Chartered Association of Business Schools – Professional Managers' Conference 2015, 3-4 December 2015 – A quick review
By Ian Hamley
The annual conference for professional service managers was held at Regents Business School and this was my second time as a delegate – first time as a speaker. The Conference is put together by the Professional Managers’ Committee of CABS on which I’ve sat for around 18 months.
The Conference opened with two very engaging and entertaining speakers. Laurie Taylor deployed his usual wit and humour to propose that universities should be ran almost exclusively by academics and that the march of ‘managerialism’ and ‘marketisation’ of the sector were movements which were not always welcomed or needed. He did of course see the need for administrative staff but this should be limited to making the tea, watering the office plants and typing up memos. Some of this, I hope, was tongue in cheek! Paul Greatrix, Registrar of the University of Nottingham, unsurprisingly gave counter views and argued that the growing complexities of higher education requires a much broader and holistic view and that truly successful universities needed professional staff to take on non-academic responsibilities in order for quality teaching, research and intellectual collateral to prosper. The debate captured the age-old dialogue (tension?) between professional services staff and academics in a very thoughtful yet non-combative manner and really energised the start of the conference.
The following sessions allowed some case studies to be presented and this is where my fellow CABS colleagues had kindly ‘volunteered’ me (in my absence at a meeting no doubt) to run a session on the School’s Professional Services Review (2013) and the subsequent gains we have made around organisational and governance structures, service delivery to students and academics and process improvements.
After lunch, David Palfreyman, Director of the Oxford Centre for HE Policy Studies, gave an overview of the legal challenges presently facing universities and demonstrated how all aspects of university life are increasingly coming under legal scrutiny with the CMA being the latest to focus the minds of VCs, Registrars and literally everyone involved in interactions with applicants and students. The afternoon’s other main highlight was hearing from Professor Kerrigan, Dean of Newcastle Business School, around his School’s strategic approach to seeking accreditation with AACSB.
The second day’s highlight was a presentation from Celia Whitchurch, UCL (Institute of Education) who has published on the concept of the ‘blended professional’ - a concept which helped to bring together some of the tensions exposed by the two opposing ‘camps’ that we heard at the start of the Conference.
The feedback from delegates confirmed that this was possibility the best Conference CABS has produced for professional services staff and was superbly managed via the CABS office and colleagues from Regents in a beautiful venue just opposite Regents Park. The Committee is already working on this year’s Conference which is being hosted by Cardiff Business School and I’m sure it will be high upon the agenda when we all get together at our next meeting at CABS HQ on March 11th 2016. I’m personally hoping that we get a nice cup of tea by a CABS’ administrator upon arrival…..