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Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

by Kate Ayres

For many years, the fair access agenda in UK HE has emphasised more transparent and consistent admissions processes that are underpinned by clearer criteria and targeted support. As a qualified accountant and training in Lean Six Sigma, I’ve always been drawn to efficiency, clarity, and measurable improvement – principles that shaped much of my work in HE. However, as I moved into more senior roles and worked more closely with institutional decision-makers, I started to ask a different kind of question: why do some reforms, even when implemented well, seem to make little real difference?

That question sits at the centre of my doctoral research. Despite significant reforms the social composition of Durham University’s student body has felt largely unchanged. From within the institution, it was evident that fairer offer-making was not translating into meaningful shifts in the home-student entrant profile. This revealed an uncomfortable truth: so far, no amount of investment or policy reform can, by itself, reshape the social forces that determine who sees a Durham degree as desirable.

To understand why, we need to stop looking only at what universities do, and start looking at how students behave, and how the wider customer base, or audience, signals who belongs where.

Why aren’t internal reforms enough?

The limited shift in Durham’s home-student body prompts a key question: are our current metrics assuming universities can control demand, when in fact they can only affect the choices of applicants already in their pool?

My research used fourteen years of UCAS admissions data for Durham University to analyse how applicant characteristics, predicted attainment, school type, and socio-economic background intersect with admissions decisions and outcomes. Using multivariate logistic regression and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, I examined the impact of Durham’s 2019 move from decentralised to centralised admissions.

Results

Since the centralisation of admissions in 2019:

  • Contextual students are now 72% more likely to receive an offer, reflecting a major shift in offer-making behaviour.
  • Contextual applicants to selecting departments remain 40% less likely to get offers than those applying to recruiting ones.
  • No improvement is seen in firm-acceptance rates, suggesting culture or fit still shape applicant choices.
  • Insurance-acceptance has risen 21%, showing Durham is increasingly seen as a backup option for these students.
  • Contextual students are now 2% less likely to enrol after receiving an offer, raising concerns about deeper barriers to entry.

Trend Analysis

The findings were initially encouraging with Contextual applicants became more likely to receive an offer after centralisation. However, the increased offer rate had very limited effect on who actually enrolled. Contextual applicants were increasingly likely to accept alternative universities before Durham. Meanwhile, the proportion of entrants from higher parental SES groups increased, and independent-school students (already overrepresented) continued to make up around one-third of Durham’s home undergraduate intake in 2023.

Who is in control of demand?

While Durham has a history of taking affirmative action for contextual students, these findings illustrate that the OfS-set POLAR4 ratios will never be achievable for somewhere like Durham because these measures assume that universities themselves control demand. Drawing on Organisational Ecology, I argue that this assumption is flawed.

To understand why improved offer-making did not shift entrant composition, we need to look beyond institutional behaviour and examine the ecosystem dynamics that shape demand. Just as ecosystems rely on diversity, so does HE. No institution can appeal to every audience, nor should it. Organisations operate within ecosystems shaped by social, economic, and political forces, and crucially by their audiences, who ultimately determine demand. Therefore, it is the audience that defines an organisation’s niche. In HE, applicants gravitate toward universities that align with their social tastes, expectations, and sense of belonging. Therefore, the most powerful forces shaping demand are the social networks and information transmissions within and these influence applicants long before they apply: what they hear at school, family expectations, and what peers believe “people like us” do—and where “people like us” go.

Currently, wider systemic shifts are reinforcing and entrenching Durham’s niche, especially among white independent-school applicants:

  1.  As Oxbridge intensifies its widening participation initiatives, applicants who traditionally succeed (predominantly white students from independent schools) are increasingly less likely to secure offers.
  2. These applicants seek the closest alternative to the Oxbridge experience, with Durham emerging as a preferred option.
  3. Durham is increasingly accepted as a firm choice because of its perceived “fit” with these applicants’ identity and expectations (as seen in this research).
  4. These applicants typically achieve their predicted grades, making entry more likely.
  5. Their growing presence reinforces existing social narratives about Durham’s student profile.
  6. Consequently, the entrant composition remains socially narrow, and these dynamics may intensify.
  7. The narrative of Durham as a socially exclusive institution persists.
  8. Applicants from non-traditional backgrounds thus perceive a lack of belonging.
  9. As a result, these applicants are less likely to select Durham as their firm choice.

While these dynamics may prompt questions about whether Durham could or should shift away from its position as an “almost-Oxbridge” institution, the evidence suggests that only limited movement is structurally possible. Organisational Ecology predicts that Durham’s niche will remain relatively stable over time and there are many benefits of sticking with a niche approach. The university may be able to broaden its appeal slightly at the margins, drawing in more students from POLAR4 Q3 and Q4 backgrounds, but POLAR4 Q1 and Q2 students are likely to remain outliers. The real question is therefore not whether Durham can radically transform its appeal, but whether it can create the conditions in which those who do apply feel they can belong and thrive. This is where the OfS should take action because, rather than holding universities accountable for applicant pools (which they do not control), it should focus on the areas where institutional agency is strongest. Improving the lived experience of contextual students, strengthening narrative and cultural inclusion, and raising offer-to-acceptance conversion rates are all within Durham’s sphere of influence. Current patterns, particularly the relatively low acceptance and entry rates among contextual applicants, suggest that cultural barriers remain. Regulators should therefore attend less to the composition of the total entrant pool and more to how effectively institutions support, retain, and attract those who already see themselves as potential members of the community.

Taken together, the wider systemic effects detailed above reinforce, rather than shift, Durham’s niche. Only a proportion of applicants will ever feel an affinity with the institution, which is entirely natural in a diverse HE ecosystem where students gravitate toward environments that resonate with their identities and expectations.

These systemic forces lie largely outside Durham’s control, and changing the feedback loop requires more than procedural reform. It demands narrative change within the social networks where ideas of belonging are first formed, and a commitment to ensuring that the lived experiences of contextual students at Durham are positive and affirming. Building stronger partnerships with schools can help shift these early perceptions, while amplifying the stories and experiences of students from diverse backgrounds can offer powerful, alternative points of identification. Applicants make decisions based not just on information, but on a deep, intuitive sense of whether a place feels like it’s for “people like us”. This cannot be achieved through admissions policy, strategy, or marketing alone. Institutions can also look to examples such as the University of Bristol, which has reshaped its entrant pool through doing exactly this. Their efforts have influenced not only who feels able to apply, but who can genuinely imagine themselves thriving within the institution, resulting in a gradual shift in their niche.

Proposal for new metrics

If we evaluate universities on metrics that assume they control demand, we will misread both the problem and the solution. In the short term, universities cannot determine who chooses to apply, but they can influence who feels confident enough to accept an offer, which may, as seen with Bristol, create gradual shifts in the entrant pool over time. Universities can and should work to broaden their niches, yet Organisational Ecology reminds us that institutions rarely move far from their point of peak appeal, meaning Durham’s niche is likely to remain relatively stable and only widen at the margins. Expecting rapid transformation would be like assuming a population adapted to the Arctic could swiftly relocate to the Caribbean. That’s not saying it’s not possible, but it is not fast. Any substantial change in who feels an affinity with Durham will likewise unfold slowly, as cultural experiences and social narratives evolve. In the meantime, improving the lived experience of contextual students, and seeing this reflected in rising conversion rates, is the most realistic and meaningful early sign of movement within the niche. This stability also means that proportion-based performance measures will continue to make the University appear as though it is underperforming, even when it is behaving exactly as expected within its ecological position. Durham has added complexities in that it will always occupy a relatively small share of the HE market because the physical constraints of Durham City limit expansion. This adds presents further broadening of the niche simply because they can’t change by admitting more students.

Therefore, metrics focused solely on broad institutional demand will never fully capture the dynamics of access or institutional “progress”. However, rising conversions – from offer to firm acceptance or offer to entry – among contextual students would signal a growing sense of fit, belonging, or affinity. And even if these students never form a majority, improving conversion is a meaningful and realistic way to measure widening participation progress, because it focuses on what an institution can actually influence, the student experience.

To take these social forces seriously, and to acknowledge that a healthy HE system depends on a diversity of institutions meeting the diverse needs of students, we need metrics that reflect audience attraction and demand dynamics. Current proportion-based measures, fail to capture these realities. Instead, I propose:

  • Because Russell Group institutions occupy a similar position in the Blau Space (they attract applicants with comparable social, cultural, and educational characteristics), organisational ecology theory suggests they compete in neighbouring overlapping niches. This means that isolated widening participation initiatives at a single institution may simply redistribute socially advantaged applicants across the group rather than increase diversity overall. Coordinated widening participation strategies across the Russell Group would therefore reduce competitive displacement and support genuine, sector-wide broadening of access.
  • Introduce regulatory metrics that reward successful conversion, for example offer-to-firm-acceptance rates for underrepresented groups, rather than focusing solely on offers or entrant proportions. This would bring cultural belonging into WP evaluation by capturing the fact that where these students accept an offer and enter, there is likely be a greater sense of affinity, a place where they feel they can “fit”, belong, and succeed.
  • Measure and report the impact of cross-institution outreach among universities with similar audience profiles, recognising that widening participation is driven by sector-level dynamics rather than isolated institutional efforts.
  • Track behavioural demand patterns (such as firm-choice decisions) across groups of institutions to reveal how social signalling influences applicant preferences.

The future of access lies in changing what we measure—and what we tell ourselves

Universities often feel they are held solely accountable for widening access, yet my research demonstrates that applicant perceptions, social networks, and systemic hierarchies play an equally powerful role. The most important conclusion of this research is that access outcomes are co-produced. Universities are not solely responsible for entrant composition; applicants are active agents whose perceptions and choices shape institutional realities. To make meaningful change, we need approaches that reflect this distributed responsibility. To make real progress, we must rethink both the metrics we prioritise and the narratives we reproduce.

Fair admissions processes matter – but without addressing the social dynamics shaping applicant behaviour, procedural fairness alone will never deliver equitable outcomes. By shifting the sector’s focus to behavioural metrics and narrative change, we can begin to challenge the feedback loops that sustain exclusivity and move toward a system where access is genuinely a collaborative effort.

Durham University may never appeal to more than a small share of the applicant pool, but perhaps the real measure of success is ensuring that those who do not fit the perceived mould feel confident enough to accept and enter. Ecosystems flourish through diversity, and so does HE; no single institution can – or should – meet every need. Our responsibility is to keep access fair, to reshape the narratives that limit choice, and to support those who want to join us to feel that they truly belong. In focusing on this conversion (from offer to entrant) we move toward a more honest and sustainable understanding of what widening participation success looks like. We cannot control the applicant pool, but we can influence the student experience, the narratives that spread through their networks, and their confidence in imagining themselves belonging here.

Dr Kate Ayres is a Chartered Management Accountant (CIMA) with a DBA from Durham University, where her research explored market niches and widening participation in UK HE through organisational ecology using quantitative methods. She has worked across finance, academic, and project management roles in UK Higher Education, including positions at Durham University and the University of Oxford. Kate currently serves as an Academic Mentor on the Senior Leaders Apprenticeship at Durham University Business School. Her work brings together analytical insight, organisational experience, and a commitment to improving HE culture. She also co-manages and sings with the Durham University Staff Chamber Choir, which she founded.


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Widely used but barely trusted: understanding student perceptions on the use of generative AI in higher education

by Carmen Cabrera and Ruth Neville

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools are rapidly transforming how university students learn, create and engage with knowledge. Powered by techniques such as neural network algorithms, these tools generate new content, including text, tables, computer code, images, audio and video, by learning patterns from existing data. The outputs are usually characterised by their close resemblance to human-generated content. While GAI shows great promise to improve the learning experience in various disciplines, its growing uptake also raises concerns about misuse, over-reliance and more generally, its impact on the learning process. In response, multiple UK HE institutions have issued guidance outlining acceptable use and warning against breaches of academic integrity. However, discussions about the role of GAI in the HE learning process have been led mostly by educators and institutions, and less attention has been given to how students perceive and use GAI.

Our recent study, published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, helps to address this gap by bringing student perspectives into the discussion. Drawing on a survey conducted in early 2024 with 132 undergraduate students from six UK universities, the study reveals an impactful paradox. Students are using GAI tools widely, and expect their use to increase, yet fewer than 25% regard its outputs as reliable. High levels of use therefore coexist with low levels of trust.

Using GAI without trusting it

At first glance, the widespread use of GAI among students might be taken as a sign of growing confidence in these tools. Yet, when students are asked about their perceptions on the reliability of GAI outputs, many express disagreement when asked if GAI could be considered a reliable source of knowledge. This apparent contradiction raises the question of why are students still using tools they do not fully trust? The answer lies in the convenience of GAI. Students are not necessarily using GAI because they believe it is accurate. They are using it because it is fast, accessible and can help them get started or work more efficiently. Our study suggests that perceived usefulness may be outweighing the students’ scepticism towards the reliability of outputs, as this scepticism does not seem to be slowing adoption. Nearly all student groups surveyed reported that they expect to continue using generative AI in the future, indicating that low levels of trust are unlikely to deter ongoing or increased use.

Not all perceptions are equal

While the “high use – low trust” paradox is evident across student groups, the study also reveals systematic differences in the adoption and perceptions of GAI by gender and by domicile status (UK v international students). Male and international students tend to report higher levels of both past and anticipated future use of GAI tools, and more permissive attitudes towards AI-assisted learning compared to female and UK-domiciled students. These differences should not necessarily be interpreted as evidence that some students are more ethical, critical or technologically literate than others. What we are likely seeing are responses to different pressures and contexts shaping how students engage with these tools. Particularly for international students, GAI can help navigate language barriers or unfamiliar academic conventions. In those circumstances, GAI may work as a form of academic support rather than a shortcut. Meanwhile, differences in attitudes by gender reflect wider patterns often observed on academic integrity and risk-taking, where female students often report greater concern about following rules and avoiding sanctions. These findings suggest that students’ engagement with GAI is influenced by their positionality within Higher Education, and not just by their individual attitudes.

Different interpretations of institutional guidance

Discrepancies by gender and domicile status go beyond patterns of use and trust, extending to how students interpret institutional guidance on generative AI. Most UK universities now publish policies outlining acceptable and unacceptable uses of GAI in relation to assessment and academic integrity, and typically present these rules as applying uniformly to all students. In practice, as evidenced by our study, students interpret these guidelines differently. UK-domiciled students, especially women, tend to adopt more cautious readings, sometimes treating permitted uses, such as using GAI for initial research or topic overviews, as potential misconduct. International students, by contrast, are more likely to express permissive or uncertain views, even in relation to practices that are more clearly prohibited. Shared rules do not guarantee shared understanding, especially if guidance is ambiguous or unevenly communicated. GAI is evolving faster than University policy, so addressing this unevenness in understanding is an urgent challenge for higher education.

Where does the ‘problem’ lie?

Students are navigating rapidly evolving technologies within assessment frameworks that were not designed with GAI in mind. At the same time, they are responding to institutional guidance that is frequently high-level, unevenly communicated and difficult to translate into everyday academic practice. Yet there is a tendency to treat GAI misuse as a problem stemming from individual student behaviour. Our findings point instead to structural and systemic issues shaping how students engage with these tools. From this perspective, variation in student behaviour could reflect the uneven inclusivity of current institutional guidelines. Even when policies are identical for all, the evidence indicates that they are not experienced in the same way across student groups, calling for a need to promote fairness and reduce differential risk at the institutional level.

These findings also have clear implications for assessment and teaching. Since students are already using GAI widely, assessment design needs to avoid reactive attempts to exclude GAI. A more effective and equitable approach may involve acknowledging GAI use where appropriate, supporting students to engage with it critically and designing learning activities that continue to cultivate critical thinking, judgement and communication skills. In some cases, this may also mean emphasising in-person, discussion-based or applied forms of assessment where GAI offers limited advantage. Equally, digital literacy initiatives need to go beyond technical competence. Students require clearer and more concrete examples of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable use of GAI in specific assessment contexts, as well as opportunities to discuss why these boundaries exist. Without this, institutions risk creating environments in which some students become too cautious in using GAI, while others cross lines they do not fully understand.

More broadly, policymakers and institutional leaders should avoid assuming a single student response to GAI. As this study shows, engagement with these tools is shaped by gender, educational background, language and structural pressures. Treating the student body as homogeneous risks reinforcing existing inequalities rather than addressing them. Public debate about GAI in HE frequently swings between optimism and alarm. This research points to a more grounded reality where students are not blindly trusting AI, but their use of it is increasing, sometimes pragmatically, sometimes under pressure. As GAI systems continue evolving, understanding how students navigate these tools in practice is essential to developing policies, assessments and teaching approaches that are both effective and fair.

You can find more information in our full research paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13603108.2025.2595453

Dr Carmen Cabrera is a Lecturer in Geographic Data Science at the Geographic Data Science Lab, within the University of Liverpool’s Department of Geography and Planning. Her areas of expertise are geographic data science, human mobility, network analysis and mathematical modelling. Carmen’s research focuses on developing quantitative frameworks to model and predict human mobility patterns across spatiotemporal scales and population groups, ranging from intraurban commutes to migratory movements. She is particularly interested in establishing methodologies to facilitate the efficient and reliable use of new forms of digital trace data in the study of human movement. Prior to her position as a Lecturer, Carmen completed a BSc and MSc in Physics and Applied Mathematics, specialising in Network Analysis. She then did a PhD at University College London (UCL), focussing on the development of mathematical models of social behaviours in urban areas, against the theoretical backdrop of agglomeration economies. After graduating from her PhD in 2021, she was a Research Fellow in Urban Mobility at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), at UCL, where she currently holds a honorary position.

Dr Ruth Neville is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL, working at the intersection of Spatial Data Science, Population Geography and Demography. Her PhD research considers the driving forces behind international student mobility into the UK, the susceptibility of student applications to external shocks, and forecasting future trends in applications using machine learning. Ruth has also worked on projects related to human mobility in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between internal displacement and climate change in the East and Horn of Africa, and displacement of Ukrainian refugees. She has a background in Political Science, Economics and Philosophy, with a particular interest in electoral behaviour.


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Reclaiming the academic community: why universities need more than metrics

by Sigurður Kristinsson

For decades, talk of “the academic community” has flowed easily through mission statements, strategy documents, and speeches from university leadership. Yet few stop to consider what this community is or why it matters. As universities increasingly orient themselves toward markets, rankings, and performance metrics, the gap between the ideal of academic community and the lived reality of academic work has widened. But this drift is not merely unfortunate; it threatens the very values that justify the existence of universities in the first place.

This blog explores why academic community is essential to higher education, how contemporary systems undermine it, and what a renewed vision of academic life might require.

What do we mean when we talk about “community”?

The word “community” can be used in two different senses. One is descriptive: communities are simply networks of people connected by place, shared interests or regular interaction. From this sociological standpoint, academic communities consist of overlapping groups (faculty, students, administrators, service professionals) brought together by institutional roles, disciplinary identities, or digital networks, perhaps experiencing a sense of belonging, solidarity, and shared purpose.

But in debates about the purpose and future of universities, “community” is often used in a normative sense: an ideal of how academics ought to relate to one another. In Humboldtian (1810) spirit, contemporary advocates like Fitzpatrick (2021, 2024) and Bennett (1998, 2003) envision academic community as a moral and intellectual culture grounded in shared purpose, generosity, intellectual hospitality, mutual respect, and the collective pursuit of knowledge. From this philosophical perspective, community is not just a cluster of networks to be analyzed empirically but a normative vision of how scholarly life becomes meaningful. This aspirational view stands in stark contrast to the conditions shaping many universities today.

The pressures pulling academic life apart

For several decades, developments in universities around the world have been hostile to academic community. While the precise mechanisms vary, academics report strikingly similar pressures: managerial oversight, performance auditing, intensifying competition, and the steady erosion of collegial structures and shared governance. Five threats to academic community are particularly worrisome:

Organisational (not occupational) professionalism

In her analysis of how managerial logic has co-opted the language of professionalism to justify top-down control in public institutions, Julia Evetts (2003, 2009, 2011) introduced a distinction between occupational and organisational professionalism. Occupational professionalism in academia implies membership in a self-governing community of experts committed to serving society through knowledge. Today, however, universities increasingly define professionalism in organisational terms: compliance with targets, performance indicators, and standardised procedures. The result is a hybrid system: academics retain some autonomy, but it is overshadowed by bureaucratic accountability structures that fragment communal relationships and discourage collective responsibility (Siekkinen et al, 2020).

Managerialism

Managerialism prizes measurable production outputs, standardized procedures, and vertical decision-making. As Metz (2017) argues, these mechanisms degrade communal relationships among academics as well as between them and managers, students, and wider society: decisions are imposed without consultation; bonus systems reward narrow indicators rather than communal priorities; and bureaucratic layers reduce opportunities for collegial dialogue. Managerialism replaces trust with surveillance and collegial judgment with quantification.

Individualism

The rise of competition – over publications, grants, rankings, and prestige – has amplified what Bennett (2003) called “insistent individualism.” Colleagues become rivals or useful instruments. Achievements become personal currency. In such settings, it is easy to see oneself not as part of a community pursuing shared goods but as an isolated producer of measurable outputs. This ethos erodes the solidarity and relationality necessary for any robust academic culture.

Retreat from academic citizenship

Academic citizenship refers to the contributions – committee work, mentoring, governance, public engagement – that sustain universities beyond research and teaching. Yet because these activities are difficult to measure and often unrewarded, they are increasingly neglected (Macfarlane, 2005; Feldt et al, 2024). This neglect fragments institutions and weakens the norms of shared responsibility that should hold academic life together.

Troubled collegiality

Collegiality includes participatory and collective decision-making, a presumption of shared values, absence of hierarchy, supportiveness, a shared commitment to a common good, trust beyond a typical workplace, and professional autonomy. It has long been central to academic identity but has become contested. Some experience collegial labor as invisible and unevenly distributed; others see managerial attempts to measure collegiality as just another way of disciplining staff. Efforts to quantify collegiality may correct some injustices but also risk instrumentalizing it, turning a relational ideal into a bureaucratic category (Craig et al, 2025; Fleming and Harley, 2024; Gavin et al, 2023).

Across all these pressures, a common thread emerges: the forces shaping contemporary academia weaken the relationships required for intellectual work to flourish.

Why academic community matters

If community is eroding, why should we care? The answer lies in the link between community and the values that higher education claims to serve. A helpful framework comes from value theory, which distinguishes between instrumental, constitutive, and intrinsic goods.

Community as instrumentally valuable

Academic community helps produce the outcomes universities care about: research breakthroughs, learning, intellectual development, and democratic engagement. Collaboration makes research stronger. Peer support helps people grow. Shared norms encourage integrity, rigor, and creativity. Without community, academic values become harder to realize.

Community as constitutive of academic values

In many cases, community is not merely a helpful means but a necessary constituent. Scientific knowledge, as philosophers of science like Merton (1979) and Longino (1990) have long emphasized, is inherently social: it requires communal critique, peer review, and collective norms to distinguish knowledge from error. Learning, too, is fundamentally relational, as Vygotsky (1978) and Dewey (1916) argued. You cannot have science or education without community.

Community as intrinsically valuable

Beyond producing useful outcomes, community enriches human life. Belonging, shared purpose, and intellectual companionship are deeply fulfilling. Academic community offers a sense of identity, meaning, and solidarity that transcends individual achievement (Metz, 2017). In this sense, community contributes directly to human flourishing.

How community shapes academic life

Several examples show how academic values depend on community in practice:

Debates about educational values

The pursuit of academic values requires reflection on their meaning. Interpretive arguments about values like autonomy, virtue, or justice in education contribute to conversations that presuppose the collective norms of academic community (Nussbaum, 2010; Ebels-Duggan, 2015). These debates require shared standards of reasoning, openness to critique, and a shared commitment to better understanding.

Scientific knowledge and academic freedom

No individual can produce knowledge alone. Scientific communities ensure that discoveries are evaluated, replicated, and integrated into a larger body of understanding. Likewise, academic freedom is not a personal privilege but a communal norm that protects open inquiry (Calhoun, 2009; Frímannsson et al, 2022). It depends on solidarity among scholars.

Teaching as communal practice

Education flourishes in relational settings. Classrooms become communities in which teachers and students jointly pursue understanding. Weithman (2015) describes this as “academic friendship” – a form of companionship that expands imagination, fosters intellectual virtues, and shapes future citizens.

Across these cases, community is not optional; it is essential to academic values.

Rebuilding scademic community: structural and cultural change

Given its importance, how might universities cultivate stronger academic communities?

Structural reform

Universities should try to resist the dominance of market logic. Sector-wide policy changes could help rebalance priorities. Hiring, promotion, and reward systems should value teaching, service, mentorship, and public engagement rather than focusing exclusively on quantifiable research metrics. Without structural support, cultural change will be difficult.

Cultural renewal

A healthier academic culture requires a different mindset—one that foregrounds generosity, relationality, and shared purpose. In Generous Thinking, Fitzpatrick (2021) argues that building real community requires humility, conversation, listening, and collaboration. Community cannot be mandated; it must be practised.

This requires academics to challenge competitive individualism, share work equitably, strengthen trust and dialogue, and reimagine collegiality as a lived practice rather than a managerial tool. Most importantly, it requires us to recognize ourselves as fundamentally relational beings whose professional purpose is intertwined with others.

A moral case for academic community

Academic community is not only epistemically valuable; it is morally significant. Relational moral theories argue that human flourishing depends on identity and solidarity. We become the moral human beings we are through our communal relationships (Metz, 2021).

Applying this to academia reveals that collegiality is grounded in shared identity and shared ends. Since the moral obligations created by academic relationships remain professional, collegial community does not require intrusive intimacy. Far from suppressing dissent or professional autonomy, solidarity requires defending academic freedom and academic values generally.

A relational understanding of morality thus implies that the ideal of academic community promises not only a more fulfilling and coherent sense of occupational purpose, but also a way of relating to others that is more satisfying morally than the current environment individualistic competition.

Conclusion: the future depends on community

Universities today face an existential challenge. In the rush to satisfy markets, rankings, and managerial demands, they risk undermining the very relationships that make academic life meaningful. Academic community is not a nostalgic ideal; it is the cornerstone of learning, knowledge, virtue, and human flourishing.

If higher education is to reclaim a sense of purpose, it must begin by cultivating the social and moral conditions in which genuine community can grow. This requires structural reforms, cultural renewal, and a shared commitment to relational values. Without such efforts, universities will continue drifting toward fragmentation, losing sight of the goods they exist to protect.

Rebuilding academic community is not merely desirable. It is necessary – for the integrity of scholarship, for the flourishing of those who work within universities, and for the public good that higher education is meant to serve.

Sigurður Kristinsson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Akureyri, Iceland. His research applies moral and political philosophy in various contexts of professional practice, increasingly intersecting with the philosophy of higher education with emphasis on the social and democratic role of universities.


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Reflective teaching: the “small shifts” that quietly change everything

by Yetunde Kolajo

If you’ve ever left a lecture thinking “That didn’t land the way I hoped” (or “That went surprisingly well – why?”), you’ve already stepped into reflective teaching. The question is whether reflection remains a private afterthought … or becomes a deliberate practice that improves teaching in real time and shapes what we do next.

In Advancing pedagogical excellence through reflective teaching practice and adaptation I explored reflective teaching practice (RTP) in a first-year chemistry context at a New Zealand university, asking a deceptively simple question: How do lecturers’ teaching philosophies shape what they actually do to reflect and adapt their teaching?

What the study did

I interviewed eight chemistry lecturers using semi-structured interviews, then used thematic analysis to examine two connected strands: (1) teaching concepts/philosophy and (2) lecturer-student interaction. The paper distinguishes between:

  • Reflective Teaching (RT): the broader ongoing process of critically examining your teaching.
  • Reflective Teaching Practice (RTP): the day-to-day strategies (journals, feedback loops, peer dialogue, etc) that make reflection actionable.

Reflection is uneven and often unsystematic

A striking finding is that not all lecturers consistently engaged in reflective practices, and there wasn’t clear evidence of a shared, structured reflective culture across the teaching team. Some lecturers could articulate a teaching philosophy, but this didn’t always translate into a repeatable reflection cycle (before, during, and after teaching). I  framed this using Dewey and Schön’s well-known reflection stages:

  • Reflection-for-action (before teaching): planning with intention
  • Reflection-in-action (during teaching): adjusting as it happens
  • Reflection-on-action (after teaching): reviewing to improve next time

Even where lecturers were clearly committed and experienced, reflection could still become fragmented, more like “minor tweaks” than a consistent, evidence-informed practice.

The real engine of reflection: lecturer-student interaction

Interaction isn’t just a teaching technique – it’s a reflection tool.

Student questions, live confusion, moments of silence, a sudden “Ohhh!” – these are data. In the study, the clearest examples of reflection happening during teaching came from lecturers who intentionally built in interaction (eg questioning strategies, pausing for problem-solving).

One example stands out: Denise’s in-class quiz is described as the only instance that embodied all three reflection components using student responses to gauge understanding, adapting support during the activity, and feeding insights forward into later planning.

Why this matters right now in UK HE

UK higher education is navigating increasing diversity in student backgrounds, expectations, and prior learning alongside sharper scrutiny of teaching quality and inclusion. In that context, reflective teaching isn’t “nice-to-have CPD”; it’s a way of ensuring our teaching practices keep pace with learners’ needs, not just disciplinary content.

The paper doesn’t argue for abandoning lectures. Instead, it shows how reflective practice can help lecturers adapt within lecture-based structures especially through purposeful interaction that shifts students from passive listening toward more active/constructive engagement (drawing on engagement ideas such as ICAP).

Three “try this tomorrow” reflective moves (small, practical, high impact)

  1. Plan one interaction checkpoint (not ten). Add a single moment where you must learn something from students (a hinge question, poll, mini-problem, or “explain it to a partner”). Use it as reflection-for-action.
  1. Name your in-the-moment adjustment. When you pivot (slow down, re-explain, swap an example), briefly acknowledge it: “I’m noticing this is sticky – let’s try a different route.” That’s reflection-in-action made visible.
  1. End with one evidence-based note to self. Not “Went fine.” Instead: “35% missed X in the quiz – next time: do Y before Z.” That’s reflection-on-action you can actually reuse.

Questions to spark conversation (for you or your teaching team)

  • Where does your teaching philosophy show up most clearly: content coverage, student confidence, relevance, or interaction?
  • Which “data” do you trust most: NSS/module evaluation, informal comments, in-class responses, attainment patterns and why?

If your programme is team-taught, what would a shared reflective framework look like in practice (so reflection isn’t isolated and inconsistent)?

If reflective teaching is the intention, this article is the nudge: make reflection visible, structured, and interaction-led, so adaptation becomes a habit, not a heroic one-off.

Dr Yetunde Kolajo is a Student Success Research Associate at the University of Kent. Her research examines pedagogical decision-making in higher education, with a focus on students’ learning experiences, critical thinking and decolonising pedagogies. Drawing on reflective teaching practice, she examines how inclusive and reflective teaching frameworks can enhance student success.


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Collegiality and competition in German Centres of Excellence

by Lautaro Vilches

Collegiality, although threatened by increasing competitive pressures and described as a slippery and elastic concept, remains a powerful ideal underpinning academic and intellectual practices. Drawing on two empirical studies, this blog examines the relationships between collegiality and competition in Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in Germany. These CoEs are conceptualised as a quasi-departmental new university model that contrasts with the ‘university of chairs’, which characterises the old Humboldtian university model, organised around chairs led by professors. Hence my research question: How do academics experience collegiality, and how does it relate to competition, within CoEs in the SSH?

In 2006, the government launched the Excellence Strategy (then known as the Excellence Initiative), which includes a scheme providing long-term funding for Centres of Excellence. Notably, this scheme extends beyond the traditionally more collaborative Natural Sciences, to encompass the Social Sciences and Humanities. Germany, therefore, offers a unique case to explore transformations of collegiality amidst co-existing and overlapping university models. What, then, are the key features of these models?

In the old model of the ‘university of chairs’ the chair constitutes the central organisational unit of the university, with each one led by a single professor. Central to this model is the idea of collegial leadership according to which professors govern the university autonomously, a practice that can be traced back to the old scholastic guild of the Middle Ages. During the eighteenth century, German universities underwent a process of modernisation influenced by Renaissance ideals, culminating in the establishment of University of Berlin in Prussia in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt. By the late nineteenth century, the Humboldtian model of the university had become highly influential, as it offered an organisational template in which the ideals of academic autonomy, academic freedom and the  integration of research and teaching were institutionalised.

Within the university of chairs, collegiality is effectively ‘contained’ and enacted within individual chairs. In this structure, professors have no formal superiors and academic staff are directly subordinate to a single professor (as chair holder) – not an institute or faculty. As a result, the university of chairs is characterised by several small and steep hierarchies.

In recent decades – alongside the rise of the United States as the hegemonic power – the Anglo-American departmental model spread across the world, a shift that is associated with the entrepreneurial transformation of universities as they respond to growing competitive pressures.

Remarkably, CoEs in the SSH in Germany are organised as ‘quasi-departments’ resembling a multidisciplinary Anglo-American department. They are very large in comparison with other collaborative grants, often comprising more than 100 affiliated researchers. They are structured around several ‘Research Areas’ and led by 25 Principal Investigators (mostly professors) who must agree on the implementation of the multidisciplinary and integrated research programme on which the CoE is based.

The historical implications of this new model cannot be overstated. CoEs appear to operate as Trojan horses: cloaked in the prestige of excellence, they have introduced a fundamentally different organisational model into the German university of chairs, an institution that has endured over centuries.

Against the backdrop of these two models, what are the implications for collegiality and its relation to competition? A few clarifications are necessary. First, much of the research on collegiality has focused on governance, ignoring that collegiality is also practised ‘on the ground’. Here, I will define collegiality (a) as form of ‘leadership and governance’, involving relations among leaders as well as interactions between leaders and those they govern; (b) as an ‘intellectual practice’ that can be best observed in the enactments of collaborative research; and (c) as a form of ‘citizenship’, involving practices that signify belonging to the CoE and its academic community.

Second, adopting this broader understanding requires acknowledging that collegiality is not only experienced by professors (in governing collegialy the university) but also by the ‘invisible’ academic demos, namely Early Career Researchers (ECRs). Although often employed in precarious positions, ECRS are nonetheless significant members of the academic community, in particular in CoEs, which explicitly prioritise the training of ECRs as a core objective. Whilst ECRs are committed full time to the CoE and sustain much of its collaborative research activity, professors remain simultaneously bound to the duties of their respective positions as chairs.

A third clarification concerns our normative assumptions underpinning collegiality and its relationship to competition. Collegiality is sometimes idealised as an unambiguously positive value and practice in academia, whilst competition – in contrast – is seen as a threat to collegiality. However, this idealised depiction tends to underplay, for example, the role of hierarchies in academia and often invokes an indeterminate past – perhaps somewhere in the 1960s – when universities were governed autonomously by male professors and generously funded through block grants – largely protected from competition pressures or external scrutiny.

These contextual conditions have evidently changed over recent decades: competition, both at institutional and individual terms, has intensified in academia, and CoE schemes exemplify this shift. CoE members, especially ECRs, are therefore embedded in multiple and overlapping competitions: at the institutional level through the CoE’s race for excellence; and at the individual level, through the competition for getting a position in the CoE, as well as for grants, publications, and networks necessary for career advancement.

How are collegiality and competition intertwined in the CoE? I identify three complex dynamics:

  • ‘The temporal flourishing of intellectual collegiality’ refers to the blooming of collegiality as part of the collaborative research work in the CoE. ECRs describe extensive engagement in organising, leading or co-leading research seminars (alongside PIs or other postdoctoral researchers), co-editing books, developing digital collaborative platforms, inviting researchers from abroad to join the CoE or organising and participating in informal meetings. Within this dynamic, competition is presented as being located ‘outside’ the CoE, temporarily deactivated. However, at the same time, ECRs remain aware of the omnipresence of competition, which ultimately threatens collegial collaboration when career paths, research topics or publications begin to converge. For this reason, intellectual collegiality and competition stand in an exclusionary relationship.
  • ‘The rise of CoE citizenship for the institutional race of excellence’ captures the strong sense of engagement and commitment shown by ECRs (but also professors) towards the CoE. It is expressed through initiatives aimed at enhancing the CoE’s collective research performance, particularly in anticipation of competition for renewed excellence funding. This dynamic reveals that, for the CoE, citizenship and institutional competition are not oppositional but complementary, as collective engagement is mobilised in the service of competitive success.
  • ‘Collegial leadership adapting to multiple competitions’ highlights the plurality of leadership modes, each one responding to different levels and forms of competition. At the level of professors and decision-making processes at the top, traditional collegial governance is ‘overstretched’. Although professors retain full authority, they struggle to reach consensus and to lead these large multidisciplinary centres effectively. This suggests a growing demand for new skills more closely associated with the figure of an academic manager than a professor. The institutional race for excellence thus places considerable strain on collegial governance rooted in the chair-based system. Accordingly, ECRs describe different and, apparently, contradictory modes of collegial leadership. For example, the ‘laissez faire’ mode aligns with the ideals of freedom and autonomy underpinning intellectual collegiality, but also with competition among individuals. They also describe leadership as ‘impositions’, which, on the one hand, erodes trust in professors and decision-making, but, on the other hand, intersects with notions of citizenship that compel ECRs to accept decisions, even when imposed. Yet many ECRs value and expect a more ‘inclusive leadership’ that support the development of intellectual collegiality. Overall, the relationship between collegial leadership and competition is heterogeneous and adaptive, closely intertwined with the preceding dynamics.

How, then, can these dynamics be interpreted together? Overall, the findings suggest that differences between university models matter profoundly for collegiality. Expectations regarding how academics collaborate, participate in governance and decision-making processes and form intellectual communities are embedded in specific institutional contexts.

Regarding the relation between collegiality and competition, I suggest two contrasting interpretations. The first emphasises the flourishing of intellectual collegiality and the emergence of CoE citizenship, understood as a collective, multidisciplinary sense of belonging that is driven by – and complementary to – the institutional race for excellence. The second interpretation, however, views this flourishing as a temporal illusion. From this perspective, competition is omnipresent and stands in a fundamentally exclusionary relationship to collegiality: it threatens intellectual collaboration even when temporarily deactivated; it compels academics to engage in CoE-related work they may not intrinsically value; and it overstretches traditional forms of collegial leadership, promoting managerial modes that erode trust in both academic judgement and decision-making processes. Viewed in this light, competition ultimately poses a threat to collegiality. These rival interpretations may uneasily coexist, and the second one possibly predominates. More research is needed on how organisational contexts affect the relationship between collegiality and competition.

Lautaro Vilches is a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and a consultant in higher education. His current research examines the implications of excellence schemes for transforming universities’ organisational arrangements and their effects on academic practices such as collegiality, academic mobility and research collaboration, particularly in the Social Sciences and Humanities. As a consultant he advises universities on advancing strategic change.


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Walk on by: the dilemma of the blind eye

by Dennis Sherwood

Forty years on…

I don’t remember much about my experiences at work some forty-odd years ago, but one event I recall vividly is the discussion provoked by a case study at a training event. The case was simple, just a few lines:

Sam was working late one evening, and happened to walk past Pat’s office. The door was closed, but Sam could hear Pat being very abusive to Alex. Some ten minutes later, Sam saw Alex sobbing.

What might Sam do?

What should Sam do?

Quite a few in the group said “nothing”, on the grounds that whatever was going on was none of Sam’s business. Maybe Pat had good grounds to be angry with Alex and if the local culture was, let’s say, harsh, what’s the problem? Nor was there any evidence that Alex’s sobbing was connected with Pat – perhaps something else had happened in the intervening time.

Others thought that the least could Sam do was to ask if Alex was OK, and offer some comfort – a suggestion countered by the “it’s a tough world” brigade.

The central theme of the conversation was then all about culture. Suppose the culture was supportive and caring. Pat’s behaviour would be out of order, even if Pat was angry, and even if Alex had done something Pat had regarded as wrong.

So what might – and indeed should – Sam do?

Should Sam should confront Pat? Or inform Pat’s boss?

What if Sam is Pat’s boss? In that case then, yes, Sam should confront Pat: failure to do so would condone bad behaviour, which in this culture, would be a ‘bad thing’.

But if Sam is not Pat’s boss, things are much more tricky. If Sam is subordinate to Pat, confrontation is hardly possible. And informing Pat’s boss could be interpreted as snitching or trouble-making. Another possibility is that Sam and Pat are peers, giving Sam ‘the right’ to confront Pat – but only if peer-to-peer honesty and mutual pressure is ‘allowed’. Which it might not be, for many, even benign, cultures are in reality networks of mutual ‘non-aggression treaties’, in which ‘peers’ are monarchs in their own realms – so Sam might deliberately choose to turn a blind eye to whatever Pat might be doing, for fear of setting a precedent that would allow Pat, or indeed Ali or Chris, to poke their noses into Sam’s own domain.

And if Sam is in a different part of the organisation – or indeed from another organisation altogether – then maybe Sam’s safest action is back where we started. To do nothing. To walk on by.

Sam is a witness to Pat’s bad behaviour. Does the choice to ‘walk on by’ make Sam complicit too, albeit at arm’s length?

I’ve always thought that this case study, and its implications, are powerful – which is probably why I’ve remembered it over so long a time.

The truth about GCSE, AS and A level grades in England

I mention it here because it is relevant to the main theme of this blog – a theme that, if you read it, makes you a witness too. Not, of course, to ‘Pat’s’ bad behaviour, but to another circumstance which, in my opinion, is a great injustice doing harm to many people – an injustice that ‘Pat’ has got away with for many years now, not only because ‘Pat’s peers’ have turned a blind eye – and a deaf ear too – but also because all others who have known about it have chosen to ‘walk on by’.

The injustice of which I speak is the fact that about one GCSE, AS and A level grade in every four, as awarded in England, is wrong, and has been wrong for years. Not only that: in addition, the rules for appeals do not allow these wrong grades to be discovered and corrected. So the wrong grades last for ever, as does the damage they do.

To make that real, in August 2025, some 6.5 million grades were awarded, of which around 1.6 million were wrong, with no appeal. That’s an average of about one wrong grade ‘awarded’ to every candidate in the land.

Perhaps you already knew all that. But if you didn’t, you do now. As a consequence, like Sam in that case study, you are a witness to wrong-doing.

It’s important, of course, that you trust the evidence. The prime source is Ofqual’s November 2018 report, Marking Consistency Metrics – An update, which presents the results of an extensive research project in which very large numbers of GCSE, AS and A level scripts were in essence marked twice – once by an ‘assistant’ examiner (as happens in ‘ordinary’ marking each year), and again by a subject senior examiner, whose academic judgement is the ultimate authority, and whose mark, and hence grade, is deemed ‘definitive’, the arbiter of ‘right’.

Each script therefore had two marks and two grades, enabling those grades to be compared. If they were the same, then the ‘assistant’ examiner’s grade – the grade that is on the candidate’s certificate – corresponds to the senior examiner’s ‘definitive’ grade, and is therefore ‘right’; if the two grades are different, then the assistant examiner’s grade is necessarily ‘non-definitive’, or, in plain English, wrong.

You might have thought that the number of ‘non-definitive’/wrong grades would be small and randomly distributed across subjects. In fact, the key results are shown on page 21 of Ofqual’s report as Figure 12, reproduced here:

Figure 1: Reproduction of Ofqual’s evidence concerning the reliability of school exam grades

To interpret this chart, I refer to this extract from the report’s Executive Summary:

The probability of receiving the ‘definitive’ qualification grade varies by qualification and subject, from 0.96 (a mathematics qualification) to 0.52 (an English language and literature qualification).

This states that 96% of Maths grades (all varieties, at all levels), as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right, as are 52% of those for Combined English Language and Literature (a subject available only at A level). Accordingly, by implication, 4% of Maths grades, and 48% of English Language and Literature grades, are ‘non-definitive’/wrong. Maths grades, as awarded, can therefore be regarded as 96% reliable; English Language and Literature grades as 52% reliable.

Scrutiny of the chart will show that the heavy black line in the upper blue box for Maths maps onto about 0.96 on the horizontal axis; the equivalent line for English Language and Literature maps onto 0.56. The measures of the reliability of the grades for each of the other subjects are designated similarly. Ofqual’s report does not give any further numbers, but Table 1 shows my estimates from Ofqual’s Figure 12:

 Probability of
 ‘Definitive’ grade‘Non-definitive’ grade
Maths (all varieties)96%4%
Chemistry92%8%
Physics88%12%
Biology85%15%
Psychology78%22%
Economics74%26%
Religious Studies66%34%
Business Studies66%34%
Geography65%35%
Sociology63%37%
English Language61%39%
English Literature58%42%
History56%44%
Combined English Language and Literature (A level only)52%48%

Table 1: My estimates of the reliability of school exam grades, as inferred from measurements of Ofqual’s Figure 12.

Ofqual’s report does not present any corresponding information for each of GCSE, AS or A level separately, nor any analysis by exam board. Also absent is a measure of the all-subject overall average. Given, however, the maximum value of 96%, and the minimum of 52%, the average is likely to be somewhere in the middle, say, in the seventies; in fact, if each subject is weighted by its cohort, the resulting average over the 14 subjects shown is about 74%. Furthermore, if other subjects – such as French, Spanish, Computing, Art… – are taken into consideration, the overall average is most unlikely to be greater than 82% or less than 66%, suggesting that an overall average reliability of 75% for all subjects is a reasonable estimate.

That’s the evidence that, across all subjects and levels, about 75% of grades, as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right and 25% – one in four – are ‘non-definitive’/wrong – evidence that has been in the public domain since 2018. But evidence that has been much disputed by those with vested interests.

Ofqual’s results are readily explained. We all know that different examiners can, legitimately, give the same answer (slightly) different marks. As a result, the script’s total mark might lie on different sides of a grade boundary, depending on who did the marking. Only one grade, however, is ‘definitive’.

Importantly, there are no errors in the marking studied by Ofqual – in fact, Ofqual’s report mentions ‘marking error’ just once, and then in a rather different context. All the grading discrepancies measured in Ofqual’s research are therefore attributable solely to legitimate differences in academic opinion. And since the range of legitimate marks is far narrower in subjects such as Maths and Physics, as compared to English Literature and History, then the probability that an ‘assistant’ examiner’s legitimate mark might result in a ‘non-definitive’ grade will be much higher for, say, History as compared to Physics. Hence the sequence of subjects in Ofqual’s Figure 12.

As regards appeals, in 2016, Ofqual – in full knowledge of the results of this research (see paragraph 28 of this Ofqual Board Paper, dated 18 November 2015) – changed the rules, requiring that a grade can be changed only if a ‘review of marking’ discovers a ‘marking error’. To quote an Ofqual ‘news item’ of 26 May 2016:

Exam boards must tell examiners who review results that they should not change marks unless there is a clear marking error. …It is not fair to allow some students to have a second bite of the cherry by giving them a higher mark on review, when the first mark was perfectly appropriate. This undermines the hard work and professionalism of markers, most of whom are teachers themselves. These changes will mean a level-playing field for all students and help to improve public confidence in the marking system.

This assumes that the legitimate marks given by different examiners are all equally “appropriate”, and identical in every way.

This assumption. however, is false: if one of those marks corresponds to the ‘definitive’ grade, and another to a ‘non-definitive’ grade, they are not identical at all. Furthermore, as already mentioned, there is hardly any mention of marking errors in Ofqual’s November 2018 report. All the grade discrepancies they identified can therefore only be attributable to legitimate differences in academic opinion, and so cannot be discovered and corrected by the rules that have been in place since 2016.

Over to you…

So, back to that case study.

Having read this far, like Sam, you have knowledge of wrong-doing – not Pat tearing a strip off Alex, but Ofqual awarding some 1.5 million wrong grades every year. All with no right of appeal.

What are you going to do?

You’re probably thinking something like, “Nothing”, “It’s not my job”, “It’s not my problem”, “I’m in no position to do anything, even if I wanted to”.

All of which I understand. No, it’s certainly not your job. And it’s not your problem directly, in that it’s not you being awarded the wrong grade. But it might be your problem indirectly – if you are involved with admissions, and if grades play a material role, you may be accepting a student who is not fully qualified (in that the grade on the certificate might be too high), or – perhaps worse – rejecting a student who is (in that the grade on the certificate is too low). Just to make that last point real, about one candidate in every six with a certificate showing AAA for A level Physics, Chemistry and Biology in fact truly merited at least one B. If such a candidate took a place at Med School, for example, not only is that candidate under-qualified, but a place has also been denied to a candidate with a certificate showing AAB but who merited AAA.

And although you, as an individual, are indeed not is a position to do anything about it, you, collectively, surely are.

HE is, by far, the largest and most important user of A levels. And relying on a ‘product’ that is only about 75% reliable. HE, collectively, could put significant pressure on Ofqual to fix this, if only by printing “OFQUAL WARNING: THE GRADES ON THIS CERTIFICATE ARE ONLY RELIABLE, AT BEST, TO ONE GRADE EITHER WAY” on every certificate – not my statement, but one made by Ofqual’s then Chief Regulator, Dame Glenys Stacey, in evidence to the 2 September 2020 hearing of the Education Select Committee, and in essence equivalent to the fact that about one grade in four is wrong. That would ensure that everyone is aware of the fact that any decision, based on a grade as shown on a certificate, is intrinsically unsafe.

But this – or some other solution – can happen only if your institution, along with others, were to act accordingly. And that can happen only if you, and your colleagues, band together to influence your department, your faculty, your institution.

Yes, that is a bother. Yes, you do have other urgent things to do.

If you do nothing, nothing will happen.

But if you take action, you can make a difference.

Don’t just walk on by.

Dennis Sherwood is a management consultant with a particular interest in organisational cultures, creativity and systems thinking. Over the last several years, Dennis has also been an active campaigner for the delivery of reliable GCSE, AS and A level grades. If you enjoyed this, you might also like https://srheblog.com/tag/sherwood/.


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Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

by Ourania Filippakou

Across global higher education, the terms of justice, equality and inclusion are being rewritten. In recent years, the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States (Spitalniak, 2025) has unfolded alongside a global resurgence of anti-gender, ultra-nationalist, racialised and colonial politics (Brechenmacher, 2025). At the same time, the rise of authoritarian and far-right ideologies, together with deepening socioeconomic inequalities fuelled by an ascendant billionaire class (Klein and Taylor, 2025) and the growing portrayal of feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism (Pitts-Taylor and Wood, 2025), signal a profound shift in the rationalities shaping the politics of higher education. These developments do not reject inclusion; they refashion it. Equality becomes excess, dissent is recast as disorder, and inclusion is reconstituted as a technology of governance.

This conjuncture, what Stuart Hall (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2010, p57) would call the alignment of economic, political and cultural forces, requires a vocabulary capable of capturing continuity and rupture. It also reflects the deepening crisis of neoliberalism, whose governing logics become more coercive as their legitimacy wanes (Beckert, 2025; Menand, 2023). As Hall reminds us, ‘a conjuncture is a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions… or as Althusser said ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’’ (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2012, p57). A conjuncture, in this sense, does not resolve crisis but produces new configurations of ideological coherence and institutional control. In my recent article, ‘Managed Inclusion and the Politics of Erasure: Gender Governance in Higher Education under Neoliberal Authoritarianism’ (Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 2025), I theorise these developments as a global grammar of illiberal inclusion: a political rationality that appropriates the language of equity while disabling its redistributive, democratic and epistemic force. The article develops a typology of symbolic, technocratic and transformative inclusion to examine how feminist, anti-caste and critical vocabularies are increasingly absorbed into systems of civility, visibility and procedural control. Transformative inclusion, the configuration most aligned with redistribution, dissent and epistemic plurality, is the one most forcefully neutralised.

Across geopolitical contexts, from postcolonial states to liberal democracies, gender inclusion is increasingly appropriated not as a demand for justice but as a mechanism of control. The techniques of co-option vary, yet they consolidate into a shared political rationality in which equity is stripped of redistributive force and redeployed to affirm institutional legitimacy, nationalist virtue and market competitiveness. This is not a rupture with neoliberal governance but its intensification through more disciplinary and exclusionary forms. For example, in India, the National Education Policy 2020 invokes empowerment while enacting epistemic erasure, systematically marginalising the knowledges of women from subordinated caste, class and religious communities (Peerzada et al, 2024; Patil, 2023; Singh, 2023). At the same time, state-led campaigns such as Beti Bachao elevate women’s visibility only within ideals of modesty and nationalist virtue (Chhachhi, 2020). In Hungary, the 2018 ban on gender studies aligned higher education with labour-market imperatives and nationalist agendas (Barát, 2022; Zsubori, 2018). In Turkey, reforms under Erdoğan consolidate patriarchal norms while constraining feminist organising (Zihnioğlu and Kourou, 2025). Here, gender inclusion is tolerated only when it reinforces state agendas and restricts dissent.

Elsewhere, inclusion is recast as ideological deviance. In the United States, the Trump-era rollback of DEI initiatives and reproductive rights has weaponised inclusion as a spectre of radicalism, disproportionately targeting racialised and LGBTQ+ communities (Amnesty International, 2024; Chao-Fong, 2025). In Argentina, Milei abolished the Ministry of Women, describing feminism as fiscally irresponsible (James, 2024). In Italy, Meloni’s government invokes ‘traditional values’ to erode anti-discrimination frameworks (De Giorgi et al, 2023, p.v11i1.6042). In these cases, inclusion is not merely neutralised but actively vilified, its political charge reframed as cultural threat.

Even when inclusion is celebrated, it is tethered to respectability and moral legibility. In France, femonationalist discourses instrumentalise gender equality to legitimise anti-Muslim policy (Farris, 2012; Möser, 2022). In Greece, conservative statecraft reframes inclusion through familialist narratives while dismantling equality infrastructures (Bempeza, 2025). These patterns reflect a longer political repertoire in which authoritarian and ultra-nationalist projects mobilise idealised domestic femininity to naturalise social hierarchies. As historian Diana Garvin (Garvin quoted in Matei, 2025) notes, ‘what fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses’, with contemporary ‘womanosphere’ influencers in the US reviving fantasies of domestic bliss that obscure intensified gendered precarity (Matei, 2025).

Such gendered constructions coexist with escalating violence. More than 50.000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024, which means one woman or girl was killed every ten minutes, or 137 every day, according to the latest UNODC and UN Women femicide report (UNODC/UN Women, 2025). This sits within a wider continuum of harm: 83.000 women and girls were intentionally killed last year, and the report finds no sign of real progress. It also highlights a steep rise in digital violence, including harassment, stalking, gendered disinformation and deepfakes, which increasingly spills into offline contexts and contributes to more lethal forms of harm. These global patterns intersect with regional crises. For example, more than 7.000 women were killed in India in gender-related violence in 2022 (NCRB, 2023); eleven women are murdered daily in femicides across Latin America (NU CEPAL, 2024). At the same time, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate cultivate transnational publics organised around misogyny (Adams, 2025; Wescott et al, 2024). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2025) warns: ‘Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny’.

These global pressures reverberate across institutions that have historically positioned themselves as democratic spaces, including universities, which increasingly recast gender equity as a reputational risk or cultural flashpoint rather than a democratic obligation (D’Angelo et al, 2024; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023). Equity becomes an emblem of modernity to be audited, displayed and curated, rather than a demand for justice. Ahmed’s (2012) theorisation of non-performativity is essential here: institutions declare commitments to equality precisely to contain the transformations such commitments would require. In this context, symbolic and technocratic inclusion flourish, while the structural conditions for transformative inclusion continue to narrow.

These shifts reflect broader political and economic formations. Brown (2015) shows how neoliberal reason converts justice claims into performance demands, hollowing out democratic vocabularies. Fraser’s (2017) account of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ illuminates the terrain in which market liberalism coupled with selective diversity politics absorbs emancipatory discourse while preserving inequality. Patnaik (2021) argues that the rise of neofascism is a political necessity for neoliberalism in crisis, as rights are redefined as privileges and inclusion is repurposed to stabilise inequality. In this conjuncture, these tendencies intensify into what Giroux (2018, 2021, 2022a) names ‘neoliberal fascism’, a formation structured by three interlocking fundamentalisms: a market fundamentalism that commodifies all aspects of life, a religious fundamentalism that moralises inequality; and a regime of manufactured ignorance and militarised illiteracy that discredits critical thought and erases historical memory (Giroux 2022b, p48-54).

The United States now offers a further manifestation of this global pattern, illustrating how attacks on DEI can function as a broader assault on higher education. As recent analyses of US politics show, the first and particularly the second Trump administration is actively modelling itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal statecraft, centralising executive power, purging public institutions and mobilising ‘family values’ and anti-‘woke’ politics to reshape education and media governance (Giroux, 2017; Smith, 2025; Kauffmann, 2025). The dismantling of DEI under the Trump administration, framed as a defence of merit, free speech and fiscal responsibility (The White House, 2025), marks the beginning of a wider attempt to consolidate political influence over higher education. Executive orders targeting DEI have been followed by lawsuits, funding withdrawals and intensified federal scrutiny, prompting universities such as Michigan, Columbia and Chicago to scale back equality infrastructures, cut programmes and reduce humanities provision (cf Bleiler, 2025; Pickering, Cosgrove and Massel, 2025; Quinn, 2025). These developments do not simply eliminate DEI; they position anti-gender politics as a mechanism of disciplining universities, narrowing intellectual autonomy and extending political control over academic life. They exemplify wider global tendencies in which inclusion becomes a field through which illiberal projects consolidate authority. The assault on DEI is thus not a uniquely American phenomenon but part of a broader authoritarian turn in which inclusion is recoded to stabilise, rather than challenge, existing power.

Understanding gender governance in higher education through this conjunctural lens reveals not merely the erosion of equity but the emergence of a political formation that reconfigures inclusion into an apparatus of civility, visibility and administrative control. These tendencies are not aberrations but expressions of a larger global grammar that binds emancipatory rhetoric to authoritarian-neoliberal governance. The result is not the dilution of equality but its rearrangement as a practice of containment.

The implications for the sector are profound. If inclusion is increasingly reorganised through metrics, decorum and procedural compliance, then reclaiming its democratic potential requires an epistemic and institutional shift. Inclusion needs to be understood not as a reputational asset but as a commitment to justice, redistribution and collective struggle. This means recovering equality as political and pedagogical labour: the work of confronting injustice, protecting dissent and renewing the public imagination. Academic freedom and equality are inseparable: without equality, freedom becomes privilege; without freedom, equality becomes performance.

As Angela Davis (Davis quoted in Gerges, 2023) reminds us: ‘Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist and misogynist as it was before… There can be no diversity and inclusion without transformation and justice.’ And as Henry Giroux (2025) argues, democracy depends on how societies fight over language, memory and possibility. That struggle now runs through the university itself, shaping its governance, its epistemic life and the courage to imagine more just and democratic possibilities.

Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.


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A topic modelling analysis of higher education research published between 2000 and 2021

by Yusuf Oldac and Francisco Olivos

We recently embarked upon a project to explore the development of higher education research topics over the last decades. The results were published in Review of Education. Our aim was to thematically map the field of research on higher education and to analyse how the field has evolved over time between 2000 and 2021. This blog post summarises our findings and reflects on the implications for HE research.

HE research continues to grow. HE researchers are located in globally diverse geographical locations and publish on diversifying topics. Studies focusing on the development of HE with a global-level analysis are increasingly emerging. However, most of these studies are limited to scientometric network analyses that do not include a content-related focus. In addition, they are deductive, indicating that they tried to fit their new findings into existing categories. Recently, Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) were able to capture the scholarly literature on higher education through an analysis of latent themes by utilising topic modelling. This approach got attention in the literature, and the study’s contribution was highlighted in an earlier SRHE blog post. We also found their study useful and built on it in our novel analysis. However, their analysis focused only on generating topics from a wide range of higher education journals and did not identify explanatory factors, such as change over the years or the location of publication. After identifying this gap, we worked towards moving one step further.

A central contribution of our study is the inclusion of a set of research content explanatory factors, namely: time, region, funding, collaboration type, and journals, to investigate the topics of HE research. In methodological terms, our study moves ahead of the description of the topic prevalence to the explanation of the prevalence utilizing structural topic modelling (Roberts et al, 2013).

Structural topic modelling is a machine learning technique that examines the content of provided text to learn patterns in word usage without human supervision in a replicable and transparent way (Mohr & Bogdanov, 2013). This powerful technique expands the methodological repertoire of higher education research. On one hand, computational methods make it possible to extract meaning from large datasets; on the other, they allow the prediction of emerging topics by integrating the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Nevertheless, many scholars in HE remain reluctant to engage with such methods, reflecting a degree of methodological conservatism or tunnel vision (see Huisman and Daenekindt’s SRHE blog post).

In this blog post, our intention is not to go deep into the minute details of this methodological technique, but to share a glimpse of our main findings through the use of such a technique. With the corpus of all papers published between 2000 and 2021 in the top six generalist journals of higher education, as listed by Cantwell et al (2022) and Kwiek (2021) both, we analysed a dataset of 6,562 papers. As a result, we identified 15 emergent research topics and several major patterns that highlight the thematic changes over the last decades. Below, we share some of our findings, accompanied by relevant visualisations.

Glimpse at the main findings with relevant visuals

The emergent 15 higher education topics and three visibly rising ones

Our topic modelling analysis revealed 15 distinct topics, which are largely in line with the topics discussed in previous studies on this line (eg Teichler, 1996; Tight, 2003; Horta & Jung, 2014). However, there are added nuances in our analysis. For example, the most prevalent topics are policy and teaching/learning, which are widely acknowledged in the field, but new themes have emerged and strengthened over time. These themes include identity politics and discrimination, access, and employability. These areas, conceptually linked to social justice, have become central to higher education research, especially in US-based journals but not limited to them. The visual below demonstrates the changes over the years for all 15 topics.

  • The Influence of funding on higher education research topics

Research funding plays a crucial role in shaping certain topics, particularly gender inequality, access, and doctoral education. Studies that received funding exhibited a higher prevalence of these socially significant topics, underscoring the importance of targeted funding to support research with social impact. The data visualisation below summarises the influence of reported funding for each topic. The novelty of this pattern needs to be highlighted because we have not come across a previous study looking into the influence of funding existence on research topics in the higher education field.

  • The impact of collaboration on higher education research topics

Collaborative publications are more prevalent in topics such as teaching and learning, and diversity and social relations. By contrast, theoretical discussions, identity politics, policy, employability, and institutional management are more common in solo-authored papers. This pattern aligns with the nature of these topics and the data requirements for research. Please see the visualised data below.

We highlight that although the relationship between collaboration and citation impact or researcher productivity is well studied, we are not aware of any evidence of the effect of collaboration patterns on topic prevalence, particularly in studies focusing on higher education. So, this finding is a novel contribution to higher education research.

  • Higher education journals’ topic preferences

Although the six leading journals claim to be generalist, our analysis shows they have differing publication preferences. For example, Higher Education focuses on policy and university governance, while Higher Education Research and Development stands out for teaching/learning and indigenous knowledge. Journal of Higher Education and Review of Higher Education, two US-based journals, have the highest prevalence of identity politics and discrimination topics. Last, Studies in Higher Education has a significantly higher prevalence in teaching and learning, theoretical discussions, doctoral education, and emotions, burnout and coping than most of the journals.

  • Regional differences in higher education research topics

Topic focus varies significantly by the region of the first author. First, studies from Asia exhibit the highest prevalence of academic work and institutional management. Studies from Africa show a higher prevalence of identity politics and discrimination. Moreover, studies published by first authors from Eastern European countries stand out with the higher prevalence of employability. Lastly, the policy topic has a high prevalence across all regions. However, studies with first authors from Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean showed a higher prevalence of policy research in higher education than those from North America and Western Europe. By contrast, indigenous knowledge is most prominent in Western Europe (including Australia and New Zealand). The figure below demonstrates these in visual format.

Concluding remarks

Higher education research has grown and diversified dramatically over the past two decades. The field is now established globally, with an ever-expanding array of topics and contributors. In this blog post, we shared the results of our analysis in relation to the influence of targeted funding, collaborative practices, regional differences, and journal preferences on higher education research topics. We have also indicated that certain topics have risen in prevalence in the last two decades. More patterns are included in the main research study published in Review of Education.

It is important to note that we could only include the higher education papers published up to 2021, the latest available data year when we started the analyses. The impact of generative artificial intelligence and recent major shifts in the global geopolitics, including the new DEI policies in the US and overall securitisation of science tendencies, may not be reflected fully in this dataset. These themes are very recent, and future studies, including replications with similar approaches, may help provide newly emerging patterns.

Dr Yusuf Oldac is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Oxford, where he received a full scholarship. Dr Oldac’s research spans international and comparative higher education, with a current focus on global science and knowledge production in university settings.

Dr Francisco Olivos obtained his PhD in Sociology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined Lingnan University in August 2021. His research lies in the intersections between cultural sociology, social stratification, and subjective well-being, using quantitative and computational methods.


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How social mobility in HE can reproduce inequality – and what to do about it

by Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Louise Ashley, Eve Worth, and Chris Playford

Higher education has become the go-to solution for social inequality over the past three decades. Widening access and enhancing graduate outcomes have been presented as ways to generate upward mobility and ensure fairer life chances for people from all backgrounds. But what if the very ecosystem designed to level the playing field also inadvertently helps sustain the very inequalities we are hoping to overcome? 

Social mobility agendas appear progressive but are often regressive in practice. By focusing on the movement of individuals rather than structural change, they leave wealth and income disparities intact. A few people may rise, but the wider system remains unfair – but now dressed up with a meritocratic veneer. We explore these issues in our new article in the British Journal of Sociology, ‘Ambivalent Agents: The Social Mobility Industry and Civil Society under Neoliberalism in England’. We examined the role of the UK’s ‘social mobility industry’: charities, foundations, and third-sector organisations primarily working with universities to identify ‘talented’ young people from less advantaged backgrounds and help them access higher education or elite careers. We were curious – are these organisations transforming opportunity structures and delivering genuine change, or do they help stabilise the present system? 

The answer to this question is of course complex but, in essence, we found the latter. Our analysis of 150 national organisations working in higher education since the early 1990s found that organisations tend to reflect the individualistic approach outlined above and blend critical rhetoric about inequality with delivery models that are funder-compatible, metric-led and institutionally convenient. Thus – and we expect unintentionally on part of the organisations – they often perform inclusion of ‘talent’ without asking too many uncomfortable structural questions about the persistence and reproduction of unequal opportunities. 

We classified organisations in a five-part typology. Most organisations fell into the category of Pragmatic Progressives: committed to fairness but shaped by funder priorities, accountability metrics, and institutional convenience. A smaller group acted as Structural Resistors, pushing for systemic change. Others were System Conformers, largely reproducing official rhetoric. The Technocratic deliverers were most closely integrated with the state, often functioning as contracted agents with managerial, metrics-focused delivery models.   Finally, Professionalised Reformers seek reform through evidence-based programmes and advocacy, often with a focus on elite education and professions.

This finding matters beyond higher education. Civil society – the world of charities, voluntary groups, and associations – has long been seen as the sphere where resistance to inequality might flourish. Yet our findings show that many organisations are constrained or co-opted into protecting the status quo by limited budgets, demanding funders, and constant requirements to demonstrate ‘impact’. Our point is not to disparage gains or to criticise the intentions of the charity sector but to push for honest and genuine change. 

Labour’s new Civil Society Covenant, which promises to strengthen voluntary organisations and reduce short-termism, could create opportunities. But outsourcing responsibility for social goods to arm’s-length actors also risks producing symbolic reforms that celebrate individual success stories without changing the odds for the many. If higher education is to deliver genuine fairness, we must distinguish between performing fairness for a few and redistributing opportunities for the many. We thus want to conclude by suggesting three practical actions for universities, access and participation teams, and regulators such as the Office for Students.

  • Audit for Ambivalence 

    Using our typology, do you find you are working with a mix of organisations, or mainly those focused on individuals? (Please contact us for accessing our coding framework to support your institutional or regional audits.) 

    • Rebalance activity towards structural levers

    Continue high-quality outreach, but, where possible, shift resources towards systemic interventions such as contextual admissions with meaningful grade floors, strong maintenance support, foundation pathways with guaranteed progression and fair, embedded work placements 

    • Redesign accountability

    Ask the regulator to measure structural outcomes as well as individual ones, at sector and regional levels. When commissioning work, ask for participatory governance and community accountability and measure that too.

    We believe civil-society partnerships can play a vital role – but not if they become the sole heavy-lifter or metric of success. Universities are well positioned to embrace structural levers, protect space for critique, and hold themselves accountable for distributional outcomes. If this happens, the crowded charity space around social mobility could become a vibrant counter-movement for genuine change to opportunities and producing fairness rather than a prop for maintaining an unequal status quo. 

    In terms of research, our next step is speaking directly to people working in the ‘social mobility industry.’ Do they/you recognise the tensions we highlight? How do they navigate them? Have we fairly presented their work? We look forward to continuing the discussion on this topic and how to enhance practice for transformative change.

    Anna Mountford-Zimdars is a Professor in Education at the University of Exeter.

    Louise Ashley is Associate Professor in the School of business and management at Queen Mary University London.

    Eve Worth is a Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.

    Christopher James Playford is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter.

    Paul Temple


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    Will US science survive and thrive, or fade away?

    by Paul Temple

    When Robert Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, young American scientists wanting to work with the world’s best researchers crossed the Atlantic as a matter of course. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer’s choice was between Germany, particularly Göttingen and Leipzig, and England, particularly Cambridge. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that Cambridge didn’t work out for him, so in 1926 he went to work with Max Born, one of the leading figures in quantum mechanics, at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate there just a year later. His timing was good: within a few years from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, attacks on academics, Jewish and otherwise, and then of course the Second World War, had destroyed what was perhaps the world’s most important university system. Let us note that academic structures, depending on relatively small numbers of intellectual leaders, usually able to move elsewhere, are fragile creations.

    I used to give a lecture about the role of universities in driving economic development, with particular reference to scientific and technological advances. Part of this lecture covered the role of US universities in supporting national economic progress, starting with the Land Grant Acts (beginning in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War for heaven’s sake!), through which the federal government funded the creation of universities in the new states of the west; going on to examine support for university research in the Second World War, of which the Manhattan Project was only a part; followed by the 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, Science – the endless frontier, which provided the rationale for continued government support for university research. The Cold War was then the context for further large-scale federal funding, not just in science and technology but in social science also, spin-offs from which produced the internet, biotech, Silicon Valley, and a whole range of other advanced industries. So, my lecture concluded, look at what a century-and-a-half of government investment in university-derived knowledge gets you: if not quite a new society, then one changed out of all recognition – and, mostly, for the better.

    The currently-ongoing attack by the Trump administration on American universities seems to have overlooked the historical background just sketched out. My “didn’t it work out just fine?” lecture now needs a certain amount of revision: it is almost describing a lost world.

    President Trump and his MAGA movement, says Nathan Heller writing in The New Yorker this March, sees American universities as his main enemies in the culture wars on which his political survival depends. Before he became Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance in a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the enemy” set out a plan to “aggressively attack the universities in this country” (New York Times, 3 June 2025). University leaderships seem to have been unprepared for this unprecedented assault, despite ample warning. (A case where Trump and his allies needed to be taken both literally and seriously.) Early 2025 campus pro-Palestinian protests then conveniently handed the Trump administration the casus belli to justify acting against leading universities, further helped by clumsy footwork on the part of university leaderships who seem largely not to have rested their cases on the very high freedom of speech bar set by the First Amendment, meaning that, for example, anti-Semitic speech (naturally, physical attacks would be a different matter) would be lawful under Supreme Court rulings, however much they personally may have deplored it. Instead, university presidents allowed themselves to be presented as apologists for Hamas. (Needless to say, demands that free speech should be protected at all costs does not apply in the Trump/Vance world to speech supporting causes of which they disapprove.)

    American universities have never faced a situation remotely like this. As one Harvard law professor quoted in the New Yorker piece remarks, the Trump attacks are about the future of “higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive, or fade away”. If you consider that parallels with Germany in 1933 are far-fetched, please explain why.

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