Quality

Some hold the view that most modern universities are more akin to business concerns than they are concerned with higher learning, scholarship and research.

In the past thirty odd years that I have taught and endeavoured to conduct myself in a scholarly manner as a university academic, I do believe I have noticed a move to managing universities as businesses. There are probably good reasons for doing so. Whether they can justify the massive increase in the size of university administrations and their accompanying bureaucracies is not clear to me. What is clear is the effect that it has on me if the following ways:

• Almost four years ago I received a new PC funded by the now defunct School of Maths, Stats and IT. It was a powerful machine at the time and met my computing requirements. Now four years later I once more needed a new machine. It soon became apparent to me that it was unlikely that one would materialise. I will not bore you with the details here except to say that in order to not compromise the quality of my teaching, I have financed a machine with other funds.
• At the beginning of this semester I was preparing material for a module and wanted to set up a CD with the computing tools the students would need to work at home on the module assignments. In order to do so, I needed to "ftp" a file from a site on the Internet. I could not do this because this Internet protocol has been blocked. Again, I would not want to bore you with the details, suffice it to say that this is such a fundamental flaw in the system that I am happy to discuss it further with any interested party.
• Shortly after that while browsing the Association of Computing Machinery's Queue News journal I came across a pod-cast that dealt with how best to install applications under Microsoft's new Vista operating system. This morning when I attempted to download this podcast using the university's Premium Internet service I was again thwarted, presumably because the file is an "MP3" file.
• More recently a colleague wanted to purchase a laptop. The one recommended only had 512 MB of RAM, some of which has to be used for video purposes. With Microsoft's new Vista operating system now available and the insatiable appetite operating systems and modern applications have for memory, that is surely a poor specification for a new machine.

I could go on, probably to write a boring, but never the less substantial book dealing with such issues. Issues that I believe severely affect my ability to achieve the quality I believe I am capable of with respect to the delivery of the modules that I teach.

Now quality is clearly something that should concern a business trying to return a profit. It is thus not surprising that it is now also something that universities are also interested in. Efforts certainly are made to measure the quality of my teaching and research and understandably so. So while I do not have a problem with that, I do at times feel that the effort is misguided whilst I am able to quote situations like the ones I have listed above. It also would not be half as bad if one was able to change these situations, but is generally not.

As I have already mentioned, I do not have a problem with measuring quality as I seriously endeavour to deliver the modules I teach to the best of my ability. Whether the students are making the most of their opportunities to benefit from these efforts is an open question, one that Steven Zucker tries to address in his article on Teaching at University Level. It is also the other side of the quality coin.