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Frank Griffiths: Why I decided to blow the whistle on Leeds Met's 'culture of excess'
THE Yorkshire Post has been outstanding in its coverage of events at Leeds Metropolitan University. It has clearly irritated the current management regime and probably made others in the higher education world somewhat edgy. In short, this newspaper has been doing its job.
The meltdown in the reputation of the university bears an uncanny resemblance to that in banking and finance; calamitous mistakes by management, woefully poor corporate governance and ultimately a lack of proper supervision by the statutory regulator, in this case the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
Some of the actions of the managers and governors of the institution are by now well known, ranging from an adventure of almost "boy's own" proportions in owning a professional rugby union club, to overseas trips by the spouse of the vice-chancellor, Simon Lee. Mrs Lee's travels represent just one example of many questionable items of spending in and among the 5m spent by the holders of staff credit cards.
What has so far been revealed is due to the doggedness of the Yorkshire Post in pursuing questions under the Freedom of Information legislation. However, in order to find out precisely what has been happening across the board, the right questions need to be asked. Most of the really important and sizeable financial commitments are not easily discovered unless there is an opportunity to dig deep into the actual working of the institution.
Take the decision to acquire 51 per cent of the shares in Leeds Carnegie, a professional rugby union club. This was an astonishing thing to do with public money and questionable given the statutory purposes of the university. An external investigation would need to look at all the advice given to the senior management at the time and, crucially, to the Board of Governors.
When they took over the rugby club, it was all about the promotional benefits and the research and education services which would be available to the players and coaching staff. That is probably just about within the legal purposes of a modern university. But did those in charge do a proper job of due diligence seeking to take into account the full financial risks involved in doing something wholly unprecedented in the world of British higher education?
From my experience of the regime led by the now absent vice-chancellor, I doubt they did. A culture of "pleasing sir" meant that those anxious to be seen as "on message" did their master's bidding and minimised any critical response to his decisions. In fact, there were occasions when they would try to anticipate them and earn even greater plaudits for taking his "vision" forward.
I worked there for almost 18 years until retirement in 2006. When I joined as a Deputy Director of the Polytechnic, it was all about preparing for the transition from control by Leeds City Council to independent corporate status, and then in 1992 helping manage the transition to university status. During that time, there were successes and failures and undoubtedly mistakes were made.
Yet we managed to grow and to invest prudently in new buildings, equipment and, not least, new academic courses. For most of that time, our Board was chaired by Leslie Silver, OBE who I can best describe as a benign, warm-hearted version of Sir Alan Sugar.
He borrowed some, but not all, of his successful experience from the world of business and encouraged us to apply it in taking the institution forward. He was far from being risk averse – note his leadership of Leeds United – but he once cautioned us that he was not in the "surprise business".
There is a role for the values of commercial business to contribute to the everyday working of public institutions such as an university. Yet there are also distinctive values and conventions which should always pre-dominate in the way those organisations are run. Above all, there should at all time be an understanding that every pound either spent or committed is ultimately paid for by the British public.
When, not if, there is an external investigation, it will be seen that people who did not fit in were encouraged to leave by receiving large payments via "compromise agreements"; that accommodation provided in theory for visiting dignitaries and academics was regularly used by the family of the vice-chancellor; and that somebody authorised payments to the vice-chancellor when he moved house way in excess of those routinely provided for by other universities.
They will also uncover a culture of excess when it comes to hospitality and so-called corporate partnerships. A small group of managers and their spouses and partners, routinely attended rugby and cricket matches and associated events where the accountable currency would only occasionally be a piece of plastic, but invoiced statements instead – far less easily attributable to any single individual.
And they will find evidence of a culture of bullying and harassment without parallel in the higher education world. At every level there are examples of people whose crime was that they were not sufficiently "on message". Healthy criticism and frank discussion was effectively outlawed.
This has been the fundamental weakness within the institution and something the new vice-chancellor and hopefully new management team and Board need to address as the top priority.
Nothing short of a rigorous, independent external investigation will reveal the full scale of what has gone wrong and enable a new team to begin to put things right.
Frank Griffiths is currently chairman of two Leeds-based charities, the Trust for Education and the IGEN Foundation, and a non-executive board member of several "not for profit" organisations.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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