LEFTFIELD: The decision-making process in university administration is hamstrung by the impact of committees, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

YOU KNOW the old saying: if you’re going to eat a bar of chocolate, you’re much better off not knowing too much about how it was made. For most people who come into contact with a university or college, they won’t know or care much about decision-making in the institution, but if they did know they might find it unsettling; better to remain ignorant.

But not everyone remains ignorant. A few months ago I got a complaint from an irate gentleman about the time it had taken DCU to decide on a particular issue. The issue in question had been put to us in December, and we took the final decision in March. The gentleman pointed out that if it took a private sector company this long to decide something they would be out of business. I made soothing noises and apologised and I hope he wasn’t too annoyed.

But actually, by most university standards DCU decides things in lightning quick time, even quite complex things. One reason for this is that DCU has far fewer committees than most colleges, and therefore fewer stages through which decisions pass.

According to a recent report, researchers have estimated that, in all the universities in the world, there are around 4,610,000 committees. Assuming each of these committees meets several times a year, and making certain assumptions about the number of academic working days in the year, I conclude that, today, there are probably 184,400 committee meetings taking place across the world.

One of the problems is that committees are very effective inhibitors of action. In a university, it is typical for proposals to have to travel along a whole row of committees before they can be adopted. As the committees have an annual cycle, and the journey through them has to be in the right sequence, months and sometimes years can go by before a decision can be taken. And where your committee is, say, one of six that is having to process a proposal, the only way you can prove that you are there at all is to turn the proposal down, or alter it, or in some way inhibit its progress. Approving it gets no attention.

Another problem is that committees far too often discuss fairly minor operational matters rather than vision, direction and strategy. Operational issues should be left to those individuals appointed to deal with them, subject to general principles of policy that some committee or other may have decided.

There is, of course, a more positive side to this: committees represent the opportunity for individual faculty and staff to participate in decision-making. If you are not a senior or middle manager, then big decisions don’t normally come your way, unless you are a committee member and your committee is a gatekeeper for some decision or other. The desire for participation is a good thing, and so committees do, or can, serve a purpose. But committee structures need to be lean, and they need to work in a businesslike way.

So, in all of this, where does the buck stop? In Ireland, under the Universities Act 1997, every university has a supreme decision-making committee which the Act (and most universities) calls the “governing authority”. Under the Act, the “functions” of each university are performed “by or under the directions of the governing authority”. In other words, it has the role that in a company is exercised by the board of directors. It includes but – except in the case of Trinity College Dublin – is not chaired by the President. In all universities except Trinity a substantial proportion of each governing authority is made up of external members; in TCD there are two, out of a total membership of 28.

The problem with the Irish universities’ governing authorities is that they are not well placed to exercise corporate governance. In particular, they are too big. In DCU, we reduced the size to the smallest permissible under the Universities Act, meaning 26 members. In UCD, for example, the governing authority has 40 members, including eight representatives of local authorities.

Best corporate practice suggests that the ideal size of a board is somewhere between eight and 12. Once you have 40 (or even 26) people in a room, there is no easy way of ensuring that effective governance will be exercised, no matter how well- meaning the members may be. Overwhelmingly governing authority members are committed to the institution and to principles of good governance. But it is hard to play an effective role in such a crowded board.

So, universities are often cumbersome bodies with excessively complex decision-making and cumbersome governance, sometimes complicated further by internal politics.

When our mission was to educate students and to remain relatively detached from the wider world, this didn’t matter much. But now universities educate and research, they connect with industry, government and the voluntary sector, and they have to compete globally. Byzantine decision- making is no longer feasible.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is a former president of DCU