The current wave of proposed job losses across the UK higher education sector, whilst not unprecedented, will have significant impacts not only on those who leave or lose their jobs but also on all of those remaining. When people leave a university, for whatever reason, they take a chunk of its history and a slice of important knowledge with them. This loss of institutional memory and know-how inevitably has consequences for those continuing to work there.

The nature of this churn over time can mean that the combined effect of lots of departures over many years, together with a more frequent turnover of those at the most senior levels, leaves some pretty big gaps in knowledge and experience. This can be especially unhelpful when universities are facing into challenges with some strong similarities to previous crises where experience would be extremely helpful.

This BBC article from 2016, describing the crash of nearly 20 years ago, captures this point about the importance of institutional memory well and highlights the consequences of the lack of it in the Treasury during the 2008-09 financial crisis:

Each time someone leaves their job, a chunk of the organisation’s memory leaves too. How, then, do you run complex systems, see through long-term projects, or avoid past mistakes? Short-term contracts and outsourcing reduce the appetite for learning company or product history. And when job losses land, even more knowledge is lost.

In 2012, one institution found that, as City firms poached its bright young employees, its staff turnover was hitting 28% – faster, apparently, than McDonalds. And for Her Majesty’s Treasury, after its experiences during the financial crisis, this was rather scary.

The Treasury’s outgoing permanent secretary, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, says its young staff are highly knowledgeable but the short time they spend in their posts means they often miss out on the “folk memory”.

This, he says, became very clear to him and to then Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling during the course of the 2008-09 crisis, when they realised “the vast majority of Treasury staff had never been through even a recession, let alone a banking crisis”.

When the run on one of Britain’s biggest banks, Northern Rock, struck in 2007, Sir Nicholas says, the Treasury “might have been able to stop the run, but we were all starting from first principles”.

The position now in the UK higher education sector is not dissimilar. Most UK university leaders have only ever known expansion and do not have a great deal of direct knowledge or relevant experience of living through or leading during an extended period of constraint or contraction. 

Returning to first principles

When I started working in higher education, a very long time ago, there were people around who had a direct recollection of or knew colleagues who had been affected by the deep higher education cuts launched in 1981. Virtually none of those people is employed in the sector now (although I was fortunate to speak to one of them recently). 

Although the current funding challenges in UK higher education are not quite at the scale of the early 1980s, as I have written before here, there is still a good deal we can learn from these events and developing a sense of recent history and the sectoral and institutional responses to previous crises is more important than ever given the gaps in direct experience of such events. There have of course been other reductions in HE funding since 1981 but in broad terms the growth curve has been continuous for the past 15 years which is about as far as almost everyone currently in leadership roles in HE can remember.

The pandemic hit everyone and businesses of all types, including universities, and all had to respond in similar ways. It was a shock but everyone was in the same boat and there was a shared spirit on the whole. In terms of the general growth trajectory of UKHE though it was really a relatively short pause rather than a handbrake turn.

Where we are now though is very different from even the impact of the pandemic and this is what contributes to making it so impactful – no-one can remember leading a university through anything similar – and it also means that many are ill-prepared to deal with it and have to resort to first principles (as noted by Macpherson above).

So, not only does no-one remember what it was like last time around, the churn we are experiencing now means that a great deal of remaining institutional memory will also disappear over the next couple of years. And this of course means that next time something like this happens it will be back to square one again.

Even worse with a chainsaw. Or a Death Star.

It could be worse though. The US government’s approach to many aspects of the state, its activities and institutional memory is to take a chainsaw to all of it. This destructive urge appears to be excising historical records and people with knowledge and experience on a sweeping basis too with a real focus on those the government doesn’t like. There are going to be some huge gaps in the institutional knowledge in US public bodies for many years to come.

I wrote a while back over on Wonkhe about some of the inadequacies of the institutional record-keeping of the Empire in Star Wars as exposed in the spin-off movie Rogue One. As noted then, the film’s final big battle sequence happens on Scarif which is an Imperial base but also the home of the government’s archive which seems to have a really poor cataloguing system and some pretty dated tech (and you can find more analysis of the Empire’s records management failings together with other historical archives in this entertaining and very relevant piece).

Anyway, the library containing the entire Imperial archive is destroyed and they don’t appear to have a back-up anywhere (just one of many unlikely records-related features of the whole Star Wars milieu). It’s possible therefore that this results in a major gap in the collective memory of the Empire which helps account for some of the subsequent challenges they face against the Rebel Alliance.

Whilst the scale of this destruction is far greater than that currently being wrought by the current US government (the Death Star is somewhat more potent than the chainsaw), nevertheless it reinforces the point that institutional memory really does matter.

New institutions, no memories

When government departments merge, de-merge or are otherwise restructured or the landscape of public bodies and agencies is reshaped or indeed as at present there is a major wave of redundancies in a sector then not only will some who held a great deal of knowledge depart but there will also be experience and documentation lost which could help with understanding the way an organisation dealt with previous situations. Some specific examples include the loss of institutional memory within BP prior to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the nuclear weapons sector management where – post-Cold War – a lot of historical knowledge was lost due to retirements. These are areas where we would all feel happier if historical records, experience and knowledge were properly managed and sustained.

When a new agency is created, as happened in 2018 with the establishment of the Office for Students, it may be able to draw on the experience of transferring staff and the history of predecessor organisations. Or it may choose not to, preferring a clean break with previous approaches.  The OfS generally took this latter approach I believe which, whilst it may have had some merit in the light of the brief the agency was given by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, has left it in a challenging position as far as the current sector financial situation is concerned. In short, it seems likely there are few individuals in the OfS or indeed in the Department for Education who have any knowledge or experience to draw on in responding to the current challenge. It’s back to first principles and bringing in consultants to assist.

Whilst there have been no forced institutional mergers as a result of the current crisis (yet), should this happen then there will be a similar set of challenges for staff around trying to establish a shared history, understanding and a knowledge base to support the new institution as it faces into an uncertain future.

Calling on experience and history

In working out how best to support institutions facing significant financial distress, it does seem inevitable that government will have to introduce some form of rescue regime to avoid the possibility of a disorderly institutional exit (as discussed here a while back). The additional element here should be the requirement for small teams of professionals drawn from other universities and/or the ranks of recently retired senior leaders with finance and management expertise and able to draw on many years of experience and knowledge. This was a model imposed on the Council of University College Cardiff (UCC) by the Department for Education and Science in 1987 when UCC was facing insolvency and it ultimately led to a successful turnaround for the institution. (Full details of the events relating to UCC can be found in Shattock, M (1988) Financial Management in Universities: The lessons from university college, Cardiff. Financial Accountability & Management, 4(2), 99–112.) 

Part of the change introduced at UCC was a significantly revised organisational structure and culture intended to prevent recurrence of anything like this situation. I would argue that a part of this kind of culture is about universities retaining a sense of their own history. I wrote over a decade ago over on Wonkhe about the importance of knowing your institutional history and the need for good record keeping, archives, and reminding everyone of the history and context of the organisation.

All of these examples show that institutional memory really does matter, not just to ensure you remember to build your Death Star without critical design flaws but also to enable a university to learn from its history and respond to new challenges based on knowledge, expertise and experience. And avoid going back to square one every time.