On December 7th 2022, I was delighted to give an invited talk about my new book as part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series. My title was Reclaiming the university narrative: new stories for an old sector?
You can watch the video recording (including a really interesting Q&A discussion) here.
Since the publication of my latest book, Universities Under Fire, I’ve been asked to give a couple interviews with well-known US podcasters. The genre is new to me, but the experiences were interesting, and it was fun attempting to reach different kinds of audience.
First, I found myself in conversation with Andrew Keen, a San Francisco based entrepreneur and author. Andrew’s questions suggested his familiarity with contemporary English higher education wasn’t in-depth, but his enthusiasm more than compensated for any gaps in knowledge.
Shortly afterwards, I spoke to The Curious Man. The curious man is Matt Crawford, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Matt’s insider understandings of how universities operate allowed for a more informed exchange, and I soon warmed to his values and politics.
Podcasts potentially offer a way for scholars to reach much larger audiences, and to influence folk outside the usual conference circle and seminar series. It’s a challenge, because usually the only people who want to talk to you for an hour about a book you’ve written are fellow academics (and among your peers you can safely assume lots of shared knowledge). But engaging with podcasters is a worthwhile endeavour, and I’m grateful for the opportunities that Andrew and Matt afforded me.
This piece was first published in The Guardian newspaper (30.06.20)
Covid-19 is causing young people to re-evaluate their educational choices. Though it seems that would-be UK university students are not being deterred as much as initially feared, it is likely that many will shun the traditional campus experience and opt to stay local. This means living at home and commuting to class instead of the bathroom and kitchen-sharing challenges – and the cost – of university accommodation.
The stay-at-home trend was accelerating even before Covid-19 struck, as young people increasingly began putting their friends, family and part-time jobs ahead of the promise of far-off adventures. Yet these students still fall beneath the radar. Some universities can even be sniffy about those who decline the ‘full’ campus experience.
Attempts to ‘involve’ stay-at-home students in campus activities are sometimes clumsy and misguided. Buddy schemes suppose that they yearn for companionship and inclusion, when many already have full social lives. Underlying assumptions can reflect an out-dated notion of the ‘ideal’ student: white, well-off, and hundreds of miles from home.
The proportion of stay-at-home undergraduates in the UK has risen to 21% from around 8% in the late 80s and early 90s. Newman University in Birmingham now classifies 93% of undergraduates as ‘commuter’ students. Such students are more likely to be from a lower-income household and to be the first in their family to attend university. British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi students are over six times more likely than their white peers to continue living with their parents or guardians.
Older generations of graduates, including university leaders, tend to assume that stay-at-home students are somehow missing out. They recall their own desperation to escape from their parents’ clutches, and grow wistful at having ‘found themselves’ during a life-defining undergraduate experience. But it’s not always acknowledged that the context was very different. In many cases, their fees were covered by the state. They were care-free because university was cost-free.
The stay-at-home option became more attractive at English universities as fees started rising. Young people are now particularly keen to avoid exorbitant rents, and universities tend to under-estimate how important paid employment can be to those feeling suffocated by educational debt. Recently, a freedom of information request found that only eight universities knew how many hours their students spend at work, and just two had any information about how this might affect their grades.
The relationship that elite universities have with their stay-at-home students often mirrors an uneasy rapport with ‘the community’ more generally – historically known as the town and gown divide. Despite claims to be civic institutions, not all universities readily share their facilities. Some open their doors for once-a-year special events, while closely guarding entry for the rest of the time. Others boast of research partnerships with local residents – while exploiting them as convenient sources of data.
It’s no coincidence that stay-at-home students are disproportionately BAME and working-class. Their sense is often that the higher education sector has been blind to issues of racism, and slow to address deep-rooted snobberies.
Regardless of where they’re living, drugs and partying are off the menu for lots of today’s students. Their identities are forged on-line, and they connect primarily through social media. Mental health is a priority. Many wouldn’t know where to find the Students’ Union bar.
If Covid-19 makes the stay-at-home option more appealing, this is something to celebrate, not regret. The local students that I teach are invariably an asset to their learning environments, bringing important alternative perspectives and enlivening academic discussions.
Crucially, stay-at-home students also take the university back to their own neighbourhoods, doing invisible but invaluable access work on their institution’s behalf. Informal chats with friends who aren’t students can demystify higher education. Stories are told. Social and cultural capital is shared. Perceptions are changed. Slowly, going to university becomes a more thinkable option for other young people within society’s most marginalised groups.
All universities may soon be forced to re-examine their provision for stay-at-home students – for financial reasons if nothing else. Applicants are no longer as geographically and socially mobile as the sector imagines. The number of mature students at English universities is beginning to recover following a drop that coincided with the 2012 fee increase. Many people have indicated that the pandemic has rekindled a long lost academic curiosity. The higher education sector – by accident rather than design – suddenly seems more available to those traditionally on its fringes.
Universities now need to focus on practical measures. Stay-at-home students don’t always have access to the working space and wifi that their peers in institutional accommodation take for granted. Employment or caring commitments may prevent some from engaging fully with group work, or socialising after hours.
In years to come, “stay-at-home” may become a redundant description. The preferred mode of engagement could be changing for all young people. Even middle-class students are beginning to choose economic and emotional security over a more immersive experience. Soon, universities may have to come up with a new label for the minority of students who insist on doing university the old-fashioned way.
The dialogue below is taken from HEPI Report 119, the full version of which includes an excellent introduction from Professor Michael Shattock.
HEPI is the Higher Education Policy Institute and Nick Hillman is its Director.
Dear Nick,
It’s good to have this exchange with you. The role of university governors is beginning to get some critical attention, but it still seems neglected relative to the responsibility that it now carries.
I sense that Board members across the higher education sector feel pulled in different directions. On one hand, there’s a traditional idea of ‘wise elders’ meeting to offer some light-touch and well-mannered guidance on a university’s general direction of travel. On the other hand, there’s a regulatory framework that positions governors as legal custodians of multi-million pound, global organisations.
The Office for Students wants Boards to be accountable for upholding ‘public interest governance principles’, but what are those principles and how best can they be defended?
University staff who volunteer for governance roles are usually regarded with suspicion. I received condolences from some colleagues when elected! Maybe this follows a long tradition of academic misgivings about perceived compromises of ‘freedom’.
Back in 1918, Thorstein Veblen characterised non-academics who join Boards as ‘quite useless to the university for any business-like purpose’. I was reminded of this more recently when Peter McCaffery, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cumbria, suggested Whitehall departments privately regard the way in which universities are governed as ‘bogus professionalism’.
However, my main concern isn’t lack of know-how. It’s that university governance – and the corporate model upon which it’s generally based – seems detached from the day-to-day reality of many academics’ working lives.
In my experience, this gap is wider in the higher education sector than in the compulsory part of the sector, where the pressures of school teaching are perhaps better understood by governors.
As an ‘insider’, I sense frustration among colleagues that representation on decision-making bodies is usually limited to a handful of staff, and that Boards sometimes focus on the narrow market needs of their individual institution at the expense of the wider societal contribution that universities make. As an ‘outsider’, what do you think?
Dear Steven,
Thank you for starting this important conversation. My experience is different to yours. When I was appointed as a lay governor, no one commiserated me. Nor did they congratulate me. Perhaps the silence reflects how poorly understood the role of university governors is – far below knowledge about school governorship.
I am amused by Peter McCaffery’s words but they don’t resonate with me. When I worked on higher education in Whitehall, little thought was given to university governance issues. There were many reasons for this but perhaps the most important is that Whitehall looks for big problems to solve and university governance seemed at the time to be ticking over quite nicely. Admittedly, my Whitehall experience came before the really big rows on vice-chancellors’ pay as well as before Hefce had made way for the new Office for Students.
During my own experience as a governor at two universities, I have been very impressed by the professionalism and calibre of the governors, especially the chairs. Many other lay governors that I have come across have fitted well into that general definition of a good Board member: an intelligent person who asks ignorant questions. That is not meant to sound rude. Anyone who has ever been interviewed by the media knows that perceptive but unexpected questions can prove the most testing. An intelligent outsider’s perspective can teach an institution lots about itself – and, of course, new lay members rapidly stop being ignorant anyway.
But no one associated with higher education must allow the core strengths of the sector to hide the need for constant improvement. Nor should we respond so defensively to media coverage that we refuse to look in the mirror for flaws. I want to avoid sweeping generalisations, yet I do worry that the quality of governance in our sector may not always be as quite good as we like to think.
The regulation of higher education has been transformed in recent years, especially from the top via initiatives like the Higher Education and Research Act (2017), which puts far more onus on governors – including for self-reporting of problems. I am not entirely convinced, as I travel up and down the UK speaking to senior managers and governing bodies, that governance has changed as fast as regulation.
Perhaps it is naïve to think this could happen quickly but, unfortunately, the regulatory changes have occurred at the same time as other changes that have, in some instances, literally threatened the existence of long-standing universities.
Moreover, people with experience governing other comparable bodies that sit between the public and private sectors – for example, in the health sector – often claim change has come later in higher education than elsewhere.
Perhaps because I am not an ‘insider’, I worry less than you about the disconnect between academics and governors. For a start, I think the supposed disconnect is overdone: the input of academics at governors’ meetings (either as members or observers), at away days discussing strategy and in other ways is more common than might be expected. This helps to provide a map for those governors still trying to uncover the lie of the land. Lay governors come into close contact with the day-to-day life of academics in other ways too – for example, when chairing disciplinary review hearings.
Notwithstanding this, if I were an academic I am not confident I would worry too much about not knowing the finer points of the latest discussions among governors. They can be some way removed from the core responsibilities of teaching students and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge so could sap time and effort from the more immediate responsibilities that would have brought me into academia in the first place.
Dear Nick,
You’re right to say that academics would much rather be doing teaching and research than pondering institutional strategy. But in the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in staff becoming more curious – and then better informed – about how their university is run. The pensions dispute is the obvious example, but there are other issues too, from capital expenditure to investment strategy. In my view, this is a good thing. But it does bring to the fore questions about who gets to govern our universities and what kind of values they bring to the table.
Take the current composition of most governing Boards in England. Having a lay majority is useful in that that universities are forced to justify their activities to people who come from different professional backgrounds and have different perspectives.
For me, it’s always refreshing to hear non-academic voices – university staff quickly become institutionalised, losing touch with how the sector is viewed from the outside. But the lay-majority composition has drawbacks too, especially where academics are framed in negative terms: as change-resistant, or ‘difficult’, or instinctively critical.
The job of the university lecturer requires a huge amount of flexibility and there’s pressure to be excellent at everything. Metrics track our every move. League tables pitch us against colleagues elsewhere in the sector with whom we’d rather be collaborating. Newer academics are under particular stress, often in precarious employment conditions. I’m not sure that Board discourses always fully acknowledge this wider professional context.
You’re unusual among lay members: you know the higher education system inside out because of your day job. But for most lay members academia remains shrouded in mystery. I think universities need to expose their governors to more routine institutional activities. Maybe induction should involve taking in a few undergraduate lectures, or attending some research seminars or eavesdropping on a departmental meeting?
I also wonder about representation. Local communities seem to have fewer Board members than in previous generations, but institutional activity can affect them fundamentally, for better and worse. And given that taxpayers underwrite what we do, I think it’s important for Boards to have representation from those who never went to university.
Then there’s the question of the student voice. Most Boards seem to have a token representative or two, but it can be incredibly difficult for those individuals to make themselves heard, surrounded not only by highly successful lay members but also by academic representatives who may well be directly involved with their teaching and supervision. The system marginalises students, not deliberately, but through top-down mechanisms that don’t always speak to their concerns.
There’s recently been talk of a ‘licence to practise’ for university governors, but the system remains largely dependent on goodwill. The Code of Governance, developed by the Committee of University Chairs in 2014, is useful. However, it captures little of the cultural expectations and challenges faced by Board members. The ‘critical friend’ role is fine, but governors mustn’t cross management lines. It’s a tight-rope for members to walk, not least because the sector can be damaged reputationally when an institutional Board is too hands-off.
Dear Steven,
There probably is not a person alive who would claim that university governing bodies are properly diverse. They do not accurately reflect the demographics of students and staff, let alone society at large. There is clearly a mountain to climb. Middle-aged white men like us are in a majority. We are often caricatured as ‘male, pale and stale’ and I plead guilty to at least two of these attributes.
The question is, as always, what to do about it. As with other realms of life, we need to advertise roles more widely, ideally in a centralised place (as used to happen) rather than wait for people to stumble across opportunities in the sector for themselves. I remember an experienced governor at the top of their own profession telling me their partner, another senior professional, was interested in becoming a university governor, but that she had no idea where to start looking. Too often governors are appointed over a drink after a tap on the shoulder. We need to employ headhunters to dig deeper.
But while the personal characteristics of governors is far from representative, a great deal of thought is typically put into the skillset of any governing body. Financial skills are especially important, such as for audit committee work. I am regularly contacted by people searching for names of potential governors with a background in policy, as many universities feel underpowered in that area.
Incidentally, it is tragic that the Department for Education (DfE) discourage their civil servants from serving as university governors. The loos in the DfE are plastered with posters encouraging staff to become school governors. But university governorship is, weirdly, seen as a conflict of interest and actively discouraged or even barred. Yet we wonder why policymakers don’t always seem to understand our sector.
On metrics, I agree academics typically dislike being constantly measured and tend to think their work cannot be easily captured by a few headline numbers. But this isn’t the fault of non-academic governors. Governors with a background in other sectors might just as likely propose more rounded ways of assessing performance than believe academics can be easily squeezed into a REF / TEF / KEF triptych.
On student representation, I agree. Student members can feel overwhelmed and inexperienced. But when I am a visiting speaker at a governing body meeting, the student rep(s) will often seek me out afterwards and the conversations are usually incredibly illuminating. A good chair will draw a student out so that their experiences inform the work of the governing body as a whole. One remaining problem is the typically short tenure of a student governor and I am genuinely uncertain as to what can be done about that. The best chief executives of students’ unions know as much about their institution and how its students are faring as anyone: can governing bodies capture their knowledge more effectively in some way, I wonder?
I also agree we need to look for mechanisms to bring governors closer in touch. Perhaps the single most interesting thing I have done as a governor is to take part in semi-structured discussions on issues like mental health and student support services with students. I am not the only governor who has found such conversations provide a year’s supply of new points to make at future meetings.
Having greater civic engagement with university boards is a good idea but it is not a dealbreaker for me. Our universities are generally national and regional, not just city-based, so there are limits to the desirability of this in my view, especially when other areas of civic life may need more urgent support. The relationship can work the other way around though, with academics becoming part of their locality’s policymakers: try attending a local council meeting in either Oxford or Cambridge and you will hear many declarations of interest from serving councillors whenever university issues come up.
I think you slightly overdo the risk of governors stepping over the management line. Any competent chair knows when this is happening and can delicately point it out. It is a challenge for every organisation with a board of trustees and widely acknowledged in all sorts of contexts. The line is an important one, as is the line between governance issues and academic decisions, because it provides clarity on who should do what.
Dear Nick,
I didn’t know the DfE discourage their civil servants from acting as university governors. It is curious that so many major organisations (universities included) now press their staff to volunteer as school governors, but joining a university Board often still requires a furtive tap on the shoulder.
You acknowledge that more could be done to connect governors with the mass of students, but what about the mass of staff? Can the broad range of views from employees spanning multiple roles and disciplines be captured by a handful of volunteer representatives? I can’t help thinking that universities miss a trick by not drawing on the expertise of their own workforce more systematically.
Michael Shattock has been writing about governance in UK higher education for decades, and he points out that there are big differences in how different universities approach the process. My anxiety here is that academics at the more elite universities retain a relatively firm grip on governance, while those elsewhere in the sector see the balance of authority steadily tipping away from them. In an already hierarchical higher education system, the danger is that this results in yet more stratification.
Michael also points out that it’s not the state that has directly imposed changes on university governance structures; it’s more a consequence of relentless shifts towards competition. I do think that’s where misunderstandings can arise.
Lay governors from a private sector background are often fluent in the language of the market, and know plenty about keeping their customers satisfied. But it’s not easy for them understand why their views might meet with push-back from academics who just don’t think it appropriate that higher education is further commodified.
Having said that, one thing that is always good to see is conflict. From the outside, Boards give the impression of being united in their views, but beneath this veneer is often forceful debate and challenge. Because academics are trained to see both sides of an argument, and to reach informed and balanced conclusions, most would be reassured by such deliberation.
However, staff are sometimes informed of blunt outcomes without being privy to any underpinning rationale. I get the idea of ‘collective responsibility’, but it’s unfortunate when it runs counter to the spirit of courteous disagreement that fuels most academic enquiry. I’d like university Boards to prioritise transparency over confidentiality, where possible.
Dear Steven,
I suspect the proliferation of governors with a business background does help explain the explosion in senior staff pay. If you come from business and are put on the Board of a university with a turnover of a billion pounds a year, then you are bound to make some comparisons in your head with the salary of a CEO at a business with a similar turnover.
But this sort of influence is hugely exaggerated in importance. Consider the pensions issue. Defined benefit pension schemes have essentially disappeared in the private sector. If lay governors had imposed their private sector practices on our universities, then the USS would have become a defined contribution scheme many years ago. It is too simplistic to think anyone who has helped run a large business cannot recognise that charitable universities are different.
A glance at my Twitter feed leads me to doubt your assertion that ‘academic research’ is typically fuelled by ‘courteous disagreement’. It can feel more like the old Newman and Baddiel sketch ‘History Today’. But I nonetheless accept your comment about transparency, at least up to a point. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, to coin a phrase.
There are many important issues that governors need to discuss though, such as restructuring, senior appointments and purchasing land, which could go badly awry if they were immediately and fully put in the public domain. So it is important we do not fall for demands for transparency that are really thinly-veiled attacks on the whole operating system of a 21st century university, especially if they also discourage good people from accepting Board positions.
Diversity seems to me to be a concept that is nearly always good, including when applied to education. So I have no principled objection to the idea that the roles played by lay governors, university managers and academics will be different at different institutions. It is, after all, nothing new. Our universities have such diverse histories that, to me, it seems odd even to entertain the idea that this is something we should worry about as a matter of principle. A single higher education system, yes; a monolith, no.
Dear Nick,
You’re right to say that not all academic disagreement is courteous. But my point was more that it usually takes place in public (in journals, on social media, and at conferences), whereas governance disagreement tends to take place behind closed doors. Decisions can then emerge from the Board that, from an academic perspective, seem not to be based on even-handed reasoning. It’s a bit like publishing a paper without the methods section.
Maybe where we disagree most is in terms of the extent to which academic involvement actually matters? Many university staff feel that the ‘comms’ are one-way and the ‘consultations’ insincere. To some extent, university governance is performed in a managed environment (more so than in schools, in my experience). I know that senior leadership teams can’t always operate in a democratic and open fashion, and that some choreography is occasionally necessary. But where two-way interaction is possible I think it’s important that it occurs as authentically as possible.
You mentioned earlier that perhaps headhunters would be useful in increasing the diversity of university governors, and I note that much of the recent coverage of Board issues has revolved around whether lay members should be paid for their contribution. I don’t have a strong view on this.
Lay members devote a generous portion of their time to governance work, and if a small fee recognised this, I think it would be a reasonable use of money. But it’s noticeable that some of the loudest voices making this argument are from private agencies that would, presumably, get a slice of the cake. I had no idea that these agencies existed, but there’s a growing industry around governor recruitment. It’s another market that, in my view, the sector doesn’t really need.
My underlying fear is that university Boards are being co-opted to enact market-driven ideologies (some of which you may support, but I know you’d also support the principles of institutional autonomy and academic freedom). Even if this isn’t the case, it remains very difficult for any group of individuals, however well-meaning and committed, to reflect the views of the incredible range of communities that universities now serve, and to act simultaneously as savvy market advisers and protectors of the public good.
Dear Steven,
I have shifted from being agnostic about, or even slightly against, paying lay governors to supporting the idea. It is, honestly, not because I am now one, and I am not necessarily arguing for payment for all. When the time spent serving as a governor is provided fully or partly by an employer, then a fee for attending would be to pay someone twice for the same job.
But how on earth are we to get the diversity we want if someone cannot afford to be a governor? Indeed, why should we expect a younger person, with not much to their name, to give up their time freely the way that a retired CEO with a huge pension and no mortgage might?
I also think people tend to take roles more seriously when they are being paid for them. It is easier to ease out underperforming people if they are not doing the job you are paying them for than it is if you are not paying them in the first place. So, in my view, a system of payments for at least some governors can’t come soon enough.
The role of a governing body is to protect their institution by reacting to the context in which they find themselves. So I don’t think a governor who recognises the reality of high fees / loans and no student number controls is somehow being ‘co-opted to enact market-driven ideologies’ any more than they would be co-opted to socialism if a left-of-centre government forced governors to take a new set of circumstances into account.
Dear Nick,
Returning to the comparison with schools, is it significant that university governors have not been subject to the same regime of ‘professionalisation’ and ‘accountability’ as their school-based counterparts? Policy now seems to be nudging higher education more in that direction.
I accept there are good reasons for this – massive and complex institutions can’t be operated by academic rota – but it’s vital that incoming lay governors understand what’s going on at the local level. Governing bodies tend to meet in their institution’s grandest surrounding, and the danger is that they soon become isolated from the day-to-day struggles and mundane resource issues with which staff must cope.
Managing academics is difficult: we tend not to be motivated primarily by income and we tend to view our employers with wariness. So it can’t be simply assumed that because someone has been successful in the private sector or as a social entrepreneur that they have the insights needed to make a university perform better.
I admit there’s sometimes too much exceptionalism in the way that higher education is discussed, but I do think the challenges are very different to those sectors in which the main goal is to gratify shareholders. The danger is that if UK universities are run just like any other business, they lose the very qualities that have made them so historically successful.
For me, there are significant core issues to address in university governance. Should we assume the corporate Board model is always fit for purpose? Can the often divergent directions in which Board members are drawn ever be compatible? Can universities learn from schools about more inclusive governance? In what ways should (and shouldn’t) Boards be empowered by government? My fear is that we’ll only get round to thinking fully about such questions when the sector reaches breaking point.
Dear Steven,
There is a saying that is used heavily by civil servants: ‘Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good’. I worry you are falling into the trap of listing the problems of the current governance model (alongside some of the positives), without really explaining what a better one would look like and how it will come about.
I fully accept some of your criticisms. As someone who regularly speaks to governing bodies, it always seems strange when meetings take place in a country house hotel somewhere miles from campus. A better model is to move meetings around so that one might be in the oldest part of the university, another in a new satellite campus and a third in the students’ union or hall of residence.
But I think the current governance model works to the extent that it is a conversation between insiders and outsiders. There are problems from having too many or too few of either, if the external expertise is not sufficiently tempered by the academic expertise or vice versa. While some Boards were unwieldy in the past, I worry that the general trend towards smaller boards risks creating imbalance as well as ensuring insufficient (internal and external) experience is on tap.
No one is saying life is perfect at the moment. Governing bodies should be more diverse, capture the student voice more and become somewhat more professional. But, compared to what we have, the European model of running universities as an arm of the state is much worse, in my opinion, because of the limited room for manoeuvre that it gives proud long-standing institutions that want to protect their future by innovating.
You assume a ‘breaking point’ is coming. Perhaps it is. It looks likely that it is for a small number of institutions, at which point managers and governors will be in the firing line but so will policymakers and regulators. More institutions will struggle if we move to a system in which the Treasury are expected to foot the entire costs of educating students – taxpayers tend to have higher priorities than higher education and most students accept good-quality mass higher education is best delivered through a mixed funding model.
The predictions of failure that echo endlessly around our sector remind me of my academic research on a fringe politician: he spent so long waiting for a crisis that he was certain would happen that he spun out of the mainstream to the extremes before spending decades in the wilderness. No doubt this analogy would break down if considered too closely. But I am sure many outside observers would find it bizarre that some people want our well-funded, open, diverse, high-quality and ancient university system to be subjected to the upheaval of a revolution in the unproven hope that there might just be something a little better to be discovered around the corner.
Dear Nick,
I’m not sure I’m about spin out into the wilderness, but I take your point about there being no perfect alternative to the current model. Without lay governance, it’s unlikely that consensual academic democracy would organically emerge in its place.
But I do believe that university Boards would be better placed to respond to an increasingly complex and difficult policy environment if they engaged differently with staff and operated less opaquely.
Your earlier point about practice changing less quickly than regulation is well made. But if university governance is ever to catch up with policy – and if public, academic and student confidence in the sector is to be improved – further dialogue is surely required.
Dear Steven,
On that, I wholeheartedly agree – indeed, I would say it is long overdue.
This piece was first published on *HE Research (09.01.18)
At a conference in December of last year, Professor Clare Callender called for debates around student funding to be depoliticised. Such is the extent to which tuition fees have become an ideological and partisan issues, many of us in attendance found it difficult to conceive of discourses that were not politicised. Subsequent appointments did not help this situation. So, at the start of a new year, this blog considers some of the steps that might be taken – and the basic principles that might be followed – if funding issues are to be discussed in less divisive ways.
Perhaps by talking about Higher Education – and the options for funding it – in less nakedly politicised terms, its status as a public good might begin to be reclaimed. As we move into a new year, the need for educational policy to be underpinned by some basic principles is arguably greater than ever before.
First published 3rd August 2016 on the Society for Research into Higher Education’s News Blog
In some respects, students at UK universities have never had it so good. Dusty old lecture theatres are being torn down and shimmering new ‘learning environments’ erected in their place. Between 2013 and 2017, outlay on buildings and facilities at higher-prestige institutions alone matched that spent on the London Olympics (BiGGAR Economics, 2014), with some universities issuing public bonds to raise extra coffers for campus development projects.
But how can the UK Higher Education sector be sure that its unprecedented levels of capital expenditure are leveraging commensurate ground-level pedagogical gains? Evaluation mechanisms, where they exist, tend not to be student-centred. For example, the Association of University Directors of Estates reports that income per square metre increased by 34 per cent across the sector between 2004 and 2013. While this might make for a healthy balance sheet, it tells us little about the ways in which staff and students engage with their environment. As Paul Temple noted in his 2007 report for the Higher Education Academy (“Learning Spaces for the 21st Century”), university buildings have the potential to transform how learning happens. The challenge for the sector is how best to assess their impact.
Earlier this year, I published initial evidence from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Kingston University. We took one new building at one higher-prestige university, conducted detailed interviews with 10 staff members and 28 students, and surveyed over 200 other users. Positive feedback was common: students relished airy, well lit corridors, with comfy seating areas for pre- and post-session collaboration; open spaces could be ‘colonised’ and made their own; water coolers, and other features associated with workplace environments, drove new conversations.
However, not all responses were as expected. Many students told us that attractive-looking buildings helped them to choose their university, but when asked to rank what would most improve their experience now, fewer than 5 per cent prioritised their learning environment. Students’ primary needs were much likelier to be staff-related – they wanted more academics to be more available more often, both formally and informally.
Among staff, frustration was often expressed about ‘flexible’ spaces that could not be easily moulded to their teaching needs. Though communal areas were welcomed as a means to foster cohort identity, many associated capital expenditure with a tacit expectation that they should teach students in ever-larger groups. The design of buildings was often seen as a reflection of managerial naivety about their role: “I don’t even take a lunch break, let alone go and mingle,” said one in relation to an atrium designed to stimulate staff-student interaction. Others noted that many students lacked the critical thinking and other independent skills that their new learning environments implicitly demanded.
Indeed, a recurring theme in the interviews was the transition from school or college to university, which many felt was being disrupted, not smoothed, by campus architecture. “In college, you knew
what everything was for,” said one student, capturing the wider view that more guidance was needed for students to exploit communal learning spaces. Few comparisons between school and university facilities favoured the latter. Technology was a particular focus of misunderstanding, with the design of new estates seeming to make untested assumptions about students’ digital learning dispositions and behaviours. While staff struggled to make unnecessarily intricate equipment work, students remarked that they didn’t “need everything all hi-tech all the time” anyway.
Our research, though no more than exploratory, raises important questions about the extent to which universities’ investment in new estate reflects students’ perceived pedagogical needs. It is clear that the sector could better consult about buildings’ design and better evaluate post-occupancy usage. A 2015 report by the Higher Education Policy Institute refers to an “arms race” in capital expenditure, and the risk is that pedagogy becomes the first casualty of universities’ recruitment wars. Only through long-term, systematic evaluation can we know whether the enormous resources being allocated benefit current students as well as lure new ones.
Jones, Steven, Michael J. Sutcliffe, Joanna Bragg and Diane Harris. 2016. “To what extent is capital expenditure in UK Higher Education meeting the pedagogical needs of staff and students?” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. Published online: 09 May 2016. DOI: 10.1080/1360080X.2016.1181881
Note: this piece was originally published here on the Sociological Review‘s website. It is co-authored by my Manchester Institution of Education colleagues, Steven Courtney & Ruth McGinity.
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is no easy sell. For a sector already awash with audits, metrics and league tables, the prospect of new measurements – especially ones underpinned by a brazenly market-driven ideology – is difficult to embrace. The ways in which the TEF is discursively framed therefore become crucial to its reception, and the strategies used offer a ready case study into how policymakers co-opt, cajole and (if all else fails) coerce their way to implementation. In an age where headlines matter more than procedural detail, and media messaging more than academic buy-in, the success of higher education policy can hinge on how convincingly it is spun. Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘language games’ are becoming as relevant to higher education research as Bourdieu’s theories of class distinction.
That’s not to impl
y that the TEF is without any substantive arguments of its own. When the current Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson, talks about “rebalancing” teaching and learning, few would argue that the scales are in need of no correction. When one of his predecessors, David Willetts, characterised teaching as “by far the weakest aspect of English higher education,” we grimaced, but we couldn’t deny that it has often been over-shadowed by research imperatives. Indeed, as TEF enthusiasts point out, only 37% of undergraduates now report that their degree represents good value-for-money, down from 53% just four years ago.
But such statistics should be treated with caution. First, because they assume commercial paradigms and implicitly deny any notion of university as a public good; in other words, once value-for-money becomes the currency, what counts is not society’s collective advancement but the individual’s net return on their financial investment. And second, because it’s wholly disingenuous to bash university teaching using value-for-money indicators; many students reporting poor value will be doing so because of the extraordinary hike in fees rather than any deterioration in their learning experience.
The reliance on metrics means that, all too frequently, universities are positioned as either reform averse (far too ivory tower’d to understand what their students want) or greedy and self-interested (seeking to preserve a bloated, over-protected sector from the market’s natural justice). The TEF, by contrast, is framed by its supporters as “strengthen[ing] the position of students and prospective students vis-à-vis these powerful institutions” (Emran Mian, 06.11.15). Jo Johnson goes further, claiming that “students are looking critically at what they get for their investment, and so must we, as a government, on behalf of taxpayers” (01.07.15). The government thus become plucky Davids slaying the Goliaths of an outmoded, authoritarian higher education sector. No matter that the National Union of Students passed a motion in favour of “principled disengagement” from the TEF, and has threatened to sabotage next year’s National Student Survey in protest.
Anti-university discourses are legitimised through mass reiteration: the ingeniously named Office for Students sounds like it will champion and defend learners’ rights; Study UK emerges as a “national representative body for independent providers of higher education”; a methodologically flawed but widely reported survey of staff at independent schools finds they don’t much like the sound of how undergraduates are taught; “too many universities teach pointless degrees that offer nothing to their students,” runs a headline in The Telegraph (Fraser Nelson, 15.04.16). Space rarely opens up to question why one of the economy’s most consistently high-performing sectors (a “world leader, with four universities in the global top ten,” according to the government’s 2016 White Paper) should model itself, both commercially and pedagogically, on a private school system.
The co-opting is relentless, and stressed-out university staff eventually turn on the very undergraduates who should rightly be their allies. “My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me,” writes an anonymous academic in the Guardian’s Higher Education Network (18.12.15). Undergraduates become pawns in a very public game of chess, discursively courted by government and universities alike, but faced with the same unprecedented levels of debt regardless of allegiance.
On the day that the government’s White Paper was published, the Minister busied himself on Twitter, disseminating responses to the document from stakeholders such as the Confederation of British Industry (“it’s good that proposals have taken on board the business view”), the University of Buckingham’s Vice Chancellor (“full marks to the minister for not succumbing to pressure from university traditionalists”) and the editor of Conservative Home (“if more would-be students had better information about future earnings they might not go to University at all”). Some might claim that what’s important is the detail of the policy, not the social media clamour surrounding it. However, as quick-to-tweet ministers probably realise, to own the discourse is to the win the argument.
And so the TEF wheedles its way into the sector, despite the perverse incentive of inflationary fee rises and the likelihood of an already-stratified sector being divided further. The prospect of an “outstanding” rating (rather than merely an “excellent” one) will seduce those institutions best equipped to play the game. And despite Green Paper pledges to “address the ‘industries’ that some institutions create around the REF and the people who promote and encourage these behaviours,” similar activities are sure to emerge around the TEF, as numbers are crunched, metrics optimised and self-glorifying statements written.
Meanwhile, so-called “challenger institutions”, summarily checked, enter the market. Public discourses frame them as high-quality food providers, and question why they must seek permission of their corporate competitors to compete (“akin to Byron Burgers having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant,” Jo Johnson, 09.09.15). Their stakes are small: low start-up costs and minimal regulatory oversight. The bigger gamble is that taken by the UK higher education sector: centuries of hard-won reputational gain wagered on the untested principle that new providers will show a crusty establishment just how HE-level teaching should be done.
If the sector were better able to speak as a united profession, public opinion may be more inclined to lean in its direction. The best way to rebalance research and teaching is probably to obsess less about measuring the former rather than to obsess more about measuring the latter. But greater coordination and discursive agility is required to persuade those outside academia how damaging an unchecked marketisation agenda might ultimately prove. Students need winning over with evidence, not assurances, that their learning is our top priority; the role of research in pedagogy needs defending more stoutly; and the value of higher education to wider society needs articulating more forcefully and more often. Perhaps the sector could learn a thing or two from the TEF’s advocates about how to frame public discourses.
I’m looking forward to giving a Sarah Fielden seminar on May 11th at the University of Manchester. All welcome. Further details here.
Note: this piece was originally published by WonkHE on January 11th 2016.
“My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me” runs the headline. It’s one of those anonymous pieces, so the wider context is difficult to figure out, but the author seems troubled by a message that reads “all I’m asking for is a little respect seeing as I pay you £9,000 a year”.
It’s the “blunt, consumerist language” that offends the author, and a number of anecdotes follow, each reinforcing this interpretation. “If you ask me,” quips a colleague in the car park, “all universities are going to need a customer services department before long”. Another claims a student once told them: “I pay you to teach me what’s in the article, not the other way around”. The author recalls how very different they had “acted and spoke” when at university – assignments were completed punctually, guidelines followed diligently, etc. How they wish they could say the same of their students now.
Such rhetoric is becoming familiar on English campuses, and the points about unfair workload allocation, expectations of across-the-board excellence, and often counter-productive management culture all deserve to be made forcibly and repeatedly to policy-makers, sector representatives and intuitional leadership teams. But venting at students about how universities are funded is like confronting fellow passengers because your train is running late.
Remember, the student’s plea is not for higher grades, quicker feedback or the guarantee of a graduate job, but for “a little respect”. Is this really a case of neoliberal higher education policy coming home to roost? Or is it something altogether more localised and petty?
Perhaps the student was wrong to mention fee levels at all. But let’s not forget the extent to which the 2012 funding system has driven higher education to “hurl the cost of itself at graduates”, as Jim Dickinson recently noted on this site. According to the Sutton Trust, only one in twenty will now repay their debt in full by the age of 40, compared to almost 50% under the previous system. An average teacher will still owe £25,000 by their early 50s. The freezing of the repayment threshold will make an undergraduate degree more costly still and, last year, we saw maintenance grants turned into loans and student nurses stripped of their bursaries.
It’s naïve to believe that such wholesale reconfiguration of the way in which our sector is funded won’t disrupt the nature of undergraduates’ engagement with their university or change academics’ working conditions. That’s exactly why our students were placed at the heart of the system – so they’d behave like consumers and enact the marketisation agenda.
However, in many respects, they’ve refused to play ball. Take the proposal to link success in the Teaching Excellence Framework to higher fees. The National Union of Students objected immediately, taking a position of principled disengagement long before the rest of the sector began to follow suit. Yes, there are some individual undergrads who’ll seize their rights as newly-empowered service users to make unreasonable demands on staff as they seek to maximise their return-on-investment. But there are millions of others who don’t measure their experience in solely utilitarian terms and want their time at university to be inspiring, cordial and enlightening.
The nameless author of the piece fantasises about replying with: “Hey student – all I’m asking for is a little respect, seeing as how much you pay makes no difference to my wages, yet the level of support I am forced to offer you takes up 80% of my time despite the fact that teaching still only equates to 33% of my workload.”
Is support for students really something that academics are “forced” to offer? And if we must gripe about our salaries, might it be judicious to acknowledge the inter-generational unfairness that the current funding model precipitates?
But the bigger question here is who gains from such grumbles. A frostier relationship between students and academics doesn’t benefit those who yearn for campuses of old. Rather, it benefits those who seek to marketise and instrumentalise the sector further. Undergraduates can be framed as dissatisfied customers, then as budding agents of change, while academics can be positioned as ivory-towered and over-protected. Many of the 4,000+ comments beneath the original piece offer precisely this reading.
But the student-academic relationship at English universities is surely stronger than such simplistic polarisations allow. Is a little respect really too much to ask for?
Note: this piece was originally published on the All-Party Parliamentary University Group website. Further details of the presentation I gave to the Group are here.
Among the stronger arguments made in the government’s Green Paper is that a ‘rebalancing’ of research and teaching in Higher Education is needed. As a sector, we’ve become accustomed to close scrutiny of our research while our teaching has largely remained unaudited, sometimes reliant on the dedication of personally committed academics. But there’s an equally strong case to be made for research and teaching to be reintegrated. What makes students’ learning at university different from earlier, more instrumental educational experiences is the opportunity to be immersed in a culture of scholarly enquiry and research advancement, to learn first-hand from those leading their field, and to conspire in the creation of new knowledge. In measuring teaching, we must take care not to set it further adrift from research.
For any teaching audit to benefit the sector, buy-in from both students and academics is vital. Attempts to frame the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) as siding with long-suffering undergraduates are undermined by ‘principled disengagement’ from the National Union of Students. The link with fees makes the TEF the hardest of sells to the ‘consumer’ it supposedly empowers, especially now maintenance grants have become loans and repayment thresholds are frozen.
For academics, the risk is that separate audits for research and teaching put the sector in a state of perpetual preparation and further fuel the kind of game-playing ‘industries’ that the Green Paper rightly chides. A better integrated, lighter-touch framework might allow more time for universities to do what matters, instead of just reporting it in the most favourable terms possible.
The questions a TEF might most usefully ask of the Higher Education sector are those that encourage us to make better use of our data, communicate more clearly with applicants, and draw on our own research to ensure that every student receives the teaching and support that’s best suited to their needs. For example, we know all about key outcome differentials, such as the relative under-attainment of Black and Minority Ethnic students compared to White students. But how do we address them? Part of the answer surely involves research. We need to understand better how cohort and staff diversity, curriculum design and campus culture affect performance.
Indeed, one problem with relying on metrics is that some are such distant relations of teaching quality that they’d barely recognise one another. Graduates salaries, for example, are predicted much more by subject choice, university prestige and social capital than by how effective your lecturers were. Similarly, high satisfaction scores can be achieved by pleasing students rather than challenging them. In so diverse a sector, metrics can never tell the whole story.
Would-be students will benefit far more if universities – and then disciplines – created their own narratives. Many young people find their school-to-university transition difficult to negotiate and would benefit from clear, evidence-based guidance about the pedagogical approach and distinctiveness of individual courses.
The Impact and Environment Statements used in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) offer useful potential templates. Teaching impact could be evidenced by localised measurements of learning gain; teaching environment by learning culture and staffing strategy, as well as by facilities and extra-curricular learning opportunities. Emerging narratives would be accompanied by relevant supporting evidence, such as student attendance at research seminars, the ratio of contact hours spent with senior academics relative to teaching assistants, the retention and performance of WP students relative to non-WP students, etc.
Eventually, any ‘excellence’ framework will get gamed. What’s arguably more important is the direction in which it nudges the sector and the behaviours it implicitly encourages. As universities grow more confident in their own research into Higher Education and articulate richer pedagogical narratives, the TEF’s role may develop into one of overseeing panel assessment rather than imposing metrics of its own. A low-maintenance REF and low-maintenance TEF could evolve and coalesce according to consistent underlying methodological principles, and in ways that allow research and teaching to complement, not compete with, one another.
A Higher Education Blog 