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A review of HE policy? It’s déjà vu all over again

by Rob Cuthbert

Higher education in England is in financial trouble, and maybe more. If former NUS President Wes Streeting were Education Secretary, no doubt he would be proclaiming that, like the National Health Service, ‘higher education is broken’. It may not be, yet, but many think that the higher education funding system, at least, is broken. So, there is talk of (yet another) review; those with long enough memories will feel that we’ve been here before. More than once a review of HE has been conveniently timed to straddle a general election, to ensure that any or all hard decisions fall to the incoming government. That was how, after the Dearing Report, we got student tuition fees in the first place. There was no review straddling the July 2024 general election, perhaps because the last government was too obsessed with culture wars and fighting amongst themselves. Probably not because they thought that overseas student visa restrictions and the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 were all that was needed to fix HE.

Consequently the new Labour government must deal with HE’s problems, and some of them are too urgent to wait for any kind of review. It is said that the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff Sue Gray had prepared a number of ‘disaster scenarios’ which need contingency plans, one of which involves a large university going out of business. More than half of all England’s universities are facing financial problems which have driven them to declare voluntary or compulsory redundancies; the situation is desperate. In such times we look for guidance where we can; this blog’s headings take inspiration from Yogi Berra, the legendary baseball player and manager, renowned for saying things that are somehow meaningful without making any sense. Another HE review? It’s déjà vu, all over again.

You can observe a lot by watching

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told universities in July they should not expect a government bailout, despite many being in financial difficulty, as Sally Weale reported for The Guardian on 22 July 2024. New HE Minister Baroness Smith of Malvern said, in effect, that “We’ll let universities go bust” in a Channel 4 News interview, as reported by Chris Havergal for Times Higher Education on 16 August 2024. However just after the Labour Party Conference The Times reported on 28 September 2024 that the government would index-link tuition fees and restore maintenance grants for the poorest students, so that fees would rise to £10,500 over the next five years. Still some £billions a year less than three years ago, but a welcome sign of change – if it is  realised. Keep watching.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future

Sisyphus might have sympathised with HE about previous attempts to solve the HE funding problem. After the Dearing Review and New Labour’s election in 1997 it seemed that there might be a mutually acceptable halfway house, with tuition fees paying first some and then during the Blair/Brown government’s tenure about half of the costs of undergraduate teaching. The boulder was slipping down the mountain in 2010 as the money and faith in the government ran out and the Browne Report was commissioned. The Lib Dems made an election ‘pledge’ to abolish fees but reneged as soon as they were in coalition with the Conservatives: instead fees were trebled to cover most undergraduate costs. The Willetts-led progressive student loan scheme might even have been broadly acceptable, but index-linking of fees stopped after just one year. University finances became increasingly precarious, especially after the government conceded to pressure from the Office for National Statistics and accepted that student loans should appear on the balance sheet this year rather than many years in the future, ending the ‘fiscal illusion’. 

At first universities escaped the worst of Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity for public services. Osborne even agreed to take the cap off student numbers, in the interests of market forces ‘driving up quality’, as Willetts, Jo Johnson and too many others wrongly believed they would, leading to the institutionalisation of a wrong-headed pseudo-market in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA). The student loan scheme was working in theory but not in practice – too many critics could easily win headlines about ‘students who will never repay’. The boulder might have seemed near the top of the mountain but now it has rolled back down again.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it

Many universities did their best to behave as if they were in a HERA kind of market. They recruited international students in ever-greater numbers, for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, charging fees which would cross-subsidise both teaching and research. Several universities not based in London opened London campuses, recognising the appeal off the capital for their target overseas market. Some opened campuses overseas. Those less able to attract overseas students looked to ‘sub-contractual arrangements’, previously better known as franchising, to shore up their student recruitment. Each initiative was kicked back. Government restricted visas for the families of students, hitting postgraduate recruitment hard in 2024. This jeopardised the availability of and access to many subjects in large areas of the country, without making any meaningful contribution to reducing immigration. The Office for Students cracked down on sub-contractual arrangements as they took over all regulatory responsibilities for quality and standards. They even tackled the more egregious ‘successes’ of ‘alternative providers’, the new entrants to HE. So what is to be done?

Richard Adams reported for The Guardian on 5 September 2024 that Shitij Kapur, the vice-chancellor of King’s College London, had told the annual UUK conference that HE needed £12500 fees – but would seem completely out of touch if it asked for them. On 30 September 2024 Universities UK issued a punchy report – Opportunity, growth and partnership: a blueprint for change – by a senior and influential group of politicians, vice-chancellors and others. In it Kapur and John Rushforth (Executive Secretary, Committee of University Chairs) said: “UK universities have been remarkably entrepreneurial and successful in the last decade. Despite a fixed and shrinking domestic resource, they have managed to engage internationally and generate the revenues to support research and domestic education of the highest quality. However, that innings has run its course. If universities are forced to play the same game for longer, we jeopardise the sector and its international reputation and success. It is time for universities and government to sit down together and agree a new financial model for the system that works for students, serves all our regions and ensures the future growth and prosperity of the UK.”

The UUK report was tuned to the new government agenda and asserted the crucial role of universities and other HE providers in helping to achieve growth and success. The wide-ranging blueprint was nevertheless fairly narrowly focused on demonstrating the instrumental value of HE in promoting economic and social growth, unsurprisingly given its target audience. Many in universities will still regret that the idea of HE as a public good is now more narrowly confined than in, for example, the 1963 Robbins Report, which suggested four main “objectives essential to any properly balanced system: instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship”. But we live in different times, and must be thankful for smaller mercies on this fork in the road.

Bridget Phillipson also said in July “The culture war on university campuses ends here”, as she announced a pause in implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (2023). HEPI’s Nick Hillman said: “I think it is now time for the Conservative Party – if they are serious about showing they’ve changed – to say the war on universities is over.” Judging by the leadership contenders’ speeches at the Conservative Party conference in October, we fear not.

If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how the hell are you gonna stop them?

Anti-university sentiment is widespread in Brazil, China, Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe. In the USA, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance has spoken approvingly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who forced the Central European University to relocate from Budapest to Vienna. Vance said that Orbán has made “some smart decisions … [on campus dissent] that we could learn from in the United States”, but already several high-profile university presidents have stepped down after failing to navigate a course between student protest, staff, boards of trustees and politicians in Senate hearings.

The fork in the road might mean a choice between anti-university sentiment leading to a smaller student population, and continuing growth and development of an expanding HE sector. Despite right wing rhetoric there is no evidence that demand for HE is declining: people still want to come to the ballpark and they still enjoy the game, as the National Student Survey continues to demonstrate. But there are nevertheless understandable reports of student dissatisfaction about some aspects of what can be an impersonal student experience on account of large student numbers. More pressing is the continuing student dissatisfaction with debts after student loans. However many times it is explained that ‘student debt is not like other debts’, graduates continue in reality to see large and depressing numbers in red on their student loan account, and there is no wider public understanding of how repayments work.

Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded

In a blog for HEPI on 5 September 2024, Peter Scott (UCL) outlined some of the current problems of English HE and argued that the best solution would be the reintroduction of a student numbers cap: “Imposing an overall student number cap would restore a stronger sense of stability and predictability into the future, which might just reassure the Treasury as it contemplates an inevitably unpopular decision to allow the maximum fee to be (modestly?) increased. It might also reassure politicians more generally that higher education, and universities in particular, will not be allowed continuously to ‘crowd out’ other forms of tertiary education and training. Similarly it is difficult to see how far down the road of realising its new financial sustainability remit the Office for Students can go without at least considering reinventing institution-by-institution student number controls, within broad tolerance bands like the former maximum aggregate student numbers, to reduce turbulence and damagingly unpredictable consequences.”

The old HEFCE regime of managed growth and change involved student number controls with some marginal tolerance for expansion and the possibility from time to time of bidding for more. The danger of an overall student number cap in the present environment is that it might freeze some undesirable aspects of the status quo. We now have a regulator not a funding council, and it is a regulator which – as required by HERA – is bound to treat potential university closures as a natural consequence of market forces. The problem with university closures is they can easily drag down a whole local economy as well as creating huge gaps in locally or regionally accessible HE provision.

It ain’t over til it’s over

HEPI published Debate Paper 39 on 25 September 2024, in which Tim Leunig (LSE), a former very senior civil servant, argued for a fiscally-neutral set of changes to restore university finances. Employer contributions was a repeated theme of HE discussions at the Labour Party Conference in September, and a significant part of Leunig’s argument was for a 1% surcharge on employers of graduates. His ten-point package of proposals was for:

“1. A 20-year, rather than 40-year, repayment term on student loans.

2. No increase, even in nominal terms, of the amount owed.

3. A minimum student loan repayment of £10 a week after graduation.

4. An additional repayment of 3% of income between the income tax and student loan repayment thresholds.

5. Letting graduates reduce their pension contributions in order to make higher student loan repayments more affordable.

6. Reintroduction of an interest rate supplement for graduates earning over £40,000 a year, set at a maximum of 4% for those earning over £60,000.

7. A new 1% National Insurance surcharge for employers that recruit graduates.

8. New maintenance grants for students with parental incomes up to £65,000, with full grants of around £11,000 for those with household incomes below £25,000.

9. Provision of maintenance loans for all students not receiving a full grant, provided their parents’ income is below £100,000 a year.

10. Additional teaching grant averaging £2,000 per student.”

English HE needs a rescue package right now, and in the slightly but not much longer term the funding system needs an overhaul. It remains to be seen whether something like Leunig’s package of proposals might be adopted. At this stage no-one knows: it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

SRHE News Editor Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert


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Teaching and research? Yes, but universities have another important job

by Paul Temple

The easy way to tell authoritarian (or worse) states from ones that are, broadly speaking, liberal democracies is that in the latter you will find a range of public institutions that are significantly independent of the central state: this is what creates a plural society. It is, when you consider it, pretty surprising that we can have institutions largely funded, one way or another, by taxation, yet not controlled by the state. Take the example of Britain’s national cultural institutions: these are mainly state-funded yet guard their independence fiercely. However, we have seen in recent years how government has tried to drag them – the BBC, several major museums – into ludicrous “culture wars” and seeking to appoint to their governing bodies individuals thought to be sympathetic to certain government agendas. It is a sign that we live in a functioning liberal democracy that government does not routinely get its own way in these struggles: under an authoritarian regime, it would not even be a matter for discussion. Liberal-minded people know, almost instinctively, that independent institutions matter.

Perhaps the most important non-state public institution, everywhere, is the judiciary. The outcomes of legal cases where the state is involved in Russia or China, say, are invariably foregone conclusions. A judge’s task in these situations requires presentational skills rather than forensic ones: to frame the predetermined outcome so that it seems as if legal norms were applied, thus allowing the government to claim that the decision was made by an independent judiciary. That show trials continue in Putin’s Russia and elsewhere (why not just throw dissidents into jail, or indeed execute them?) is an implicit recognition that the moral standing of liberal institutions is too high to be simply ignored.

But those of us fortunate enough to live in liberal societies – being, as the poet Douglas Dunn puts it, “on the pleasant side of history” – cannot be complacent: the institutional structures that we all-too-readily take for granted and which underpin pluralism and support our freedoms are, we have seen recently, desperately fragile. The “enemies of the people” assault on the judiciary by the tabloid press in November 2016 over, bizarrely, a legal determination that parliament needed to vote to trigger the process of leaving the EU, showed how a populist frenzy might be worked up. That the attack was not countered immediately and vigorously by the government, because it suited the government’s political purposes at the time, was deeply shameful and worrying.

In most authoritarian states, universities and colleges do not seem to carry the same weight as the judiciary: they are apparently mostly left to get on with their work in peace, providing, naturally, that they don’t cause trouble for the regime. Academics in the former Soviet bloc countries became expert in knowing how far they could push matters (normally, not very far) and still keep their jobs and privileges. The state was a constant – if to outsiders, hidden – presence in university affairs, and university rectors usually saw their jobs in terms of keeping their academics quiet and the secret police out. The Soviet academic observation that the most dangerous university subject was history – because while we could be certain that the future would be a socialist nirvana, the past was full of traps for the unwary – neatly delineated the scope of university work under authoritarian rule. A recent detailed account of governance in Chinese universities today (Liu, 2023) explains that each university has a Communist Party committee which is “the highest authority within the university”, a point not made, in my experience, when western visitors meet the university president. He or she is accountable to a political structure that outsiders do not usually see (and if they do, its role is glossed-over), and which determines how decisions made in Beijing will be applied within the university.

In Britain, by contrast, the state/university divide was once maintained with almost religious fervour. In the days of the University Grants Committee (UGC) – peak liberalism for higher education – I once found myself chatting over coffee in a conference break to an Education Department civil servant. When he learned that I worked in a university, he almost dropped his coffee cup in shock when he realised that he’d sinned against the arms-length principle that meant that the UGC was supposed to be the only means of contact between universities and government departments. Universities, like local authorities, were seen then as autonomous parts of the public realm, each with their own goals and methods, rather than as agencies delivering central government policies. “The department [for Education and Science] dispensed cheques to the University Grants Committee for the universities and to the local authorities for schools and polytechnics with guidelines sometimes attached but virtually nil powers of enforcement…In the 1980s [under the Thatcher government] all that changed” (Hennessey, 1989: 428).

That change meant that the sharp state/university divide has now largely vanished: the role of the OFS is of course utterly different to that of the UGC. The proposal put forward by the then government in the recent general election campaign (have we heard the last of it?), that there would be central direction on which degree courses universities would be allowed to offer – or, in the measured tones of the Department for Education press release, “Crackdown on rip-off university degrees” – would mean that universities should be considered for all practical purposes as central government agencies, just as in China.

Why does this matter? One not-insignificant reason is about effectiveness: largely autonomous institutions – self-governing universities, locally-elected councils, free trade unions, the Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners – responding variously to the needs of the groups they are aiming to serve will almost certainly lead to better outcomes than would be produced by a remote, centrally-directed operation. But the larger reason is that pluralism underpins the freedoms we value in liberal societies, creating the distributed decision-making which you and I might have a chance of influencing. When those decisions are not ones that central government finds to its taste, it is even more important that independent thinking might prevail. The regular attacks on universities by Ministers in the last government, as regularly chronicled in SRHE News, surely had the purpose of undermining autonomous institutions with a commitment to disinterested knowledge production, and so weakening a core element of a liberal society. If this isn’t a fight worth having, I don’t know what is.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.

References

Hennessy, P (1989) Whitehall London: Secker and Warburg

Liu, X (2023) The Development and Governance of Private Universities in China Singapore: Springer Nature


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How can PhDs support solutions to local challenges?

by Rachel Handforth and Rebekah Smith-McGloin

Recent news headlines highlight the range of social and economic challenges faced by cities and counties across the UK (BBC, 2024; Financial Times, 2024; Guardian, 2024), reflecting wider predictions of ongoing economic challenges for the UK as a whole (OECD, 2024). Recent local election results seem to indicate public desire for change in their communities – and whilst we await the national democratic process later this year – the devolution process to combined local authorities indicates a positive shift towards increased funding, resources and power for those working to achieve positive change in their local communities.

What is the role of universities in all this? And how might the highest-level qualification that they offer hope to address any of the complex, systemic issues faced by local communities, and those that live and work within them?

The answer to these questions is not clear-cut, but exploring the ways in which the doctorate might lend itself to addressing locally relevant challenges – in theory and in practice – may offer a vision for how universities might enact their civic mission, and consider themselves ‘truly civic’. Yet whilst undergraduate curricula often contain elements of civic engagement through service learning, volunteering, and policy discussions (McCunney, 2017), work on civic and community-informed practice has been slow to emerge at doctoral level.

The last decade has seen an increase in the number of doctoral researchers in the UK (Smith-McGloin and Wynne, 2022) and in the proportion of doctoral graduates working beyond academia (Vitae, 2022). Yet the capacity of the doctorate to contribute to positive place-based change has not been fully explored. Indeed, a recent report from the National Civic Impact Accelerator highlights the ongoing positive economic and social impacts of doctoral graduates; boosting research productivity across sectors, contributing to cutting edge research and development, as well as adding to research capacity through a highly skilled workforce.

Existing literature on doctoral education and wider engagement with communities focuses predominantly on praxis in the context of industrial and professional doctorates (see Boud et al, 2021; Terzioğlu, 2011; Wildy, Peden and Chan, 2015). Too often, doctoral education is still conceptualised as an instrumentalist tool of neoliberal higher education, producing highly-skilled postgraduate researchers and knowledge for the economy. For example, professional doctorates are viewed as a mechanism by which the university can realise its potential, through close interaction with industry and government, to deliver innovation and economic development in a knowledge society.

At the last Society for Research in Higher Education conference in December 2023, we presented our early thoughts on how place-based partnership programmes such as the Public Scholars Initiative and Co(l)laboratory might seek to address socioeconomic challenges, and legitimise broader conceptions of scholarship within doctoral education. Following Gibbons et al’s (1994) consideration of knowledge production modes in relation to university knowledge transfer, and drawing on recent literature relating to modes of knowledge production (Liyanage et al, 2022; Miller et al, 2018; Peris-Ortiz, 2016), we considered how discussions around doctoral education and the public good (Deem, 2020) may be reimagined in the context of these programmes.

Our own experience of leading and working within Co(l)laboratory, a new Nottingham-based doctoral training programme which recruits a diverse range of candidates to co-created research projects, developed with local employers to address place-based issues, has shown the great potential of doctoral education to drive positive change locally. We have seen in practice how programmes such as Co(l)laboratory can act as a node in a wider civic knowledge and innovation system, and produce an expansive network currently involving two universities, 12 civic agreement partners, 30 community organisations, as well as current doctoral students and supervisors on 20 distinct research projects. This new model for doctoral training positions the doctorate as an agile, socially responsive and community-engaged catalyst to enable local people to tackle local problems.

Whilst it is clear that the complex and persistent challenges faced by communities across the UK require significant regional and national investment to resolve, the capacity of place-based doctoral education, shaped by civic partners and their local universities, should not be underestimated.

Dr Rachel Handforth joined Nottingham Trent University as Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement in January 2023 to work on the Co(l)laboratory programme, working with local employers to build a community-informed model for developing place-based PhD research projects. Her research interests include gender inequality in higher education, and belonging, access and participation in doctoral education. She was recently funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education to explore public attitudes to, and engagement with, doctoral research programmes.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of Research Culture and Environment and Director of the Doctoral School at Nottingham Trent University. She provides strategic leadership in the area of inclusive research culture, environment and doctoral education. She is currently principal investigator on two major projects in the field of inclusive doctoral education; the Universities for Nottingham Co(l)laboratory Research Hub and Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation. She is an executive committee member and trustee of the UK Council for Graduate Education.  She was a member of the UKRI Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy Panel (2015-2022) and an expert panel reviewer for the UK Concordat for Researchers (2019). Her research interests lie in higher education management, postgraduate research student experience, widening participation and access to higher education.

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Radical proposals in leader’s conference speech

by Rob Cuthbert

The leader’s speech to Conference was expected to include far-reaching proposals for higher and further education. We obtained this leaked text of an early draft:

“It is time for radical change. We will introduce the new rigorous, knowledge rich Advanced British Standard which will bring together A-Levels and T-Levels into a new, single qualification for our school leavers. At the next level, what we used to call further and higher education will be swept away to create a new Higher Skills curriculum. The first part of this (HS1) was achieved some years ago through investment in infrastructure connecting the UK with the rest of Europe. But now we need to change course. We committed to a second phase of the project (HS2) through legislation in the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017. The first part of HS2 is progressing but if we are to create change and drive growth across our country, then we must get our infrastructure right. HS2 is the ultimate example of the old consensus. The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed.

Universities are overcrowded, because too many students want to be in higher education. The Labour government pursued the false dream of 50 per cent of children going to university … one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years. We now have an Office for too many Students – student choice must be paramount, but only if they are the right students. The previous government’s efforts (well, alright, it was this government, but that was three prime ministers ago) to transfer most of the cost of HE to the students has been thwarted by the Office for National Statistics, which forced us to account for fees and loan repayments properly, and of course by the previous government’s mistakes in changing repayment thresholds (well, alright, it was this government, but that was two prime ministers ago). We have of course now changed repayments to ensure that loan repayments will cost graduates a lot more, which should help in choking off demand from poor students.

Our country’s economic competitiveness demands that we now cut back on higher education and graduate skills. Our Secretary of State for Education has pointed out that “people go to university because they don’t know what else to do”. We already lead the world in tuition fee levels for public universities, and we can also be world-leading by slashing student numbers, which will differentiate us from every one of our major competitors, indeed, probably the whole world (apart from Afghanistan). In this way we can also prevent further recruitment to rip-off courses which prepare students for their future employment in our low-wage economy [Speechwriter’s note: you may need to rephrase this bit]. Identifying rip-off courses has been a bit tricky, but I have asked the Office for Students to redouble its efforts to find them by concentrating the search on universities in unlikely places in the North and the Midlands. If all else fails we can rely on the OfS Proceed metric, which generally avoids  drawing attention to courses in London and the South East where graduate salaries are much higher. Of course the cost of living is much higher there too, which ensures that graduates still have virtually no chance of buying a house, unless they enjoy inherited wealth. To support the housing market I am therefore considering abolishing inheritance tax.

Student accommodation is a problem for many universities, but I welcome the innovative solution of universities like Bristol, which has decided to house some students in a different country. A similar approach has also been mooted for our prison population, and this has led us to consider extending our agreement on migrants with Rwanda. At our expense, naturally, they are willing to construct a series of new universities to accommodate students unable to gain admission to our own elite institutions. The Rwanda Institutions Providing Offshore Courses (RIPOff Courses) project should drastically reduce demand and the pressure on our universities in the same way that for immigration, with the prospect of Rwanda, small boat crossings are, for the first time since the phenomenon began, down 20 per cent this year. In some disciplines Rwanda may have a problem recruiting sufficient staff with the necessary expertise, but we propose to offer them the staff from places north of London which really shouldn’t have a university. We can also re-use the small boats abandoned by people traffickers to provide free cross-Channel transport for socioeconomically disadvantaged would-be students who prefer to take their chances in Europe. This will further enhance our student support measures.

HS2 has of course reinforced the golden triangle, in line with longstanding bipartisan government policy, but that means it has so far only reached as far north as Oxford and Cambridge. I welcome the new challenger institutions, almost all innovatively offering business courses in London, which have done so much to drive up the pay of their senior managers and their profits or surpluses from student tuition fees. However the number of institutions willing to provide such cheap courses has overall been disappointing, and therefore the cost of the HS2 project has continued to rise. The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed and for which the economic case has massively weakened. I say, to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed. And the right thing to do when the facts change, is to have the courage to change direction. And so, I am ending this long running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project.

In its place, we will reinvest every single penny (of what’s left after deducting the costs of RIPOff) in hundreds of new projects in the North and the Midlands, and across the country. We are putting in infrastructure improvements in selected places to form a new Network North. Durham, of course. York, probably. A bit for Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds, if we must. Nothing for Liverpool, except where there are people in marginal constituencies unable to travel to anywhere better. Nothing at all for Bradford, because my vice-Chairman says no-one wants to get there.

My main funding priority in every spending review from now on will be education. No more rip off degrees; no more low aspiration; no more denigration of technical education. Just the best education system in the Western world. But we will go further towards this vision. The pernicious effects of arts and humanities, and I might add social sciences, have already received one welcome corrective with the decision of the Arts and Humanities Research Council to cut PhD studentships by 25%. We will therefore extend the proposals on smoking for younger people, because if we are to do the right thing for our kids we must try and stop teenagers taking up arts and humanities in the first place. Because without a significant change thousands of children will start studying arts, humanities and social sciences in the coming years and have their future prospects cut short as a result.

People take up these subjects when they are young. Four in five sociologists have started by the time they are 20. Later, the vast majority try to quit. But many fail because they are addicted and they wish had never taken up the habit in the first place. If we could break that cycle, if we could stop the start, then we would be on our way to ending the biggest cause of preventable left-leaning wokery in our country. So, I propose that in future we raise the age at which young people are allowed to enrol on any arts, humanities or social science degree by one year, every year. That means a 14 year old today will never legally have access to any knowledge that doesn’t have Maths in it, and that they – and their generation – can grow up free of any understanding of culture and society.

Be in no doubt: it is time for a change. And we are it.” Editor’s note: the italicised text survived unchanged in the final version.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert


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New Higher Education Institutions in England: A real chance to innovate?

by Katherine Emms

The 2017 Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) enabled new and innovative HE providers to enter and establish themselves, with the aim of diversifying the HE sector. The HERA reforms enabled institutions to apply to register as HE providers, obtain their own degree awarding powers (DAPs) and finally secure university title and status through a supposedly more streamlined and flexible process overseen by – the then new body – the Office for Students (OfS). At this unique time when many providers have been seizing this opportunity to enter the market, the Edge Foundation wanted to capture the experiences of setting up and developing new HEIs in England. Our subsequent research therefore aimed to explore how vision, pedagogies and approaches to learning are being developed, and what are some of the challenges these HEIs are experiencing in establishing themselves.

To investigate this we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews focusing on six newly established HEIs across England. At the time of the interviews some were in the process of recruiting their first intake of undergraduate students, while others were in their first few years of programme delivery. We spoke to founders, directors, senior leadership team members and those involved in setting up a new university and developing the first programmes. Policymakers were also interviewed.

We found that all the new HEIs set out clear and purposeful visions for their establishment. Many regarded the opportunity as a chance to break the mould of the traditional HE landscape and to help provide solutions to some global issues through preparing students sufficiently for a varied portfolio career in a complex world. Some HEIs were responding to more local needs, whether that be local skills shortages or offering HE opportunities for young people in their locality to help tackle local economic issues and widen participation.

Across many of the institutions’ organisational structures, administrative and academic processes, and physical spaces, they looked to break away from normalised HE structures. For instance, admissions policies and procedures aimed to move away from academic grades as the primary judgement for admitting students. Instead they consider personal attitudes and the potential of the applicant important. They assessed this through use of broader admission measures eg interviews and submission of ‘selfie’ videos. The scalability of such approaches however is uncertain as applications to the new HEIs grow. One of the reasons behind these approaches was to ensure they widened participation to more disadvantaged and diverse groups of students who may struggle to have previously entered HE.

For their staff body, new HEIs wanted to ensure that they recruited not just pure academics but also those with a background in industry. In order to recruit the right staff, they went beyond standard interviewing processes for recruitment, instead using a broader set of methods, such as running a test class. They were particularly looking for engaging and excellent teachers who also have the ethos, creativity and impetus for working in a start-up environment.

All the new HEIs in this research took non-traditional approaches to programme design and delivery, particularly by not relying on lectures and exams to teach students. Instead they wished to use more student-centred approaches to learning and make connections to the real-world through pedagogies such as problem-based learning, whereby students work primarily in teams to tackle issues whilst drawing on knowledge from multiple disciplines. Employers and external partners also are key role players in the design and delivery of these new HEIs, from designing the curriculum to offering real-world and authentic projects for students to work on. Importantly students also interact with these employers whether that be through presenting their ‘product’ from the team projects to the employer or through such interactions as expert lectures or work placements. A disinterest in traditional pedagogies and enthusiasm for external collaboration were understood as key to ensuring the authenticity otherwise suggested to be lacking in some existing HE provision.

Setting up a new HEI was not an easy feat, with participants reporting a number of challenges including funding and attracting new students. One particular challenge was the registration process and navigating the regulatory system. The process from registering as a HE provider to gaining DAPs was often seen as a slow and, for some, complicated process. Furthermore despite the impetus behind the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) endorsing ideas of innovation, new HEIs felt that external factors restricted the degree to which they could truly be ‘innovative’. For instance, the regulatory frameworks that new HEIs had to work within to register as a provider were based on assumptions about the traditional model of a university. One provider described the experience as ‘trying to fit a square peg into a round hole’. Likewise, some new HEIs discussed similar restrictions applying when working in partnership with existing universities, meaning they were restricted within the parameters of their awarding university. In both cases, some new HEIs stated that this led to mission-drift or a watering down of their ‘innovative’ approaches. 

Nevertheless, these new HEIs were ambitious and keen to achieve their visions through wielding and deploying unorthodox means, whether that be reimagining organisational structures and processes or combining pedological practices that would not necessarily be considered innovative by themselves, such as problem-based learning, interdisciplinary teaching and learning and student-centred teaching. But through presenting these practices together or in different combinations and in new contexts HEIs made ambitious attempts to generate different student outcomes.

The HEIs featured in this research were still in the early stages of conception or delivery. It is difficult therefore to judge their success as HEIs. It is yet to be seen whether many of their current practices, such as their innovative and personable approach to recruitment, are manageable when student applications and intake grows, or whether relationships with employers can be sustained and courses kept up to date. For the new HEIs of today, many of them consider the markers of their success will be in their student numbers over the coming years and the success of their graduates once they enter the workplace. Yet, despite the attention of policymakers looking to clamp down on “low-value degrees”, we may need to look beyond graduates’ salaries as a marker of success and instead delve further into learners’ experiences of HE, innovative and otherwise.

Katherine Emms is a Senior Education and Policy Researcher at the Edge Foundation. You can read the research New Higher Education Institutions in England: A real chance to innovate? here.


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Freedom of speech and students’ unions

by Phil Pilkington

In March 2023 Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), wrote a review of Freedom of Speech in Universities: Islam, Charities and Counter-terrorism by Alison Scott-Baumann and Simon Perfect (both SOAS), covering freedom of speech, populism (of the left and right), ‘no platforming’, and students. I disagree with his argument and his conclusions.

Nick Hillman’s review may appear a slight text, but it demands a response as it sheds light on a particular and influential perspective on higher education. The comments on freedom of speech interest me as someone who over many years had to ensure events with guest speakers either did or did not take place, running to hundreds of events. Hillman notes correctly on risk assessment: ‘you do not always know which event which will be the one that flares up’. One event I approved did not go well: the experience of a student’s conversion from Sikh to Islam caused a furore, not on campus, but throughout the region and nationally, ignited by formidable Sikh activists. Nick Hillman perhaps has limited experience of the consequences of such events, which can include death threats, social media storms, massive impact on ethnic minority groups on campus and their alienation from the culture of the university. ‘Flaring up’ is a delicate euphemism. Many opinions in the review are misleading because they are ahistorical and expressed without the benefit of material, practical experience.

The book identifies four possible responses to the issue of free speech on campus: libertarian; liberal; guarded liberal; and no-platforming. Hillman says the authors back the ‘liberal’ approach and “the authors regard the threats to free speech on campus as coming almost wholly from the right”. He argues however that there are threats from the left, exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn’s period as leader of the Labour Party and its association with anti-semitism. The authors argue that right-wing populists “sneak into the gap” between neo-conservative and right-libertarian, an argument Hillman criticises because: “the right are portrayed as wrong if they want to limit more extremist speech, wrong if they push for a looser libertarian approach and wrong if they take a position in the space between these two positions. If you’re on the right and you have a view about free speech, it is deemed to be incorrect on sight, which seems unconducive to a reasonable conversation. At this point, the careful architecture of the authors’ argument starts to crumble, not least because left-wing populists and others (eg the NUS) are in exactly the same ‘gap’, which is really a chasm.”

Hillman’s suggestion is that to have a ‘no platform’ position while opposing the PREVENT strategy is to occupy an equally inconsistent liberal ‘gap’. But there is no inconsistency: the matter is much more subtle, complex and dangerous. There is a case for both positions on practical and historical grounds. Historically, a ‘no platform’ position was taken up in the 1970s by many students’ unions against the rise of the far right (the National Front and later the British National Party) which had gained some questionable success in marches in the East End of London and some success in local election results into the 1980s. Students’ unions are often conflated with the National Union of Students (UK), but  many students’ unions[1] did not have ‘no platform’ policies and a few were not affiliated to NUS, which is a confederation of students’ unions, guilds and associations.

A university or polytechnic campus was a focal point for the far right, not to gain support from the students or staff in debate but as a ‘piece of theatre’ for their supporters, who would have been suspicious of higher education. This situationist political action had the lineaments of populism, more recently shown in the occupation, and videoing for social media, of campus buildings by National Action, an organisation which celebrated the murder of Jo Cox MP and is now proscribed by the Home Office. No platform policies were subtitled ‘for Racists and Fascists’. Nick Hillman may have had in mind more celebrated and extremely rare cases of ‘cancel’ culture, but these should not be confused with ‘no platform’ policies nor the actions taken by students against the rise of racist political groups and parties. This stand was important in itself and influential in later legislation for protected characteristics in the Equalities Act. The other purpose of the policy was of course to ensure support and harmonious relations on campus when ethnic minorities were threatened.

No Platform policies were arrived at by debate, with motions democratically passed by the student body. PREVENT in contrast is a statutory duty of universities, instructed by the Secretary of Education under the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 to have a PREVENT policy and strategy which should “balance freedom of speech with the assessing of risk of external speakers”. Unlike No Platform policies it was not debated by the student body. Responsibilities under the Act rested with university trustees/governors, but as a member of staff at a students’ union I was allocated some responsibility for ensuring duties were met and I liaised with anti-terrorism police officers on the adoption of the policy. My experience confirmed the findings of Greer and Bell that the liaison was almost entirely taken up with intelligence of far right and multinational far right groups active in the area who could target the ethnic minority community and students. Political objections by some students’ unions (and NUS) to PREVENT were based on the perception that it was Islamophobic. Attacks on Muslim students on campus at that time, both verbal and physical, reinforced their perception that PREVENT discriminated against them. There was no causal connection between the Act itself and the attacks, but the ‘hostile environment’ was a reality: I established a Hate Crime Reporting Centre within a students’ union to support Muslim students (amongst others).

For many the practical objections to PREVENT were insuperable. The monitoring required to trigger concern for ‘indicators of being drawn into terrorism’ was impossible: for example, that lecturers and other staff should note changes in behaviour, declining academic performance, etc. What might have been possible in a school classroom setting could not apply to a cohort of hundreds of students on a computer science course, for example. Staff training was advised, so that they might notice changes in behaviour likely to be related to susceptibility to terrorist activities. This might have focussed on academic staff and personal tutors, but in our mass HE system I prioritised training for staff working in halls of residence to notice changes in behaviour; it was nevertheless unlikely to be effective.

Overall, to suggest a ‘liberal gap’ between no platforming and opposition to PREVENT fails to recognise the details and the historical roots and practices of the two. It was and is more complex than that.

The review then goes on to address failures in understanding right and left populism and the related threats to free speech. There are some difficulties with this application of populism. I have suggested that the historical origin of no platforming was a reaction to the rise of a violent far right in the UK using a campus and its students as part of a situationist spectacle, against an (educated) elite rather than for support. These historical origins open up a wider discussion. Speech is more than opinion and our right to hold or possess it. Freedom of speech has some conditions of origin and direction, otherwise it would be simply incomprehensible noise. The theatre of speech has attributes beyond facts, truth conditions, empirical evidence, or whatever other enlightenment features may be included in ‘debate’. Debates are rare – most external speakers give a presentation, answer a few questions and then leave. These linguistic details are rarely considered in the discussions about free speech. The focus is on the handful of cases involving ‘cancelling’ or postponement, among the tens of thousands of events each year. Why is this a priority for HE, given the problems facing the sector? Why has it become such a priority? Who has driven this as an issue? Has it been tangled up with a populist view of HE in the UK?

Using the criteria developed by Michael Cox (LSE) for an understanding of populism, it can be argued the UK government is not so much right of centre, as Nick Hillman suggests, but is a government becoming right-wing populist. How is that possible and how could it be related to interests in free speech and universities? Cox’s criteria for right wing populism match many government policies and rhetoric in the UK. Populism of the right is nativist, declaring allegiance to those living ‘somewhere’ (with no social or actual mobility in deindustrialised regions) against the socially and literally mobile who live ‘nowhere’ (graduates, the metropolitans). It distrusts elites, has a disdain for intellectuals, promotes a conspiracy theory of the establishment as traitors, is sceptical about science, and seeks to ensure cultural elites (eg Arts Council, BBC, museums, university governance et al) are ‘loyal’. Some of Cox’s criteria may not be met, but recent developments in the Illegal Immigration Bill, following Theresa May’s Home Office policies of creating a ‘hostile environment’ and the Windrush generation deportations, contribute to a perception of the current government as right-wing populist.

Cox argues that left wing populism is rare, given that the basic condition of populism is nativistic (or ethnically based) whereas the left will focus on class divisions across ethnicity and be internationalist. However, Hillman identifies Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, and ‘Corbyn-mania’ as left populism because of the antisemitism attached to his time as leader. The apparent implication, since half of university staff and two-thirds of students supported the Labour Party at the time of Corbyn’s leadership, is that many in universities also supported a form of left populism.  This leaves hanging the thought that perhaps they presented dangers as a form of populism to the university spirit, essence or whatever it is about freedom of thought and speech. Hillman says the ‘gap’ between free speech and clamping down or cancelling becomes ‘a chasm’. But that depends on who is deciding what happens in that gap. The free speech imbroglio – if it is that – flows from some deliberate choices. We should ask not how it happened – it began as a counter to racists and fascists attempting to threaten campus unity and vulnerable individuals – but how it became such an obsessive issue for some. An issue which crowds out the academy precariat, the loss of research collaboration with Europe, the financial instabilities of HEIs, the enormous foreign investment in halls of residences, the rise of AI to challenge the curriculum and assessments, graduate indebtedness, et al.

Hillman’s review then turns to students’ unions, suggesting that stricter controls have been introduced; his meaning is not clear unless he means the incorporation and charitable status formalised by the Charities Act of 2006. That Act made students’ unions accountable to a board of student trustees, with charitable status no longer depending on the ‘parent institution’. The recruitment of external lay trustees by student officers allowed for greater expertise on financial, commercial and employment matters but overall control and campaigning policy remained in the hands of elected student officers via student councils, referenda and general meetings according to their constitutions. Ironically, this is the strongest form of democratic control on a UK university campus, notwithstanding trade union activities, in terms of size and scope of activities. Hillman went on to say: “the authors condemn the common idea that student unions should avoid political campaigning that is not focused on students. They envisage students backing a motion that devotes resources to protesting about a national economic policy and argue ‘we think their students’ union should have at least the possibility of enacting the motion if they so wish.’ This sounds more like finding an excuse to divert charitable funds from their proper use than protecting free speech. If a group of students want to campaign against a national economic policy, there are plenty of existing and legitimate routes for them to do so (including joining a political party) aside from (mis)using their fellow students’ charitable financial resources.”

The misuse of funds by students’ unions has long been a trope. It was certainly around in the 1970s and early 80s over alleged support for the IRA or hunger strikers. Probably the biggest financial scandals within students’ unions were the seeming misuse of funds to support rock bands – or to put it another way, to provide grants and arts subsidies to future global rock stars such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This was considered to be ultra vires by the then Attorney General in 1973, at a time when there was no legal identity for students’ unions. Unions subsequently separated commercial operations from charitable core activities.

The case against students’ unions campaigning on ‘non-student issues’ because it would be a misuse of students’ resources is simplistic on two grounds. Firstly, there is the question in a universal HE system of what is and is not a student issue. NUS research showed that over 80% of students were concerned or very concerned about climate change – an NUS led survey won a UN award for environmental understanding in the tertiary sector.  So is global warming a student issue? Tick. What about the growth of foodbanks? Students have been accessing them through agreements between students’ unions and the Trussell Trust. A tick for the cost-of-living crisis. Inflation and government fiscal policy are connected, so what are the limits? Childcare costs and the mature students’ society? Disabled students and the benefits test? And so on. A student body is a global body. There is interconnectedness and there is empathy. Who is to decide if ‘x’ is a worthy subject for a students’ union to campaign about? The student body decides on policy collectively. As a charity the students’ union has a legal personality; to make a collective decision is to form a corporate opinion.

Secondly, charities have been deeply concerned with their gagging by the Lobbying Act of 2015. This goes much further than students’ unions and their alleged profligacy in ‘irrelevant’ campaigning. The Act states that charities (including students’ unions) may have political activities in accordance with the aims and objectives of the charity, but not party politically. When there is a close correlation between a charity’s position and that of a political party manifesto (which is usually a position opposing the ruling party) then there is considered to be a contravention of charitable status. The objection to the Act’s powers over charities is not limited to students’ unions, it has been an objection voiced by many large and respected charities such as Amnesty UK, Friends of the Earth, Shelter, et al. Is the condemnation of supposedly ‘irrelevant’ campaigning another aspect of right-wing populism?

Assumptions about parallels between left and right wing populism are highly questionable, and practical knowledge and experience of campus issues around freedom of speech and counter-terrorism points in a very different direction to the one encouraged by topical but superficial political narratives, such as those represented in Nick Hillman’s review.

Phil Pilkington’s former roles include Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, and CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union. He is an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE. He chaired the SRHE Student Experience Network for several years and helped to organise events including the hugely successful 1995 SRHE annual conference on The Student Experience; its associated book of ‘Precedings’ was edited by Suzanne Hazelgrove for SRHE/Open University Press.

[1] Note: ‘students’ unions’, not as in the review ‘student unions’


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The Polytechnics legacy – continuing to break down the academic/vocational divide in the twenty-first century

by Kat Emms

For two years Edge Foundation has been drawing together lessons from past education policies. Government is at risk of institutional amnesia for a variety of reasons, such as a high level of organisational churn (Stark, 2018) and at Edge we believe it is essential that decision-making about future policy builds on and adapts evidenced best practice from the past, in order to avoid repeatedly falling into the same traps. As part of Edge’s Learning from the Past series one recent initiative was SRHE Fellow Professor Gareth Parry’s (Sheffield) paper on Polytechnics.

The polytechnics were designated in the 1960s as new institutions formed from existing technical and other colleges within the English further education system, and with one in Wales. Rather than focussing on traditional further education provision, these establishments wholly or largely concentrated on higher education (‘advanced’) courses. In the 1960s Britain was facing an increase in demand for higher education and these new institutions would help meet this demand. Furthermore they would help diversify the sector through offering higher education across a number of levels, notably sub-degree as well as degree and postgraduate courses, while also offering the ability to study in different modes (full-time, sandwich and part-time). Offering sub-degree qualifications and more flexible modes of study supported access to higher education for those who would otherwise not have had such opportunities.

The new polytechnics were mostly formed by a merger between two or three colleges – colleges of technology, art, commerce or more narrowly specialist institutions. The responsibility for these newly developed institutions lay with local government (Sharp, 1987), with awarding powers coming from the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA).

The polytechnics policy was based on an economic need to equip the workforce with the vocational, professional and industrially-based expertise it required, particularly in the face of international competition. Traditional universities were not able to meet this need alone. Polytechnics provided centres of excellence at higher education level across a range of disciplines, and offered more practice-based, work-related learning. The CNAA’s charter required that their degrees be comparable in standard and quality with those in universities (Silver, 1990).

By the late 1980s the polytechnics were becoming large institutions with strong national roles, equipped with their own central admissions service to manage student applications. Their establishment as independent, self-directing institutions was realised by the Education Reform Act of 1988, which removed the polytechnics and larger higher education colleges from local government control. The Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 eliminated the binary divide and enabled the polytechnics to acquire university title and the power to award their own degrees.

The former polytechnics increasingly shared similarities with existing universities, partly because traditional universities also adapted to compete and meet societal demands, for example through widening participation in their student recruitment and developing more work-related elements for their existing curricula.

Several features bequeathed by the original polytechnics can still be seen in today’s twenty-first century HE system. In the 1960s/1970s the polytechnics tackled skill shortages facing many sectors in the UK economy; in 2017 Degree Apprenticeships (DAs) were established for similar reasons. The advent of DAs emphasised a vocational orientation, with these courses now firmly a feature in pre-1992 universities including those in the Russell Group, as well as the former polytechnics. This epitomises the polytechnics policy, which explicitly aimed to achieve a  ‘blurring of boundaries’ and ‘a breakdown of the traditional demarcation between vocational and academic courses’ (Pratt, 1997, p309). DAs were meant to be an innovative new model bringing together the best of higher and vocational education, whilst also upholding the same standards as non-apprenticeship degrees. Not only are DAs continuing to blur the academic/vocational divide within the sector, they are also supporting the formation of new partnerships between employers and higher education providers in order to develop new forms of higher-level, occupationally relevant education.

As well as helping the HE sector to diversify provision, polytechnics were acclaimed for expanding and diversifying the student population going into higher education (Scott, 1995). DAs have the same aim: they target school leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds, and mature learners already in the workforce, to offer them the opportunity to enter higher education. However, so far the evidence that they are achieving this is mixed, with recent research showing that fewer degree apprentices are eligible for free school meals than those attending university (Cavaglia et al, 2022).

As with the polytechnics in the 1960s, the HE sector is also seeing again the opening of new, and arguably innovative, higher education institutions across England. Locally focussed developments such as Milton Keynes University, ARU Peterborough and UA92 aim to meet the needs of the local community and employers. They do this through a particular emphasis on designing and developing their provision in collaboration with local stakeholders including the local authority and employers.

The new HEIs are to an extent emulating the polytechnics’ approach, not necessarily by offering distinctly new professional routes, but in ensuring that students’ education is continuously relevant to the real-world and professional life, through engaging with employer projects or developing students with a wide set of transferable skills. This is reinterpreting ‘vocation’ in a way which is more relevant to the 21st century: a profile career and the development of transferable personal skills is crucial for today’s workforce, compared to the sometimes narrower range of technical skills required and delivered by the polytechnics.

The polytechnics transformed the HE sector by diversifying provision and the student population. The blurring of the academic and vocational divide can still be seen in today’s higher education sector, particularly when we consider degree apprenticeships and newly established higher education institutions, with their provision becoming adapted to a 21st century world of work. At Edge Foundation we are exploring these two areas in our forthcoming research which will be published in early 2023.

Katherine Emms is Senior Education and Policy Researcher at the Edge Foundation. Her main areas of research cover higher education, vocational education, skills shortages and employability skills.


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Mobilities and the ‘international academic’ in higher education

by Vera Spangler, Lene Møller Madsen, and Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

December marks the month of the International SRHE Research Conference. It was an interesting week full of presentations and discussions around the theme of Mobilities in Higher Education. In the opening plenary talk, Emily Henderson invited us to reflect critically on the different ways in which mobilities of academics and students in higher education are discursively constructed. She debated how discursive constructions of mobility may influence who can access academia/higher education, who can gain recognition, and who can establish a feeling of belonging. Emily’s presentation set an interesting and highly relevant ground for the week to come, opening space for critical thought about  academic mobility and experiences of mobility, subjectivities, and power. Our presentation about who is considered ‘the international academic’ addressed similar ideas and observations, which we would like to share in this blog post in order to open the conversation with a larger audience.

Never has the higher education sector been so mobile, particularly as internationalisation occupies a central position on the global agenda of policymakers. Over the past decade we can observe a significant increase in academic mobility. This is partly due to the fact that the academic profession is becoming exceedingly internationalised and globalised, often involving some sort of travel on the part of the academic throughout their career. In the academic sector, having international staff is often seen as integral to the institution’s reputation and recognition. Likewise, international mobility is perceived as inherently beneficial for the individual and as a valuable asset for academic research careers. Professional stays abroad can function as a mark of distinction or valuable international capital.

Mobility and, notably, internationalisation are often used with many positive connotations, presented as neutral and unconditionally good. Internationalisation is often deemed instrumental in enhancing the quality of research and education. Universities put increasing effort into attracting international academics, seeking their contribution in establishing an international research and teaching environment to promote the status of the faculty and their position internationally. Particularly for universities outside Anglo-America, international scholars constitute an important element in creating a so-called ‘international university’. However we often see a uniform, unidirectional, and unproblematic description of how to attract and retain international academics in higher education strategies and mainstream policy documents. There is a dominant prominence in university strategies of attracting ‘global talent’ and ‘the best and the brightest’, promoting a specific idea of the ‘international academic’. Yet questions remain about how academics of different national and social backgrounds understand the role of being an ‘international academic’ and how their understandings are consonant with those sought, promoted and shaped by higher education institutions.

Our paper for the SRHE conference tried to unpack ‘the international’ in international academic mobility based on interviews with international academics (varying in age, nationality, and academic position) living and working in Denmark. The data stem from the larger research project Geographies of Internationalisation, which explores how internationalisation affects the perception of quality, relevance and learning in higher education and how these perceptions travel with mobile academics. Our conference presentation examined what it means to be an international academic, who the ‘international’ is, and how the academics’ ‘international-ness’ is being used and/or neglected by institutions.

During the interviews, interesting conversations emerged as to when one is considered international – do you have to be recruited as ‘an international’ or can you just be a ‘love migrant’ who then gets employment at a university? Others pondered how long one could live in Denmark and still be considered ‘an international’. Our analysis shows that ‘the international’ is not a neutral concept, but often ‘international-ness’ is associated with those from the centre (the Anglo-American academy), while academics from the (semi-)periphery are viewed as less international, perhaps just ‘foreign’ as one interviewee stated. Language is an important factor in this context. As we have shown elsewhere, English is often conflated with the international, for instance internationalisation may simply mean English Medium Instruction. This may explain why academics from the Anglo-American academy can appear to possess more of that universal character that is international. In this way, we point to the uneven geographies of internationalisation, and how universities in the (semi-)periphery can end up mimicking the Anglo-American academy in their attempt to internationalise.

While internationalisation can bring many social, material and professional benefits concerning, for instance, intercultural competencies and employability, there is a diversity in geographical patterns, constraints, demands, privileges and motivations that are to a large extent silenced in prominent policy documents and discourses. Hidden behind its neutralising and universalising discourse, internationalisation is a multi-dimensional, highly uneven process; a plural landscape of possibilities for some, and disadvantages for others. For some years now, critical scholarship on internationalisation has been growing. There is increasing concern that internationalisation practices and mainstream policies reproduce global inequalities and already uneven relations and geographies. There are a number of different ways to avoid this. Along with other scholars of critical internationalisation studies, we encourage efforts to rethink and critically explore consequences, practices and discourses of internationalisation both in scholarship and in academic conversations to open up questions for a renewed focus and to find ways forward.

Vera Spangler is a PhD student at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England. Her research project is a comparative study between England, Denmark and Germany with focus on knowledge legitimacy and the role of student mobility in the re/production of global hierarchies.

Lene Møller Madsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. She is part of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation, responsible for the WP on academic mobility. She holds a PhD in human geography, and have worked with pedagogical training of staff for many years including international academics.  

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen is Associate Professor and academic international coordinator at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. Originally trained as a human geographer, her research concerns mobility, space, and education. Since 2019 PI of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation with 14 affiliated international scholars and master students.


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Gamekeepers, poachers, policy wonks and knowledge

by Adam Matthews

I was excited to attend SRHE’s event, Bridging The Gap: Improving The Relationship Between Higher Education Research And Policy on 4 November 2022. It was the first time I’d been to London since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The event promised to bring together and bridge the gap between those making higher education policy and those researching it. The event description pitched the former, in government, thinking that academic research is too narrow, theoretical or impenetrable for their purposes focusing on critique rather than practical solutions. The latter were descried as thinking government only selectively engage with academic research evidence to support their desired arguments and outcomes. This then was quite a gap to be bridged.

SRHE put together two panels of highly experienced policy makers and academics – some having experience of both – described more than once as gamekeepers turned poachers. Maybe this is the start of, and one of many ways of, bridging that gap.

Sticking with the analogy, gamekeeping policy makers want to see accessible, broad and practically orientated research; the poachers are asking to be listened to even when the gamekeeper doesn’t like the answer. As the panel sessions developed it was clear that there are some vessels bridging the gap in the choppy waters below the unbuilt bridge – think tanks such as HEPI and Wonkhe (nicely described as a newspaper for people who work in universities). It was suggested several times that both were primary and vital sources of knowledge for policy makers and university leaders. HEPI’s Nick Hillman may be a little biased here but this does present a real challenge to higher education researchers and the influence of their work. Both HEPI and Wonkhe provide in many ways an insider’s view having former special advisers writing news, commentary and reports. Some (such as Peter Scott) have argued they are ideologically and politically influenced. Many voices are needed to help inform policy but, as was clear at the event, this isn’t a simple case of finding one possible solution.

Each panel member spoke from their own perspective on policy and systems, and education and students, expertly chaired by David Palfreyman and Nick Hillman. Policy levers mentioned were access, REF, TEF and system wide changes. These are areas I have engaged with in my own work on part-time access, the relationship between REF and TEF and the identity and practice of quasi-public university institutions. There was quite some frustration directed at ‘my lot’, the higher education researchers, for only being interested in complex writing, academic journal articles and not for writing blogs, starring in podcasts and simply presenting ‘the evidence’. In defence of me and my colleagues, we do try to do both. However, promotions and kudos sit firmly in citations and h-indexes rather than short form communication. Training in the form of a PhD often has little development in teaching, never mind media and blog posting; we needed to get to the magic 80,000 words!

I raised the very academic word of epistemology – knowledge and understanding and how different mediums and research methods produce different epistemic outcomes. Epistemology is something which academics in social science and humanities think and write a lot about – usually whole chapters in an 80,000-word thesis, and a field of study in its own right. Yes, I could have said knowledge and understanding instead of epistemology. This is an important point: understanding the gamekeeper, poacher and policy wonk is not always easy for each other and bridging gaps will take work, but this effort feels worth it for all parties. The event certainly made me realise how little I know about how policies are made, other than watching the West Wing over and over again. And as Leo McGarry says in the political drama: ‘There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em – laws and sausages’. I am open to seeing how policy is made, not so much the sausages. More West Wing below.

Some ‘non-academic’ panel members conveyed a sense of frustration that knowledge wasn’t accessible in a neat package that could then be applied to policy. This epistemic cause-and-effect positivism defies the many different types of academic research – large scale quantitative, secondary data analysis, small scale qualitative, systematic reviews, speculative futures, developing theory, conference papers to develop ideas, public seminars … the list could go on. My point is that trawling ‘the literature’ won’t find the ultimate and objective truth or answer (my own epistemic position) but it might help. Another epistemic view of mine is that HE research in many cases isn’t an objective hard science.

In my own work, in particularly teaching, I have been working in interdisciplinary ways with Engineers, Computer and Data Scientists and Physicists. We speak in different disciplinary languages, epistemic languages with different knowledge and understanding of the world. Key to interdisciplinarity is integration. The Manifesto of Interdisciplinarity states:

The essential feature of interdisciplinarity is integration: interdisciplinary research and teaching should seek to synthesize the insights generated by the specialized research undertaken within disciplines.   

We all speak and work in our epistemic cultures, bodies of knowledge and experience that we know well. The key is integration – the bridge that this event has hopefully started to build. My experience of interdisciplinary teaching and learning is dialogue and centring around common goals and issues. Moreover, we should not underestimate long-term trusting relationships which allow for critique and admitting you haven’t a clue what your colleague is talking about!

The work of all parties is different and the outputs that we produce (policy, news articles, events, teaching, academic books and journals) are all designed for different audiences and purposes. The work of HEPI and Wonkhe is vitally important and it can move quickly, for example Nick Hillman and Mark Leach played out an insightful debate on student number controls, over 2 days and three pieces, highlighting no safe return to student number controls, the possibility of a different way of looking at number controls with some final words from Nick. The exchange offered an excellent resource on the debate of student number controls delivered quickly and from different perspectives. A more in depth, academic, peer reviewed piece of work on the same subject by one of the event organisers, Colin McCaig (Sheffield Hallam), equally adds to the knowledge base but in a different way. We do also need to consider academic freedom and distance between the game keepers and poachers and allow for critical analysis.

Yes, academics need to write in more creative ways to convey ideas and evidence but we also need book, thesis and journal length depth and analysis building on bodies of knowledge and literature – it’s what we do, but there are many forms of media to explore.

I am an avid reader of HEPI (and have written one blog for them) and Wonkhe – looking out for their references to policy wonking from political drama the West Wing. Writer Aaron Sorkin is a master of using dialogue to explore ideas and the SRHE event this November was a good starting point for dialogue on bridging the gap and improving the relationship between gamekeeping policy makers, HE-researching poachers and commentating policy wonks.

As Sorkin via President Bartlett reminds us, ten words are not enough …

The ten words and epistemic cause and effect of ‘This is what the research says, now make the policy’ is certainly not enough. I hope this is the first of many dialogues between policy makers, policy wonks and higher education researchers that I am involved in.

Dr. Adam Matthews is Lecturer in Education, Technology and Society at the University of Birmingham working across Social Sciences and Engineering and Physical Sciences. Adam’s research is focused on the idea of a university at system and policy level.


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Interdisciplinarity

by GR Evans

Historian GR Evans takes the long view of developments in interdisciplinary studies, with particular reference to experience at Cambridge, where progress may at times be slow but is also measured. Many institutions have in recent years developed new academic structures or other initiatives intended to promote interdisciplinary collaboration. We invite further blogs on the topic from other institutional, disciplinary, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.

A recent Times Higher Education article explored ‘academic impostor syndrome’ from the point of view of an academic whose teaching and research crossed conventional subject boundaries. That seemed to have made the author feel herself a misfit. She has a point, but perhaps one with broader ramifications.  

There is still a requirement of specialist expertise in the qualification of academics. In its Registration Conditions for the grant of degree-awarding powers the Office for Students adopts a requirement which has been in used since the early 1990s. An institution which is an established applicant seeking full degree-awarding powers must still show that it has “A self-critical, cohesive academic community with a proven commitment to the assurance of standards supported by effective quality systems.”

A new applicant institution must show that it has “an emerging self-critical, cohesive academic community with a clear commitment to the assurance of standards supported by effective (in prospect) quality systems.” The evidence to be provided is firmly discipline-based: “A significant proportion (normally around a half as a minimum) of its academic staff are active and recognised contributors to at least one organisation such as a subject association, learned society or relevant professional body.” The contributions of these academic staff are: “expected to involve some form of public output or outcome, broadly defined, demonstrating the  research-related impact of academic staff on their discipline or sphere of research activity at a regional, national or international level.”

The establishment of a range of subjects identified as ‘disciplines’ suitable for study in higher education is not much more than a century old in Britain, arriving with the broadening of the university curriculum during the nineteenth century and the creation of new universities to add to Oxford and Cambridge and the existing Scottish universities. Until then the medieval curriculum adapted in the sixteenth century persisted, although Cambridge especially honoured a bent for Mathematics. ‘Research’, first in the natural sciences, then in all subjects, only slowly became an expectation. The higher doctorates did not become research degrees until late in the nineteenth century and the research PhD was not awarded in Britain until the beginning of the twentieth century, when US universities were beginning to offer doctorates and they were established as a competitive attraction in the UK .

The notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ is even more recent. The new ‘disciplines’ gained ‘territories’ with the emergence of departments and faculties to specialise in them and supervise the teaching and examining of students choosing a particular subject. In this developing system in universities the academic who did not fully belong, or who made active connections between disciplines still in process of defining themselves, could indeed seem a misfit. The interdisciplinary was often disparaged as neither one discipline nor another and often regarded by mainstream specialists as inherently imperfect. Taking an interest in more than one field of research or teaching might perhaps be better described as ‘multi-disciplinary’ and requires a degree of cooperativeness among those in charge of the separate disciplines. But it is still not easy for an interdisciplinary combination to become a recognised intellectual whole in its own right, though ‘Biochemistry’ shows it can be done.

Research selectivity and interdisciplinarity

The ‘research selectivity’ exercises which began in the late 1980s evolved into the Research Assessment Exercises (1986, 1989, 1992, 1996, 2001, 2008), now the Research Excellence Framework. The RAE Panels were made up of established academics in the relevant discipline and by the late 1990s there were complaints that this disadvantaged interdisciplinary researchers. The Higher Education Funding Council for England and the other statutory funding bodies prompted a review, and in November 1997 the University of Cambridge received the consultation paper sent round by HEFCE. A letter in response from Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor was published, giving answers to questions posed in the consultation paper. Essential, it was urged, were ‘clarity and uniformity of  application of criteria’. It suggested that: “… there should be greater interaction, consistency, and comparability between the panels than in 1996, especially in cognate subject areas. This would, inter alia, improve the assessment of interdisciplinary work.”

The letter also suggested “the creation of multidisciplinary sub-panels, drawn from the main panels” or at least that the membership of those panels should include those “capable of appreciating interdisciplinary research and ensuring appropriate consultation with other panels or outside experts as necessary”. Universities should also have some say, Cambridge suggested, about the choice of panel to consider an interdisciplinary submission. On the other hand Cambridge expressed “limited support for, and doubts about the practicality of, generic interdisciplinary criteria or a single interdisciplinary monitoring group”, although the problem was acknowledged.[1]

Interdisciplinary research centres

In 2000 Cambridge set up an interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. In a Report proposing CRASSH the University’s General Board pointed to “a striking increase in the number and importance of research projects that cut across the boundaries of academic disciplines both within and outside the natural sciences”. It described these as wide-ranging topics on which work could “only be done at the high level they demand” in an institution which could “bring together leading workers from different disciplines and from around the world … thereby raising its reputation and making it more attractive to prospective staff, research students, funding agencies , and benefactors.”[2]

There have followed various Cambridge courses, papers and examinations using the term ‘interdisciplinary’, for example an Interdisciplinary Examination Paper in Natural Sciences. Acceptance of a Leverhulme Professorship of Neuroeconomics in the Faculty of Economics in 2022 was proposed on the grounds that “this appointment serves the Faculty’s strategy to expand its interdisciplinary profile in terms of research as well as teaching”.  It would also comply with “the strategic aims of the University and the Faculty … [and] create a bridge between Economics and Neuroscience and introduce a new interdisciplinary field of Neuroeconomics within the University”. However the relationship between interdisciplinarity in teaching and in research has still not been systematically addressed by Cambridge.

‘Interdisciplinary’ and ‘multidisciplinary’

A Government Report of 2006 moved uneasily between ‘multidisciplinary’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ in its use of vocabulary, with a number of institutional case studies. The University of Strathclyde and King’s College London (Case Study 2) described a “multidisciplinary research environment”. The then Research Councils UK (Case Study 5b) said its Academic Fellowship scheme provided “an important mechanism for building interdisciplinary bridges” and at least 2 HEIs had “created their own schemes analogous to the Academic Fellowship concept”.

In sum it said that all projects had been successful “in mobilising diverse groups of specialists to work in a multidisciplinary framework and have demonstrated the scope for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries”. Foresight projects, it concluded, had “succeeded in being regarded as a neutral interdisciplinary space in which forward thinking on science-based issues can take place”. But it also “criticised the RAE for … the extent to which it disincentivised interdisciplinary research”.  And it believed that Doctoral Training Projects still had a focus on discipline-specific funding, which was “out of step with the growth in interdisciplinary research environments and persistent calls for more connectivity and collaboration across the system to improve problem-solving and optimise existing capacity”.

Crossing paths: interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications was published by the British Academy in 2016. It recognised that British higher education remained strongly ‘discipline-based’, and recognized the risks to a young researcher choosing to cross boundaries. Nevertheless, it quoted a number of assurances it had received from universities, saying that they were actively seeking to support or introduce the ‘interdisciplinary’. It provided a set of Institutional Case Studies. including Cambridge’s statement about CRASSH, as hosting a range of externally funded interdisciplinary projects. Crossing paths saw the ‘interdisciplinary’ as essentially bringing together existing disciplines in a cluster. It suggested “weaving, translating, convening and collaborating” as important skills needed by those venturing into work involving more than one discipline.  It did not attempt to explore the definition of interdisciplinarity or how it might differ from the multi-disciplinary.

Interdisciplinary teaching has been easier to experiment with, particularly at school level where subject-based boundaries may be less rigid. There seems to be room for further hard thought not only on the need for definitions but also on the notion of the interdisciplinary from the point of view of the division of provision for posts in – and custody of – individual disciplines in the financial and administrative arrangements of universities. This work-to-be-done is also made topical by Government and Office for Students pressure to subordinate or remove established disciplines which do not offer the student a well-paid professional job on graduation.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.

[1] Cambridge University Reporter, 22 April (1998).  

[2] Cambridge University Reporter, 25 October (2000).