The University of Western Australia

What makes an effective Academic Board?

Speech by Professor Don Markwell,
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), The University of Western Australia,
at the Conference of Chairs of Academic Boards,
Perth,
Monday 22 October 2007

Colleagues –

As my remarks today will make clear, in my view an effective, independent Academic Board focussed on academic quality assurance is no less an essential element of the running of a successful university in the increasingly competitive environment of today and tomorrow than it has ever been.

I ought to begin by making clear that what I want to say is by way of personal reflections based principally on my own experience in a small number of Australian universities. I am conscious that there are many different sizes, roles, powers and other characteristics of Academic Boards, but – rather than attempt a sophisticated taxonomy – I will make broad statements that I believe should – and I hope will – apply generally. If my statements are too broad-brush, they may nonetheless act as a provocation to debate.

The question 'what makes an effective Academic Board?' depends on what the purpose of an Academic Board is.

In my view, the central purpose of an Academic Board in an Australian university is academic quality assurance. Other roles are attributed to Academic Boards – such as communication, a forum for debate, and so forth – and these have real value. But it seems to me that the role for which an Academic Board is essential – which a University needs and which a Board is likely to be uniquely capable of providing – is the maintenance of the academic standards of the institution.

In his paper for AUQA, 'The Role of Academic Boards in University Governance', Anthony Dooley says – quote – 'The Board should be the engine room of the university'.¹ I find this a puzzling image. In my mind, it is the role of those with executive responsibility – such as deans and their teams, and vice-chancellors and theirs – to initiate new activities by the faculty or university – for example, to initiate the creation of new academic programs. It is the role of the Academic Board to ensure that these initiatives are undertaken within an appropriate framework of academic standards, policies, and processes, and to test these initiatives against them.

As we know – as Lord Acton famously wrote – 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. Power is apt, sooner or later, to be misused. Constitutional structures of states must balance the need to have sufficient concentration of power for effective action to be possible, and sufficient checks and balances against the excessive concentration of power to ensure, if possible, that it is not abused or misused, or that abuse is identified and rectified. It seems to me that in the constitutional structure of a university, the Academic Board plays a crucial role as a form of check or balance.

In a modern university, there is the executive or management function – exercised by deans, vice-chancellors, and the administrative apparatus of the university; secondly, the governance function of the University Council or Senate, which gives formal approval to the strategy and highest level policies and key decisions of the university; and thirdly, there is as an academic quality assurance mechanism, the Academic Board. You will notice that this characterization is itself an over-simplification: for example, in some universities, and in many at some time, the most important line of cleavage is between the deans and the central leadership of the institution. But I think the tripartite distinction between functions and arms of the University – executive, institutional governance, and academic quality assurance – remains.

The relationship between these three functions and arms of the University changes over time. It is commonly imagined, I think, that it has changed considerably in the last decade or more as universities have had to respond to the increasing need to position themselves in a competitive market – for example, for international students, for Australian postgraduate students, and increasingly for Australian undergraduate students, and for other sources of revenue – and have become what Simon Marginson and Mark Considine call 'the enterprise university'. There is no doubt that the challenges and opportunities of the last decade or so, including the growth of university reliance on international student fees, have in many cases affected the relationship between executive officer-holders and Boards. But a glimpse at the histories of older Australian universities would also show that there was no 'golden age' of perfect equipoise between these bodies either – instead, many instances of competition for power and of discord. If you seek an example, why not read A P Rowe's book, If the Gown Fits, arising from his decade as Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide from 1948?

In my view, the increasingly competitive market environment in which universities have to operate means both that Academic Boards need to be conscious of the strategic imperatives of their institution, and constructively engaged with the university's strategy for its future, and that Academic Boards need to be as rigorous as ever in their upholding of academic standards.

To illustrate my emphasis on the continued need for rigorous, even unrelenting, focus on academic standards, let me take up an area which is of major interest to AUQA, and which features in your agenda for this meeting. Martin Carroll and David Woodhouse, in their discussion of 'Quality Assurance Issues in Transnational Higher Education'² , have noted:

• the growth of senior executives with specifically 'international' responsibilities;
• the growth of committees responsible for approving and reviewing transnational operations, which committees are often weighted towards a business rather than an academic focus;
• the use of private corporate arms to manage universities' transnational activities in a commercial manner; and
• partnerships with private operators managed through trusts and private commercial entities.

As Carroll and Woodhouse write:

'The core characteristic of transnational operations is that they are means of helping students learn and achieve success at standards recognised in higher education. This means that there is a leadership role for academic boards or similar committees charged with primary responsibility for the academic affairs of the institution. In some cases, the concern for financial and corporate aspects, while essential, has worked to diminish effective academic input to the governance of transnational higher education operations'.³

As they later write:

'…in some cases transnational higher education operations are run primarily as a "commercial" activity rather than an "academic" activity. This can mean a less central role for entities such as the academic board that have been charged with maintenance of academic governance and quality assurance. This in turn can place the maintenance of academic standards under strain, and the quality assurance arrangements for transnational activities in Australian universities range from excellent to poor.'⁴

I agree with the 2005 statement about 'The Purpose and Function of Academic Boards and Senates' that emerged from the National Conference of Chairs of Academic Boards and Senates:

'The Board and its standing committee carry responsibility for quality in all academic activities… The Board should hold authority for approval, accreditation and review of new and existing academic programs, including those offered by commercial entities owned or partially owned by the university. The Board has ultimate oversight of all programs, onshore and offshore, and its processes play a key role in ensuring comparability of standards both within the institution and externally.'⁵

In my view, failure to uphold academic standards – offshore or onshore – is bad from an academic perspective and is bad business: sooner or later, it will damage the reputation – if you like, the 'brand' – of the institution, and potentially of Australian higher education as a whole. Academic quality assurance is an essential element of, and is not antagonistic to, the commercial and any other strategic imperatives in the conduct of profit-generating programs.

Or to take another area – the temptation to those responsible for the admission of students, in particular international students, to relax the declared admission requirements (for example, the English language requirements) of the institution so as to admit fee-paying students who do not meet the requirements but who will boost enrolments and fee income. This is one form of the temptation, to which some institutions have at times inappropriately succumbed, to lower their entrance standards. My experience leads me to the strong belief that high academic standards are good marketing – the harder it is to get in, the more people want to get in – or, if you like, in the words of the old advertisement, 'it's the fish John West reject that makes John West the best'.

The greater the temptation to disregard academic standards, the more important is the safeguard of those standards – and thus, in my view, is the Academic Board.

Academic standards, of course, need to be considered in the context not only of universities seeking to generate revenue, or more accurately, surplus or profit from activities. Universities also seek to promote equity, access, and diversity; and an Academic Board will need to concern itself with how these crucially important objectives are to be achieved consistently with the appropriate academic values of the institution.

And so, for me, the question becomes – what enables an Academic Board to be an effective mechanism for academic quality assurance? What enables it effectively to uphold the academic standards of the institution?

First, it needs to exist. To state the obvious, a peak academic body focussed on academic quality assurance needs to have been created, and not to have been abolished. Typically, institutions which did not have a professorial board which 'morphed' into an Academic Board have had to create an Academic Board or similar body.

The idea that Academic Boards should be abolished, or neutered through being merged with some other body or by subsuming roles that compromise their central quality assurance purpose, seems to me highly dangerous.

As you will have seen, David Woodhouse and Jeanette Baird have written:⁶

'Is a separate academic "peak body" really needed? … wouldn't a more sensible structure have no academic board, but a governing body that contains a reasonable number of people who know about an educational enterprise, i.e. academics? Such a governing body/council could have about 20 people, including 7 academics, 2 administrators, 3 students, 3 senior managers, and 6 external members. The academic staff on a council need not necessarily be staff of that institution. Internal academic quality assurance for learning and teaching could be strengthened through the replacement of a central academic board by a small committee of acknowledged leaders in learning and teaching across the institution. This committee might be responsible for university-wide review of standards, including external comparisons, and ensuring good practice in curriculum and assessment design.'

This seems to me to raise many problems. First, it implicitly invites the governing body of the institution to focus on and decide on academic matters on which I would prefer that it defers to a more traditional Academic Board. Secondly, it replaces a large and in some sense representative body with a small committee of learning and teaching experts – a category, incidentally, about which I have some scepticism, even suspicion. And who will guard these guardians? Who will protect us against the protectors? The existence of a more traditional Academic Board may be, I would argue is, important for academics around the institution having an appropriate sense of ownership of the academic enterprise, and for communication within the institution.

There may be better ways of organising the academic quality assurance function than the presently constituted Academic Boards, Academic Senates or Academic Councils of our universities – but let us be very careful that in well-meant change we do not undermine that quality assurance, and raise fresh problems. Every higher education institution needs some form of academic board.

Secondly, it needs to be independent of the management of the institution.

This seems to me axiomatic as a necessary element of effective quality assurance, as it would be of, say, effective audit.

The statement in the 2005 paper on 'The Purpose and Function of Academic Boards and Senates' states it well: The Board 'is independent of, but shares membership with, senior executive, senior management and Council'.⁷

My personal view is that this independence is in danger of being fatally compromised if the Vice-Chancellor or a deputy vice-chancellor chairs the Academic Board. But I agree with the 2005 statement that 'frequent and full communication between the Chair [and] Deputy Chairs [of the Academic Board] and Vice-Chancellor [and I would add, deputy vice-chancellors] is necessary to implement the Board's mission'.⁸

Thirdly, the Academic Board needs to have a clear and resolute focus on academic quality assurance.

This involves not simply declaring policy, but ensuring that the policy is actually carried out. As Anthony Dooley has pointed out, some audit panels have divided quality assurance into two parts – 'development of appropriate policy; and monitoring its implementation'. He also points out that AUQA 'audit panels question the extent to which policy is implemented and systematically monitored'.⁹

Tony Pollock, the head of IDP, made this point at the national symposium in Sydney in August on the English language skills of international students: the problem, he said, was not the admissions policies of institutions; it was the instances when these policies were not implemented in practice.

Anthony Dooley's paper also says that 'Boards' roles as forums for collegial discussion are often at odds with their perceived roles as policemen'.¹⁰ He also points out that 'the tension between a community of scholars and the meeting of an enforced standard is one which is felt in many aspects of university governance'.¹¹ I respond to this by saying two things:

• first, that we should encourage collegial communities of scholars in which it is accepted that the upholding of standards is an essential activity, important to the integrity of that community of scholars, and – so far as possible – to be welcomed rather than resisted;
• secondly, that to compromise the upholding of standards for fear of undermining collegiality is to make the wrong bargain: better some period of frosty relations, even of unpopularity, than to risk the standards and reputation of what the institution stands for.

Fourthly, the Academic Board needs to combine that clear focus on academic quality assurance with a constructive engagement with the strategy of the institution's executive leaders.

Universities have multiple objectives, and operate in complex and highly competitive strategic environments. The Academic Board needs, in my view, to remember that it is the executive leadership of the institution, under the ultimate governance body, that must determine the strategy for the institution. The role of academic quality assurance is not to stymie the strategy of the university, but to ensure that it is chosen and implemented consistently with the appropriate academic standards of the institution.

Audits of some universities have referred to 'aligning academic governance and executive management', and 'an effective partnership between Academic Board and the executive'.¹² There are different ways of achieving this. But at their heart will be a relationship between Board and executive management which is, ideally, mutually respectful; in which the Board will be co-operative and constructive but also uncompromising on standards.

Balanced against my urging to Board officers to be courageous, I should also observe that a Board that establishes itself simply as an obstacle to change regarded as important by the executive management and the governing body is unlikely to prolong its own effective life.

Fifthly, the Academic Board needs effective leaders. It follows from what I have already said that I think such leaders need to combine a rigorous commitment to quality assurance with an understanding of institutional strategy and imperatives, and also a capacity for communication and ideally skills of diplomacy. They must be able to command the respect, however grudging, of institutional executives and academic staff alike.

How to ensure a steady supply of such paragons may, of course, be a problem – especially if the position of the Board is not well-entrenched and respected within the culture of the institution. I therefore think that the position of chair or president of the Academic Board should be established and treated within the university as one of importance and authority, neither at loggerheads with nor subservient to the executive leadership. Individuals who have had experience in Board committees and in other leadership roles within the institution will generally be best. Personally, I like very much the model that has Board officers, carefully identified, serving for a run of years in increasingly senior roles – say, as Deputy Vice-President, then as Vice-President, and then as President of the Board – coming to that last role with considerable experience.

It is important that Board leaders should be neither subservient to, or beholden to, nor needlessly hostile to those with executive responsibility. This raises sometimes-hard questions for institutions and individuals – should Board officers be included in executive groups, or not? Should the pattern be established, or carefully avoided, of Board officers going on to hold executive positions – of the Board presidency being a stepping stone to a deputy vice-chancellorship or deanship?

As in most things in life, Board leadership requires a balance – of clarity of purpose, resolution, courage and fearlessness on the one hand, and humility, willingness to listen, and willingness to contemplate the possibility of being wrong, on the other.

There are various types of perversion of Board leadership that need to be guarded against. Let me mention three types I have imagined myself to have observed over the years:

• first, the ones whose independence, even integrity, may be compromised by personal ambition to high executive office;
• secondly, the demagogue, one who – perhaps with ambition to make a name for themselves as slayers of executive dragons – imagines him – or herself to be the voice of the people – 'the voice of the academy', as if there was only one voice in what one would expect and want to be a diverse range of voices; and
• thirdly, the over-enthusiastic Board officer who takes on the role of executive officers of the university – for example, themselves designing and enthusiastically promoting entrance pathways to the university which lead them into the same temptations, to compromise standards, into which other designers and promoters of pathway programs can too readily be led.

Leadership that avoids these and other traps is what we need.

Sixthly, the Board also needs a membership that will also effectively balance understanding of institutional needs with commitment to upholding standards.

Of course one of the recurrent issues for Academic Boards in many universities is that they become too large to be effective – though, as I will go on to touch on, a large body may work effectively through committees that report to its plenary meetings.

There is also a danger in a Board that has too small a membership.

There is a risk in some bodies that too many members are too concerned not to have their own proposals questioned that they are reluctant to question the proposals of others. A P Rowe in If the Gown Fits wrote:

'In the University of Adelaide [this was in the 1950s] the main academic committee dealt well enough with small matters, though at a considerable expenditure of time; but in large matters I found it to be a kind of mutual protection society in which no breath of criticism of any department might be heard. … In my experience, fear of change dominated the massive academic committee of which I write.'¹³

One safeguard against the problem that, say, no dean dares criticise a proposal put forward by another dean, lest his or her own proposals be criticised later, is to have a number of elected members, beholden to no one, and encouraged in their role as questioners.

So is having a Board secretariat that ensures that the procedures required for proposals to come to the Board have been fulfilled – for example, without being mindlessly bureaucratic, that the documentation required to support a proposal for a new academic program has been properly completed.

Seventhly, the Academic Board needs an effective committee structure.

David Woodhouse and Jeannette Baird, in their somewhat dismissive paper on 'The Central Role of Academic Boards in Quality and Standards', say: 'As a group, usually large, of academics from across the institution, the academic board also faces difficulties in discharging its critical quality assurance responsibilities'. They argue that it is too likely to defer to the expertise of disciplinary specialists, and unlikely to have sufficient 'professional expertise in the design and quality assurance of higher education curricula and assessment methods'.¹⁴

It seems to me that the answer to this is to have an effective committee structure; small enough and continuous enough to be focussed, but large, diverse, and sufficiently rapidly changing not to become cliques; involving – and helping to train – colleagues from around the university; drawing in specialist expertise as it is needed; and developing its own expertise and that of its support staff over time in the fields with which it is concerned.

Eighthly, all this should be embodied – I think the modern word is 'embedded' – in the culture of the university. Many political scientists have said that the political culture of a community will determine how the institutions created by formal legal documents actually function in practice. This is certainly true of universities.

Cultures can be created, and they can be changed. Indeed, cultures are the creations of countless acts of individuals over time. I think it is desirable for those who value the kind of Academic Board I have sketched to work to encourage a culture within our institutions which will uphold this.

And so, in short, my answer to the question 'what makes an effective Academic Board?' is that there needs to exist an independent body with a clear and resolute focus on academic quality assurance, combining that with positive understanding of the institution's broader strategy; led effectively, fearlessly but constructively, and with a membership that ensures thorough though constructive scrutiny; with an effective committee system; and all this embedded in the culture of the institution – a culture that both gets things done, and does so with full respect and regard for the high academic standards which, in my view, should be at the heart of any academic institution.

_________________

1. Anthony Dooley, 'The Role of Academic Boards in University Governance', Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), 2007, p 20.
2. Martin Carroll & David Woodhouse, 'Quality Assurance Issues in Transnational Higher Education', in Jeannette Baird (ed), Quality Audit and Assurance for Transnational Higher Education, AUQA, 2006.
3. Ibid, pp 67-8.
4. Ibid, pp 84-5.
5. See Dooley, op cit, p 27.
6. David Woodhouse and Jeanette Baird, 'The Central Role of Academic Boards in Quality and Standards', 2006, p 2.
7. See Dooley, op cit, p 26.
8. See ibid, p 26.
9. Ibid, p 10.
10. Ibid, p 13.
11. Ibid, p 17.
12. Ibid, p 12.
13. A.P. Rowe, If the Gown Fits, Melbourne University Press, 1960, pp 25-6.
14. Woodhouse & Baird, op cit, p 2.

What makes an effective Academic Board? - Professor Don Markwell.