report on the facts and to look to the lessons to be learnt. Their remit was not to draw up indictments against those guilty of misconduct in their offices. Their role was not to serve as the initiators of a disciplinary process.

'The principal officers concerned', as the Board of Scrutiny describe them in paragraph 12 of their Report, are people and have feelings. Their feelings we should very properly disregard. But they are officers too and their rights as such may not be overlooked. They enjoy the protection of Statute U and the more general expectation of fair dealing and just procedure at the hands of the University. The issue that the Council had to decide was this. Was there a sufficient prima facie case against any officer to make it desirable, in the interests of the University, that a disciplinary investigation be conducted into the facts found by Professors Shattock and Finkelstein; that proceedings be instituted before the University Tribunal; and that justice take its slow, deliberate, and costly course?

I myself looked at the matter in that way, but also perhaps more particularly in a somewhat different fashion. Were trust and confidence gone? My answer to both formulations of the question was, very simply, no. If one asks, were mistakes made? Then the answer is, plainly yes. If one asks, as do the Board of Scrutiny, were the Council right to take their decision so quickly, then my answer is yes. Trust and confidence are a two-way street. If the Council wish to retain the trust and confidence of their officers, then they must be prepared to make expeditious judgements where circumstances require it and not leave them to dangle hapless in the wind. We live in an imperfect world, with imperfect officers, and - but I speak for myself only - an imperfect Council. Let us not set our judgements against the backcloth of some other, illusory, canvas.

These are serious matters, and I make no criticism of the Board of Scrutiny for pointing them up to us. The boundary between cosiness - no mere illusory danger - and working together in the common good can be a narrow one. But if I ask myself now, would my view have altered had the decision been made today, rather than straightaway on receiving the Shattock-Finkelstein report? My answer is, no.

Which said, trust and confidence are not to be taken for granted by any officer. So I perceive my own position within my College. And so I will continue, while I serve on the Council, to apply my judgement in respect of each and every one of the principal officers of the University.

Dr D. R. DE LACEY:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, to attend this Discussion I have had to take precious time out from a major project providing software for this year's Tripos for one of my Faculties. I have done this for two reasons; the first is the magnitude of the impact of CAPSA and hence its importance for us; the second is my concern that this is now the only way one can guarantee to apprise oneself of the content of Discussions.

This is an admirable Report, clear and specific. If any complain that it says too much in picking over old sores, it could have gone farther. The Board of Scrutiny acknowledges that CAPSA does not yet work. It does not note, though it could, that the words quoted from the UFS website, 'The University staff have been fully involved in every stage of the design of the system', belie the fact that after the departure of Bayles Consultancy the client requirements gained from this involvement were quietly ditched. The Board comments on the huge future investment which CAPSA will yet cost. It does not question, though perhaps it should, the basis on which the interim upgrade to 11.03 is to be made, and what assessments have been done to assure ourselves that this represents value for money. The Board does also comment on the Council's failure of duty towards the University in refusing to make our principal officers take responsibility for their actions, a duty which the Board is not alone in considering 'the minimum necessary' (sections 13-14). It is to be hoped it will continue to press for more to be done.

It is not only in the world of CAPSA that 'decisions just happen, … and no one is accountable' (section 14). CAPSA perhaps served to focus our minds on a sizeable number of aspects of our administration which could be characterized as 'dysfunctional behaviour' (section 16). We have just issued job descriptions for two crucial posts in the University. At least one of these appears to anticipate a vague and fuzzy individual to run MISD, corporate middle (muddled?) management rather than IT leading edge. The advertisement and job description are poorly drafted and sadly unlikely to attract the kind of person we need. Shall we know who is responsible for this? According to the other, a major task of our next Vice-Chancellor is to spearhead a great celebration in 2009. If Council continues to ignore the warnings and recommendations of the Board of Scrutiny, as the administration continues to ignore its 'lower ranks' (section 17), there may be very little left to celebrate by then.

Mr R. J. DOWLING:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I wish to speak on paragraph 17 regarding failures of communication and the need for management to be more 'receptive'. I wish to furnish some concrete examples to focus people's minds during their consideration of this Report.

Prior to 'go-live' the Director of MISD attempted to silence a Computer Officer of the chemical laboratories by 'phoning the Acting Head of the laboratories. He failed, but the Computer Officer has subsequently left the University. His crime? Frank comment and hard questions in a public arena regarding CAPSA.

In e-mail discussions involving members of MISD and University Computer Officers, an explicit request was made for 'go-live' to be delayed until a critical usability issue was addressed. It never was. No dialogue was entered into.

Also prior to 'go-live', bugs were found in the purchasing module. This was blamed on networking. All technical responses saying how implausible this was were ignored. (The University's network infrastruc-ture cannot distinguish data packets from purchasing modules from any other module.)

This failure of communication needs to be addressed because I think it is at the heart of where CAPSA went wrong.

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, have you read the Newsletter of June/July 2002? That is the publication of the University of Cambridge put out by our spin-doctors, where you get only the 'good news', as distinct from the full story you get from the Reporter until that censorship Grace goes through. (Read all about it while you can.)

Page 3: 'The governance proposals [which the Newsletter, like CAM, is heavily marketing] take account of criticisms in the various reports into the introduction of a new financial system in 2000'. But Press Office, you are a little ahead of yourselves. The governance proposals are not published as a Report until I believe, tomorrow or even next week. We here, the University of Cambridge in our Parliament, have not read them yet. Or are you referring to that ill-thought-out, hasty, and universally criticized document a couple of Vice-Chancellarial hopefuls were hawking round the University last term?

Page 3 continues (no picture of a well-endowed young female to cheer the reader up, I fear. This may be our tabloid but it is not the Sun). The present Report of the Board of Scrutiny is mentioned. But not its criticisms. No. We get a quotation from a footnote. Readers of the Newsletter will get a quite different impression. They are told that the Board of Scrutiny, 'take some comfort in the fact that those responsible for CUFS [note the name-change, as in Consignia] are working very hard to improve it, that the system is improving, and that there is room for hope that the technical problems will eventually be overcome'.

Those who put the Newsletter together seem to be aware that the University's staff are still not happy about CAPSA. They get a special mention. Their attention is drawn to the Council's statement (Reporter, p. 340) with the apology. They are reminded that the Council 'regretted' the failures 'and paid tribute to the continuing support of staff throughout the University whose lives had been made more onerous as a result' of CAPSA. For it is CAPSA in everyone's thoughts.

The devil is not merely in the detail, but also in the font-size. I understand the low-down on the operation of CAPSA goes round in 7-point type. It is hard enough for the academic and general community to get a sufficient grip on what they are told in Reports to encourage them to turn up and take advantage of the inestimable privilege of having a right to have their say in their own affairs. (Not something they would get elsewhere.) It is asking a lot to expect that everyone should carry a magnifying glass.

But the Board of Scrutiny has helpfully done some peering for us. I will be uncharacteristically brief.

1. Improve the quality of the information about the operation of CAPSA. Make it, in every sense, readable.

2. Take seriously the need for the system to be clear in operation and not so complex that it generates errors by its sheer difficulty of use.

3. Switch on that commitment accounting so that the University is not spending in the dark (with consequences for our deficit which are beginning to look more than a little alarming).

4. Own up about the unreliability, the incompatibilities, the huge long-term additional running costs. Stop insulting our intelligence with bland assurances. Think again about whether any heads will roll. Though, frankly, I do not know how the owners of the heads attached to certain senior shoulders can hold them up and look us in the eye, and why sheer common decency (or the ultimate Byers cumulative effect) does not get them handing in their letters of resignation for which we should greatly have respected them if they had written them last year. Of course they have the protection of Statute U if they will not go voluntarily. Grievances can take five or ten years to be heard in this University. Disciplinary processes may yet (slowly) roll.

5. The most important thing I want to say is the biggest. It is shocking, even to the battle-hardened like me, to find that the Governance Committee is ploughing on regardless with its untested, ill-thought-out project to change our governance by giving more powers to those at whose door the CAPSA scandal has been laid. Paragraph 17 of the Report before us really says it all. The ordinary troops who tried to warn about CAPSA's inevitable failure, the Computer Officers who really knew what they were talking about, were ignored by those arrogant bastards. And the Governance Committee, appointed by some of the same arrogant bastards (hope this is not defamatory) and the spin-doctors in the Vice-Chancellor's Office, have the nerve to blame the community and pretend that it was that very democratic structure in which everyone ought to be able to speak and be listened to, that was somehow at fault. Are they expecting the ignored and oppressed staff to be mollified by that sop in the Newsletter?

And yes, I know I was on the Council at that time, but at least I did try to call a halt. Dr Laming is quite right about the belatedness of a full report to the Council on 25 September 2000. Questions raised earlier were ignored. A healthy habit of mutual trust would not have let that happen. The senior heads Dr Reid defends should not have been allowed to put themselves so far in the wrong and so far at fault.

And the future? In the Reporter this week (pp. 862-3) you may read the illiterate brief which the Council have agreed for the selection of the next Vice-Chancellor and passed on to their Advisory Committee. Remember, the next we hear will be a name with a Grace attached to it. There is quite a lot on money and the management of money in that brief, as is only right when the Vice-Chancellor is the University's Chief Accounting Officer to the Higher Education Funding Council. The incomer will not have a lot to worry about, though. The Notice speaks of 'the successful tenure of Professor Sir Alec Broers since 1996', so his replacement will only have to match up to CAPSA standards to be successful too.

But he (or she if the Principal of Homerton makes it) does, apparently, have to 'secure a financial base sufficient to allow the delivery of the university's mission, aims, and objectives'. That will be no mean feat since the 'mission' and the 'goal' are described in quite different terms within a few sentences of each other on p. 862. But then, he or she is to have 'academic credibility' so he or she will not be fazed by little things like contradictoriness and inconsistency in the job specification. The 'academic credibility' is not, however, in any 'order of preference' in the list which includes 'experience of philanthropic fundraising, including outside the UK' and 'a strong network of external contacts' (p. 863). Those will be needed to get more money to pour in to make up for our rumoured £34m deficit.

Madam DEPUTY VICE-CHANCELLOR: Could you return to the topic of discussion?

Dr G. R. EVANS: I don't think I have strayed from the topic of discussion. We are talking about the financial future of the University, Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor. May I continue? I have only three or four lines.

The Newsletter reassures me. All is well in the best of all worlds, and soon, soon we shall have a 'Vice-Chancellor of the stature and presence commensurate to lead this major and distinguished academic institution' and quite capable of rising above the infelicities of that phrasing as above the continuing scandal of CAPSA, and ready to give 'complete commitment to the University of Cambridge'. The Notice tells us we have had one since 1996 and he has been able to do that while holding a non-executive Directorship of Vodafone, so (failing that ambitious internal gang), why shouldn't a big businessman suit us nicely? Someone from our benefactor Marconi? We know how good they are at financial control at Marconi and Vodafone.

Professor M. SCHOFIELD:

Madam Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as we have already been reminded, mid-June is a busy time of year for most of us, and I have just three brief things to say, though mostly to repeat less precisely what Dr Reid has already said.

First, the Report reminds us of what a miserable experience for the University CAPSA/CUFS has been and in many ways continues to be. As a member of the Council since 1997 I express my own regret that the Council for its part did not exercise more effective control at the key points highlighted in Professor Shattock's report. I have been teaching in the University for thirty years now. I have tried my best not to let colleagues or students down throughout that time, and I can assure you the regret is sincere.

Second, I have also to say - as an individual, not of course formally on behalf of the Council - that the Report badly misconstrues things when it says that the Council rushed into judgement and acquittal of the University's principal officers with regard to the discharge of their duties in the matter. The Council made no 'judgement' on the officers at all, no more than did Professors Shattock and Finkelstein, who stressed systemic failings and among their many recommendations made no suggestion that an investigation directed to the question of whether the principal officers concerned were competent should be undertaken. It is the Board of Scrutiny who construe and construct the Council's statement as judgement, and who for all the kind words in their footnote about the reports of Professors Shattock and Finkelstein in effect imply that they were wrong not to recommend such an investigation. For the Board's view appears to be that the Council should have launched a further enquiry neither undertaken nor proposed by the authors of the reports on CAPSA which were specifically commissioned by the Council and the Board to analyse what had happened and to point the right way for the future.

Third, suppose the Council had set such an enquiry in train, implicitly or explicitly targeted, unlike the Shattock-Finkelstein enquiry, at particular individuals. Whether such an enquiry would have established anything more definitive than Professor Shattock's and Professor Finkelstein's investigations achieved in this regard must be considered doubtful. More importantly, to me at least it is hard to see how that hypothetical enquiry could have been conducted without either suspending the officers concerned or still worse leaving them in a limbo where they had neither the clear support of the Council in their attempts to do their jobs nor the option of not doing them. What could have been confidently predicted would have been something akin to planning blight for several months in an administration which Professor Shattock convincingly argued is still undersized, underpowered, and undervalued by the University, with grim consequences for the on-going process of decision-making and management in the University at a time of exceptional difficulty. The principal officers concerned are to my knowledge honourable, talented, and hard-working servants of the University, on whom we all rely heavily. I am quite sure that the Council were right to express confidence in their commitment to moving things forward, and I am pleased the Board note in their paragraph 15 evidence of our having had some success in making progress.

That said, the Board are obviously quite right, as a number of this afternoon's speakers have reinforced, that the Council still have a lot to do and ponder in the wake of the CAPSA episode.

¹ Reporter, 2001-02, p. 354.

² C. Northcote Parkinson, The British Waste Line (1962).

³ Reporter, 2001-02, pp. 742f.

⁴ C. Northcote Parkinson, Paperwork (1962)

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