UK universities should rip up a lot of their “back-end nonsense”, tackle managerial bloat and stop repeatedly spending money on different versions of the same thing to allow them to return to their core missions and heavily invest in academic jobs, according to an influential professor who has helped to pioneer a new approach to digital infrastructure in the public sector.
Higher education institutions are afflicted by the same problems as local councils, government departments and the NHS in that they are legacy organisations that have grown in silos and are all trying to reinvent the wheel, Mark Thompson, professor in digital economy at the University of Exeter, told Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities UK conference in Exeter.
This has fuelled a rapid expansion in bureaucracy, meaning that much of universities’ budgets for digital transformation goes on maintaining “business as usual” and that leaders “spend most of their time keeping the lights on”, he said.
“Universities have been going the wrong way for some time…in cutting academic [posts], courses and research, and at the same time we are ballooning administrative activity,” Professor Thompson told the conference.
