"We have a joint responsibility as department heads, so in relation to administration at department and centre level, we would like to see a discussion across the faculty in which we clarify where it would be most appropriate to place the administrative staff members.

And it is not necessarily certain that the individual department’s needs can be accommodated in this connection. In the role we will be playing as a faculty management team, we have to be able to look beyond our own departments to see the big picture.

However, in any model that we arrive at, there must be room for a high degree of flexibility – and that’s just so important because we have some very different departments. But we must agree on the framework for that flexibility together.

Many of the administrative staff members at ST have tried out three different models within a relatively short period of time with total decentralisation, centralisation at faculty level, and then finally centralisation at university level. So they have some knowledge about all this and it makes a lot of sense to involve them in the process.

But we must not make decisions based on what’s easiest for the administrative staff members in this context. We must think the other way around so we can ensure that it will be easiest for the people at the departments to receive services from the administration.

In total I pay just under DKK 50 million a year in costs to the faculty administration and the central administration. So it would be great for me to now have more influence over half of what I pay for, which is to say the faculty administration. But I also want to have influence over the other half.

For example, I would like to make sure that tasks are being handled in the right places. It might well be that in future, some of the tasks which are currently handled by the central administration should be taken over by the administration at the faculty. We now have such a large faculty that it is difficult to argue that tasks should be placed in the central administration due to economies of scale."

Translated by Peter Lambourne 

Twelve department heads have submitted a joint consultation response

The twelve department heads at Science and Technology have submitted a joint consultation response to the senior management team.

Omnibus has talked to two of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, both see greater managerial responsibilities and powers for the department heads as the most significant element that ought to result from the entire process. 

While the two department heads take the joint consultation response from the department heads at ST as the basis for their comments, in the following they answer solely on their own behalf.

"… We (will be) happy to see hiring authority transferred to the departments which will without doubt make it possible for us to act quickly, thereby ensuring we get hold of the best possible candidates. ( …)
We interpret the dean's role in connection with permanent tenure of academic staff as one of checking that the formal requirements are met and not as a further assessment of the suitability of the candidate."

Excerpt from the joint consultation response on making appointments from the department heads at ST.