The UK higher education senior management survey: a statactivist response to managerialist governance

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present results from an extensive survey of United Kingdom (UK) university academics investigating satisfaction with senior managers and university governance: the Senior Management Survey (SMS). In total, 5888 academic staff across the United Kingdom Higher Education (HE) sector completed the survey, and results were used to construct a league table of staff satisfaction with management. This table is a stark indictment of the current state of the UK HE sector, showing a mean satisfaction score of 10.54%. The SMS also collected qualitative data, and we extend the league table’s insights using these data. Thematic analysis revealed seven major themes: the dominance and brutality of metrics; excessive workload; governance and accountability; perpetual change; vanity projects; the silenced academic; work and mental health. We conclude with a discussion of how this statactivist research can be used to bring about change in management and governance of UK HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• higher education management
• academic labour process
• statactivism
• mental health
• staff satisfaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 1994–5 HESA figures 946919 FT UG and 285069 PT UG; 2016–17 1766285 FT and PT UG Source https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/whos-in-he (accessed May 20, 2019)

2 Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/participation-rates-in-higher-education-2006-to-2017 (accessed May 20, 2019)

3 Academic communities’ opposition to metric-based assessment regimes is not confined to the UK, or to this sort of ‘research selectivity’ exercise. The trend towards metric-based evaluation of research quality, and with it the ‘quality’ of those producing the research is, arguably, endemic across academia and across the globe. Opposition to this trend is manifested in local struggles against the inclusion of impact factor and citation scores in promotion evaluation procedures to national campaigns of opposition to exercises such as the REF in the UK, to international campaigns for the responsible use of research metrics, with the DORA campaign the most well known (https://sfdora.org/).

4 The NSS is an annual survey of final year UK HE undergraduates. Commissioned by the Office for Students on behalf of the UK university funding and regulatory bodies, the survey is administered by Ipsos MORI, a private polling company. See the NSS website at https://www.thestudentsurvey.com/ for further information regarding the survey and questions used.

5 THE also reported on the initial findings of the SMS in October 2017 at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/survey-results-confirm-uk-university-staffs-deep-dissatisfaction

6 The quantitative data was initially compiled into four subscales: staff dignity, senior management impact on students, senior management performance, wellbeing and work pressure.