Resource List
| Resource | Description | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Deb Verhoeven and Ben Eltham. “Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities? | Analysis of the ‘vampiric’ tendencies of higher education consultancies, like Nous Group, written by researchers at the University of Alberta and Monash University in Australia. | Consultancies give managers cover to drive through unpopular measures like restructures. They provide pseudoscientific imagery, documentation, and data to conceal the blunter truth of pyramidal power imbalances. Consultancies also contribute handy tactics, such as outsourced teaching workforces or the increasingly indecipherable performance metrics which contribute to sweated academic labor. |
| Heather Young-Leslie. Notes from and for the frontlines of academic restructuring. | A blog post that discusses the “dramatic agenda” of organizational transformation brought to the University of Alberta by Nous. | Why is it that management consulting firms only offer universities one model for organizational effectiveness, leadership, and transformation, a model based on a capitalist corporation? Instead of accepting a huge failure rate in transformations, why not offer universities an organizational structure more similar to what a university is? Yes, our university has to change. But does it need to be corporatized? Why aren’t our current leaders demanding —of themselves—expertise, higher degrees, MBAs even, in co-operative management? Why are they not demanding of the consultants they hire—NOUS, McKinsey—something that respects the collegial governance system and its longue durée of successful production and sharing of innovation, creativity, critical thinking, and knowledge? |
| Katie Teeling and Emily Williams. Two years in review: Academic restructuring at the U of A. | This article describes what it is like to work and study at the University of Alberta, recently restructured with the help of Nous. | The only thing holding the university together is non-academic staff. Even with a nearly doubled workload, they’re doing their best to maintain the same level of excellence students and faculty expect. But many are unhappy. If nothing changes going forward, the U of A could experience an incredible loss of invaluable faculty and non-academic staff, changing this institution for good. |
| Non-Academic Staff Association, University of Sydney. Lessons from Down Under: Restructuring at the University of Sydney. Rachel Narvey. USydney staff share grim experience with academic restructuring amid U of A’s similar plans. | In 2020, the faculty and staff associations at the University of Alberta hosted an online panel featuring staff and faculty from the University of Sydney in order to learn more about what Nous-guided restructuring looks like. | “Most people are held back by fear of management reprisal, in my experience this is far more feared than real,” he said. “There is no downside to organizing on campus, that’s an important message that I think everybody needs to understand. There is no downside to resistance.” |
| Peter McInnis. President’s Message / Consulting for austerity. | Column by the President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) on the increasing and increasingly problematic role of private consulting firms in higher education. | Without active democratic engagement, post secondary education yields ground to neoliberal technocrats. Consequently, our institutions may be “transformed” beyond recognition from ones offering a diversity of subject knowledge and broader societal contributions to highly commodified enterprises geared to extruding “knowledge products.” |
| Simon Fraser University Administrative and Professional Staff Association. UniForum — What is it? What have been the outcomes for other universities? | Background information on the Nous UniForum survey. | “We’re continually facing restructures, the goalposts are continually shifting, and that leads to a general climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and precarity. No one can take the institutional structure for granted or hope there’s some fair chance of an ongoing durable context for their work at the University. Everybody’s position is always under threat, and the organizational arrangements that really make our work possible are always up for grabs.” said Riemer. |
| QCAA. Punishing staff for being starved: Critiques of the Nous Cubane “Service Effectiveness Survey”. | Critiques of the UniForum survey offered by several Queen’s experts. | But since every question of the survey is connected to staff positions at risk of layoffs, our recommendation is to mark all services as “critical” and to answer “very satisfied” – in line One of the most fatal flaws they point to is breathtaking: given the levels of understaffing at Queen’s, the survey will not measure faculty’s dissatisfaction with existing services, but rather dissatisfaction with understaffing. So given that the purpose of the survey is to make cuts to services, there is a good chance that it will end up punishing the most understaffed services – for being understaffed. |
| Roger Martin. Benchmarking is for losers: Don’t let it crowd-out strategy. | Critique of benchmarking (not specific to Nous) by Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto | If you are a loser, there is merit in driving your own regression to mean. Do it. But don’t confuse it with strategy. You will likely get a financial lift from getting to mediocre. But it is likely that it won’t be long until you are back to being a loser… Unique strategy choice is the only path to winning, which is the path to the greatest reward. Virtually everyone, including your ‘strategy consultants,’ will try to keep you engrossed in benchmarking. You just have to resist. That is very hard and very lonely. But life is too short to waste it on benchmarking. |
| UBC VPFO Project Management Office. UniForum FAQs. | University of British Columbia list of values and principles that will guide decision-making related to the UniForum survey at that institution. See item #3 in the FAQ. | Recognize that the university is a complex, diverse, and decentralized organization, and that departments and faculties have developed different approaches and different practices which reflect their diverse disciplines and histories. |
| UCL UCU. Proposed template response to the ‘UniForum Service Effectiveness Survey’. | Advice regarding the UniForum Service Effectiveness Survey provided to members of the University and College Union at University College London in 2018. | … we are suggesting you fill in this survey according to the following template response for the form: a) complete pro forma questions with high satisfaction rates for professional staff and services, and b) then add in the written feedback (at every point where there is space to write): I am very satisfied with the work of professional colleagues, who do a difficult job under troubling Senior Management pressures and decisions. I am aware of issues at central services, but these appear mainly to do with Senior Management’s running of these, including the use of outsourcing and the creation of an overloaded workforce. Unfortunately this survey does not sufficiently differentiate between Senior Management and their policies and processes versus the performance of ordinary staff, and as such it is unfit for its stated purpose. Our professional staff do an excellent job, in which they are hindered by erratic Senior Management decision-making geared towards other agendas such as saving money, outsourcing, redundancies, and surplus-chasing. All of this has huge impact on morale. We believe all our staff are important. |
| University and College Union. Higher education branch action note: UniForum benchmarking. | Report on UniForum survey from the University and College Union in the UK. | The main concerns are: • Uniforum benchmarking is creating the potential for jobs losses in professional non-academic services. It is clear that Cubane actively markets that their work leads to change; • the data which is being collected and which will feed into review proposals can be critiqued in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that it is flawed (see data collection critique table below); • poor professional support services planning will have long term consequences on the overall operation of an institution which will negatively impact on the work of academics and students, over time. |
| University of Toronto Faculty Association. Mediated agreement on the UniForum program restricts use of data collected. | University of Toronto Faculty Association grievance related to UniForum Global Benchmarking Program and the inclusion of academic librarians. | “…data collected through the UniForum Program will not be referred to or relied on: (i) in connection with the termination of a librarian or an assessment of the performance of any faculty member or librarian, including any tenure process, continuing status process, permanent status process, promotion process, or PTR process, and (ii) in any Article 6 negotiations as to the terms and conditions of employment of faculty members and librarians. It is understood and agreed that librarians will not be required to participate in the UniForum training and data collection process for themselves or other librarians. There will be no reprisal against any librarian for refusal to participate in the UniForum training and data collection process for themselves or other librarians.” |
To get an idea of the extent of Nous’ involvement in higher education in English-speaking countries, just Google UniForum and “services effectiveness survey” or UniForum and benchmarking!
About the blog
This blog contains emergent news and information about the budget cuts at Queen’s University and their implications. While we do our best to fact-check all information posted, we cannot guarantee the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of the information presented. It is not a substitute for your own research and, if relevant, conversations with those you report to.
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