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Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 12 October 1999. The remarks made at this Discussion that were held over from the Reporter of 27 October (see p. 94) are published below. Under the provisions of Statute D, VIII, 8 the Council has directed that, for the purposes of the publication of these remarks, the Deputy Registrary be appointed Editor of the Reporter. Under the provisions of Regulation 6 for Discussions (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 113) the Editor has omitted five passages from the remarks made by Dr Evans; these omissions are indicated by square brackets.

The Joint Report of the Council and the General Board, dated 26 July and 21 July 1999, on the implementation in Cambridge of the 1999 pay increase for non-clinical academic and academic-related staff (Reporter, 1998-99, p. 920).

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr. Deputy Vice-Chancellor, this Report on proposed pay increases strengthens the trend to differential pay. (And before someone starts a story that I am motivated by discontent at the smallness of my Lecturer's salary, I believe they acknowledge in the Old Schools that I cannot be bought.)

This Report should be read in conjunction with Staff development policy: Academic staff, a text of unknown drafting and provenance printed in the Reporter of 11 August, p. 949. It contains no provision, as far as I can see, to ensure that the big leading players will be either properly trained for their responsibilities, or accountable for the exercise of their growing new powers over their new subordinates.

'We recommend a fundamental reappraisal of training arrangements',1 said the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in its recent report on the Southampton Institute. I heartily support that. (Members of the Regent House should be aware that that was a case in which the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards had more than a hand; as its Public Policy Secretary, I assure you that we do get results.)

Cambridge comes top of league-tables for teaching and research. I do not think we should dare to enter any competition in which our administrative practice - whether of our committees or our paid administration - was exposed to scrutiny.

So where do we begin?

If you have reason to be dissatisfied with the handling of anything by or in the Old Schools, send a formal complaint to the Registrary.

If he tells you that your complaint has to go to the Secretary General and you have found that everything disappears into another universe behind the Secretary General's door, then the Registrary is your man. He is the Secretary General's boss and ought to be able to retrieve your urgent questions from the fourth dimension. But then they have to go on working together....

If the complaint were to be about the Registrary himself, you would have to go to the Vice-Chancellor, and then you would be asking him to stand back and give you an independent view of your complaint about his right-hand man.

If it is the Vice-Chancellor's head you think should roll, there is provision under Statute U, but only for a direct attempt to remove him from office. Three members of the Council could seek to do that, but there surely ought to be some avenue of recourse short of the ultimate sanction.

The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee realized there was a problem-area here: 'The Funding Council found that procedures for dealing with concerns involving the Institute Director were inadequate.'2

'There should have been a proper mechanism for dealing with complaints against the former Director'.3

I invoked Statute K, 5 recently. The Vice-Chancellor chose as his deputy Professor Newland, a fellow engineer and big leading player, who deals professionally in 'random vibrations'. I pause there for artistic effect. He was asked to decide a fine point of administrative law.

The Vice-Chancellor did not send me the 'decision' with his signature and a date, thus preventing me from utilizing the seven days available to me under the Statute to collect fifty signatures to go to the Chancellor. The Registrary, whose conduct I had challenged under the Statute, had been sent the 'decision', however. When I protested, I got a dismissive letter which the Registrary honourably owned up to having written himself for the Vice-Chancellor's signature. The Vice-Chancellor assures me that 'in no circumstances do I sign letters without careful review of the supporting material and without being fully in agreement with their content'. I invite very careful scrutiny of that sentence and checking-up on the Vice-Chancellor's knowledge of the 'supporting material' when you get a letter from him in future.

How long is it since I asked for Statute K, 5 to be revised so that we might have a means of calling to account which works?

I return to the PAC report: 'Where individuals had raised issues…they were not confident that their cases had been considered fully and acted upon.…This was a totally unacceptable way to deal with the legitimate concerns of staff about the management of the Institute and its governance'.4

Statute U seems to be one of the Statutes the Vice-Chancellor (advised by the senior officers) takes seriously only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Several members of the Regent House who have tried to get help through the grievance procedure have, apparently, hit periods when the Statute was not in force. HEFCE has been asked by the PAC to review 'how effectively... grievance procedures operate in practice'.5 I shall be glad to tell them my own story of trying to get the Vice-Chancellor to do what Statute U requires and look at my situation through the grievance procedures (which would have kept us out of the courts). Delay can amount to maladministration.

My Faculty Promotions Committee was informed by one of its own members that my grievance case against him 'had been dropped'. So that was a misrepresentation on which the Faculty Committee relied because no action had been taken when I complained. What other pieces of false information have been fed to my Faculty and loll in the promotions documentation like land-mines without my even knowing they are there? It would be improper for me to go into how loosely senior officers in the Old Schools have sat in at least two or three other cases to the requirements of the Statute.

Where a cock-up is to be covered up, rather than put smartly right, a duty of confidentiality is likely to be prayed in aid. I do hope the union representing one of our recently dismissed assistant staff will ask formally to know what was the decision of the Council on 27 September. The Council is seeking to gag me on this point with calls for my resignation. The Registrary sent me a letter about 'breach of confidence'.

[153 words omitted]

Of course, the Vice-Chancellor whose pay is about to be inflated has many strengths. He has done sterling work for us in raising funds and building up links with industry. He has discovered the humanities (though I wish whoever wrote the bit about the humanities in this year's 1 October speech (p. 24) could have improved on 'the conceptualization, organization, and presentation of primary research' for 'writing a book'.)

I come back to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee Report: 'It appeared to the Committee that problems had arisen because the Institute had been dominated by a small cabal of people'.6

'Problems arose partly because undue control rested with a small cabal of governors and senior staff'7.

Every Monday morning at 8.30 a.m. you may see the central members of our cabal converging on the Vice-Chancellor's room in the Old Schools. The Vice-Chancellor, the Registrary, the Secretary General, the Treasurer, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors who are the Vice-Chancellor's personal nominees, with one or two others, make plans in secret. The Council finds out later on about some of the things they decide, but often not until a scheme has gone too far for it to be easy to stop it. Anyway, a dormouse would feel at home among us.

While we are on the subject of the need for good quality administration in return for these pay rises, you may be interested to know what happened when I appealed against my Faculty Promotions Committee's decision that I had become less worthy of consideration for a Chair this year than last. The appeal went to the General Board's all-purpose Appeal Committee of three scientists, a philosopher, and a Nobel prize-winning economist, whose membership was notified to candidates at the last minute in August. (Why not sooner?) No one with a knowledge of fair procedure.

The misinformation about the status of my grievance allowed Professor Blanning 'to participate fully in the work of the Committee'. But lo, I learn that after I sought an injunction in June, 'legal advice was received' by the Faculty Committee, and 'Professor Blanning withdrew from further consideration' of my case. But I thought no further material was to be admitted? That was certainly the basis on which the Secretary General refused to let the Faculty Committee receive all those letters to the Vice-Chancellor from people all over the country saying that they did not think I could get a fair hearing, those letters which it will be recollected the Vice-Chancellor had undertaken that they would receive.

So what did the Appeal Committee do? It 'concluded that the outcome would not have been altered'. In R.v.Board of Governors of Sheffield Hallam University and others ex parte R [1995] ELR 267, you may read, 'if a party in breach of proper procedure is to escape the ordinary consequence by asserting that nothing has been lost by the breach, it is for the party to demonstrate it'.

They appear to be above the rule that they must not fetter their own discretion too. They held a meeting on my procedural objections to their acting, timetabled to continue into their single main meeting. So they could decide only one way. The General Board were waiting with their own timetable, which of course the rules do not allow them to vary, it being in force at all times and not only on Wednesdays when there is an 'R' in the month.

[91 words omitted]

I expected nothing better, really. But it does grieve me that we have achieved so little by way of transparency and the use of 'relevant expertise' after five years of struggle for reform.

I expect Mrs Collins-Taylor will be allowed to revise the procedures again, as she did last year and the year before, with limited help or supervision; and this year, because you voted to let the General Board have complete control, you will get no say at all, members of the Regent House. The General Board may take its head out of the tea-pot for a moment as the procedures go past its nose. But the Mad Hatter's tea-party of our administration will go on. The system can carry on getting more and more secretive, more and more unaccountable, more and more uncritical of slapdash decision-making, until the old patronage systems are safely back in place.

I seem to appear on the BIDS database (the arts and humanities equivalent of bibliometric measures for scientists) more often than most of my judges. I am not sure that I should take it as a compliment if such 'judges' ever found in my favour. I take some comfort from the fact that on 1 October (p. 24), the Vice-Chancellor uttered the name of F. R. Leavis as one of the 'eminent figures' in the humanities of which Cambridge should be proud. Someone should have alerted him to the embarrassing fact of Cambridge's failure to give Leavis recognition by promotion.

Let us make these pay rises conditional upon an improvement in the quality of our administration.

1 Overseas Operations, Governance and Management at Southampton Institute, Committee of Public Accounts, Twenty-Sixth Report, 1999, 3(b).

2 'The decision of the Institute Director was final in all cases, including where the cases involved himself'. ibid., 21.

3 'We asked the Funding Council whether it was acceptable that the Institute Director could draw up his own rules, even where decisions affected himself. They agreed it was not'. ibid., 23.

4 ibid., 4(viii).

5 ibid., 4(ix) and 41.

6 ibid., 16.

7 ibid., 4(vi).

The Report of the General Board, dated 21 July 1999, on the establishment of Professorships of Linguistics, Psychology in the Social Sciences, and Plant Ecology (Reporter 1998-99, p. 925).

Professor B. TURNER (read by Dr G. DUVEEN):

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as the incoming Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences, I wish to welcome the recommendation contained in this Report for the establishment of a Professorship of Psychology in the Social Sciences. The basis for this proposal came from the recommendations of the General Board's Review Committee Report in 1998. In the discussions leading up to that Report, as well as in subsequent discussions within the Faculty and with the Council of the Schools and the General Board, establishing Chairs within each of the constituent disciplines making up the Faculty was recognized as a key element for the strategic development of the Faculty. The General Board's initiative for proleptic appointments in advance of the next RAE provides the first opportunity to seek the additional resources which will give tangible form to these strategic discussions.

As the Report notes, a Professorship of Psychology in the Social Sciences will not only strengthen the Faculty's submission to the next RAE, but, perhaps more importantly, will also help to provide coherence and leadership for the Faculty's research in Psychology in the years following that exercise. There is much good research in Social and Developmental Psychology within the Faculty at present, and the appointment of a senior figure in either of these fields will help to raise the profile of SPS and Cambridge as a centre for research in these areas.

This will, of course, not be the first Chair in Psychology to be established in the University. That distinction belongs to the Chair of Experimental Psychology which was established in 1931 and held for many years by one of the seminal figures in Psychology, F. C. Bartlett. By 1931 though, the study of Psychology at Cambridge had already made a distinguished contribution to the history of the discipline as a whole. The first University post in Psychology was a Lectureship in Psychology and Physiology established in 1893, and the original holder of this post was W. H. R. Rivers. And only last year we celebrated the centenary of the expedition to the Torres Straits in which Rivers and other Cambridge psychologists, notably William McDougall and C. S. Myers, collaborated with colleagues in Anthropology under the direction of A. C. Haddon. In looking back to these early contributions to Psychology in Cambridge, one is struck by the extent to which the discipline has always been both a natural and a social science. As one of the founders of modern Psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, argued more than a century ago, these two contexts provide a complementary frame for the discipline as a whole, a theme which was echoed in the work of Bartlett himself. A new Professorship of Psychology in the Social Sciences can thus be seen as continuing a Cambridge tradition, as much as contributing to the future development of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences.

Professor R. A. LEIGH:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I speak as Professor of Botany and Head of the Department of Plant Sciences. On behalf of the Department, I welcome the proposal to create a Professorship of Plant Ecology. Cambridge has made many contributions to Plant Ecology, ranging from the establishment of methods to trace and understand vegetational histories to the development of physiological approaches to elucidate why some plants succeed in particular environments, while others do not. However, after retirements and other changes, Plant Ecology is no longer as strongly represented as it once was. Yet there are many problems of an ecological nature that need to be addressed - from the challenge of understanding how environmental changes of various sorts will affect plant communities, to applying developments in Molecular Genetics to understanding the genetic basis for plant success in relation to habitat factors. In addition, there is a strong and continuing demand from students for teaching in Ecology, which is presently provided cooperatively by the Departments of Plant Sciences and Zoology. The new Professorship is an opportunity for Cambridge to contribute to the research challenges in Plant Ecology and to maintain the strength of ecological teaching within the spectrum of Botanical Sciences. It will also help to maintain the University's historical pre-eminence in this subject. This University has one of the few Departments left in the UK that is dedicated solely to teaching and research in Plant and Fungal Sciences. The creation of this Professorship will ensure that Ecology is appropriately represented and led within the Department.

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, these are the first of our proleptic appointments in advance of the next Research Assessment Exercise. The buying in for the RAE was a public scandal last time round. I hope it will be so again. So whose idea is it? If I, as a extremely vigilant member of the Council, cannot uncover the policy-making trail, I think you should all be worried with me. The General Board is going ahead with this despite repeated requests to put the matter down for Discussion as a matter of policy.

The Parliamentary Accounts Committee Report on the Southampton Institute is intended to be used in universities at large: 'We urge the Funding Council to speed up their efforts to help the sector improve their costing procedures.'1

It is impossible to say what 'costing procedures' we have undertaken. I have repeatedly asked, but no one can point me to any. We need to score as high as possible in the RAE, it seems to be reasoned, in order to get more funding. This is in part public money, and we should not spend it without proper stocktaking.

'Income-generating activities make an important contribution to the funding of higher education institutions, but involve risks that need to be managed carefully and professionally'.2

'The National Audit office found that the Institute had decided to proceed without undertaking careful planning, including market research, investment appraisal and sensitivity analysis'.3

I repeat: to my knowledge we have done none of these things before putting this Report to the Regent House.

I learn that our pensioners who took early retirement are receiving a letter from the Vice-Chancellor inviting them to commit themselves to giving £25 a month to their University. Then they are telephoned by junior members pragmatically practising for a career in salesmanship, to clinch the deal. I should have thought there was something profoundly wrong with asking our students to beg for money for an institution, already formidably wealthy, to which they now have to pay fees out of their own pockets.

Perhaps these students are encouraged to believe that it is for their benefit that the University - already the richest in the UK - seeks to grow richer still by such ploys as this. Those same students got a financial kick in the teeth in July which underlines, I believe, how little those in charge of this spending on the RAE really care about the application of our resources to student welfare.

I want to set the following stories by way of contrast beside the proposals in this Report to lash out £1.3m on proleptic appointments before RAE 2001. It may be recollected that, when I last went to court, in June, to try to get the University to keep the rules in the purple book of promotions procedures, the University ran up a costs bill of £5,000 getting its costs of £5,000 and now seeks to take the whole £10,000 from me. Upon the Executive Committee, at the stage when it was decided to resist my application, rather than accept that there was a problem about appearance of bias in allowing things to run remorselessly on, were Professor Bob Hepple, Master of Clare, Dr Rosy Thornton, an academic lawyer in the field of property, the chemist, Professor Sanders, Dr MacLeod of Engineering, and Professor Tony Badger of the History Faculty Promotions Committee (I think an exclamation mark is allowable there). The Vice-Chancellor chairs this committee, and I believe the Registrary and the Secretary General are in attendance. The Executive Committee then decided on 20 July to reject my offer to pay a substantial sum to a ring-fenced fund for the benefit of students in difficulty over the payment of their fees, as a sensible compromise out of which some good might have been brought. The Vice-Chancellor assured us in his speech of 1 October that the University wants to address student hardship. He can still apply that £3,000 to the purpose for which I offered it. I shall not take the offer back.

The matter then came to the Council on 26 July. I learn that the story is circulating outside the Council, so I have no duty of confidentiality here. I tabled cheques for the sum I had offered for the students, made out pointedly to the Executive Committee. Dr Macleod tore one of them up and threw it at me. I hope the new student members of the Council will not quickly forget that. The Council rejected any offer to meet it half way and the argument that, had it not itself rejected Sir Brian Neill's settlement in the spring of 1998, none of this need have happened, for this dispute would have been over long ago.

The University has never before sought to take costs from one of the University's own members or staff because it has always been recognized that the inequality between our individual resources and its £1bn a year is so huge. This principle is now formally embodied in the practice directions for courts, under the Woolf reforms, which Professor Hepple is, one supposes, teaching our law students about. It is recognized by the courts that improved access to justice requires that the parties be put on an equal footing. In taking this wholly exceptional decision, the Council has gone against the principles of the Woolf reforms. I hope Professor Hepple will be asked some questions about this by his law students, for they will be concerned what advice he will give about pursuing and taking costs if student members have to take the University to court in the future.

It should be made public, too, that there has been an improper suggestion that I should be asked to give an undertaking that I would not litigate against the University in future in return for the non-enforcement of these costs. (That would of course allow them to sack a tenured University Officer and get away with it.) I want you to know just how dirty this fight against one individual now is.

The Registrary returned the cheques to me with an assertion that the consequences of undertaking this litigation had been 'spelled out' to me. You may go through a sizeable bundle of friendly e-mails exchanged during the relevant period and find no such mention. [17 words omitted] The court transcript shows that I was not expecting the costs to be enforced and that the judge recognized that. (The Registrary now gets to 'recommend' that they take interest from me as well.)

If it is argued, as it undoubtedly will be, that the University is entitled to take back what it spent on fighting my request that what it says in the purple book procedures be followed, I would answer that it need not have fought it at all. It could have listened. I always did dress at Oxfam, but I shall probably have to give up that form of haute couture now. Some who knew about this have sent me cheques in recognition that this campaign has been for the general good. I am immeasurably grateful for their generosity. I think the contrast between that goodness and the spirit of reprisal which seems to me to hang over the Council Room, should be allowed to stand in the record.

I will go on a moment longer on this wider problem of balance in financial planning, in which the buy-ins for the RAE need to be placed, because I want to set in its full context of the chaos and waste with which this University is run, this greedy buying in of new staff in advance of the RAE. (I, as a valuable RAE earner, do not have to be bought in.) We have just been prosecuted for losing a radioactive isotope. This is a serious matter, with eight charges under radioactivity and health and safety legislation. We undoubtedly lost the thing. We had to plead guilty to five out of eight charges. But instead of putting our hands up and going to court to say 'sorry' we tried to fight. At the Magistrates' Court on 2 August (the day the first episode of my own bill fell due), I watched the University's Counsel admit in his description of events to the chaotic carelessness with which our safety regulations were implemented in this matter, while trying to mitigate the consequences by pleading (a) that it was only a little isotope and hardly radioactive at all really and (b) that the Magistrates must not go along with the 'myth' that this is a wealthy University, since it is only a poor little charity. The core issue, as Counsel for the Crown brought out with vigour, is that such carelessness could lose us other dangerous substances, and that it is the carelessness not the size of this vial of viscous liquid, which lies at the heart of the offence. It is not our first offence. The Health and Safety Executive have warned us before (see Reporter, 17 December 1996, for mention of Improvement Notices). I see that the first issue of The Cambridge Student raises the alarm about asbestos on the Sidgwick Site. Three charges still lie on the file, and if they have to be resurrected because we have broken Health and Safety Regulations again, the courts may not be amused.

[160 words omitted]

The PAC expressed an interest in such issues: 'We note the Funding Council's plans to produce guidance for the sector, including in particular guidance on taking legal actions and the roles of governors in approving legal expenditure. We would like to see this guidance produced quickly, and would like a copy.'4 So would I.

Other aspects of our administration need quality-testing, too, in return for these pay increases at the top. Back to the PAC Report: 'Public funds intended for the support of teaching and research activities within the United Kingdom should not be used to finance institutions' income-generating activities'.5

Only when I insisted on the Council did the Treasurer compile a list of commercial ventures in which the University or its employees are involved. It is of significance that no such list previously existed and that the Finance Committee and the Audit Committee have been operating without one. It is still not a complete list and when I asked for more detail it emerged that the Treasurer does not know about much of our commercial activity at all. Why do we have no fully operational management accounting system? Why has this laxity been allowed to go on? Why is she not routinely kept up to date?

[117 words omitted]

I see that the General Board has been advised that the proposed Professorship of Psychology in the Social Sciences will 'give added strength and coherence to the Faculty's submission for the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise'. But surely, where we most urgently need 'added strength and coherence' is in the oversight of our expenditure and in ensuring that our money is spent first and foremost on 'education', 'learning', and 'research' as the Statutes require. That means for the benefit of our students.

1 Overseas Operations, Governance and Management at Southampton Institute, Committee of Public Accounts, Twenty-Sixth Report, 1999, 4 (xv) and 70. 'We question whether the processes of internal and external audit at institutions and cyclical reviews by the Funding Council's auditors, are effective in overseeing such a complex sector', 4(xv) and 73.

2 ibid., 34.

3 ibid., (9).

4 ibid., 4(xix) and 74.

5 ibid., 4(xv).


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Cambridge University Reporter, 3 November 1999
Copyright © 1999 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge.