by Rob Cuthbert
“Ideas of the university in the public domain are hopelessly impoverished. ‘Impoverished’ because they are unduly confined to a small range of possible conceptions of the university; and ‘hopelessly’ because they are too often without hope, taking the form of either a hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defence of the emerging nature of ‘the entrepreneurial university’.”
Fifty years on from the Robbins Report, that was how Ron Barnett began Imagining the University in 2013, and it seems that nothing much has changed since then. Stefan Collini had written a much-cited book, What are universities for?, in 2012, which as the Guardian review said (Conrad, 2012) was “heavy on hand-wringing and light on real answers”. Tom Sperlinger, Josie McLellan and Richard Pettigrew wrote Who are universities for? Remaking higher education in 2018, which despite its respectable intentions was more akin to what Barnett called a ‘defence of the emerging nature of the entrepreneurial university’, aiming in the authors’ words to “make UK universities more accessible and responsive to a changing economy.”
By 2019 Raewyn Connell was taking a rather different tack in The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change:
“… what should a ‘good university’ look like? … Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.”
Simon Marginson and his colleagues in the Centre for Global Higher Education have pursued a broad programme to conceptualise and promote the idea of the public good of higher education, but in his interviews with English university leaders:
“Nearly all advocated a broad public good role … and provided examples of public outcomes in higher education. However, these concepts lacked clarity, while at the same time the shaping effects of the market were sharply understood.”
His sad conclusion was that:
“English policy on the public good outcomes of higher education has been hi-jacked, reworked, and emptied out in Treasury’s long successful drive to implement a fee-based market.”
This means that everyday pressures too often drive us back to either handwringing or apologetic entrepreneurialism, or some mixture of the two. Even Colin Riordan, one of the most thoughtful of VCs during his tenure at Cardiff, could not break the mould:
“What are universities for? Everybody knows that universities exist to educate students and help to create a highly educated workforce. Most people know they’re also the place where research is done that ends up in technologies like smartphones, fuel-efficient cars and advanced medical care. That means universities are a critical part of the innovation process.”
These ideas sell the university short, and leave their leaders and managers ill-equipped to live the values they need to protect.
We are entering an era when Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem determined to ‘move fast and break things’, as the Facebook motto once had it. Mark Zuckerberg tried to move on ten years ago to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, but it seems that Elon Musk didn’t get the memo, as the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ cuts huge swathes through and – as it presumably hopes – out of US government. Whether or not DOGE succeeds we will soon discover, but the disregard for stable infrastructure may well prove fatal to its own efforts.
People would not normally accuse a university of moving fast, but what some might see as an excessive concern for stable infrastructure perhaps conceals the speed at which universities move to break existing ideas and understandings. The pursuit of truth may be an imperfect way to describe the aim of the university, but as an academic motivation it suffices to explain how one way of understanding will sometimes rapidly give way to another. Yes, we know that some paradigms hang on doggedly, often supported long past their sell-by date by academics with too much invested in them. But usually and eventually, often more suddenly, the truth will out.
How can universities best protect their distinctive quality, of encouraging open-minded teaching and research which will create the most favourable conditions for learning, individually and collectively? Strategies and academic values have their place, they might even constitute the stable infrastructure that is needed for a university to flourish. But the infrastructure needs to be built on a simple idea which everyone can comprehend. And that simple idea has to be infinitely flexible while staying perpetually relevant – here is one I prepared earlier:
“Many people can’t shake off the idea that management in higher education is or at least it should be about having clear objectives, and working out what to do through systematic analysis and ‘cascading’ objectives down through the organisation. They want to see the university as a rational machine, and the manager as a production controller, because Western scientistic culture has encouraged them to think that way.
The best way to deal with that way of thinking is to agree with it. You say: yes, we must focus on our key objective. In teaching our key objective is personal learning, development and growth for students, a process which cannot be well specified in advance. In research our key objective is the generation of new knowledge. So in higher education the key objective in each of our two main activities is the generation of unpredictable outcomes. Now please tell me what your key performance indicators will be.”[1]
The fundamental test of performance for a university is that it generates unpredictable outcomes. An infinitely flexible, endlessly relevant idea that everyone can understand – and always disruptive. That is why higher education matters – not just training students for the economy, not just innovation in research for economic growth. Universities need to keep generating unpredictable outcomes because that is their unique function as open public institutions, and that is what their wider society needs and deserves.
Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.
[1] Text taken from inaugural professorial lecture; Rob Cuthbert, 7 November 2007
March 4, 2025 at 11:39 am
“So in higher education the key objective in each of our two main activities is the generation of unpredictable outcomes. Now please tell me what your key performance indicators will be.”[1]”
This may have been the question in 2007, but this is the wrong question today and even then it was inappropriate, pointless, silly and irrelevant.
Universities can do whatever they like with their own money, that is what independence allows them to do, but if they want money from the Government or tax payers, they have to be accountable for the way they spend it.
If this is the best they can do, government funding should be switched off. Perhaps they should ask the defense industry for funding as this seems to be the focus of the moment.
March 4, 2025 at 4:27 pm
Albert, I don’t agree the question was “inappropriate, pointless, silly and irrelevant”, now or then. On the contrary, in a world ruled by metrics it behoves people in universities to remember ALL the reasons why they do what they do. Universities need to be accountable to all their stakeholders – students, because fees provide most of the funding for teaching; research funders, who may take a broader view of what research is for; university staff, with widely varying views of what universities are for; diverse local, regional, national and international communities and government. University leaders and governors must strive for an appropriate balance; it will always be difficult. Through teaching and research universities make a large contribution to the defence industry and many others, but not if they forget that part of their fundamental purpose is open-ended inquiry.
March 5, 2025 at 3:15 pm
I agree all stakeholders need to be involved but my main point is that the parties that invest the most money should have the biggest say and that is the Government on behalf of tax payers and you seem reluctant to give them priority.
Student fees my be a large component but over 50% of loans are never recovered.
Research is mainly government funded via agencies.
I think the gap between us is to wide to make further discussion beneficial to either of us but thank you for replying.
March 6, 2025 at 8:39 pm
Albert, no doubt we will have to agree to disagree. But your 50% figure is not accurate. The arithmetic is complex and it depends which loan regimes are being taken into account, see for example the recent https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01079/ . In some circumstances the government may even make a profit, but it is more likely to provide a subsidy for student loans, depending on how the interest rate paid by students compares with the cost of borrowing for government – see
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/higher-long-term-interest-rates-and-cost-student-loans.
There is much recent and continuing commentary, especially on wonkhe, eg https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/are-there-providers-where-graduates-tend-not-to-repay-their-loans/. When £9000 fees were introduced government expected the RAB charge (which government defines as “the proportion of loan outlay made during the year that we expect not to be repaid when future repayments are valued in present terms”) to be between 28-32%. It subsequently rose significantly but by 2023-2024 it had returned to about 30% – https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-catalogue/data-set/83327f6b-4a49-4204-8b6f-937403f50119.
In terms of research, in 2017-2018 62% of research in UK HE was publicly funded, but much has changed since then. Government commissioned a review of the research landscape by Sir Paul Nurse (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6409fda2d3bf7f02fef8832b/rdi-landscape-review.pdf) which said: “The present underpinning of UK university research by other commercial income sources, notably fees paid by international students, is valuable, but care is needed as such sources are not always reliable and sustainable.” That was sadly prescient. Paul Nurse, I am quite sure, would strongly support the idea of open-minded and open-ended enquiry, reflected in the autonomy given to researchers at the Crick Institute.
So I will still give priority to students who contribute most of the funds for teaching, and staff who do the research, as well as government.
March 4, 2025 at 10:31 pm
Universities are for training professionals, and conducting useful research. If you want a university to do something else, then you can pay for it, not me.
Universities are there to support the community who are paying for them. Otherwise, who would they pay for them?
A good university is one which produces well trained professionals, ready to go to work for the benefit of the community. They also produce high quality applied and theoretical research, in areas of value to the community.
Universities can protect themselves by doing what they are supposed to do: training and research. They are also there as a reserve of expertise in an emergency. When there is a pandemic, natural disaster, or war, the community, industry and government call on universities to advise what to do and provider experts to lead doing it. As an example with COIVID-19 there were not only all sorts of medical experts, and statisticians called in to help, but also computer professionals and educators.
March 6, 2025 at 10:14 am
I use the fundamental skills learned at university -such as critical thinking, high levels of information literacy, IT confidence -throughout my life, not just my work. And I see graduates across the community using them and also the difficulties -vulnerabilities – that people have who lack them. To reduce the impact of universities to graduate jobs is myopic. To follow on from Tom’s comment, many of the experts who mobilised in the Covid epidemic (such as IT task forces) were volunteers.
March 6, 2025 at 9:52 pm
Ella Taylor-Smith, I agree that skills learned at university are useful beyond a job. But university education is expensive & unless you are wealthy, it would not be feasible investing all that money just for some life skills. Likewise some of the ways university trained people were able to help with COVID-19 were serendipitous, but others were not. Money was specifically invested in universities, by governments and private funders, to prepare for a pandemic. I was teaching computer students to design web pages for a pandemic ,14 years before COVID-19. I also trained in digital education, to be ready if a crisis kept students from campus. My colleagues found this weird, up to the day it happened, and they then asked for advice.