Vice-chancellor narcissism and university performance

Over the last two decades (or more), universities have increasingly come to be managed like businesses. In that case, the role of the university vice-chancellor (or president) has come to resemble that of a business CEO. As a consequence, the types of skills a successful vice-chancellor must possess have changed. And, the types of academics attracted to becoming a vice-chancellor have also changed. If I claimed that current vice-chancellors are, on average, more narcissistic than vice-chancellors from ten years ago, I think many academics would agree.

In fact, that is one of the findings of this new article by Shee-Yee Khoo (Bangor University), Pietro Perotti (University of Bath), Thanos Verousis (University of Essex), and Richard Watermeyer (University of Bristol), published in the journal Research Policy (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Khoo et al. aren't interested in the level of narcissism of vice-chancellors per se, but whether vice-chancellor narcissism is related to university performance. They use data from British universities from 2009/10 to 2019/20 to investigate this question. Their sample includes 133 universities, and 261 vice-chancellors.

Interestingly, they:

...measure narcissism based on the size of the signature of the VC...

First, we obtain the signature of each VC from the university annual report, or the university strategic plan or letter when the signature is unavailable in the annual report. Second, we draw a rectangle around each VC's signature, where the signature touches its furthermost endpoint, ignoring any dot at the end of the signature or/and underline below the signature... Third, we measure the area covered by the signature by multiplying the length and width (in centimetres) of the rectangle. Fourth, we divide the area by the number of letters in the VC's name to control for the length of the VC's name.

Apparently, this is a widely used measure of narcissism <quickly checking the size of my signature>, and Khoo et al. note that it has advantages over survey-based measures because it is "unobtrusive". It is also less subject to manipulation than survey-based measures, although I was worried that the size of the signature on an electronic document (like an annual report) would create a lot of measurement error. However, in the section on robustness checks, Khoo et al. report that:

...we compare the handwritten and electronic signature sizes of the same VC, for the sample where we have both types. The size of the signature remains the same irrespective of the signature type.

Ok then. For their measures of university performance:

Firstly, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor until 2014, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), is a system for assessing the research quality of UK universities and other HE institutions... We use the overall quality of research based on the REF (formerly known as the RAE) as our research quality indicator...

Secondly, we employ the National Student Survey (NSS) which assesses teaching quality in UK universities... In particular, we employ the Student Satisfaction Score, which is the average score from across the organisation and management, learning resources, learning community and student voice sections of the NSS...

Thirdly, we use the overall university ranking, based on the Guardian newspaper.

Based on the way that they describe their results though, it seems like they use the ranking of each university, rather than the scores themselves for research quality and teaching quality. For the analysis, they perform the analysis separately for 'old universities' (those that were created before 1992) and 'new universities' (those created after 1992). The main difference between those groups of universities is that the old universities tend to be more research-focused, while the new universities tend to be more teaching-focused. The analysis for each type of university compares the university ranking two years before and two years after a change in vice-chancellor:

In particular, we rely on the universities that face a VC transition, i.e., a change from a low narcissist VC to a high narcissist VC, within the sample period. We define a high narcissist VC as one in the top quartile of the distribution. In our analysis, our treatment group consists of universities that appointed a high narcissist VC during the sample period (i.e., low-to-high transition universities). The baseline group consists of universities that appointed a low narcissist VC during the sample period (i.e., low-to-low transition universities).

Collapsing vice-chancellor narcissism to a dichotomous variable (equal to one only when a university transitions from a low-narcissism vice-chancellor to a high-narcissism vice-chancellor) deals with some of the measurement error issues I noted above. However, it does open up their analysis to some criticism, since there are many alternative arbitrary cut-offs that they could have used (and they don't report the robustness of their results to this particular choice). With that limitation in mind, Khoo et al. find that:

...a change from a low narcissist VC to a high narcissist VC is associated with a deterioration in research performance for both New and Old universities. VC Change×Narcissism Change is negative and significant, confirming that VC narcissism has a negative effect on research performance. Controlling for university as well as VC characteristics, and year and university fixed effects, a change from a low narcissist VC to a high narcissist VC is associated with a drop of approximately 16 places (VC Change×Narcissism Change = –16.07) in research performance for the sample of New universities and nine places for the sample of Old universities (VC Change×Narcissism Change = –9.57). This finding also demonstrates that New universities are more susceptible to VC transitions.

Then for teaching quality:

The coefficient of VC Change×Narcissism Change is negative and significant, indicating a drop of approximately 12 places for the group of New universities and 19 places for the group of Old universities (VC Change×Narcissism Change = –12.06 for New universities and –19.52 for Old universities).

And for overall ranking:

The transition from a low to a high narcissist VC is associated with a drop of approximately 27 places in the Guardian ranking for the group of New universities but has no effect on the Guardian ranking of Old universities.

So, narcissistic vice-chancellors lower the research and teaching performance of universities, but have more negative impact on new universities (except for teaching quality, where the impact is greater for old universities). Why do vice-chancellors negatively impact performance? It turns out that the answer may be different for old universities and new universities. Khoo et al. go on to show several additional results, including that:

...for Old universities, financial risk substantially increases with VC narcissism. Specifically, the appointment of a highly narcissistic VC deteriorates the financial sustainability of Old universities by approximately five to six [Financial Security Index] points...

Hence, the appointment of a highly narcissistic VC is associated with higher financial risk (i.e., lower financial sustainability) and lower effectiveness of the use of the resources. These results are consistent with excessive risk-taking behaviour. For Old universities, the findings suggest that highly narcissistic VCs take unnecessary risk, which might lead to a decrease in university performance...

The results for Capital Expenditures are insignificant. However, when using Expenses to Revenue as the dependent variable, the coefficient on VC Change×Narcissism Change is positive and significant at the 5 % level for the group of New universities. This evidence, although based on only one of the two measures, is consistent with highly narcissistic VCs engaging in empire-building strategies in New universities, which might be detrimental to the performance of the organisation.

I don't find the ratio of expenses to revenue very convincing as a variable, but Khoo et al. use it to suggest that narcissistic vice-chancellors in new universities are engaging in empire building. In contrast, Khoo et al argue that narcissistic vice-chancellors in old universities are engaging in excessive risk-taking behaviour. Both of these behaviours have been noted of narcissistic business CEOs as well.

So, what should universities do in order to mitigate the negative impacts of vice-chancellor narcissism? Khoo et al. recommend that:

...university councils and relevant committees should take into account and, if possible, measure the narcissism of the candidates for the role of VC... Given, however, that narcissists tend to appeal to recruiters, we also recommend that VC selection committees should undertake rigorous training that will allow them to control for this implicit bias in favour of narcissistic applicants.

I don't find those recommendations to be very convincing (and they aren't really supported by Khoo et al.'s results). What is supported is higher-quality governance, since in their final set of results:

The core finding that VC narcissism has a negative effect on research performance still holds after controlling for the effect of university governance; however, we note a decrease in the magnitude of the effect...

The results here are not consistent across all measures of university performance, but in all cases the measure of university governance does appear to moderate the effect of a shift from a low-narcissism vice-chancellor to a high-narcissism vice-chancellor.

So, the takeaway message from this research is the narcissistic vice-chancellors harm university performance, but having strong university governance can limit the damage. The only question remaining is, how did the vice-chancellors of these researchers' universities respond when they learned of this research?