The Guardian higher education summit is not the only summit this month. There is a leadership summit, too, on the question: "What is an effective and high-performing governing body?" Anyone who has been touring the HE conferences in the last few months cannot help but notice a growing unease in that area.
Thanks to the requirement of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 that "at least half" of the members of a governing body be "independent members" - external to the university and uninvolved in its affairs - governors must sit in a hovercraft-on-a-mission, gazing at the horizon and approving strategic directives, with little understanding of the academic work of those teaching and researching in them. Can that possibly be risk-free? It is now an open secret that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) knows there are problems in getting the members of university governing bodies to do the job properly.
It has always been preposterous to put people in charge of universities without requiring them to demonstrate that they understand what they are to "supervise", have the relevant skills, and are not too busy to do the job.
It was always an untested hypothesis that non-executive directors would be able to keep an eye on the executive by turning up to meetings a few times a year and reading any papers the executive chose to show them. This ideology that external "supervisors" should be in a majority, which derived from the Cadbury report and its concern to protect financial integrity in the running of businesses, has suddenly been tested to destruction, and we have a global recession.
So what is being done about it? The website of the Committee of University Chairs (CUC) has a list of worried projects. There are the key performance indicators (KPI) - reports of 2006 and 2008. Reading those papers? Busy and important people cannot be expected to glance through more than, say, 30 pages for a meeting. They will be looking for a summary of the key points of those key points.
The CUC review of the KPIs published last year was a little defensive. "A key point here is that the guide was not intended to suggest that all the complexity of a university either can or should be captured on one page," it said. It admitted that "governors cannot expect to make a real contribution without some appreciation of the context and complexities of the environment, and it has been stressed that there is a responsibility on governors to invest some time in learning about and engaging with these difficult issues". Their independence is not qualification enough, then?
The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education was set up partly to "educate" governors and ease the niggling concern that they need it. At the LFHE conference at the end of January, tautologically entitled "Leading Transformational Change", there were the KPIs again. I asked where these abstract, euphemistic management aspirations were being generated. Not by governors, it was acknowledged. They have short attention spans and need to be educated. Not by academics, who just needed to be brought into conformity with them.
And that leadership summit? You will have to wait until Thursday for the full story to be published. But I can reveal that demonstrating any correlation between the "performance" of governors and the teaching and research performance of an higher education institution is proving tricky.
In a university, you have to have your infrastructure to support teaching and research. The case for a superstructure of independent governors has not been made. The discredited ideology compressing what used to be the good, thick "academic-activity" filling of the sandwich to a thin layer of ersatz fish paste now shouts for radical review.