Teaching Matters:  We are in a fast-changing world that demands extensive and rapid change in our universities. But we are lumbered with a system in which any change occurs only at a glacial rate. To maintain our national competitiveness, we must urgently seek to devise tools for change that will deliver what we need. My purpose in this article is to point to what those tools might be.

Much is made of the contrasting approach to change between the public and the private sectors. This masks the reality - that change is always difficult, wherever it takes place. So difficult is the process of change that leaders in the private sector become iconic if they successfully transform their organisations or processes.

Looking at the private sector for guidance, there seems to be three main levers for change:

A dramatic happening that arouses the organisation's instinct for basic survival.

Charismatic leadership that infuses the motivation to change throughout the organisation.

A structure and culture that orients the organisation to change as a natural way of life, something to be sought and embraced rather than resisted as a reflex reaction.

When competition raises a threat of company closure, barriers to change tend to fall away. The problem is that in the public sector the fear of total failure can rarely be made real. When a private company fails to meet its customers' needs, it goes out of business - usually sooner rather than later. But public sector bodies rarely go out of business, however inappropriate and expensive they become. This builds up a massive bulwark against change, since one's job is never at risk.

The nay-sayers have a built-in advantage in that situation. They can disrupt by their non-co-operation and by raising doubts and "reasonable" questions, and by sowing seeds of dissension among more positive people. And they are often more vocal than the usually silent majority. So change must wait on a consensus emerging - and when it comes it will certainly be slow and painful and conservative.

Charismatic leadership is as important in the public sector as it is in the private sector. But in making change happen, leadership on its own is never enough; it needs to be twinned with a range of tools to smooth the process, such as resources to compensate people who are affected.

With such resources, change is as possible in the public sector as it is in the private domain. We saw an example recently in the case of Queen's University Belfast, when George Bain, the QUB vice-chancellor, replaced underperforming academics, he had some €37 million to fund the change.

Our universities do not have a financial surplus to support a change agenda and so the inevitable initial costs that arise cannot be met. There is the proposal to create a Strategic Innovation Fund, however its disbursement will be by competition between universities. That holds the danger that only ideas likely to win a competition will be proposed rather than the ideas required for positive change in a given institution. It ignores another reality - that change is required in all universities not just in a few, and that the real needs of any institution and the motivation for change vary from university to university.

But throwing money at the problem is not enough. There is also a need for an infrastructure that supports change as a continuous way of life. At Queen's they at least had a process in place - the Research Assessment Exercise - that provided some data as to which academics were active and significant researchers, data that is sadly lacking in the rest of Ireland.

Even more fundamentally, what is needed is a new approach to how we pay our academics. Currently in our system, the yearly salary increase is seen as a predictable event unrelated to performance. Whether an academic's performance is good or bad, the annual increment always gets paid! Contrast this to the US, where any salary increase is based an individual's performance and achievement - or not - during the past year. An academic can be awarded zero, the maximum increase or any point in between and the committee that takes these decisions often consists of members of the academic staff of the university.

The late and distinguished president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, stated with emphasis that if he had to choose one system which contributes more than any other to the greatness of Berkeley, the annual salary review process would be it.

A proper reward structure for academics would include three other essential elements:

Removing the constraints on initial salaries, which make it difficult to pay exceptional talent above the norm.

Reforming the tenure system to extend beyond the one year applies here, to something closer to the multi-year assessment that prevails in the US.

Creating proper professional assessment of teaching, including an element of student assessment, to replace the present situation where the teaching prowess of academics is based on rumour rather than on objective fact.

Given the constraints within which university leaders now have to work, it is surprising that any change at all has been possible. Despite their Herculean efforts, change will come slowly, late and be inadequate. Government could free universities to bring about change (and it will cost little or no money to do so) by releasing them from public-sector reward rigidities and by funding them so they can accumulate reserves.

Danny O'Hare is a former president of Dublin City University