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- Author: Michele Abendstern x
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Endless arguments arose as to whether the new and increasingly formal system of management would actually make the University more effective. It provided machinery for procuring a general level of efficiency, keeping everyone up to the mark by constant scrutiny, and seeking to motivate academics by material rewards and gains in status. In abeyance was the liberal notion that academics should be their own managers, doing their own work with some encouragement from colleagues and friends.
If the price of liberty had always been constant vigilance, it seemed that the price of survival in the late 1980s was constant surveillance and the price of efficiency constant competition and the publication of results. In return for their employment, academics must now submit to scrutiny, designed in part to establish whether or not they were giving value for money, and in part to identify strengths and weaknesses. Concern with the Research Selectivity Exercises threatened, as time passed, to become obsessive. ‘Publish or your department perishes’ became a nagging admonition, impossible to ignore. However, the improvement of research performance was a legitimate goal. The reorganisation of biological sciences demonstrated the University's ability to reform itself; it provided a model and a precedent for the refashioning of groups of departments into schools in other parts of the University.
In the late 1980s the students at Manchester had come to distrust the gesture politics and rituals of left-wing protest, partly, perhaps, because they offered no solution to the practical and material problems of student life. Student officers in 1989–90 came close to agreeing with the views adopted by the Vice-Chancellor in 1981—to the effect that the best way to impress the government was not to demonstrate on the streets but to lobby behind the scenes. Much of the fiercest campaigning, by Woolton Hall, was in the name of a traditional order, rather than in favour of change. Sexism rivalled, perhaps even replaced, racism and fascism as the principal target of progressive thinkers in the 1980s; it too was recognised as an evil which flourished within the University as well as outside it. Women students were now numerous, influential and self-confident enough to demand the respect which was due to peers.
In October 1989 Senate and Council heard that Sir Mark Richmond had resigned his office with effect from 30 September 1990. He had presided with stoicism and courage over the most critical years in the University's history, when the position of Vice-Chancellor brought the least pleasure and the most pain. One year after Richmond's departure, Martin Harris, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex, agreed to succeed him, eventually arriving in August 1992. Harris had the formidable task of adjusting to the system of devolved management in the University of Manchester, whose staff was six or seven times larger than that of the University of Essex, where personal government had been much more practicable. An optimist in the Armitage tradition, with great faith in the University's capacity for self-improvement, he aspired above all to raise it to its rightful place in the league table. Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, Imperial College, and perhaps Edinburgh would be hard to overtake, but Manchester should at least be Number Six in the national race for acknowledged excellence in teaching and research.