Academic structures are now designed by corporate consultants

You're seeking to save £140 million. You've just saved £73 million and are now £14 million in surplus. In that context, a bill for £200,000 may not seem particularly egregious. Yet a contract from Edinburgh University to a private consulting firm feels exactly that.

Edinburgh University is one of a number of Scottish universities which have got themselves into serious financial trouble – not as bad as Dundee but seemingly worse than Glasgow or Aberdeen or Glasgow Caledonian. With an annual budget of £1.4 billion, Edinburgh is effectively trying to cut five weeks' of provision in a year (proportionately).

Common Weal has commented regularly on the fact that it is the managers who created the budget crisis who are mostly being allowed to resolve it – on their terms. The management of Edinburgh are not content to be back in surplus and claim (probably correctly) that some of those are one-off savings which cannot be repeated.

So in pursuit of further cuts they have appointed PA Consulting on an extended £200,000 contract. The purpose of this contract is because “External support to help develop a cost model for CAHSS, as part of their Academic Size and Shape activity, will now be extended to CSE and CMVM”. CAHSS is the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, CSE the College of Science and Engineering and CMVM of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.

PA Consulting are not educational specialists. They provide consulting services to corporations in defence and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government and public sector, life sciences and transport among a range of other topics. Clients range from Heathrow Airport to alcohol behemoth Diageo to DFDS freight business to Microsoft to Unilever, one of the world's biggest producers of Ultra Processed Foods.

So the fact that this corporate services company driven by a highly neoliberal consultancy firm whose primary commercial interests are in the private sector is now playing a key role in defining academic provision in one of Scotland's most ancient universities is surely cause for concern.

After all, PA Consulting's most recent engagement with Edinburgh University was to do a post-implementation review of the botched introduction of a new finance and HR system in the university (itself sourced from a global corporation which is known to be close to the Trump Administration and has largely funded the Tony Blair Institute).

This starts to give you a picture of how contemporary Scotland works. The highly-paid public sector management class make a serious mistake, so they hire corporate troubleshooters to come in and cover up their mess or advise them on how to ensure that the costs of the mess are met by those further down the hierarchy than those who caused it.

The tangled network of consultancies, private interests and senior management in the 'public' sector in Scotland is almost impossible to keep track of. The number of new contracts issued each week across the public sector is so substantial it is seldom properly covered in the media. And it all has a cumulative effect.

Every time policy development (which is what this is) is outsourced to a company ideologically committed to a culture of cuts, high executive pay, deregulation, low tax and managerialism, that philosophy is transplanted into the institution which commissions the consultants. This has now been happening for at least 30 years.

And one of the most apparent features in the public sector is over-complication and reduced transparency. That which should not be complex is made complex (this approach is how consultancies extract additional public money by making systems complicated to operate and so requiring more support), and that which should be clear is made opaque (such as the complex and expensive Oracle software system which caused so much trouble in the University but which is universally known by managers as the unintelligible 'People and Money', or just P&M).

It should not take Common Weal to state that academic provision should not be decided by private sector consultants and a university which spends as much on management services as Edinburgh but cannot do its own arithmetic represents a very serious failure. The assumption on the part of many is that university leaders just want the blame for the nature of cuts to be placed elsewhere.

Universities used to be a simple collegiate structure which operated simply by providing teaching and research, delivered and overseen by a collegiate body of academics. Now it is an obtuse corporate structure serviced by an army of external consultants. This has not turned out to be an improvement. Universities must be reformed back to their original philosophy if things are not to get worse.