22BoardOfScrutinyDiscussion
On Tuesday, 24 October 2017, at 2 p.m there will be a Discussion of the Regent House this will discuss the 22nd Report of the Board of Scrutiny.
Daniel Thomas is considering the discussion and making the following comments:
Dr Daniel R. Thomas Department of Computer Science and Technology, the West Cambridge Active Travel Group, and Peterhouse
Dear Deputy Vice Chancellor,
The 22nd Report of the Board of Scrutiny makes numerous useful remarks and I support all of its recommendations.
With regard to governance I think that it is important for post-docs from all schools should be members of the Regent House. Post-docs conduct research, supervise undergraduate and graduate students, give lectures, run labs, set exam questions and mark them, apply for funding, interview applicants, and serve on departmental and University committees including the Council and Board of Scrutiny. Post-docs do all the things that University Teaching Officers do. Senior Research Associates are even on the same salary grade as Lecturers. The only difference between post-docs and contract researchers is that they are on short term contracts rather than having permanent positions. Some post-docs continue on short term contracts for decades. The argument that post-docs short contracts mean that their interests are not aligned with the University would also apply to anyone approaching retirement age, and hopefully this shows that it is a poor argument. One way to ensure that post-docs see the University as their own and seek its interests is to enfranchise them with Regent House membership.
With regard to finance there is still some room for improvement in the way the University brings in research funding. In some instances across multiple schools funds have taken 6, 8, or 12 months to travel from Development and Alumni Relations (CUDAR) or Research Operations Office (ROO) to the researchers who have obtained the funds and want to use them for researchers. In some cases this has resulted in researchers receiving notice that they are being made redundant despite the next several years of their funding having arrived over 12 months previously. In other cases multi-million pound grants have been loss due to slowness in processing paperwork. While some of the staff at CUDAR and ROO are excellent there are still regular instances where things are going badly wrong. The University should use as a Key Performance Indicator for CUDAR the time between funding being received by the University and it being available to be used for its intended purpose. For ROO where there are additional complexities a Key Performance Indicator of funder notification date to a usable cost centre could be used though care would be required in interpreting it.
With regard to Estates, one way of further improving transparency around building projects would be for the draft planning documents to be made generally available to members of the University as a matter of course. This would provide members of the University an opportunity to review them before they become public and would help avoid the embarrassment of parts of the University objecting to the University's own planning applications. By way of example: I represent the Department of Computer Science and Technology on the Shared Facilities Hub Representative User Group (SHRUG) and so I was able to obtain the draft planning documents for the Shared Facilities Hub and Cavendish III. That enabled me to find significant problems with them that can now be addressed before the documents are submitted for planning. My colleague who works in the Cavendish was unable to obtain such drafts despite having a keen interest in the success of the project. If this information was more widely available others might be able to identify similar issues with other projects in advance.
