How long does it take to introduce a new course on?artificial intelligence?taught by faculty conducting research in the area? In some top-performing programmes, the answer can sometimes be as little as three months. But at numerous UK universities, it can take up to two years to navigate multiple committees and persuade peers who lack research expertise in the subject that the proposed course meets essential ¡°quality¡± benchmarks. It¡¯s a huge amount of work.

Nor does the bureaucracy end with course approval. Assessment frameworks and institutional protocols may require faculty to complete extensive paperwork for each student, frequently involving multiple assessors and cumbersome digital systems that are often not seamlessly integrated and/or are not designed based on the actual functional needs. Such requirements are ostensibly designed to minimise bias, yet such systems are absent from many, if not most, renowned European and American institutions.

Internal bureaucracy also hampers research. Consider the scenario where a faculty member asks for a specific IT service for their academic work. If the university IT department offers a comparable service, it will probably push back and urge them to use this instead. But individual academics often have distinct preferences or professional needs and may wish to use alternative global-standard solutions.

Doing so does not disrupt institutional workflows, and academics are often willing to fund the alternative service out of their own research budgets. Nevertheless, the process of approval can devolve into email exchanges stretching over weeks, consuming significant resources and wasting cognitive bandwidth. And sometimes the ultimate answer is still no, further detracting from academics¡¯ research ¨C especially when the internal IT systems don¡¯t work as intended, which is not a rare occurrence.

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Upon closer inspection, universities increasingly reveal themselves as arenas for competition over resources and authority. IT departments and committees all seek to secure and justify their respective budgets ¨C and they are doing so with conspicuous success.

Economists describe this dynamic as ¡°¡±, a term most often used in connection with regulators. The hallmark of a captured institution is that its policies offer little tangible benefit to most of its constituents ¨C and as far as faculty are concerned, universities would be better off without the many ¡°services¡± provided by IT and oversight committees.

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The laborious processes they insist on are granted legitimacy under the cover of ensuring that proper procedure must be followed. Yet the link between those procedures and educational outcomes can be specious. To insist on them is a case of the tail wagging the dog, as substantial faculty time and cognitive effort is consumed by non-educational tasks. The cost of that is seldom quantified accurately as decades-long patterns of ?in faculty persist, further weakening higher education¡¯s core asset ¨C the academic staff itself.

To be sure, some committees are composed of faculty, most of whom act in good faith. Nonetheless, universities¡¯ evolving governance architecture increasingly resembles a system crafted by lawyers and accountants principally to indemnify the university and prevent any exploitation of limited resources by faculty. Academics are barraged with myriad rules and regulations, often to the extent that it is not feasible for them to?be cognisant of all of them. Such systems, with heightened surveillance and oversight, give the impression that faculty are not to be trusted.

In such low-trust settings, tend to be very high, making the system even more inefficient. Over time, innovation is also diminished. After all, what incentive do academics have to be innovative if they are rewarded with scrutiny by committee? The wonder is that so many are still willing to endure this ¡°reward¡±.

So how might this situation be redressed? One starting point is to evaluate university processes against the primary institutional goal ¨C which, particularly in an era when artificial intelligence threatens traditional employment, is to hone students¡¯ capacity for critical thinking.

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A constructive counterfactual approach would question whether existing processes truly add value compared with more streamlined and perhaps less technologically sophisticated alternatives. For instance, is a digital platform requiring a two-factor login that assumes that one always has access to internet or phone really better than a shared Excel sheet when sensitive or financial information is not involved?

But the key point is for institutions to reconsider their underlying power structures and the rationale for procedural dominance. Decision rights on procedural efficacy must be accorded to those who have : teaching faculty, rather than those removed from the teaching and research process, such as IT staff.

A dog wagged by its own tail is not a dog that is going to lead the pack.

?is an associate professor at the?University of Bath School of Management.

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