Much of what will shape the coming year for universities rooted in a particular place is being decided far from the institutions themselves. A funding settlement is being argued over between administrations, a wider negotiation is under way in which the sector’s interests are one consideration among many, and at least one provider has changed hands through a decision taken in another boardroom altogether. None of this is new in kind. Institutions have always been shaped by forces beyond their walls. What appears to be changing is the proportion of consequential decisions taken at levels that no governing body can reach, which raises the question of what a board is distinctively for when so much is settled elsewhere.
One answer is already thoroughly provided for. A board’s accountability upward, to the bodies that regulate, fund and assure the sector, is instrumented with a completeness any clerk or secretary could recite: the annual cycle of returns and assurances, the audit and risk calendar, the conditions attached to registration and to grant, the code against which governance reviews its own effectiveness. This is as it should be. Public money warrants public assurance, and the discipline of that cycle is part of why confidence in the sector’s governance has held. The papers arrive with their reader already known, and the board’s obligations in that direction are written down, scheduled and tested.
The obligation without an instrument
Accountability outward, to the place an institution sits in, enjoys no comparable machinery. Commitment is not the difficulty. A commission on the civic role of universities reported in 2019, and the agreements it recommended between institutions and their local partners now number in the dozens, signed by universities of every kind alongside councils, health bodies and employers. Yet these commitments live, almost everywhere, at the level of strategy. They are held by executive teams, delivered through partnership structures and reported to governing bodies as narrative, in the good-news section of the vice-chancellor’s report, rather than as anything resembling assurance. The sentiment is widespread and sincere. The instruments through which a board might govern it barely exist.
The gap has mattered less whilst the levels above were predictable. It may prove to matter a great deal now, because at none of the tables where this year’s consequential decisions are being taken is any particular place represented. A settlement between governments is struck on aggregates, a trade negotiation weighs sectors rather than towns and a change of ownership answers to investors rather than neighbours. If the obligations an institution carries to its locality are to be taken seriously anywhere, they will have to be upheld within its own governance, because no one above it is holding them. That is the distinctive work now available to a board, and it is work no external body is likely to ask of it.
What holding it would require
The work is more particular than the language of civic mission suggests. It begins with information. Few boards could say which of their institution’s provision is locally load-bearing, in the sense that a course marginal in the institution’s own accounts may be structural to the place around it. A board may see a small health programme with difficult economics; the health system down the road may see the future of its workforce. Nothing in a standard suite of board papers distinguishes the two, since income, margin and demand are institutional measures, and the measure that matters here – what would happen locally if this provision went – is not routinely collected by anyone.
It continues with timing and with voice. The moment at which partnership becomes real is the moment before a decision hardens, when colleges, councils, health bodies and employers can still shape what is decided rather than absorb it, and a board is well placed to ask whether that moment was offered or missed. It might also ask when it last heard from anyone who depends on the institution without being employed by it, in a governance setting rather than a ceremonial one. Most boards hear about their localities through the executive’s account. The habit of hearing them directly, occasionally and formally, is rarer than the sector’s civic language would suggest.
None of this should be read as an argument that boards are neglectful, or that they should simply do more. Governors give finite volunteer attention, and the assurance burden they already carry is real and not optional. A board that adopted its place wholesale would trespass into executive territory and govern the worse for it, since holding an obligation is not the same as managing a partnership. And in a hard year a board’s first duty remains the institution’s continued existence, without which every local obligation fails at once. Those who have chaired difficult meetings in difficult years will recognise that survival questions crowd out stewardship questions for entirely respectable reasons.
The argument is narrower. It is that the obligations an institution carries to its place deserve, somewhere in its governance, the seriousness its obligations to the national system already receive, and that at present it is unclear where that somewhere is. The commitment is affirmed in strategy and invisible to assurance, and an obligation visible to neither tends to be held by everyone in general and nobody in particular. This is not a failure anyone chose. It is what happens when one direction of accountability is built and the other is inherited, and it suggests that the question for a board is less whether it cares about its place, which it almost certainly does, than whether its machinery of attention gives that care anywhere to land.
Three questions may most repay a chair’s attention as the autumn cycle begins. Whether the board could say which of its institution’s provision the place around it could not replace, and whether it would know before that provision became a line in a savings plan. When it last heard directly, as a board rather than at a graduation or a launch, from those who depend on the institution but do not work for it. And whether its agenda would read any differently if the institution were the last anchor left in its town, as some now are, or whether the papers would arrive unchanged, with their reader already known and their subject already framed.