Split image: traditional university pyramid structure crumbling into flat, collaborative workspace blocks

Having previously moaned about government support (lack thereof), the parochial “business models” and ignorance of simple cost savings in UK universities, I now turn to the why. Why are universities incapable of managing themselves efficiently or even rationally?

Part of the reason is that British universities, once bastions of eccentric brilliance held together by chalk dust and tweed, have quietly morphed into Versailles-sized palaces of PowerPoint where nothing happens until someone has convened a stakeholder-engagement workshop—complete with gluten-free muffins.

The Managerial Pyramid: A Curious Growth Industry

Between August 2023 and July 2024 our universities added roughly 7,000 new academics, a perfectly civilised three-per-cent increase. Admirable—until you discover that non-academic posts grew almost twice as fast, continuing the decade-long trend charted by HESA. At several Russell Group institutions a mere twenty-one per cent of total spending now lands in anyone’s lecture timetable; the rest vanishes into other operating expenses—marketing campaigns, franchise fees, strategic consultancies and the sort of “digital transformations” that require everyone to use four log-ins where one once sufficed.

Meanwhile, vice-chancellors have launched their own space programme. Average remuneration in 2025 eased past £340,000, while a handful of particularly well-nourished incumbents saunter along at closer to £400k once subsidised mansions are thrown in. By comparison, the median lecturer’s real-terms pay has fallen fifteen per cent since 2009. Nothing like a little shared sacrifice to build camaraderie.

Bureaucracy by Design (and Delight)

Regulation, like ivy, never sleeps. The Research Excellence Framework devoured ÂŁ471 million in 2021 and will cheerfully eat another half-a-billion each time the cycle renews. Its younger sibling, the Teaching Excellence Framework, now costs providers about ÂŁ50 million per outing once one tallies all the compulsory surveys, data returns and 40-page narratives.

Staff morale responds in the predictable fashion: pulse surveys show soaring stress wherever a fresh “compliance document” lands in the inbox. One academic described the annual quality-assurance audit as “the Hunger Games in knitwear”.

Financial Cracks and Educational Fallout

Ask the University of Dundee, whose £35 million deficit recently triggered an exodus from the senior leadership suite. When the international-student cash tide recedes, even the grandest managerial pyramids reveal damp foundations. Students notice other tremors too: contact hours squeezed by ballooning class sizes, endless queueing for feedback, libraries that close earlier than budget meetings run late. Early-career researchers, keen on anything resembling a pension, vote with their feet—and sometimes their passports.

Lean Lessons We Imported, Then Mislaid

Oddly enough, Britain already ran a successful experiment in less management. Sunderland’s Nissan plant, opened in 1986, matched Japan’s productivity within three years by championing Lean and Kaizen—ideas built on flat structures, relentless small improvements and the heretical belief that the person closest to the work might know something useful about it.

Toyota’s UK team later used the same methods to cut inventory by two-thirds and redirect resources to the front line. British-owned factories that clung to 1950s hierarchies mostly decayed or died.

Three Alternative Operating Systems (and a Health Warning)

First, cast your gaze to the Netherlands, where Buurtzorg’s self-managed nursing teams operate without middle managers, yet somehow deliver stellar outcomes and sky-high job satisfaction. Professional standards remain non-negotiable, but nobody needs thirty signature boxes to requisition a kettle.

Second, recall Brazil’s Semco. There, employees famously vote on their bosses’ pay and set departmental budgets in town-hall meetings. Radical? Yes. Effective? Also yes—provided your workforce can decide anything more complex than lunch without descending into civil war.

Third, the gaming company Valve ditched titles altogether: people choose projects, desks come on wheels, and the org chart looks like spilled noodles. Innovation gallops. So can informal power networks, so transparency had better ride shotgun.

Each model shares a family resemblance: authority lives near the coalface, not at the summit of Mount Gantt Chart. Academics, who already peer-review one another’s research with merciless glee, might actually thrive here.

What Universities Could Actually Do Tomorrow Morning

Shrink HQ and empower departments. Give each department an operating grant and let adults decide how many “learning-technologies partners” they truly need. Every pound unspent on a meeting buys an extra seminar.

Turn audits into Kaizen sprints. Swap annual 40-page action plans for fortnightly improvement sessions run by the people who teach. Toyota can review a production line before lunch; surely a team of historians can streamline the feedback loop on the Reformation essay.

Publish the executive-to-median salary ratio. If sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant, broadcast how many lectures could be funded by one deputy pro vice-chancellor’s compensation package. The optics alone might deflate the pyramid faster than any white-paper.

Borrow participatory budgeting. Let a History cohort decide whether they prefer another administrator or more teaching support. It’s their tuition fee, after all.

Pilot self-managing colleges. Start with postgraduate research units—small, motivated, already semi-autonomous. Measure completion rates, student satisfaction and cost per credit against centrally micro-managed equivalents. Publish the results, even if they make the senior common room gasp into its sauvignon blanc.

“Flat structures may harbour shadow hierarchies, but pyramids advertise theirs in brushed steel on the door.”

A Brief Nudge to the Sceptics

Yes, Lean can be abused by stopwatch zealots who time your loo breaks. That is a failure of imagination, not an iron law. And yes, Valve alumni confess that popularity contests lurk in any flatland. The antidote is radical transparency, not the comforting embrace of eighteenth-century titles like Pro-Vice-Assistant-Deputy Dean for Enabling Strategies.

Conclusion (Short, We Promised)

Our universities once borrowed the seminar from Germany and the tutorial from Oxford’s medieval guilds. Lifting a few modern governance ideas is hardly sacrilege. Flatten the hierarchy, trust the people who can actually spell phenomenology, and we may yet rediscover that elusive pastime known as scholarship. A slimmer pyramid also leaves more room at the base for students—and rather less space at the top for executive away-days in Provence.

Feel free to disagree, but please lodge all complaints via the new seven-stage stakeholder-engagement portal, open Mondays between 10:07 and 10:12.