When everything becomes a priority
University strategies often contain an impressive collection of priorities. Research excellence is a priority. Student experience is a priority. Internationalisation is a priority. Employability is a priority. Digital transformation is a priority. Industry engagement is a priority.
The difficulty is that calling something a priority does not necessarily make it one, and how can everything be a priority?
Almost everything a university does matters in some way. The purpose of strategy is not simply to identify important activities. It is to decide which activities matter more than others and where limited resources should be concentrated.
It is important to make these distinctions because universities do not have unlimited resources. Money is finite, as are leadership attention, staff time, physical space and organisational capacity.
If everything is treated as strategically important, the institution can easily end up spreading those resources across so many objectives that none of them receives enough attention to become a genuine strength.
A strategy then starts to look less like a set of choices and more like a collection of ambitions.
Excellence is expensive
There is another problem. Excellence normally requires disproportionate investment.
A university that genuinely wishes to be internationally competitive in research needs more than a statement in its strategic plan. It may need laboratories, research infrastructure, doctoral scholarships, research management support, reduced teaching loads, grant-writing capability and experienced research leadership.
A university that wants to become outstanding in open and distance learning (ODL) will require a different set of investments. It may need digital platforms, specialist academic support, sophisticated student analytics and people who understand how to design education specifically for online delivery.
Pursuing both research and ODL at the highest level, to take just these two examples, requires different and substantial investments. When these are added to ambitions around internationalisation, rankings, industry partnerships and student experience, the resources required may, and probably will, exceed those available.
This is where strategy becomes uncomfortable. Choosing to be excellent at something usually means accepting that something else will receive less attention. You can’t be excellent at everything.
Good enough can be perfectly acceptable
There is sometimes an assumption that saying an institution does not need to be excellent at everything is equivalent to arguing for mediocrity.
That is not the case.
Every university should expect high standards in areas such as teaching quality, governance, student support, academic integrity and financial management. There are some activities where just meeting a minimum standard is clearly insufficient.
But there is a difference between maintaining a strong professional standard and seeking to make something an area of institutional distinction.
A university might provide very good teaching across all its programmes while choosing to invest disproportionately in employability. Another might decide that research is its defining strength. A third might focus on adult learners, professional education or flexible online provision.
The important point is that these institutions do not need to look the same.
Indeed, if every university pursues exactly the same model of excellence, it is difficult to understand what institutional differentiation really means.
The problem with copying successful universities
Universities inevitably look at their competitors.
Benchmarking can be useful. There is nothing wrong with learning from institutions that perform well, and universities should certainly understand what others in the sector are doing.
Problems arise when benchmarking turns into imitation.
A relatively small university might compare itself with a large research-intensive institution with a history extending over several centuries, substantial research income, strong international recognition and access to resources that the smaller institution could never realistically replicate.
It can copy the strategic objectives. It cannot necessarily copy the conditions that made those objectives achievable.
This is one of the dangers of rankings and other external measures of success. They can encourage institutions to pursue similar definitions of excellence even when their missions, resources and student populations are very different. They can also force them to chase metrics that may not be aligned with their strategy.
Perhaps universities should spend less time asking, “What do the best universities do?” and more time asking, “What should this university be exceptionally good at?“
Those are not the same question.
Strategy should involve saying no
Many strategic discussions focus on what the institution should start doing.
What new programmes should we launch? Which countries should we recruit from? What research areas should we develop? Which partnerships should we establish? What technology should we invest in?
Those are legitimate questions, but continually adding new priorities creates its own problems.
Far fewer strategic discussions appear to begin by asking what the institution should stop doing.
That might mean closing programmes with persistently low demand. It might mean withdrawing from partnerships that produce little meaningful activity. It might mean deciding not to compete in particular research areas. It could involve abandoning initiatives that were fashionable five years ago but no longer contribute significantly to the university’s objectives.
These decisions are difficult because almost every existing activity has supporters. Somebody originally argued for it, somebody is responsible for it and somebody may benefit from its continuation.
Yet strategy that only adds and never subtracts eventually becomes unsustainable. Prioritisation is not deciding what matters. Almost everything matters. Prioritisation is deciding what matters most.
Universities should be different
There is a wider question about what kind of higher education system we want.
A diverse university sector should contain institutions with different missions and strengths. Some may be research intensive. Others may concentrate on teaching. Some may have a strong regional mission, while others operate internationally. Some may specialise in particular professions, while others offer broad-based education.
Increasingly, there may also be universities whose primary strength is flexible and online education.
This diversity should be an advantage. Different students need different institutions, and societies need universities that perform different roles.
Yet universities often seem under pressure to converge. They pursue similar rankings, establish similar international partnerships, use similar strategic language and aspire to many of the same indicators of success.
There is an irony here. Universities frequently talk about differentiation while behaving remarkably like one another.
The governing body has a role
This is not only an issue for vice-chancellors and senior management teams.
Governing bodies should also be asking whether the university’s strategy reflects genuine choices. A strategy containing ten major priorities may look ambitious, but ambition is not necessarily evidence of strategic discipline.
Boards should be able to identify where the institution intends to concentrate its resources and, equally importantly, where it has deliberately decided not to compete. They should also be willing to challenge strategies that appear to promise excellence everywhere without explaining how that excellence will be funded.
One of the most useful questions a governing body could ask may be “If this university could only be genuinely outstanding at three things, what would they be?”
The answer would reveal quite a lot about whether the institution really understands its purpose.
But there is an even harder follow-up question. What would it be prepared to stop doing to make that possible?
That, perhaps, is where strategy really begins.
About this newsletter
Governance, Leadership & Research explores issues affecting universities and other organisations, with a particular focus on leadership, governance, research and the changing nature of higher education.
I publish a new edition each week, drawing on my experience of university leadership, research and working across higher education in several countries.
If you found this edition useful, please consider subscribing and sharing it with colleagues.
My other newsletter
I also publish Publishing with Integrity, which examines research integrity, scholarly publishing, peer review, authorship, retractions and the systems used to communicate research.
You can follow Publishing with Integrity here:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-with-integrity/
About the author
Graham Kendall is Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University in Malaysia and Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. He has held senior leadership positions in higher education, including Vice-Chancellor, Provost, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Provost for Research and Knowledge Exchange.
His academic background is in computer science, operational research and artificial intelligence. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has held senior editorial roles with international academic journals.
You can follow Graham on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamkendall1/