Managing the academic unit.

Allan Bolton Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000.

There are many books, journal articles and conferences on governance and management at the institution-wide level of universities. Yet there is not a great deal of material available to guide those who manage academic units (departments, schools and faculties) in universities. Hence Allan Bolton's Managing academic units should be welcomed by deans and heads of departments. Written as a handbook for practitioners, Managing academic units identifies challenges facing managers of academic units, including staff selection, resource allocation, strategic planning, creating effective relationships between academics and administrators, benchmarking, performance indicators and representing the academic unit within the university and to external stakeholders. Then the book provides strategies for academic heads and managers of academic units to deal with these issues. Although the book discusses the English higher education system, there are sufficient parallels between the English and Australian systems that Bolton's advice is relevant to those in similar roles in Australian universities.

The advice that Bolton provides on managing academic units is realistic and practical because of his experience in administration management in academic units. Throughout the text, Bolton's advice is supplemented by quotations from people performing these roles, which adds authenticity to the text. The section on drafting a budget for a faculty comprised of departments with different income-earning potential illustrates a common dilemma faced by many deans and offers a rudimentary but effective solution. Discussions on the role of head of department and administration manager of an academic unit include suggestions on curriculum reform and conflict resolution that practitioners will find helpful. The section on the implementation of service-level agreements between central administration and academic units makes some relevant points. The review of the positive and negative aspects of outsourcing services such as personnel, marketing, Facilities management, student recruitment and information technology will be informative for those evaluating the feasibility and benefits of these strategies.

Managing academic units could have made stronger connections between the issues covered in the text. For example, how does strategic planning relate to resource allocation, benchmarking and entrepreneurial initiatives? Treating these issues as isolated topics makes the text readily accessible as a reference guide to practitioners, but means that a more comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities involved in managing an academic unit is not provided.

There are several parts of the text that reiterate received wisdom about higher education management without analysing or challenging these views. This is illustrated by Bolton's discussion of devolution of authority for budgetary and administration functions to academic units. Referring to the example of completing the requirements for the Research Assessment Exercise (1), Bolton notes that, in industry, there are trends for devolution of authority over budgets, staffing and production to base-level organisational units. Yet he argues that this will not work effectively for universities because central administrators do not want to deal with large numbers of staff in academic units, and that the work produced by academic units would need to be checked by faculty staff (p. 2). Consideration is not given to the possibility that improvements in information communication technology may enhance the accuracy and efficiency of academic units completing this task, not to mention that this is a rather disparaging view of the competency of academic staff.

A further weakness of this text is that it does not provide a comprehensive analysis of diversity among academic units. Managing academic units could have been a richer and more useful text for practitioners if it comprehensively examined variations in characteristics of academic units, such as discipline, resources, age of institution, networks to commercial markets and professional associations, and considered whether variations in these characteristics impact upon the effectiveness of particular management strategies. It also would have been worthwhile investigating whether particular management strategies are more effective for academic units in certain types of universities.

There are several case studies of best practice for managing academic units described in the text but readers are left to work out for themselves why the case in point is best practice among a range of management techniques, and to determine the type of academic unit in which the technique described would be appropriate. Managing academic units raises some of the issues and challenges involved in managing an academic unit in a modern university. It provides some suggestions and advice that practitioners will find valuable. However there is a great deal of scope for further investigation of this topic.

Note

(1) 'The Research Assessment Exercise measures research quality in order to determine where funds should be applied.' A guide to the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/Pubs/index.htm

Deanna de Zilwa
Monash University