Dundee uni – same behaviours, same problems

One of the things that you would identify as reassuring progress when there has been a crisis is that the behaviours which led to the crisis are then very clearly altered. It is hard to identify such progress at Dundee University, based on reporting in today's National.

Dundee University is discussing a recovery plan having hit a major financial crisis which is leading to one in ten of the university's staff losing their jobs. There was a major report into the crisis which identified a string of management and governance failures and a lack of candour on the part of senior officials.

The problem is that it now appears that frontline staff at the university are as in the dark about the recovery plan as they were about the initial financial crisis. Staff report that they are receiving information on what is happening primarily through the media and that senior officials are not keeping them informed about (never mind involving them in) decision-making.

If secretive governance by a small group at the top of the university with insufficient scrutiny or input from others in the institution was the problem, is secretive recovery with insufficient scrutiny or input the solution?

The report into the Dundee crisis (produced by former Glasgow Caledonian University Principle Pamela Gilles) was particularly biting in its criticism. It was pretty unflinching in apportioning blame over what had happened. It certainly made some strong recommendations.

However there is reason to be concerned that yet again the wrong lesson has been learned. A report that should have been read as a critique of narrow and unresponsive governance leading to hubris seems to have been read as a report that is only claiming it was narrow and unresponsive governance by the wrong people which was the problem.

Rather than moving away from this extremely top-down model of running a large institution, recovery appears to be little more than a change of technocratic leadership which is otherwise running the university in the same manner.

This is the regular and dispiriting reality in Scotland. There appears always to be three separate fights. First, to get proper recognition and assessment of a problem – the fight for a public inquiry or review or other form of accountability.

Then to get a thorough and honest assessment of what has gone wrong and why in that review process, with clear recommendations for change, carried out by a genuinely independent reviewer. And then finally to try and get that accountability report and recommendations genuinely accepted and acted on in the spirit with which they were made.

This is a long process of fighting. Often it is difficult to get any accountability in the first place. Some campaigns have to struggle patiently for decades for any accountability process. Once that begins it is often another struggle to get findings that are not a whitewash and which are delivered within a credible timescale which enables them to be acted on.

And yet it is often the final phase where the biggest fight occurs. There is a big difference between the appearance of reform and actually reforming something. It's not only the many shades of 'lessons will be learned' (as in we accept all the recommendations but won't do anything significant about them).

It's also that responses are often bureaucratic and run by the same class of people who caused the problem in the first place – the governing classes. This is a change only in personnel, not in approach or mindset.

Common Weal has a wide range of proposals for reform of governance and accountability. Dundee University would not be in the trouble it is in if it was governed as it used to be, as a community of learners and thinkers. However no moves towards more collegiate governance are being pursued.

We also have a range of proposals for oversight of reform, above all that reform should be overseen not by the governing classes themselves but by a Citizens' Assembly of ordinary people who would have different standards of accountability for public failure.

Instead it appears that a crisis which was created by a closed shop of technocrats is being resolved by a closed shop of technocrats and that the fundamental weaknesses that led to the initial crisis will all remain in place. There is an unacceptable level of tolerance for failure in public sector governance in Scotland and it is citizens who pay the price.