The Corporate Cancer Destroying Our Institutions

Having worked in administrative roles for the greater part of my professional life, the matters I am about to write about may mark me (in the eyes of many) as a hypocrite and a fraud. I could also be disqualified on the basis of my background in Classics. It may once have been thought that a solid background in Latin and Greek fitted a man (rarely, of course, a woman) for positions of power in church and state, including the just administration of colonial possessions, but for such a person to express opinions on governance and management in today’s enlightened world must look like impertinence.

On the first point, that of hypocrisy, perhaps having been a CEO of one body or another for thirty years I am fairly to be blamed. A decent person should speak out about unhappy developments in the evolution of human structures at the time they appear rather than wait half a lifetime to denounce them, after we all have become thoroughly inured to them and remediation no longer appears possible. “First they came for the communists …”

In 1984 I was appointed principal of Jane Franklin Hall, an affiliated college of the University of Tasmania. In those days the university issued a loose-leaf staff manual that listed, among many other interesting things, the complete set of university wages and salaries. This book was regularly updated—one removed the obsolete pages and replaced them with the new. The practice was common to all tertiary institutions at that time. Pay scales recorded ranged from those of groundsmen and part-time casual tutors to the vice-chancellor, whose rate was, I think, pegged at about 25 per cent above full professors. I can’t now check the accuracy of that figure for reasons that will become obvious.

The book disappeared in the early 1990s. From memory they didn’t actually send someone to seize our copies, they simply stopped revising it and one gathered that it was no longer a valid guide to anything. Everything was deregulated and processes in practice went underground. Governing bodies became smaller, the business model began to take over from the traditional collegiate one. Professors were “hired” at market prices. In hindsight it all happened very quickly.

The warning signs were there for all but the blind to see, but most of us were blind.

In 1985, the Thatcher government published the Jarratt Report, which stressed that “universities are first and foremost corporate enterprises”. The report argued that the tradition of vice-chancellors being scholars first, chairmen of senates whose will they were to execute, should be replaced by a model under which professional CEOs should provide strong leadership. The word autocratic was never used but was clearly implicit. “Scholars should not run universities—business leaders must.”

I was appointed a University of Tasmania ombudsman in the late 1980s, but the position was abolished without notice in January 1991 or 1992, at a meeting called in the absence of the president of the union, though it was the union that had originally brokered the appointment of ombudsmen. The reason for the abolition was never explained and came as a surprise and a shock to the union. We suspected that the timing and lack of notice were deliberate. Perhaps it was innocent enough, but I am sceptical about that: to me it seemed to be part of the process of centralising authority and constructing new and more complaisant hierarchies. The reader will note my uncertainty as to the dates of the appointment. I tried to confirm them by letter and telephone but no record could be found. Apparently I and my fellow ombudsmen (former State Governor Professor Kate Warner was one of them) had suffered damnatio memoriae.

This was a time, too, when executive deans acquired a new and special status, with larger suites of offices, designated carparks, better-quality furnishings—and air-conditioning, a luxury then unknown to ordinary staff. It was as if the new potentates were strengthening their hold on power by introducing a further tier of privilege between themselves and their ordinary colleagues, suborning lesser men and women to share some of their perks and thereby join their alliance. It’s perfectly understandable, of course: anybody who has been a manager knows the value of appointing assistants to do some of the less popular work. If you want to give students bad news, get your deputy to break it to them; if good news, do it yourself! We all do it that way if we can. But I think there have been fewer constraints on the construction of hierarchies in the past quarter-century.

As head of an independent college, Jane Franklin Hall, I could observe these changes as a relative outsider; as an honorary member of the Arts faculty I used to enjoy meetings where real decisions were still made, if in what would now be regarded as a rather bumbling, amateurish, old-fashioned way.

After eighteen years at Jane Franklin Hall, I became Rector of St John’s College in the University of Sydney, which had made the decision to become co-ed two years before my appointment and was determined to walk away from its old image as a bastion of male privilege. St John’s at that time still operated, at least in theory, on a religious model. Religious model, you ask? Yes, of course: for the “Oxbridge” colleges, the only real models for Sydney’s first colleges in the middle of the nineteenth century, started life as religious communities of masters or “fellows” (the professed) and undergraduates (the novices and aspirants). But that couldn’t survive the approach of modernity, and the enabling St John’s College Act, passed in the 1850s by the Parliament of New South Wales, was doomed.

I quarrelled with the Fellows of St John’s College on matters of governance. I had been appointed Rector by the Fellows who, together with me, constituted the Council of the College under the Act. A mechanism for electing Fellows had been introduced for the first time shortly before my arrival, but there had been no provision for it in the Act: the Fellowship was originally intended to be a self-perpetuating body. I do not now argue that this was a good thing, but I do regret the process by which it was abandoned in favour of a more modern “business” model.

The modernising process (perhaps aggiornamento might be a fitting term for it!) began with the appointment of a Chairman of Council (a role unknown to the Act) whose existence effectively reduced the Rector’s part to that of a CEO, subject to annual reviews and expected to respond positively to such things at “KPIs” and other tools of efficient management.

I resisted such innovations strongly and in so doing fell out of favour with the dominant group in the Fellowship. Eventually, in my successors’ times, St John’s finally persuaded the New South Wales government to discard the old quasi-religious polity of Rector and Fellows in favour of a smaller board on the commercial pattern.

Almost nobody understood what I had been talking about, when I tried to uphold the principles by which I had been appointed and insisted upon retaining the almost monarchical powers of an abbatial head of a medieval religious house. In retrospect, I suppose, it was a pointless campaign to wage. I retain no bitterness at losing it, but question whether the system that replaced it was, for all the quaintness of the old way of doing things, a real improvement.

The changes that have now occurred at St John’s and other colleges at Sydney and in other institutions were triggered by the university’s increasing willingness to direct blame towards the colleges and their students for their supposedly appalling behaviour, in response to media-driven publicity. This was deeply hypocritical, for universities had generally abandoned the exercise of moral authority as long ago as the 1960s. The colleges, however, provided them with a kind of scapegoat for their own ethical negligence, an opportunity for grandstanding that also allowed them to demonstrate their politically-correct disdain for elitism. Naturally, activist feminist groups clambered on board and we began to hear statistics about sexual abuse that were utterly disproportionate to the experience of students and college staff. Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? The behaviour of college students was indeed sometimes quite unconscionable, but no more appalling than that of any other young people in the florescence of adulthood. College students, however, are more readily identified, for 200 students together in one residence have a very high public profile, and are more conveniently pilloried. More justly pilloried, too, for they are perceived as elite.

The outcome of those interventions is that the university now exercises a firmer hegemony over the colleges, part of a continuing policy of centralisation, which might possibly impress us, if it were not for its weak and culpable lack of control over activist groups as disparate as “pro-choice” advocates and Hamas supporters. Its hypocrisy exposes its moral bankruptcy.

My wife’s experiences as a social worker in palliative care during the 1990s paralleled my own in the university. The appointment of a professional manager to head her unit, a person without social work or pastoral experience, meant more meetings, more paper work, and of course less time available for visits to the patients and clients who actually needed care. Some wit in those days parodied the situation with this piece of managerial advice:

Ensure that the proportion of staff actually engaged in delivering services is not excessive: there must be a strong management structure whose members are not corrupted by any actual understanding of the real work of their departments.

That would be funny if it weren’t too close to the truth.

Everywhere in the West, the managerial elite are decoupling from the middle and working classes, whom they despise. Power—real power—is increasingly restricted to smaller and smaller groups, whose financial rewards are ever greater, while people in the lower tiers of administration are increasingly burdened by compliance requirements. As a member of the board of a large education body in my state I noted that the number of full-time equivalent positions increased by 24 per cent between 2018 and 2021. This was not empire-building, but a response to pressure from government: more staff are needed to meet the growing demands for data and risk avoidance. That rate of growth shows no sign of slowing down. The real killer (from the point of view of society’s welfare) is that people need to feel that their work is important. There is thus a strong tendency for people performing frankly useless and unproductive administrative tasks to persuade themselves that their contribution is essential. This is a huge disincentive to real reform.

Meanwhile management has formed a new alliance with the Left. Many managers are now in lockstep with radical ideologies, a situation inconceivable just a couple of decades ago. And the consequence of that is very serious, for the radical Left despises limitations, whether of biology, history, race, geography or religion, and a left-leaning management class may well introduce a “re-set” utterly inimical to the liberty and wellbeing of the great majority of humanity. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue (1981):

… there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals.

I see no easy solution. In my view systems do not dismantle themselves except under irresistible external pressure.

Unless we do something radical there will be more policies, more committees to draw them up and review them, more enforcement of increasingly stringent legislation. I have never had the slightest sympathy for anarchy, and yet by some strange irony the only resolution I can see would be some kind of forced dismantling of structures, removal of clutter, drastic reduction of the burden of regulatory compliance and—dare I say it—drainage of the swamp. In effect, a kind of guided and limited anarchy might do us all a favour. None of these things can end well: if there is no appetite and no courage for a controlled simplification of public and private administration, the whole system could collapse chaotically under its own weight.

Somebody likened Tony Blair’s 1999 reform of the House of Lords to the axing of a whole forest of mighty trees without any considered plan to replace them or make best use of the timber. Chesterton’s Fence is perhaps a better analogy: do not chop it down unless you know for certain who put it there and why, and if it was effective, and what you can replace it with. The felling of forests and the demolishing of fences was a striking feature of the second half of the twentieth century that shows no sign of slowing down. Such zeal may have done some good work. But the suspicion remains that the motives of the wreckers have not always been as high-minded as they sound, for fear and the lust for power can be at least as powerful drivers of human effort as good and humane intentions.

David Daintree has been Director of the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies since its foundation in 2013. He plans to retire (for the last time!) at the end of this year.