Quiet Flows the Don: The Radice Critique of Higher Education in the UK

Writing about web page http://inderscience.metapress.com/link.asp?id=xj92884n72203v41

Hugo Radice has written a fine critique of the management of higher education in the United Kingdom ("Life After Death? The Soviet System in British Higher Education," in The International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy 3:2 (2008), pp. 99-120). Radice's case is that British universities work under the same centralized command-and-control regulation as the old Soviet economy, and are subject to the same perverse incentives and the same dysfunctional behaviours that arose as a result: "plan bargaining, endemic shortages, sectoral autarky, and the battle for political control of decision."

I have shared this view since I first came across Radice's paper (and another on similar lines: Ronald Amann "A Sovietological View of Modern Britain," in The Political Quarterly 74:4 (2003), pp. 468-480). Now that Radice's paper has been rightly published in a refereed journal, I find I have somewhat less sympathy for its conclusions than I expected. It hits the right buttons on many core issues. And yet ...

Radice took six years to write and revise his paper. For three of those years, I chaired my department. From my first days in that role, I found that I had an accidental advantage – one of inestimable worth – over other novice chairs: a lifetime of studying Soviet bureaucracy. The aspects of university administration that baffled others seemed natural and obvious to me: the plan bargaining that Radice describes, soft budget constraints, the importance of networks and coalitions, and so on. I felt like a fish in water.

I reminded myself of the things that Stalin thought of as critical to power. At one time Stalin said: "Politics decides everything," so I became a political animal. At another time Stalin said: "Organization decides everything," so I tried to ensure that my department was clearly and well constituted, and then to respect that constitution. On yet another occasion Stalin said: "Cadres decide everything," so I gave almost all of my time to "cadres" – the identification, recruitment, promotion, and retention of academic talent. Stalin never said: "Money decides everything," so I limited  the attention I gave to money. I didn't ignore it, but I tried to ensure that money followed academic priorities, not the other way around.

I recalled what Soviet managers said consistently when asked what was the the most important condition for them to do their jobs: "To have good relations with everyone." No Soviet manager could do their job without cultivating networks of loyalty and influence. They never knew when they would need a friend, or regret having made an unnecessary enemy. I observed how fellow chairs that gave offense or picked gratuitous quarrels with peers and superiors paid a heavy price in their ability to bargain resources for their departments.

I knew Stalin appreciated loyalty, but as a signal of loyalty he also valued the ability to speak truth to power. Showing loyalty to a university that had already employed me for three decades was not a difficulty, but I also tried to tell the truth to my leaders. I cultivated their trust, partly so that my own recommendations would be heard and my own decisions would be respected. I knew that, like Stalin, the vice chancellor could change any decision I made if he wanted to. I also knew that, like Stalin, he had limited attention; he didn't have time to manage my department himself. I wanted him not to want to manage my department; I wanted him to want me to do it, and to leave me to do it. I needed him to trust me, and I carefully monitored the signals of that trust.

I observed the continual battle for resources inside my university. It was a game instantly recognizeable to students of the Soviet economy. There was a centre, hungry for discretionary power over departmental resources; departments were continually working to pool risks and insure themselves against the grabbing hand of the centre. In this context budget constraints were continually negotiated, varied, and renegotiated, so were never hard. Conservatism and short-termism were rife, and intertemporal smoothing nearly impossible. Like the Soviet economy, our system's dysfunctions could be mitigated by intervention from time to time, but fundamental reform was out of the question. Despite the problems, feasible solutions emerged.

There were many times when I didn't know what to do. Sometimes I put myself in the shoes of a party secretary governing an important region of the USSR, or perhaps the director of a big weapons factory in the Urals. What would they do? I did the same; usually, it worked.

Collective responsibility is one of the aspects of the Soviet command system against which its leaders fought a lifelong battle. The excess of collective responsibility in British higher education for teaching and assessment is something that drove me crazy and no doubt will continue to do so. The teaching quality people always go on about collective responsibility as though it is a good thing, a moral value in itself. To me, a little collective responsibility is a necessary evil, required to give some protection to students against sloppy teaching and arbitrary assessment and to shield academics against undue student pressure. But too much of it and no one is responsible; along with responsibility, blame is pooled, and we all end up carrying the can for a few bad citizens that few have the courage to identify and no one can manage because no one person is responsible.

And yet ...

There were some things I knew about the Soviet system, that I found I could not use. I thought of the fear that Stalin inculcated and exploited in those around him. I hoped that my colleagues respected me, but they did not fear me. I did not classify them into enemies and potential enemies (those who were my friends today but might turn against me in future). I did not order them arrested, tortured, and shot, nor did I hold their partners hostage in my Northumbrian Gulag to ensure their loyalty. When they voted me down, I served up my revenge neither hot nor cold but smiled and acknowledged the preference of the majority.

My university did not feel like the Soviet Union! I knew the Soviet Union. I had lived, worked, and breathed in it; my first visit was in 1964; I studied there in the 1970s, and have visited Moscow many times since. After 30 years, I also knew my university. It wasn't the same. But how did it differ?

The big difference was this: I had no barbed wire. With a few coils around the campus, I could have blocked off the exits. I'd have had to give guns and spotlights to the security staff. If I could have stopped my professors from leaving, I would have been able to do things to them that would lower their welfare, and they would have had to accept it. They would have grumbled, and then conspired against me, and I would have needed a political police within the department to listen, detect, and report it to me. I'd soon put a stop to that. Forced labour would be next. But I had no barbed wire. If they didn't like the pay or conditions on offer, and could do better elsewhere, my colleagues would leave. Other universities that could use their talents more productively would make them a better offer, and I would have to match it or lose them. Without barbed wire, I could not accumulate personal power by treating others badly; I could get my way only through reliance on positive motivations. 

What motivations? Here I had another revelation: if my department was like anything in the Soviet economy, it was like the parts that worked best! There were parts of the Soviet economy that didn't work; there, enterprises padded their costs and met the plan through false accounting and other manipulations. But in other branches, a relatively poor country could set talent to work and achieve great things: the best tank, the first satellite, and so on.

In those branches, what motivated people to put in effort was not cash but an inner drive to achieve something great and thereby win a prize. I had studied Soviet military engineering. The Soviet designers were motivated partly from within (they wanted to get into space) and partly by reputation (they wanted to be first into space). This motivation was extremely powerful; one finding in my work was that these designers implicitly priced the immortal reputation of being the first in the world to invent something at thousands of times their annual salary.

I saw that this also described my colleagues pretty well: each new idea they had, each new finding they reached, each new paper they wrote was like a ticket in a lottery where first prize was immortality. This motivation was also the thing that made them so hard to manage, since a manager could not easily manipulate it. As for cash, it was important mainly that cash did not de-motivate them by making them feel disrespected or undervalued. 

Putting these things together, I saw that what made my department work was competition. There were two markets in which we competed, the market for talent and the market for reputation. In the market for talent, we had to compete to hire great scholars and pay them their worth. To afford that, we had to care about costs and use all our resources productively. In the market for reputation, we were all competing for immortality. My department was competing with other departments in national and international rankings by research quality (approximated, with some error, by the quality of journal acceptances), research influence (approximated, with a variable and unpredictable lag, by citations), research inputs (QR income and competitive grants), teaching quality (approximated, with a wide error, by student evaluations and, with less error but a greater lag, by our graduates' incomes and academic placements), and (in the student market) fee income; but the income side was mainly important to my department in that it would allow us to compete more effectively in the market for talent. And, as individual scholars, we were all competing with each other for immortality (approximated by citations).

It was this competition that aligned everybody's interests. It was't perfect competition; there were clear signs of rent seeking and overinvestment. But we couldn't achieve our plan through false accounting, because we had to meet objective, externally verified criteria of our product quality. We couldn't push up costs all the time, because if we did we would lose competitive advantage to leaner departments. For these reasons, I decided, my university was most certainly not going to repeat the sad history of the Soviet economy.

We were better than that, because we had no choice but to be better.

Radice's model of UK higher education is nearly but not quite mine. In his framework, HEFCE is the funding ministry, the universities are the spending ministries, and departments are enterprises. The targets are set by the RAE and the QAA. The research councils administer the special innovation funds for which ministries and enterprises compete. Some differences are unimportant. The most important one is that university departments are not like the typical Soviet enterprise, but are more like Soviet research institutes and design bureaux. Like their Soviet equivalents they employ a mix of talented people, people that look talented but are not, and people that looked talented once and maybe still have something in them -- or maybe not. Like their Soviet equivalents, they all have a capacity to surprise the world.

Another difference between us might be over the RAE. To Radice, the RAE has us all playing a bureaucratic game. I agree there is an element of that, primarily in deciding whom to submit or exclude. But in three years of trying to recruit world-class scholars from countries that do not have an RAE, my complaints about it have met with little sympathy. Generally, scholars trying to leave Germany, Italy, and Israel, for example, wish that their country had an RAE, and expect it would be easier to stay home if it did. They would tell me that, if the RAE was bad, to have no RAE was worse. The fact is that, beyond deciding participation, there is far less to manipulate in the RAE than in teaching quality, say. And the evidence is that the RAE has been instrumental in a substantial improvement in the international standing of UK research.

Beyond criticism of the RAE, Radice claims that "ultimately teaching quality really is important" but has been bureaucratized without giving it priority. I agree about the bureaucratization; the QAA is a rent-seeking monopolist, not a true regulator. Worse, it has seeded itself into the teaching quality sections of university administrations across the country.

I don't agree about that teaching quality merits higher priority than research. The most important contribution of universities to teaching may be not to what is taught today, nor to how it is taught, but to what will be taught in thirty years' time. What comes out of the best research today will decide how textbooks will be written for the next generation of students. The most important of today's new concepts will be featured in those textbooks, named after their inventors, as the Edgeworth box, the Phillips curve, and Granger causality were in their time.

That's immortality.

Radice took time off from teaching his students to write "Life After Death." Good for him; this paper is important for both scholarship and public policy. If that is right, the education textbooks will soon feature added sections on:

The "Radice Critique" of Higher Education in the UK

Mark Harrison : 26 Jan 2009 10:02 |  Tags: Russia Stalin Universities |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Victims and Perpetrators

Writing about web page http://www.itar-tass.com/prnt.html?NewsID=13357267

I spent a long weekend in Moscow at an international conference on “The History of Stalinism: Research Problems and Results." The conference was an important public event, organized by liberal scholars to counter the conservative tendencies in government and popular culture. There were 400 participants including academicians, archive directors, professors, and members of the public. In addition to many Russians there were scholars from Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan. The closing session was chaired by Nikolai Svanidze, Russia's Jonathan Dimbleby; Putin's minister for education and science Andrei Fursenko attended and spoke briefly.

Russia's citizens know little about Stalin. We are 55 years since Stalin's death, so no one younger than 60 can have a clear memory of the time when he ruled; the average life expectancy of Russian men today is 59 years. They know only what their parents and grandparents told them. A majority believes Stalin was a positive figure -- on balance, one of the great leaders of the twentieth century. There is nostalgia, inflated by conservative myth-making, summed up in the common perception that Russia needs strong, centralized leadership and should avoid the "excesses" of democracy.

My taxi driver to the airport, a man in his 50s, told me that his family was rooted in the trading class of Riazan, to the south east of Moscow. In the 1930s relatives of his grandparents' generation were arrested and executed. But when I asked for his personal view of Stalin he told me Stalin was too far away and high up for him to care. "The most terrible tsar," he said, "is the one that is nearest to you -- your boss at work or the neighbourhood bully." Between Stalin and the victims were many layers of perpetrators, who were also responsible.

That's true, of course. One statistic I heard quoted in the meetings was that, by the fall of the Soviet system, the KGB had 25 million informers -- a tenth of the whole Soviet population.

But, while true, it doesn't do justice to Stalin. One feature of Stalin is that he was an effective dictator. He had an exceptional talent for orchestrating the activities of those under him. As master of the ruling party and state, he ran an army-like command system that directed the lives of everyone. One thing that he orchestrated was the murder of three quarters of a million "potential enemies" in the Great Terror of 1937. When he gave the order, the shooting started. He ordered the creation of lists of numbers to be executed by region and category. He accepted or rejected the amendments proposed by those below him. When he was satisfied that enough had been shot, he gave another order and the shooting stopped.

So, who was more terrible: the man that fired the bullet, or the one that gave the order?

For the sake of justice, to bring the facts into the open, and to reconcile the state with its victims, both the man that fired the bullet and the man that gave the order need to be held to account. Not only Stalin but those who followed his orders. Not only those who followed orders, but Stalin himself. As South Africa has shown, it is possible to have truth and reconciliation without revenge, but without truth there can be no reconciliation.

One participant in the meeting noted that the crimes of Stalinism have produced victims but no perpetrators. Some real perpetrators were punished in Stalin's time, because Stalin was not satisfied until he had "cleaned out" his own secret police in addition to the rest of society. But Stalin is dead; since the collapse of communism not one executioner or torturer has been brought to account. The archives protect them from history, since files relating to living persons may not be disclosed and the families of dead persons retain the right to prevent disclosure.

On a different note, as an economist I was interested in discussion of the efficiency of forced labour. There is a debate about how effectively Stalin's GULAG labour camps used their resources. At various times Stalin held between a million and two and a half million people in the labour camps of the GULAG, but since most sentences were relatively short the throughput was much higher. During Stalin's time, maybe 25 million people passed into the GULAG -- and most came out again. In peacetime the annual death rate averaged around 30 per thousand, rising to 200 per thousand in the worst years of the war when there was not enough food to go round. Most forced labourers were engaged in logging and mining in the remote regions of the far north and east, and in construction around the country. A few were engaged in research and development, as Solzhenitsyn described in The First Circle.

How effectively were the forced labourers used? To some participants in the meeting, this question was clearly a source of anxiety.

By the end of Stalin's lifetime senior officials saw the GULAG as a financial loss-maker and an economic and social burden. They wanted increasingly to abolish it, but couldn't persuade Stalin. Conditions were awful and labourers were paid little, but even behind barbed wire it was hard to force effort out of people who had little or nothing to lose, so even in the labour camps there were cash incentives and better food for hard workers. A million forced labourers required a hundred thousand guards. In short, forced labour was not as cheap as you might think. Productivity was probably low on average, but some camp commanders may have been better at forcing or inducing effort than others. Or perhaps some were better than others at inflating reports; that is also possible. There are many details in the evidence, and as yet there is no summary.

So what? Here's what. More than 30 years ago there was a debate on the profitability of American slavery before the Civil War. Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross settled it, showing clearly that slavery was profitable. What did this mean? It meant that slavery would not have withered of its own accord. It was necessary to fight a civil war and spill blood to destroy it. That was how the American debate went.

Here is how the Russian debate goes: if the GULAG labourers were unproductive, if the GULAG was a burden on society, well and good that it is gone. But if it was productive and profitable -- well, then it worked! In that case, why not restore it? If only parts of the GULAG were efficient, why not study those parts to find out the secret -- and copy that? In short, on one side of the Russian debate, the price of forced labour paid in liberty lost and blood and tears spilt is seen as unimportant, compared with patriotic pride in the success of a great national effort carried out within barbed wire and under armed guard.

To conclude, we need to research the facts about Stalinism, but we also need a moral compass. A former comrade once said (I paraphrase, because neither the ideas nor the words were mine): "we study what happened in history, not to criticize history in the light of our ideals, but so that we can criticize our ideals in the light of history." I go along with that; communism is a nice set of ideals, but it is because of knowing what has happened in history that we can see its consequences. Evidently, to draw conclusions from the economic record of Soviet forced labour is a test not only of our knowledge but also of our political morality.

Mark Harrison : 11 Dec 2008 18:04 |  Tags: Cab-Drivers Forced-Labour Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem