Would you consider a move into senior management at the moment?

[notlisteningwithmother]

I'm thinking about options.

Currently working on a full time permanent T&R contract, on sabbatical after internal leadership roles including department chair and Faculty head and an internal secondment which ended in January.

I'm worried about the future. We expect a VR scheme followed by compulsory redundancies in my area, although there's been no formal announcement yet.

The chances of a sideways move into T&R are slim (humanities) but there still seem to be opportunities in senior management. Of course that may tell a story about the future of the sector too! Would you consider a move into management, or is it too much of a poisoned chalice at the moment?

Not personally, becauase senior management at my place are toxic, cold-hearted c*nts who've totally bought into the idea of market-driven education. I've also yet to meet one who doesn't join an institution to enact some bullshit 'change agenda' only to then move on the instant they have made academic staff spend enormous amounts of time rewriting new 'pillars' into module descriptors or some such similar nonsense that doesn't actually benefit anyone other than said senior manager who then moves onto a new job somewhere else having been able to demostrate their 'ability to manage change'. But I can see the rationale if your career is already moving in that direction and hopefully you'd be one of the good ones! Maybe you can bring down the toxic culture of senior management from the inside?

Soon HE will just be senior management and zero-hours contract academic staff teaching 'at scale' I reckon. Which is why I'm getting out now (after 20 years) as part of my place's current VS scheme.

In all seriousness, the reason I really wouldn't want to be a senior manager right now is there's no way you could avoid, surely, having to deliver downwards a whole pile of shit to people working at the coal face of HE (i.e. those who actually work with students and do the research). And that sounds like a really miserable job. I'd hate to be in that sandwich between the exec board and academics.

@HippyKayYay - that encapsulates my worries beautifully! A leadership role that is rooted in teaching and research, and supporting staff and students can still be tough but it feels rewarding. Senior management attitudes often seem hard to understand. If I could guarantee that I'd be one of the good ones I'd be happy to give it my best shot. But I can imagine the corporate mentality becoming oppressive. I think I know the answer to my question :-)

@HippyKayYay Sending sympathy for whatever has driven you to the VS decision but I understand entirely why getting out seems sensible in the current context. I think this is the first time I've felt utterly despairing about the very things that made me so determined to pursue a career in academia.

@notlisteningwithmother thanks. I'm actually feeling quite chipper about the VS decision! It was certainly voluntary, on my part. Although compulsory redundancies will almost certainly come next in my dept and I'd rather jump than be pushed.

Good luck with your decision. I'm sure it's possible to go into senior management without selling your soul. I expect it's very institution-dependent. Mine is really top-down and corporate and there's a big divide between the them (senior management suits) and us (academics and prof services who actually work with students and/or do research). We have had waves of better sm, but we seem to have taken on a particularly toxic bunch recently, one of whom is slicing and dicing our faculty with enormous gusto less than a year after arriving.

I'm PS but work quite closely with a lot of the SMT. I think there are ways that you can do the job with integrity and keep a clear sight of the reasons you wanted to do it and the good you thought you could do in the role. What you absolutely can't do is manage to have everyone else - including all your former close colleagues, and all the people who you thought you had a close personal relationship with - think that's what you're doing. The job is too tough, the circumstances of the sector too hard (and just how hard they are is just still not realised by many people, who ascribe far too much to individual university management and too little to a system that is collapsing), and so what you can do even if you do absolutely everything you can will still not be up to what people want from you. You don't have to lose your soul to corporate management, but you absolutely will have some people think you have. Not everyone can stand that (I don't know that I could) but I think you have to be realistic about the limits of 'being one of the good ones' - it'll mean do everything you can and doing it for the overall good, not doing everything you want to or everything that people want you to do. You'll have experienced a lot of that as a HoD/head of Faculty, but it is really ramped up in SMT and you have a lot less ability to basically point up and say 'they made me do this'.