FINANCIAL TIMES: Are universities suffering from management bloat?

Press/Media: Expert comment

Period18 May 2022

Media contributions

1

Media contributions

  • TitleAre universities suffering from management bloat?
    Media name/outletFinancial Times
    Media typeWeb
    Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
    Date18/05/22
    DescriptionTimothy Devinney recalls his horror when he was shown a sprawling spreadsheet of the “key performance indicators” for the university department where he once worked. It included 110 targets, each with staff assigned to monitor them.

    “There are only two that matter: scholarship and pedagogy. Any sane organisation would look at the administrative overheads and try to remove them,” says Professor Devinney, now chair of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School.

    He argued in a recent blog post that faculties should be spun out of wider universities to counter a focus on sprawling operations, just as private sector conglomerates have been broken up in recent years. “Universities are basically strangling the capabilities of the people within them.”
    URLhttps://www.ft.com/content/338d7321-bc87-4573-885e-565f34a80b30
    PersonsTimothy Devinney

Keywords

  • higher education
  • management