AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Alan Lawson Alan Lawson is actively engaged in the analysis of national policy in research and research training. He has been involved in policy and administration of research higher degrees at the University of Queensland (UQ) since 1987.

In the research higher degree policy arena, he has initiated debates in the media and in higher education peak bodies about the Research Training Scheme and about students’ reasons for withdrawing from research higher degree candidature. He was recently a chief investigator on two nationally-funded research projects:

The Impact of Risk Management on Higher Degree Research Policy and Pedagogy in Australian Universities (Australian Research Council)

PhD Graduates 3 to 5 Years out: Employment Outcomes, Job Attributes and the Quality of Research Training (Higher Education Investigation Program, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations)
He is the author of the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies National Guidelines for the Examination of Australian Doctoral Theses. He was inaugural Chair of both the Group of Eight and the Universitas 21 Deans of Graduate Studies. In December 2004, he accepted the Australian Awards for University Teaching National Teaching Award on behalf of the UQ Graduate School. His current interests are in developing more expansive understandings of the terms 'research training' and 'early career researcher'.

I have to admit that I haven't got far enough through the 'decluttering your office' book, and I think I need the advanced course. Over the last few years I have adopted the so-called horizontal filing system, which means piles of paper on the floor, and the one thing I have learned from the book so far is that that produces really bad feng shui and is probably what causes me anxiety and energy blockages as soon as I go into my office. I am at least glad of the explanation.

I am the really lucky guy who was asked to talk about university administration at 9 o'clock on the morning after the dinner the night before, and I realise that is a fairly big ask.

I had initially thought of giving a recruitment talk, explaining to you all why, at some point in your career, you should become academic managers and administrators, and why that was a really noble outcome to one's research career. There is a little bit of that still in the talk, but the reason for having it there now is to try to explain to you what actually makes research managers, academic managers, senior administrators tick. As Toss Gascoigne's talk yesterday illustrated really well, if you understand the industrial circumstances, if you understand the genres and protocols, if you understand the motivations and the working situations of the people to whom you need to address your problems and your requests for solutions, then you can probably find the most appropriate way of productively communicating with them.

I have done a little bit of media training before – it doesn't show – and the thing that Toss said that I will never forget for the rest of my life is that a three-second television grab equals nine words, just nine. That understanding of the practicalities and the realities of the world into which you move when you try to communicate with journalists was really valuable. So, without being as snappy as Toss was, I want to give you some insights into what drives academic managers, administrators and decision makers.

I am, in a sense, going to tell you how to deal with administration; and I want to spend about 90 seconds telling you how to do administration, and a bit of time telling you how to be an administrator. I wouldn't want to separate those, and I wouldn't want ultimately to separate those from your job as researchers, because I think it helps you to understand better how to communicate with those people if we link those things together.

I had a colleague years ago who told us that he hoped to reach retirement without ever having demonstrated any administrative competence whatsoever. He succeeded in that, but only because he retired extremely early. I think he realised the time had come when people had recognised that in fact he was a born administrator, and since he wasn't doing much else they were about to give him plenty of administration to do.

I am not going to give a talk about avoiding administration. I don't think any of us can – or should. We were discussing a couple of recent university scandals in the bus coming here this morning, and it was a useful reminder of why some of this paperwork and record keeping is actually necessary. When the ventilation apparatus gets really soiled by the smelly stuff, you need to be able to rely on paper records – who made what decision when, and so on. It is a pity, it is annoying, it is embarrassing to have to treat your colleagues in that way, but ultimately when things get really sticky there does need to be a trail of evidence to work out whether things were done appropriately.

When I was first appointed to the University of Queensland, my duty statement was fascinatingly concise. It said that I had been appointed to do teaching, administration and research – and then there was a fourth duty: to carry out any other such tasks as my head of department should ask me to do from time to time. And I have taken seriously for the rest of my career that I am supposed to be doing teaching, administration and research. It seems to me that every single one of us in this room, no matter what our position is in a research institution or a university, does at least all of those first three things, and all of us probably find ourselves from time to time doing the fourth one as well.

There is a kind of a continuum that we move backwards and forwards across in the course of our careers, where the proportions of teaching, administering and research might vary extremely widely but it is pretty difficult to avoid any of those three.

I don't really think you can be very good – excellent, outstanding – as a researcher if you don't also have some good pedagogical skills and some good administrative skills. I also believe that you can't be a good teacher unless you have got some administrative skills and certainly some research skills, and I don't think you can be a good senior administrator unless you've got both pedagogical skills and research skills.

I also think that a lot of the attributes of a good researcher are transferable to the field of academic and research administration. I don't think every single one of them is; I don't think it's always obvious, but I think it is important for us to consider what the equivalences are between the characteristics that make you good at research and the things that drive good administrators as well.

Like almost all of my most senior colleagues in the senior executive at the University of Queensland, I do actually continue to do all three of those things. Almost all of us in the senior executive still supervise graduate students. We all give talks and seminars and workshops and those kinds of things, several times a week. We're getting our pedagogical pleasures, we're fulfilling our pedagogical obligations by continually explaining to people how things work, why they're important, how we can make them work better.

I think that most of us do research because, ultimately, we want to make a difference in a particular part of the world: we want to make a difference to how people think about the things that are really, really important to us in our area of expertise. And the people that we want to persuade to think differently, we want to encourage to think differently, are of course most immediately our disciplinary peers, our disciplinary colleagues, the specialist peers, but they are also policy makers, they are industry, they are patients, they are people in the professions and so on.

We also want to make a difference to how things work: processes, techniques, products, policies. I think those are also the only really good reasons to get involved in academic administration. If you acknowledge that you really are a control freak and that you like power, I don't think getting into academic administration is what you should aim for. Maybe becoming a lab group leader is a better way to exercise megalomania – you've got a group that you can keep under control and terrorise if that's what really drives you. I think that in a broader position, in a larger organisation, there will be far too many people who will thwart that desire. So don't go into administration for those reasons.

We got a lovely email a few weeks ago back from a senior Australian academic who was surprised – but clearly pleasantly – by a difficult decision we'd made: 'What is that Dean doing? Doesn't he realise that he is supposed to make our lives more difficult, to give us more work to do and to thwart good academic decision making?' Well, no, that's not what senior academic managers are supposed to do. We are supposed to make good academic judgments and we are supposed to take good academic advice, and that's what mostly we try to do.

A few years ago, a very senior colleague shouted at me over the phone for about 10 minutes, telling me how outrageous a particular set of circumstances were, and how none of this contributed to the greater good of the University, and when he finally paused for a brief breath – after 10 minutes – I said, 'let me say just two things. One, I agree with you. Two, we can solve it.' I then gave him an extremely brief account of the Department of Immigration regulations and the Department of Education regulations that had led us to this particular impasse – that was my way of treating him with intellectual respect; so he could understand the situation we were in – and then I said: 'And this is how we solve it.' That took, I suppose, 45 seconds: he doesn't shout at me any more, and that's really terrific.

You go to senior managers and administrators to solve problems, not to create them. Don't write them a seven-page email full of righteous indignation. Those of us who like writing good vigorous persuasive prose get enormous pleasure out of writing those seven-page letters full of righteous indignation – there's a real adrenalin rush from writing like that, there's an almost self-pleasuring satisfaction out of reading just how good your prose can be when you're really excited. But don't send it, at least not in the first instance; hang on to it for a couple of weeks. If the situation proves to be absolutely irresolvable, and only as a very last resort, then you might think about sending it – after you show it to three or four other people and get the really defamatory bits taken out of it. But that's almost never a way to actually get a solution. It might be a way of getting a successful appeal at some ultimate tribunal, but it's not a way to do problem solving. Some seven-page letters full of righteous indignation have been directed at me: I've also got pleasure out of reading them, because I enjoy the genre; but that's never made me change my mind.

As I say, many of the attributes of good administrators, good managers and good teachers are comparable, transferable. I continue to use, and certainly I continue to expand, my research skills. Like most of the other people who have spoken in this seminar, I find that my research areas of interest have changed over time. And because they have changed over time, not only have I learned new skills but I have transferred my original research skills and learned to apply them in different areas. So my very early training in the analysis of literary texts is now something that I apply in quite different circumstances to policy texts and political speeches, and listening to ministers talk. I do a rhetorical analysis in my head of the kinds of things they're really saying, or trying not to say.

If you do get into academic administration, I think there are ways of continuing your research. There are vice-chancellors who continue to be active researchers because they have made some really canny decisions about the kind of research that they can do while working on a vast array of diverse but strategically-important issues in a very long working week. Those are usually research projects that are ongoing, largely coordinated on a day-to-day basis by other people, but which they can re-engage more closely when time permits.

One of the things I think it is important to understand when dealing with people who have central university positions – deputy vice-chancellors, deans of graduate studies, pro vice-chancellors (teaching and learning), directors of IT services, or of student administration, or of the research division, university research contract lawyers, the legal office, the insurance office – is that those kinds of people actually have formal responsibilities to maximise opportunities and outcomes while minimising risks (of all sorts) for the university as a whole. Let me give you a couple of simple examples from my own situation.

When I travel abroad and talk to international funding agencies, I'm trying to work out how to get the maximum number of scholarships, funded research, outstanding visitors right across the University of Queensland. I am not going there just to make sure we get an extremely large number of students in evolutionary biology or anatomy or astronomy. My job is to maximise things for the whole. If your area happens to be one in which I can see an opportunity, I will pursue it as hard as I possibly can, but if it is a dead horse I am going to pursue the live one.

I think that one of the things we all need to be reminded of from time to time is that very simple and obvious distinction between behaving as a maximiser and behaving as an optimiser. All of us, I think, at different moments in the day, behave as maximisers and as optimisers.

There are moments when we are maximising the outcomes for our own sectoral, sectional, local, disciplinary, even personal, interests, and that can be profoundly important: we operate in an extremely competitive environment. Every time you write a grant, every time you interview a prospective student, every time you are thinking about employing somebody, every time you are advertising for a postdoc you are trying to maximise the benefits for your particular research group or your discipline or whatever.

There are other moments, though, when it is important for you to behave as an optimiser for the larger population, for the larger domain in which you operate. It is extremely important for those of us who have central or whole-of-university responsibilities to be optimisers as often as possible. So I compete furiously with my very good friend the dean of graduate studies at the University of Melbourne for everything that's going, until we meet together nationally as deans of graduate studies, and then she and I work together to optimise for the sector.

I think it was really important that we had [Senator] Kim Carr, Margaret Sheil and Warwick Anderson here yesterday, because that reminded us that we are also in the position of optimisers when we are trying to deal with people like that. We are here, as far as they are concerned, representing not just the Academy, not just 50 individual research groups, but 'the sector'. I am sure Senator Carr, in some report or some account to his ministerial colleagues, will say, 'I have consulted with the sector,' and that talk he gave yesterday is part of 'consulting with the sector'. So the kinds of things that we take to him will be heard as coming from 'the sector'. They will be views from 'the sector'; whether we like it or not, we're identified as part of that larger political/institutional entity.

That realisation leads to the sort of political motivation that Bob spoke about yesterday (and others have alluded to) that gets a lot of us into positions of management, administration, leadership, whatever you want to call it. There is a point at which you simply get tired of sitting on the sidelines and shouting (or whispering), 'They should do something about it. Don't “they” understand what it's really like?' One of the reasons they don't understand what it's really like is that we haven't explained to them what it's really like adequately – yet. We may have tried, but we may not have tried in the most effective way. Sometimes you have actually got to get off your bum and go out there and start taking responsibility for the things that you really want to change.

One hears too many conversations in universities that begin with people talking about the university in the third person: 'Oh, the university doesn't do this,' 'The university should do that.' Well, what in God's name is 'the university' if it isn't the people who are employed by it and who work in it and who give their blood, sweat and tears for 85 hours a week? There are ways of effecting change within institutions if you work out the appropriate way to go about it.

The second thing I want to talk about is the different roles that occur in academic administration, and it might help you to actually distinguish between the different kinds of administrators that you deal with. It's not simply a matter of saying 'admin', or 'the people in the grey building' (as they call it at the University of Queensland), or 'the people on the dark side'. It's a highly differentiated population; and – just as Toss explained, you have got to work out which kind of media person you're addressing, which group you're communicating with – so you have to work out which kind of administrators.

At one end there are the data entry people. Their job is to actually get the data entry right; their job is to record, to maintain, to possibly report on records. They're doing that because the university has legal, legislative, regulatory and/or contractual obligations for which it is accountable to external bodies and to other bodies within the university. It's essentially there to allow us to be able to prove that we comply with a variety of regulations, whether they are from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, the ARC, the NHMRC, the state government, the pig industry research council or whatever it may be.

It is extremely important when we get to cases of individual grievance that that kind of record keeping has been done accurately and verifiably. Most appeals and most grievances are heard on the grounds of procedural fairness and procedural correctness. Appeals are seldom heard and won or lost on the grounds that somebody made a bad academic judgment. So that is another reason we need to keep those records straight.

These are not entirely unlike the reasons for recording carefully, comprehensively in your lab notebooks.

I was once probably quite good at data entry. I was a bibliographer for a few years, and I developed a really good eye. I'm occasionally reminded of that if I see a typo on a PowerPoint slide or I see a wrong number entered in a cell on a spreadsheet. I have some notoriety for having noticed a typo carved in sandstone at the University of Queensland, and the sculptor had to come back and correct the typo. So I am probably good at it – but I don't want to do it any more, and I am extremely grateful for the people who do that.

The second group of administrators are those who are charged with ensuring that we comply. Those are the people who check that the procedures have been followed, the decisions have been made, in a way that complies with regulations and rules and so on. As I have said, the rules and regulations and all the rest of it that we have to comply with are internal and external, and it is worth remembering that, with the exception of the ANU, every university in Australia is established under state or territory legislation and is subject to a variety of state and territory laws and regulations. And every university in Australia gets the majority of its public funding from the federal government, and that obliges us to comply with all sorts of federal laws, regulations and so on. So we find ourselves reporting to both kinds of parliaments. One hopes that Kim Carr and Kevin Rudd might take on board that particular challenge over the course of the next few years: there is some evidence that they might.

Over some of those external requirements we have some influence. So, when the NHMRC, ARC and Universities Australia guidelines on the conduct of research were being developed, universities had some input; individual researchers and research peak councils like this one had some input. But, there are still things that we are required to comply with.

It is probably in the area of compliance checking that most of us end up having the greatest amount of frustration with administrators. These are the people who really drive us around the bend; it pays to remember that these are the people who save our necks when things really get sticky. They're rule geeks. And it's really good to have some people like that around – just don't let them out! When you really need to know whether it is possible to do X or Y under the regulations of your particular grant, or whether the university's rules will allow you to do what you want to do, it is absolutely fabulous to have somebody like that, that you can call and say, 'Narelle, what does the regulation say about this?' And if Narelle can tell you in five minutes or less, then we will all be extremely happy and you will do well. Find out who those people are, and use them extremely sparingly, otherwise you'll go mad.

The third kind of administrator is the one you probably, I would hope, encounter a bit more often. They are the academic administrative decision makers. They're still internally focused, in many ways, but they're not ultimately process focused. These are the people who ideally have a sense of how their decision making fits in with the larger set of objectives that the institution has. They're the people that you should be able to go to when you think you have got a problem and you want to learn how to actually solve it. They are the people whose real job in the university is problem solving, path smoothing, and obstacle removal. I think there is a nice flattering way of reminding them of that, if you do go to them for a solution, and that's why I suggest you don't do the seven-page rant full of righteous indignation; you write them a nice polite one-paragraph email saying, 'I think I've got a problem. I may have misunderstood something about X and Y. Can you please help me?' They'll be flattered, and in most cases they will help.

Those kinds of administrative decision makers that I have just talked about are the people who do have a sense of the overview, and those are the people you need to get used to.

Finally, there are the policy leaders or managers within the institution, who are interested in policy change and policy/portfolio innovation – how to change policy, how to get rid of policies that don't work. Actually, one of the most satisfying things that a senior administrator can do is to cancel a policy. Rescinding a policy is as satisfying as filling a wheelie bin at the end of the year with all the junk in your office.

Sometimes one can make process changes based on the kinds of things that keep coming up from those administrative decision makers, who might tell you that they are having to make a large number of ad hoc decisions in a particular area. That should lead you to make a simple policy that will cover that, so everybody knows what they are doing and doesn't have to treat things as a special case.

I have two more points. I have a good academic decision maker working with me who gives a wonderful talk called Forms are Your Friends. Think about the form. The law of the form is firstly, I think, that it must explicitly specify the minimum information that is required to make a secure decision. We need to make secure decisions in the sense that we don't want decisions to be overturned at the point of appeal on trivial grounds. That is one of the reasons why we need to specify the minimum information we need – otherwise somebody will argue that we didn't have it.

Secondly, the form has to satisfy good record keeping protocols. You'd be astonished how long universities need to keep that kind of documentation – it's a data-retention obligation. I have somebody who still calls me from time to time saying that a major decision the university made in 1989 about his academic program should be overturned. He said, 'One of the things I need to tell you, Professor Lawson, is that I am now retired so I have the money and the means to pursue this.' So every now and then we get an FOI request and we get the documents out and we are able to remind him that good decisions were made at the time. But the point is that we have still got to actually have all that stuff to be able to respond to him; and he's entitled to see it.

Good record keeping is firstly about accountability, but it should also enable good downstream analysis. I think that is an important feature of form keeping that we often forget. One of the ways in which the ARC can improve its processes is by doing an analysis of the information it gets on those cover sheets and appendices, and correlating that with particular kinds of grants, particular kinds of processes that were in place at the time. Good policy needs to be based on good research; good research needs to be based on good data.

The final point I want to make is that you are most likely to solve administrative and academic and research related and personnel related problems as close to the source as possible. Grievance procedures are always arranged in a carefully ordered ascending fashion, and that is because the people who are closest to the action can in the majority of cases solve the problem. There is then a kind of hierarchy of appeals, in which one ascends further and further up the chain. No responsible vice-chancellor, no responsible DVC (research), no responsible dean of the graduate school will make a decision about an individual case unless it has already gone all the way up the chain – because the senior administrator, the vice-chancellor, runs the risk of making a grave error if he or she tries to do that. So your seven-page letter of righteous indignation to the vice-chancellor will simply be moved back down to somebody who knows enough about the situation to make an appropriate decision.

How to manage managers? Be rational. Don't personalise the dispute – we've all got our roles within the institution; there are things that we are required to do; there are things that one would expect you to do under a given situation. Remember what our motivations are, our KPIs. Start from the explicit assumption that the administrator can help you, not from the assumption that they have to do what you want. And remember that we already know that you're really important, that your work is fantastic, that you're highly regarded and that the world would be a much worse place if your research project did not go ahead.

We know that because a peer reviewed body has given you a research grant, because the university has headhunted you, because the university has offered you a postdoc – all sorts of processes have already assured us of your quality. We don't need to be persuaded of that again; we need to be told what you think the problem is and why you think there is a better outcome that can be achieved.

Discussion

Graham Farquhar: I would like to ask one question that goes back to the sorts of questions people ask in terms of management of time. How do people like yourself manage the balance between work and private life? Detective novels I know about.

Alan Lawson: Well, my wife is an academic and she understands the kind of life. My kids are grown up, and suffered enough (they don't want to suffer any more) by watching the kinds of hours I work. I literally enjoy what I am doing, just as you do. You will work, presumably, 80 hours a week somehow or other. One essentially does it, though, by rationing time. One of the best bits of advice I got when I moved into this position is that if you ever have to go and see the vice-chancellor, or if you have a proposition to put to the vice-chancellor, it must fit on one piece of paper, preferably on one side but if you really can't manage that then it can perhaps go over onto the back of the page.

I actually think now that most people can and should be able to make their case in about a paragraph. The talk that Janet Salisbury gave yesterday highlighted that there are really excellent skills to be learned in explaining what you need, why it is important, what is the outcome. You should be able to do that in three or four sentences, and if you do it well, a good decision maker can make a decision on that basis. There are so many other things that we simply don't need to know in order to make those kinds of decisions.

Basically, we start from the assumption that you want to make good academic decisions occur and that you are giving us good academic advice. In the back of our minds is the notion that you are probably acting out of self-interest as well, but if we can be persuaded that you are trying to make a good academic decision occur, it is our job to work out how to make that happen.

[ Home | Contacts | Search | Index ]