Imagine yourself to be in the mythical Land of Beyond where you need minions to do a dirty job that men with honour would refuse to do. A classic trick in this situation is to pick people despised by the rest of society who are thus dependent on protection and will simply do what is asked for.

The Chinese emperors hit upon this truth when they started to surround themselves with eunuchs, despised by the rest of Chinese society and thus fiercely loyal to their protector, the Emperor. The roman emperors, similarly, made a habit of surrounding themselves with freed slaved who were despised by other Romans, as well as by a dedicated palace guard (the Praetorians) who were the only militia allowed in the vicinity of Rome.

The European colonialists too used this basic ‘dirty dozen’ technique when it came to keeping a large population in check with minimal own presence, particularly in Africa, by elevating some small despised group (ethnic or religious minorities) as the preferred club from whom the senior administrators came. This small favoured group would get personal benefits (riches and influence) but in return they would do whatever the colonizers wanted.

To see the relevance of this for university cuts in the Land of Beyond, you first need to step back a level and imagine yourself to be the Vice Chancellor of a second-rate university that brings in, say, a billion ‘Beyond’ dollars a year out of which some 300 million is money you dont really need to generate that 1 billion. It is ‘potential profit’ if you like.

Now, your first thought will of course be to give as much of this money to yourself as you can. That is not so easy though: in Beyond, universities are non-profit organisations nominally run by senates and full of academics who like to monitor and criticise you. You would never get away with giving yourself multi-million dollar salaries and huge offices if academics are really watching your every step.

So in order to get more of the profit, you need to subdue two groups, the academics and the senate. You subdue the academics by keeping them busy with ‘compliance’ and having a lot of systems in place to punish them if they become pesky. You thus include in your rules that anything that harms the reputation of the university is a sacking offence. You put yourself at the top of the committees that decide on professorial promotions and academic bonuses so that you are their direct boss. You appoint hundreds of administrators to monitor the media, teaching, and student-related activities of the academics with the purpose of keeping them quiet and punishing them when they get out of line.
You subdue the senate by overloading them with information (for which you need again more administrators) and by keeping them happy with luxuries and gifts. Over time, you attempt to get control of the mechanism via which new members get to be in these senates.

Now, the essential problem you face in this as a VC is how to ensure that the people helping you with your take-over plans are somewhat loyal to you rather than to something as silly as the goals of the university or academia or even to the needs of Beyond. It is loyalty to yourself that you need in order to eventually be able to get away with giving yourself huge amounts of money.

You remember your history lessons and realise that what you need is a set of eunuchs: people despised by the academics in your organisation who will thus have the same incentive as you have to subdue the academics and grab as much of the university resources as possible.

What are the equivalent of eunuchs in universities? Why, non-academics of course! Better still, non-academics whom you give academic titles for they will be even more despised! Hence you pick the most efficient bullies you can find, call them all professor and put them in charge of the divisions that subdue the academics and that send mountains of information to the university senate to ensure they will just go along with whatever you happen to ask of them at the end of some sumptuous occasion.

Due to your brilliance and foresight, the trick works like a charm and you find yourself earning well over a million, with several huge offices, and in a position to bargain for even more kick-backs from outsiders who want to use parts of the university for their own end (property developers and the like).

Now imagine yourself in the layer yet higher: you are now an ambitious paymaster in the Capital of Beyond, someone who nurtures a reputation for being able to get things done even if they might not really be in Beyond’s best interests. You too have a control problem for you want all kinds of things from universities. You would like the universities to keep the population happy by churning out cheap degrees to domestics. You also want universities to sell visas to smart oversees students by means of high fees for almost no education (cross-subsidising those domestics). Basically, you want universities to abide by whatever fancy drifts into the head of your current minister.

The control problem you have as a ‘wheeling and dealing’ senior civil servant in Beyond is again those pesky academics: they are self-righteous, not all that interested in your opinion or even your money, and wouldn’t easily go along with these plans. They might well flatly refuse to sell visas to foreigners because they would baulk at short-changing the education given to those foreigners. Indeed, they would probably laugh in your face if you suggested that universities should fall in line with, say, your wish to have a campus in the middle of nowhere just because it is a marginal constituency.

Just imagine what confident academics would do if you told them to cut their budget by 900 million! Why, they might do something as bold and brash as to honestly tell their students that there are no funds to properly educate them. Imagine the political fallout of such honesty by a bunch of self-righteous academics who won’t simply do your bidding! No no, it is quite clear to you that the last people you want leading universities are academics. You want leaders who know what you really mean when you talk about ‘university accountability’, ‘stakeholder management’, ‘strategic visions’ and ‘preparing for the future’.

So the senior Beyond bureaucrat too finds herself in the situation of needing eunuchs in charge of universities. You don’t mind if they get some private benefits out of the arrangement as long as they do your bidding and not rock the boat politically.

Now think a step higher again and consider why Beyond might have fixers at the top of the ministries …..