by Paul Temple

We left the pub in good time to walk to Waverley station to catch the 18.52 Avanti West Coast train to Euston. The departure board told of signalling problems on the East Coast mainline, but as we weren’t heading for King’s Cross that didn’t bother us. We even remained relaxed when the display didn’t give a platform for our train, as it was still shown as being on time. Until it wasn’t. Damage to the overhead wires just south of Carstairs Junction meant that no trains from either Edinburgh or Glasgow could travel south on the West Coast mainline. A broken-down train in the Scottish borders added to the fun. The apocryphal London newspaper headline, “Fog in the Channel, Continent isolated”, came to mind, but black humour about England being cut off took us only so far. Railway staff advice varied between “Wait to see if trains start running” and “There may be a rail-replacement bus to Manchester” – I thought, wouldn’t a hot-air balloon be a more realistic option?

There was certainly no shortage of railway staff on the Waverley concourse that evening: the crews of non-running trains gossiping among themselves; station staff in high-vis jackets with not much to do; bored-looking coppers … what there wasn’t was anyone who looked as if they might be doing a spot of managing, perhaps even providing up-to-date news to a generally good-humoured crowd of would-be travellers. It wasn’t hard to understand why this element was missing: the situation involved four train companies, Network Rail fixing (we hoped) the overhead wires and the signalling, and another part of Network Rail running the station. Take a look at the Network Rail organisation chart and tell me whose job it would be to take action over the effective closure of the main station of Scotland’s capital.

Not that long ago, there was a notion that higher education might work better if universities were ”unbundled”, to use the then-fashionable term. After all, went the argument, university finance or HR departments aren’t specialists in medieval history or particle physics, so they could provide professional services to random academic departments from what are currently different universities, so gaining economies of scale. Potential history students would be unlikely to be interested in a physics course, so why make them apply to an institution teaching a range of subjects? Let academic faculties do their own things in teaching and research, paying for the support services they need from the fees they receive, from whichever providers of services and infrastructure can offer the best deal. The academic units that prove to be good at operating in this new environment will grow, others will fail, but overall students, and some staff members, will benefit. The comprehensive, unitary university, went the argument, was a carry-over from the days of small, elite institutions, outdated in today’s mass higher education environment, and missed important efficiency gains. Modern corporations generally outsource non-core functions such as logistics and property services; academic units could do likewise. (Older readers may recall that the late Charles Handy described the unbundled corporation, employing a minimal group of core staff, on these lines.)

The case for the break-up of British Rail in the mid-1990s was, as I recall, less sophisticated than this, relying largely on lazy thinking about the supposed bureaucratic inflexibilities of state-owned businesses. There was certainly no suggestion then of state rail companies from other European countries becoming shareholders in the new UK train companies, in most cases receiving substantial subsidies from British taxpayers. The results of unbundling in the rail industry were on display during my recent prolonged stay at Waverley station: what privatisation had apparently overlooked is that railways are network organisations, where each element interacts with many others, and the failure of one ripples out across the network. Burton Clark in his 1983 classic, The Higher Education System, argued that the idea of integration was central to understanding how universities worked; they “symbolically tie together their many specialists” (p136): they are, in other words, network organisations, not simply collections of different disciplinary groups. We shall have to see if the promised Great British Rail can recapture the benefits of an integrated organisation, with managers having the responsibility for the functioning of the whole network, not just one part of it. Perhaps some university managers could offer advice.

SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.