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Tuesday, 29 October 2002. A Discussion was held in the Senate-House of the following Reports:
Seventh Report, dated 18 July 2002, of the Board of Scrutiny (Reporter, 2001-02, p. 1306).
Professor J. SPENCER:
Deputy Vice Chancellor, the Seventh Report, of the Board of Scrutiny, which was published on 7 August, contains some 13,000 words. I therefore think it might be useful if I, as this year's Chairman of the Board, began the Discussion by briefly summarizing some of the main points that it contains.
Most of it is about money, and the fact that the University finances are running into deficit. We point out that the annual Allocations Report, which is in a sense the University's budget, shows for 2002-03 a projected deficit for the Chest of £11.6m and further deficits of £15.7m, £18m, and £20.5m projected for the next three years. This looks bad enough: but matters are in fact worse, because this year's projected deficit of £11.6m has been calculated after taking into account the effects of a deficit containment exercise. In other words, the targeted deficit of £11.6m is not the real deficit, but the deficit after significant deferrals of expenditure.
The immediate implications of this is an urgent economy drive, the principal manifestation of which is a freeze on the filling of academic posts. To cope with the financial problem, it is said that the University will have to draw on 'reserves': but, as we explain in §13 of our Report, there is a question mark about how free these are to draw upon. Unless the problem is solved, the long-term result will be that, in order to keep running, the University will have to start liquidating its endowments.
In §18 of our Report we summarize what we believe to be the immediate causes of the deficit as follows:
an early retirement programme, that eventually proved costly;
a significant growth in grant-funded research, without adequate provision by the Research Councils and other funding bodies to cover overhead expenses or the costs of the administrative infrastructure;
promotions to personal Professorships and Readerships ad lib, combined with supplementary payments, without regard to the cost;
new buildings, with insufficient investment analysis of individual projects or of the impact on the finances of the University as a whole;
budgeting based on 'historic[al] expenditure patterns' when the funding councils have been pressing for economies;
growth rather than reallocation as a way of funding new initiatives;
CAPSA.
The underlying cause of all this, we believe, is that during the last decade, decisions have been taken or policies allowed to evolve that, with proper management accounts, forecasting, and analysis could have been predicted to have caused problems. Since our Report was published, we believe that this analysis has been confirmed by a remark the Vice-Chancellor made in his speech at the beginning of the year, in which he said (Reporter, p. 66): 'The Council and its advisors had reasonably expected that such costs would be covered by a significant increase in income from research overheads, and, in time, from the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise ...'. In other words, they saw the deficit coming, and counted on HEFCE getting us out of trouble by giving us more money for doing well in the Research Assessment Exercise. As HEFCE had never made any promises, this was not, with respect, a wise course for the University to take.
A large part of the financial problem, we believe, is that the University has been putting up buildings without properly factoring in all the future costs. In this connection, we draw the University's attention in our Report to a discipline that it is supposed to follow when planning new buildings, which it has recently tended to neglect. Ordinances stipulate that 'Approval by Grace of the Regent House shall be required for any proposal for the erection of a new University building ...'. But sometimes this approval has not been sought until the project in question has reached the point of no return. Last summer, for example, the Report on the new building for the English Faculty was discussed in the Senate-House when the contractors who believed that they were going to erect the building were already present on the site. In reality, therefore, the Regent House was not being asked to give advance approval to the project, but retrospective approval for a project that had been agreed on and partly implemented. The Board does not understand why, if the approval of Regent House was required, it was not sought earlier. Properly viewed, the requirement for new buildings to be graced is a potentially important check on improvident building schemes, but this is to turn it into an empty formality.
In §7 of our Report we also suggest that the University's budgetary difficulties are exacerbated by the obscure way in which the University continues to present its budgetary forecasts. Each year the annual Allocations Report - i.e. the University's annual published budget - only covers what is called 'Chest income', which is only part of the revenues that each year come in and out.
But the real root of the problem is, we suggest, the absence of any overall strategic planning. As we say in §20 of our recent Report:
'Last year [i.e. in our Sixth Report in 2001] the Board brought the matter to the attention of the Regent House and asked that 'the Council should organize open debate within the University about what its policy should be about the rate of future growth' (Reporter, 20 June 2001, paragraph 5). No such debate has taken place and a further £120m of projects will have been completed by the end of this year. It would have been better that such debate had occurred before rather than after the University was irretrievably committed to an implied policy of expansion.'
We welcome the fact that the Council has set up a Working Party to tackle financial problems, and we wish it well in its endeavours. An important task of the Board of Scrutiny this year will be to monitor its progress.
Another major section of our Report deals with the proposed Resource Allocation Model (RAM). In this connection, we believe that one of the figures that we gave may have been wrong, and we would like to make the following correction.
This concerns our discussion of the interpretation of the HEFCE 'T' grant and the attribution of the College fee. In particular, in stating the position in its starkest form the Board suggested that in 2001-02 the University, in the form the Faculties, Departments, and central bodies, had just over £600 to lecture, examine, and provide central services for a Band D student. However, a case could be made that £290 of the College fee came from the HEFCE 'QR' research component and £410 from special HEFCE transitional funds. If these sums are taken into account then in 2001-02 the University, in the form of Faculties, Departments, and central bodies, had just over £1,320 to lecture, examine, and provide central services for a Band D student. Although this amount is just over twice the size of our original figure, it is still probably too small to cover expenditure.
Another big section of our Report deals with governance issues. In this section we express worries about certain aspects of the current Governance Report, notably the apparent obscurity about where executive authority would lie if the reforms proposed were carried out. We also express our concern about the reform process. There was a very long delay before the Governance Report came out, but it now seems to us that there is excessive haste in seeking to implement it.
On the subject of governance again, the Board draws the attention of the University to what it believes has become in recent years an undesirable habit of implementing changes in the way that things are run first, and bringing the Statutes and Ordinances into line with the changes afterwards. Of this, our Report contains a number of concrete examples. As we say in §58 of our Report: 'The Board is not opposed to change as such, but firmly believes that in principle the proper order for implementing changes is to decide them after public discussion, amend where necessary the Statutes and Ordinances, and only then to implement them. Too often in the recent history of the University, the reverse order seems to have been followed.'
Another section of our Report discusses the University civil service. In this connection, we are pleased to note encouraging signs that the UAS appears to be achieving some stability after its recent reorganizations.
We are aware that what we said about the deficit has attracted major publicity, most of it bad. We note that in his speech, the Vice-Chancellor said: 'The unconstructive and damaging criticism that comes from some sectors of our community is not what is needed. We need to pull together on issues.' If this remark was meant for us - or if not so meant it has been so interpreted - we have this to say in response. We fully understand that much of what we have said may be painful reading, and we regret this. Saying what we have said has given none of us the smallest thrill of pleasure, and we wish nothing more than that we could honestly have said something different. But we could not. Under the University Statutes, the duty of the Board is 'to scrutinize on behalf of the Regent House (i) the Annual Report of the Council, (ii) the abstract of the accounts of the University, and (iii) any Report of the Council proposing allocations from the Chest', and this is exactly what we have done. The financial situation that the University now faces is a grave one, and we would have failed in our responsibility to the University if we had not explained this, attempted to analyse the underlying causes, and made concrete recommendations about what ought to be done.
In the eight weeks or so that have passed since our Seventh Report was published, nobody has told us (either publicly or privately) that our analysis of the University's financial position and its causes is incorrect, and many people have said to us that they believe it is right. We await with interest the reaction of the Regent House in this Discussion.
Dr R. L. TAPP:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I will be delivering my remarks on the Report of the Board of Scrutiny largely from memory; I am unable to read normal print and, in common with most venues in our University, the Senate-House is not equipped with a closed circuit television system, which would have enabled me to read them, or even with an eye-level lectern that will take A3 paper, which might have allow me to use keyword prompts in very large print.
In its Seventh Report, the Board of Scrutiny has commented on the slow progress towards equality of opportunity, using the issue of gender to illustrate its case.
For the very few members of staff who are disabled, poor working conditions and inequality of opportunity remain as serious obstacles to both job satisfaction and personal achievement. Eight years after its initial publication (Reporter, 26 January 1994) and six years after the Disability Discrimination Act came into effect (December 1996) the University's Disability and Employment Policy remains an advisory document, without statutory authority. It has not yet been applied, nor its recommendations implemented, in my own case although I was registered as a blind person in March 1994.
This is a truly remarkable state of affairs that demands some explanation.
Firstly, the fact that the University has a Disability and Employment Policy is not widely known and many staff, including senior staff, are unaware of its existence. It is not sent automatically to a member of staff who declares a serious disability and there is no mechanism to ensure that it is applied to such a member of staff.
Secondly, it is not possible for a disabled member of staff to initiate its application. From personal experience I know that requests to a Head of Department, discussions with the Occupational Health Physician, and even application to the Vice-Chancellor have not triggered its systematic application in my own case. It would appear that there is no procedure, no agreed, standardized way for actually putting the Policy into effect. In fact the situation is even worse: the Policy is advisory and lacks the authority of a Statute. There is no obligation for anyone to implement its contents and if it is inconvenient or too costly to do so, then it can be ignored without penalty.
Thirdly, there is little if any incentive for anyone to try and apply the Policy. Making reasonable alterations to the workplace and reasonable adjustments to working conditions for a disabled member of staff, as required by the Disability Discrimination Act, can be very expensive. There is no money set aside specifically to fund such alterations and adjustments, and anybody who considers applying even part of the Policy must be deterred by the bureaucracy involved in both making the case and applying for funding. It is far simpler to procrastinate by debating what 'reasonable' may actually mean.
Fourthly, as pointed out in the Schneider-Ross Report (January 2001) there is a deplorable 'blindness' to equality issues among senior academics in the University. The publication of this Report augured a sea change supported fully by the Vice-Chancellor's affirmation of his full, personal support of equality reform. Rather little seems to have happened and such is the vast momentum of our entrenched, traditional system that these enterprises of great pith and moment have had their currents turned aside and lost the name of action.
I would seriously question whether the present Disability and Employment Policy is worth anything at all! To give but one example from my personal experience: the Policy recommends that the Occupational Health Physician should visit the workplace of a disabled member of staff and make recommendations for necessary modifications. It took more than four years from the date of my registration as a blind person (March 1994) for such a visit to occur (December 1998) and that visit was restricted to my departmental room. Visits to lecture theatres, laboratories, libraries, supervision rooms, etc., all of which are needed to function effectively, have never taken place!
Such failures in the application of the Policy matter greatly, precisely because of the 'blindness' of senior academics (and one might add, senior administrators!) to disability issues. When the scheme for promotion to Senior Lectureships was introduced in the academical year 2000-01, no provision was made for an application by a disabled member of staff. The University tried, as it had to because of the Disability Discrimination Act, to adjust its procedures ad hoc and on the hoof, but the modifications it introduced and the changes that were made in subsequent promotion rounds serve only to illustrate how 'blind' those drafting the Policy remain to the ineffectiveness of the Disability and Employment Policy and to the very real difficulties faced daily by disabled members of staff. Key issues have not been addressed, probably not even considered, and most of them relate to the absence of a sensible and effective Disability and Employment Policy in this University:
How do you assess the merits of lecture courses that have to be given from memory because lecture theatres lack any provision to help the visually impaired?
How can you compensate for the far longer time needed to prepare teaching materials?
What allowance is to be made for a visually impaired person unable to take on administrative duties because paperwork is not available in audio format and committee rooms not suitably equipped?
Is it acceptable to require similar research productivity when most, if not all libraries, lack text-to-speech facilities and offer no special help for the blind?
How can account be taken of the long periods of time, including sabbatical years, that disabled staff need to spend in trying to secure the conditions and equipment needed to survive at the most basic level?
I could go on adding to this list but one question probably encompasses all the rest:
Can it be assumed that adequate provision and adjustment will be made by the employer when their Disability and Employment Policy remains in its present unenforceable and unsatisfactory state?
From my personal experiences and with absolute conviction I can say that the answer is very clearly NO!
Because the disabled are such a small minority it is very easy to understand why their needs do not take priority. Few of us know what it is actually like to be confined to a wheelchair, to be dumb, deaf, or blind. It may be impossible, even with modifications to the workplace and to working conditions, to enable such people to compete fairly with the able bodied. But not to try is surely unacceptable?
What changes are needed if we are to take the positive steps that have been promised for so long?
| 1. | The Disability and Employment Policy should be given statutory authority. This does not mean that it, itself, needs to be a Statute, which might hinder its reform and alteration in the future, but there should be a statutory requirement to systematically apply the policy to every disabled person in the University. |
| 2. | A copy should be sent to every member of the University who declares a disability. |
| 3. | A Personnel Consultant should be assigned to every disabled member and charged with the responsibility of seeing that the Policy is systematically applied in their case. |
| 4. | Money should be earmarked for disability needs, making it clear that it comes from central funds and is not a burden for individual Departments. |
| 5. | Guidance on helping disabled staff and students should be a required part of the training of all Heads of Department. |
| 6. | When a required modification is considered unreasonable and not provided, compensation for its absence should be built into the career progression of that disabled person. |
| 7. | The criteria for promotion should reflect more equably the achievement limits of disabled staff particularly where suitable modifications to the working environment have not been or cannot be provided. |
This is obviously not a complete list of suggestions but I sincerely hope that it will provoke some positive discussion and stimulate progress towards true equality of opportunity for the disabled in our University.
Professor M. SCHOFIELD (read by Mrs S. BOWRING):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the Board of Scrutiny make some observations about governance issues in §§48-54 of their Report, leading to the recommendations (a) that the Council's proposed amendment to Statute D, III, 3 - relating to the responsibilities of the Vice-Chancellor - should be withdrawn, and (b) that the Council should consider introducing an amendment to the Statutes to allow for delegation to a person. As a member of the Committee on Governance I read these paragraphs with particular interest, and I hope for my part that the Committee and the Council will indeed give serious consideration to (b) as the Board suggest. Their argument for (a), however, is in my view not made out.
The Board complain that the current proposals leave it obscure 'where executive power and decision-making in the University would in future lie', as between the Council and the Vice-Chancellor. In §§6 and 7 of its Report on Governance the Council sought to meet this concern, but the Board of Scrutiny do not regard the Council's treatment of the issue as an adequate answer to their objection. Unfortunately they don't give any detail on where they think the Council's carefully argued and relatively full discussion goes wrong. But they do make two very brief points of their own.
First, they say: 'Where two bodies have overlapping powers and there is no clear order of precedence, there is an obvious risk of conflict and of impasse.' This is true but I fear irrelevant. The Council is a body, the Vice-Chancellor an officer or person, not a body (cf. the Board's own recommendation (b)). Moreover, the proposed amendment to Statute D, III, 3 makes it clear that the Vice-Chancellor's responsibilities to manage and direct University business are to be subject to the responsibilities of the Council and other bodies (including of course the Regent House), and Statute A, IV, 1 makes the Council the principal executive and policy-making body of the University. The Council clearly therefore has and would retain 'precedence' over the Vice-Chancellor. Nor is there any difficulty in providing that both the Council and the Vice-Chancellor have executive powers, since contrary to the Board's statement these would not in principle or definition overlap, and indeed they are powers in different senses of the term.
The Council as a body must make policy decisions and other decisions of various sorts. But no body ever literally does (or has the power to do) anything. Executive action by a body consists in saying: 'Let p be so.' Pulling the levers and pushing the buttons - making p the case - need to be entrusted to actual persons, i.e. in an institution such as ours to officers, who have the actual ability to do the pushing and pulling. Our CAPSA experience demonstrates that it ought to be helpful and an improvement in our arrangements to spell out in Statutes where the buck ultimately has to stop so far as such executive managerial decisions are concerned.
Dr Cowley in his contribution to the Discussion of 8 October 2002 objects that 'there is not always a clear distinction between policy and management'. Quite true, if Dr Cowley means that in practice the boundary between the two can be blurry or get blurred, or that those with managerial responsibilities in a given area may be tempted to set policy too; but wrong if he means that in principle or definition they must overlap. The Statutes need to be clear on matters of principle, and in my view the proposed amendments to Statute D, III are in that regard an improvement on the existing Statute, with its talk of customary rights and duties. The remedy for confusion or uncertainty in practice, or for the illegitimate substitution of management for policy, cannot consist in simply avoiding any attempt to build ultimate responsibility for the executive performance of managerial duties into the Vice-Chancellor's duties: that would be ducking an issue which the Board of Scrutiny are as insistent as anyone should not be ducked. The remedy should rather lie in the institution of robust reporting arrangements whose operation will permit the Council to advise the Vice-Chancellor if they think he or she is not merely taking a lead as principal officer in helping it to formulate and implement policy, but making or taking policy decisions on his or her own account.
Second, the Board argue that if the Vice-Chancellor is now to be conceived as a Chief Executive, then the University is woefully ill-equipped with those powers to sack a Chief Executive who forfeits confidence that are vested in boards of companies in the corporate world. Dr Cowley in the remarks to which I have already referred finds in the Report on Governance, and in explanations he has heard colleagues giving of the thinking behind the Report, a great deal of suspicious ambiguity as to whether the Vice-Chancellor is or isn't being thought of as Chief Executive. The blameless reason - I submit - is that 'chief executive' is no more a univocal expression or a context-free concept than is 'executive power'. That will come as no surprise to readers of Wittgenstein, or of Aristotle's Politics: the master of them that know distinguished four species of democracy, four kinds of oligarchy, and five varieties of kingship - this sort of thing is the going rate in discourse about political institutions. Such distinctions are not the sinister 'sophistry' Dr Cowley alleges, but the groundwork necessary for any profitable conversation on the subject.
What is meant by those who say: 'No, of course we're not thinking of making the V-C Chief Executive, or of empowering the V-C to exercise such functions' is something like this: 'In a complex institution like the University of Cambridge, where much of the key policy-making is - and by our nature and constitution has to be - the outcome of quite elaborate processes of consultation and of deliberation in bodies like the General Board and ultimately the Regent House which are accorded substantial statutory powers of their own, no V-C could ever operate as can the Chief Executive of a company in the corporate world which quite lacks that kind of democratic texture. For example, no V-C under the governance reforms proposed could hire or fire a single academic member of staff.' What is meant by those who say: 'Yes, a Chief Executive is what - as Oxford have recognized - the V-C now is and ought to be empowered to be' is something like this: 'The University needs at its helm someone who has the capacity, authority, and responsibility to prod us and our key policy-making bodies into taking the hard decisions ahead of us, and then to make sure they are carried through. Indeed, there is no point in paying the V-C a handsome six-figure salary for anything less.'
The Yes and No camps are not really two camps, nor one party speaking with forked tongues. The Nos are not denying what the Yeses affirm, nor are the Yeses making a claim the Nos are rejecting. Nobody who is attracted to the redefinition of the role of Vice-Chancellor proposed in the Council's Report is envisaging anyone much like a Chief Executive in the corporate world, nor indeed is the Council's advisory committee on the appointment of a new Vice-Chancellor. I suspect the Board of Scrutiny have got hung up over the terminology, and that there isn't really a disagreement with the Council on anything substantial. However that may be, I submit that they haven't provided anything like decent reasons for withdrawing the proposed addition to Statute D, III, 3.
The Board's proposal that it should be withdrawn is a response, of course, not to the Annual Report of the Council or to the Allocations Report, but to the Council's Report on Governance. The Board explain why they take commentary on the Report on Governance to fall within their remit in their §1, by appealing to the provisions of Statute A, VII, 2. I question whether it was wise of the Board to proceed in this way. The Council's Report was published after an extensive consultative exercise, and in that context the Board had already put in an extensive set of valuable comments. The Governance Report has been before the Regent House for Discussion on two subsequent occasions, and the Council are now intending to go ahead and publish a Notice in response and to promote Graces. For the Board to leap in again at the eleventh hour and make a formal recommendation covering one or two rather particular points relating to the Report is not very measured, and scarcely a model of how good governance should operate.
Dr D. R. DE LACEY:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, once again the Board of Scrutiny has presented us with a clear and honest report, and recommendations all of which can be cordially endorsed. May I make just three ancillary comments.
Paragraph 4 comments on the University's ''large reduction in the amount available for equipment', and 'a freeze on vacancies''. The latter would not be clear to anyone reading the subsequent advertisements in the Reporter, but there is a real danger of squandering the resources we already have if we cannot provide at least minimally adequate equipment for staff in post. With our current chaotic budgeting no doubt we shall see further instances of Professor X in Faculty A getting the latest and fastest computer simply to enable him to read his e-mail and perhaps occasionally surf the Web, while Secretary Y in Faculty B cannot open a spreadsheet on the fourth-hand machine which the squeeze prevents her from upgrading, and Computer Officer Z has no equipment adequate to run the software he is supposed to be supporting. (I use the pronouns advisedly in light of paragraph 68 concerning sexual discrimination.) It is not the Board's responsibility to bring coherence into our local budgeting, but I am grateful to it for highlighting the issues. As they comment in paragraph 7, 'The case for 'joined-up budgeting' is as strong as ever'.
Yet as all this budgetary husbanding is going on, we are embarked on a major spending spree. Are we ready for this, without any of the safeguards suggested by the Shattock and Finkelstein reports? Do we have any assurance that the safeguard we were promised, of 'widespread consultation with interested bodies' (Report of the Board of Scrutiny on CAPSA: Notice, Reporter, p. 5), is any more than the 'policy based on assertion and belief' which Council and General Board found 'hard to justify' in the IPR Report (Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on the ownership of intellectual property rights, Reporter, 2001-02, p. 1268, Section 6)? Can we afford, and have we properly budgeted for, a costly appeal against the planning permission refusal on the animal research facility on Huntingdon Road? If the appeal is successful, how much will construction and policing cost in years to come? I trust the Board of Scrutiny will continue to press for answers, and for a full financial statement such as we were encouraged to believe CAPSA would provide for us, and continue to police all this spending on our behalf, to ensure that any developments really do represent value for money. I share the Board's concern over the way the English Faculty building was handled; it is surely appropriate that, rather than depending on a Grace of 1995 applying only for planning permission (Reporter, 1994-95, p. 456), the Regent House in our current and very different circumstances should have been given the opportunity to re-assess whether we can really afford our present profligacy.
We are in the midst of two ballots to decide the issues raised in Recommendation VIII and Paragraph 55. But none of the options offered in the Discussions ballot can be regarded as entirely satisfactory, if only because all of them ignore the critical points raised by Professors Shattock and Finkelstein. It is also hard to reconcile any of the options (even (d), the rejection of the Grace and all its amendments) with the plain statement of Statute A,VIII, 3 that 'Members of the Senate shall have the right to attend and to speak at Discussions of the Regent House'. I trust that, whatever the outcome of the ballot, the Council will return to the question of Discussions in a way which seeks to strengthen rather than emasculate our democracy.
Dr G. R. EVANS:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the Notice on p. 5 of the Reporter, 2002, swats away everything which was said in the Discussion of the Report of the Board of Scrutiny on CAPSA 'while the Council associate themselves with the remarks made by Dr Reid and Professor Schofield, who are both serving members of the University Council' (my italics). I trust that will not happen again with this Discussion of the Board's Annual Report, whose impact is still reverberating through the press.
Members of the Council, it is time to listen to the Board of Scrutiny, for it is scrutinizing on behalf of the Regent House.
In Oxford's neat 174 pages of new Statutes and Regulations (Gazette, 9 October) it is made quite clear who is boss. Statute VI, 2. 'In the exercise of its functions and powers, Council shall be bound by all resolutions passed by Congregation and all other acts done or decisions taken by Congregation in accordance with the Statutes and Regulations and shall do all things necessary to carry them into effect'. Council is the servant of Congregation. It is time our Council behaved like our servant. Oxford, as David Secher said, does not have our problem of mistrust. We ask ourselves whether that has anything to do with the different style of the administration there.
Those minded to approve the proposals to change the governance of the University should read with some care paragraph 58 of the Board of Scrutiny's Report. It points to 'an undesirable habit of implementing changes in the way that things are run first, and bringing the Statutes and Ordinances into line with the changes afterwards'. They give examples.
I turn to the the statesmanlike annual oration of Colin Lucas, Oxford's Vice-Chancellor, on their new Statutes (Gazette, 17 October). He recognizes the importance of expressing 'clearly the new organizational structure of the University rather than simply inserting these innovations into the existing text as yet another accretion'.
It is by no means paranoid to fear that further 'tidying-up' operations will progressively be put to us, until we find that we have become a 'managed' University indeed with all our democratic rights a mere quaint memory. It is, I fear, pretty much the consolidated view of the central bodies and the Old Schools that since they are always right it is absurd that they should have to put up with the nuisance of having to wait while we argue about it and even have a vote.
Professor Schofield has just admitted that shortly a Notice and Graces will seek to blunder on regardless with the Governance changes.
Secrecy and cover-up. The Education Committee, a year ago 'did not consider that an open Discussion of the issue [of the future of small Departments] was the most appropriate strategy for dealing with it'.1 I raised concerns about the University keeping the money for the Robert Monk Chair of Governance in the Judge Institute, when the benefactor had been arrested for massive tax fraud. To keep the money is in breach of our code on the ethics of benefactions. The Registrary, on enquiry, tells me that the Vice-Chancellor has written to the benefactors just 'offering to co-operate' in any enquiries. And what became of the promise in the Reporter that 'CMI will adopt transparent accounting and audit procedures … Decisions on expenditures in the four programme areas will be taken in a way which secures value for money against agreed measurable outputs.' (Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on the Cambridge-MIT Institute, Reporter, 1 March 2000). Nothing has ever been published for the University to read. Secrecy and cover-up.
This is a powerful Seventh Board of Scrutiny Report precisely because there is so much it has had (however regretfully) to hit hard; so much is wrong, not at the level of governance, but at a level of the practical running of our affairs and the spirit in which it is done. Reporter p. 179 has a Notice (not a Report) about what is shaping up to be another CAPSA disaster, CamSIS. Others will no doubt be speaking with more expertise than I on some of the financial questions. I will confine myself to areas where I have particular knowledge.
Let me begin this part of my speech by saying that on one matter I believe the Board has got it wrong, and this is a matter ultimately affecting the career prospects of all the University's staff.
'The Board shall have the right to examine the policies of the University and the arrangements made for the implementation of those policies, and to report thereon to the Regent House' (Reporter, 17 June 1998). This, Board of Scrutiny, is a matter of policy-change, to a degree you could not have known until the Report on promotions to senior academic offices was published on 18 October. But now that it is in the open let me say a few words here for they affect the Board's remarks on this matter.
I recollect the present Master of Downing, presiding today, when he was Registrary, remarking that he thought everyone who deserved it had been promoted and to promote more would be to devalue the titles. (And yes I did tell him I intended to mention this.) Well, either he was wrong or the dozens of individuals the General Board Committee has since annually insisted it has correctly identified as deserving promotion were not. We have to complete the catching-up. It is only fair.
It would be very wrong to go on with those secret top-up payments and huge recruitment incentives while claiming that we cannot afford to promote or upgrade our long-serving good and faithful servants.
'Meeting student and staff needs are the University's priority.' (Ungrammatical Development Office website.) Not according to the General Board it isn't. The projected annual costs of maintaining that new Cancer Research facility we were discussing last week are equivalent to many many promotions and a great many tuition fees. So yes, there are priorities to be weighed against one another when belts have to be tightened. But to do that we need the policy question put frankly and openly to the University for decision, and not a smuggled volte face embedded in a Report ostensibly on procedural matters. Dr de Lacey is right.
What many of us will find unendurable is the fact that these decisions about priorities are necessary only because they have wasted all that money on CAPSA and on the buildings programme which has run out of control and we are in galloping deficit. Stop adding to that deficit by starting yet more giant building projects. Reward people. Fairly and openly.
Equal opportunities and protection against discrimination (68). The latest spin in the Newsletter claims that: 'Cambridge has already established a reputation for actively promoting equality'. But look at the BBC News Online for 30 January 2001. 'A survey of both academic and support staff at Cambridge has identified an 'insular and secretive 'macho' culture', dominated by white males.' Schneider-Ross, that expensive consultant exercise, condemned us roundly in print in the Reporter.
E-mail the Equal Opportunities Officer (mustn't mention her name so you will just have to find out), and ask her for a copy of her recent e-mail to me in response to an enquiry about what exactly we are doing about the new race discrimination requirements. Good stuff. But when? Compare it with the several paragraphs on this subject in the Oxford Vice-Chancellor's annual oration. On disability issues read the speeches of Dr Roger Tapp, both those he has made in the past and the powerful speech he has made today.
On equal opportunities for women there is something the Board of Scrutiny did not spot. The experimental psychologist, Professor Lorraine Tyler (sorry but I really do have to give her name if this is to make sense and I have given her notice) has formed a group of 'Senior Academic Women'. These were defined by her as those holding Readerships and Chairs, thus practising discrimination against those 'promotionally challenged'. They have constituted themselves an advisory committee to the Vice-Chancellor, as is revealed in recent Council Minutes. At their instigation, the Academic Secretary is now asking women to tell him (why him?) if they would like to be on committees. I got more than one Notice into the Reporter long ago, with such an invitation, and not just for women. But it will continue to be ineffective, until the process of appointment to committees is made transparent. I could have told them that.
When I first came to Cambridge there was a Senior Women's Committee. Its meetings were in the Reporter for all to see and it was open to everyone who wanted to go along.2 Why did you not proceed in that way, Lorraine? Your way seems to me to embody many of the worst features of our present discriminatory practices: secrecy, exclusion, control games, hierarchy, and patronage.
Now they are sending round e-mails to 'invite' other women to meet this self-appointed committee. The first meeting is on 27 November in the Conference Centre at St John's from 8.00-10.00. I do hope a good number of the uninvited will go along now that I have announced the meeting in the Reporter. Unfortunately I shall not be able to be there myself for that evening I am to be called to the Bar at Gray's Inn. (Beginner I may still be, but scarcely more so than Professor Malcolm Grant who was called to the Bar only in 1999.)
I have not been able to find any speeches made in the Senate-House by Lorraine Tyler. Since we have not been told who else is on her Senior Women's Advisory Committee to the Vice-Chancellor I cannot say whether we have ever heard from any of them, and whether they have won their spurs in open debate in this House before declaring themselves the leaders of the community of female employees, without asking us.
Finally, I would like publicly and formally (what more appropriate opportunity), to invite the Board of Scrutiny to direct its enquiries to the escalating expenditure on legal fees, a notable omission from its report in a year when the University's legal expenditure hit £1,500,000. (How many professorial promotions would that pay for?), I offered the Registrary sight of what I am about to say. He declined.
It was agreed after two separate invocations of Statute K, 5 by different members of the Regent House and a Discussion on a Topic of Concern in 1999 that the Registrary must run any case which looks likely to cost more than £15,000 past the Executive Committee of the Council. After that, it seems, there is no check. We have still not appointed the in-house legal advisers who could save us a fortune by advising the Registrary on a salary and not at nearly £500 an hour. I thought that awaited only the passing of the Graces on the Unified Administrative Service, Registrary?
I must of course declare an interest before I say another word. My application for permission to seek judicial review of the failure to give adequate reasons to promotions candidates and other procedural matters was successful up to a point. I got permission to have the preliminary question of whether this was an employment or public law matter taken to a full hearing. We had an hour of that full hearing and further submissions on paper and in due course the judge found for the University. Unhappy that he had had let Oxford accept in the Galligan case that it was indeed a public body, he decided to close the door. He said that he feared the High Court would be flooded with judicial review applications from academics alleging unfairness and lack of reasons. With judges, you win some, you lose some. He did however decide that the promotions procedures are Ordinances and put on record the University's admission that they are contractually binding on it. So we can at least attempt to challenge failure to follow the procedures in private law actions. (And that disability 'policy', too, I suspect.)
Five months after the hearing I received a bill for nearly £125,000, plus VAT, with threats that if I sought to have it assessed the University would pursue me for more costs on that too.
I have sought the advice of an experienced professional costs draftsman. Let me quote him. 'Costs totalling £124,425.34 are wholly disproportionate to the matters in issue in this case'. 'The Defendant was under a duty to conduct the proceedings proportionately and to plan its expenditure accordingly. Far from doing so, the Defendant seems to have been determined to spare no expense, running up a huge bill, which it now seeks to lay at the door of the Claimant'. 'The bill is defective'. Indeed, no one could possibly tell from that bill how much general conversation about me on other matters between the Registrary and Clifford Chance has been inappropriately included, for there is known to be a great deal. See Council Minute 22 July 2002, 228(b).
But this is not just about a decision to spare no expense against me. The evidence is that the University does not challenge its solicitors' bills at all.
Let 'p be so', says the Registrary, and Clifford Chance, the most expensive firm in the business, has, in effect, a blank cheque. And yesterday's Financial Times ran the front page story of the internal memo which admits that Clifford Chance is habitually padding its own bills. Other linked FT stories hint at worse. Cambridge should join the angry corporate clients doing some challenging.
The Registrary should be accountable for his failure to keep track of mounting expenditure and to get the best value for money for the University. Perhaps the 'account' for the difference between what a court says on assessment that I owe and what he has allowed the University to spend, should be sent to him personally? Otherwise he will have wasted enough to have promoted a dozen or more to Professorships and how many student tuition fees would that be?
Over to you, Board of Scrutiny, and although nothing you can do can, or should, assist me in challenging my own giant and 'wholly disproportionate' bill, I hope that out of this will come good for the University. And reins in the Registrary, whose name does seem to be cropping up everywhere now in this matter of who is accountable.
1 Education Committee Minutes 10 October 2001, 370.12.
2 See, for example, Reporter, 7 October, 1992, p. 28.
Mr S. J. BUCK:
Fellow Members of the Senate, Recommendation XI of this Report is that
In cases where the University is in danger of not satisfying its legal obligations, the administration needs the power to require its advice to be followed.
This assumes of course that the administration is aware of cases where the University is in danger of not satisfying its legal obligations.
By omitting Computer Associates from the Roll of the Regent House, while including Computer Officers whose duties are broadly similar, the University is in breach of the Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002, which implement the EU Directive on Fixed-Term Working.
As became apparent on the afternoon of 18 October when I raised the issue at the public hearing of corrections to the draft of the Roll, the Administration seems completely unaware that the University is not satisfying its legal requirements in this respect. Nor was it apparently noticed when the Report of 24 July on the Directive was drawn up.
Fortunately, the Council has powers under Statute A, III without reference to the Regent House to ensure that the University is not open to litigation, simply by extending approval under Section 7(e)(ii) to all Computer Associates, whether or not they are members of Faculties. This can be done before the Roll is promulgated on 7 November.
Dr S. J. COWLEY:
I would like to make a few remarks in the light of what Professor Schofield has had read out.
I think that he said that there were many issues on which he, the Board of Scrutiny, and myself (since he referred specifically to me by name) agree. Yes, I think that is so. In the case of governance we agree on Pro-Vice-Chancellors, and I think that we agree on external members of Council. However, he also suggested that the Board was possibly over-reaching itself by commenting on the Governance Report. In answer, let me quote that part of the Board's Seventh Report where it was recalled that Wass envisaged that the Board would 'draw the attention of the Regent House … 'to any issues arising ... that merit … discussion [with a small 'd'] or criticism''.
Indeed I recall that earlier this calendar year Dr Johnson encouraged the then Chairman of the Board of Scrutiny to join in a Discussion, and I believe that the idea behind the Wass Report was that the Board of Scrutiny would not confine itself to an annual Report. Of course, the Board of Scrutiny could have decided to wait until the governance proposals had gone through, and been put to a vote, before saying something, say, in a year's time. However, after the vote it might have been a little bit too late to have any influence on the Chief Executive proposal!
Concerning that proposal, it is true that there are changes between what was originally proposed in the Notice on Governance and what is included in the Report on Governance. I do not have those documents before me, but when it comes to the role of the Vice-Chancellor, my memory (which may be wrong) is that essentially only one or two words have been changed. Further, I recall that the Board of Scrutiny was not the only body to raise the issue of clarity in the proposals for the Vice-Chancellor. Again, if my memory is correct, I believe that the Law Faculty, in its response to the original proposals, raised a similar objection as to the clarity of where executive function would lie.
I am not a lawyer, so I am not qualified to state whether the one or two word change is sufficient for the Law Faculty to now be happy that there is not an ambiguity in the revised proposals. To be honest, I am still not clear in my own mind, despite having listened to Professor Schofield, as to what 'executive management' (as used in the proposed Statute) means. However, what I think, or what the Council thinks, is not the issue, the issue is what the lawyers think. Therefore it seems to me that before we proceed further we need a legal opinion as to whether or not there would be any conflict regarding executive function.
Like Professor Schofield, I too have read paragraphs 6 and 7 of the commentary in the Governance Report. Indeed I referred to those paragraphs three weeks ago in the Discussion on Governance. Since then of course we have had the IPR Discussion, during which it became abundantly clear that what was in the commentary at the beginning of the IPR Report was at variance with what was in the Statement of Policy at the end of the Report. I am not necessarily saying that what is in the commentary of the Governance Report is at variance with what is proposed in the revised Statutes, but there might be a case that it is so, and that is why we need a legal opinion.
Now of course one may be wondering why I am worried about what is in the Statutes and Ordinances given that in the recent past we have had a number of examples of Council ignoring the Statutes and Ordinances. However, surely it is appropriate to be worried about what is in Statutes and Ordinances?
I believe that, by Statute, in most UK universities executive power formally lies with the individual University's Council, but in practice most Council's allow their Vice-Chancellors to act very much like, what I would term, a Chief Executive Officer (in the business sense). A key question then is, do such Councils bring their Vice-Chancellor's into line when she or he goes too far? If our Council has not been unduly concerned about obeying Statutes and Ordinances, am I not the only one who is worried that they will not bring a Vice-Chancellor (and I should make it clear I am not referring to our current Vice-Chancellor here) into line when necessary? Once Vice-Chancellors have power they tend to use it.
I leave as an example what has happened at University College London (UCL) recently. One would have assumed that before the decision to propose a merger with (or possibly more correctly, a take-over by) Imperial College was announced, UCL's Council would have been consulted. However, as I understand it, only three members of UCL's Council knew beforehand that these merger talks were going to be announced - in fact at least some members of Council learnt about it at the same time as the rest of UCL's staff by reading their e-mail. We should have Statutes and Ordinances sufficiently tightly written so that something like that could not possibly ever happen in Cambridge.
Dr M. R. CLARK:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I would like to address the Report of the Board of Scrutiny in respect of the statements in paragraphs 63 through to 66, and Recommendation IX, on the Unified Administration Service and in particular the comments on the Research Services Division (RSD) and the Technology Transfer Office (TTO).
Before I do I think it appropriate to draw your attention to the fact that I have previously declared personal interests in commercial IPR which have been handled by the RSD, and which are detailed in my opening remarks to recent Discussion on the Report on IPR Policy on 22 October 2002.
I have had a very good working relationship with staff members of both the old WILO [Wolfson Industrial Liaison Office] and the new TTO so I hope that these comments I make here are not construed as personal criticism of any individual members of staff, but are taken as being directed at overall University policy. It has been my recent experience that the extra resources put into the RSD, particularly into the TTO, and the legal section, have generally resulted in a faster turnaround time on responses to enquiries. I have encountered a few operational problems which I have brought to the attention of the appropriate staff, but my hope is that these turn out to be teething problems inevitable in a newly established organization, and that remedial action will be implemented.
In their Report the Board remind us that the University is facing a financial crisis and that steps need to be taken to carefully review our expenditure. In paragraph 63 the Board comments on the expansion in the number of staff in RSD to approximately 50, and questions whether the extra expenditure will be cost effective and offset by increased income from technology transfer. Firstly, I would like to point out that whilst the expenditure on the TTO is immediate, my experience is that this predicted extra increase in income may take many years to see, and might never equal or exceed the expenditure. Crucially it is not clear what the overall aims of the Technology Transfer Office are. With regard to the Board of Scrutiny's Recommendation IX, as applied to the TTO, there are two distinct operating models I could contemplate, which have differing implications for expenditure versus income.
The first is that the TTO could see their responsibility as trying to maximize the public benefit by attempting to get as many ideas as possible transferred out into commerce or the public domain, perhaps by selling commercial rights very quickly and cheaply, or adopting non-exclusive licensing terms. The aim would not be to maximize income for the University, but would be to maximize throughput of ideas. The predicted outcome under this model would be that the TTO would handle the maximum number of requests regardless of the nature of the technology and would only be constrained by the annual budget provided to the TTO by the University. Income from profitable ventures could be used to subsidize not-for-profit or low-income ideas, but the likely overall financial consequence would be that the TTO would operate as a general cost on resources of the Chest.
A second model, and at the other extreme, is that the TTO would try and cherry-pick only the ideas they judge likely to be profitable. Technologies brought to them would be scrutinized and judged in some way, most would be rejected, and a few would be taken on. Resources would then be put into these selected projects in proportion to the expected financial rewards for successful transfer. Big ideas with a high potential reward would attract big budgets and major resources. Some development work and additional investment in the projects as well as considerable legal costs in protecting the IPR with world-wide patent filings might be undertaken. This is the general kind of scheme adopted by venture capital organizations who are gambling on big financial rewards. A return on the investment over a time period of five to ten years is a common target for such funds. If the TTO adopts this strategy it could end up generating a large capital return for the University, if it backs the right projects. On the other hand if it gets it wrong it will probably cause a significant drain on the Chest.
Members of the University, in particular the Regent House, ought to know what business model the TTO is working to. Is it one of these two extremes or is it a compromise between the two models? I hope that Council will respond to Recommendation IX of the Board Of Scrutiny and provide this information.
In reviewing the seventh Report I also note that the Board of Scrutiny have failed to ask if the recent change in IPR policy on externally funded research, will impact on budgetary forecasts for the TTO. I would draw the Board's attention to the following points which I think the Council should be asked to address for Regent House to consider.
| (i) | What are the resources to be allocated to RSD in order to ensure that they can meet their responsibilities and liabilities over all of the IPR which they now own? |
| (ii) | Will the RSD have resources sufficient to be able to demonstrate due diligence in ensuring the proper protection of patentable or copyrightable inventions? Given that initial UK and PCT filings with the EPO work out at about £10,000 to £20,000 per invention, how many inventions per year are envisaged to be protected in this way? |
| (iii) | What resources do the RSD have for long-term archival storage of data, notebooks, drawings, samples, specimens, which might form part of registered IPR and could be necessary as part of litigation for many years into the future? |
| (iv) | If RSD rely on the material being looked after by individuals or Departments, how will they compensate them for any expenses? What provision is made to ensure retention of material when an investigator leaves the employment of the University? |
| (v) | What liability does the University acquire over all the IPR it now owns? For example, as the declared legal owner is the University liable for any claims for damages? Has the University sought professional legal advice on these potential damages from newly acquired rights in IPR and are we insured properly? |
As someone who uses the services of the TTO I am aware that some of these liabilities are protected through the use of a company, Cambridge University Technical Services Ltd (CUTS). However it has never been very clear to me how CUTS operates in different circumstances. Sometimes CUTS is used to take over full assignment of rights in IPR on behalf of both the University and the individual inventors, and on other occasions I have been advised as an individual to use CUTS as simply a Trustee for income received. Could I ask that a future Report more clearly examines and explains the operations of CUTS on behalf of the University and of individuals? How does it ensure it looks after the appropriate interests? For example does liability over one piece of IPR or income administered through CUTS Ltd ever impact on others?
Returning to the question of a business plan and value for money from the RSD, I note that in the Council minutes of the 22 July 2002 that there is an item on the agenda:
'221. Cambridge Business - W
A paper proposing changes in arrangements for support for technology transfer and business creation was received. The Council agreed in principle to the early creation of Cambridge Business within the Research Services Division of the Unified Administrative Service and that a further paper should be submitted to the next meeting.'
This sounds as if it is a plan for further restructuring of RSD and the TTO. I hope that the full financial implications will be looked at and also that a proper assessment of the proposal is carried out. Hopefully the Regent House will be fully informed on the business plan in a Report if they are asked to approve any changes.
I would already caution both the Board of Scrutiny and the Council to pay particular close attention to some of the information which is already being put out to justify the role of the TTO in bringing in financial rewards to the University. I refer them to a recent article in the January 2002 edition of the Cambridge University Newsletter:
'Research News
Licensing income from the University's intellectual property during the academical year to October 2001 has exceeded £1 million for the first time ever. This is up from £262,000 in 1996/97 and a massive leap from £663,000 last year. The figure demonstrates the big successes the University has had in recent months, such as the licensing of the leukaemia treatment, CAMPATH, which was first developed in Cambridge and was approved by both the US and the EU earlier this year. Dr David Secher, Director of Research Services, said: 'Research Services is still a relatively new division within the University and this result shows that the time and money invested in it are beginning to pay off. Investing in research support has become much more important to the University, as has fostering an entrepreneurial spirit among academic staff. We are now seeing the fruits of those efforts.' He added: 'What is even more important is that academics get real rewards for their efforts because 45 per cent of income from intellectual property goes back to the inventors. The rest is split between their own Department and the University chest.'
Firstly 45% is a curious figure to provide given the published IPR policy. However as someone who personally knows a great deal about CAMPATH, being one of the inventors, I find the details of this news item grossly misleading, particularly in the way that the article is being used to justify recent expenditure on the RSD and TTO by implying they played a role in the technology transfer and in bringing in the increased rewards to the University from CAMPATH. The true facts are that the project was initiated by Dr Herman Waldmann in the Department of Pathology in 1980, and the first commercial assignments involving Dr Waldmann and Dr Geoffrey Hale directly with the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) took place on 25 July 1984. Later an improved version of CAMPATH was assigned to the NRDC on 20 October 1989 by the four inventors and the Medical Research Council. Herman Waldmann and I were the two University inventors on that assignment. CAMPATH was originally licensed to Glaxo-Wellcome, but they abandoned the project at a very late stage in 1994. When BTG (formerly NRDC) failed to find a new licensee it was the dedication of Waldmann and Hale, then in the University of Oxford, who identified the US startup company LeukoSite as a new licensee, and it was Hale who played a major role in the transfer of the necessary know-how needed for LeukoSite to pick up the project. A new revenue sharing arrangement whereby Herman Waldmann and I agreed to appoint CUTS Ltd as Trustee to receive our revised share of income from BTG was signed on 31 March 1997.
As can be seen this whole process took place long before the establishment of the RSD and the TTO. The Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on research services was published on 15 December 1999 and the RSD was created on 1 March 2000, sixteen years after the first document I cite above and three years after the last. Indeed the University was not a signatory to the assignments I cite.
I very much hope that a strong business plan emerges from the RSD for Regent House to eventually see. However I hope that the Board of Scrutiny and the Council will be vigilant in ensuring that the data used for justification of the whole process is analysed correctly and not misused as in the news item above. We have a responsibility in a university to remain faithful to the principle of presenting ideas in a clear and open fashion for all to see and understand and I do not think that we should allow what might be regarded as commonly accepted business 'PR' practices to damage this integrity.
Report of the General Board, dated 2 October 2002, on the Professorship of Clinical Gerontology (p. 60).
No comments were made on this Report.
Second Report of the General Board, dated 2 October 2002, on future arrangements for the Scott Polar Research Institute (p. 61).
Professor K. S. RICHARDS:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I speak as the previous Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, and having contributed to the 1996 review by the School of the Physical Sciences of its institutional position. The inter-disciplinary nature of the Institute, with both environmental and social science interests, implies a natural association with the Department of Geography. The recommendations of the General Board's 1997 Report, which recognized this, have been substantially implemented. The second Report makes this very clear. It is thus a pleasure to see this further Report linking the Institute even more closely to the Department, while still preserving its unique identity. An open meeting in the Institute last year gave widespread support to the proposed change of status. I thus commend the Report to the Regent House.
Professor J. DOWDESWELL (read by Professor K. RICHARDS):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as the current Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, I welcome the proposal to change the status of the Institute from that of a Department to a Sub-department of Geography. The proposal would set the Institute firmly within a wider community of scholars with strong interests in environmental issues, and would also provide enhanced infrastructural support in areas such as computing and digital cartography. Many of our staff are University Teaching Officers on the establishment of Geography, and I am the first appointee to a new chair in Physical Geography. Sub-department status would be a logical step in this context. Discussions have taken place with Institute staff, who are in favour of the change of status. The status of Sub-department also preserves the identity of the Institute, and reflects both its origins and endowments, and its continuing role as a centre for polar-regions research within the University and beyond. As Director, I commend this proposal to the Regent House.
Professor R. P. HAINING:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as the current Head of the Department of Geography, I wish to record my support for this proposal that has been fully discussed within my Department. We are of the view that the research and teaching in Scott Polar complement well our own activities. I commend the proposal to the Regent House.
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Cambridge University Reporter 6 November 2002
Copyright © 2002 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars
of the University of Cambridge.