If you sometimes get the sense that your teaching isn’t having much effect on the students in front of you, then perhaps you need a bit of advice from colleagues at Hong Kong’s schools and universities. There – at least, according to China Daily, Beijing’s Pravda equivalent (2 September) – the “root cause of young people’s participation in the Hong Kong protests” is to be found in the teaching taking place in high schools and universities. As a result, “rioting protestors are…ordinary young men and women, including many university students who have…lost their moral bearing”. What is this incendiary teaching about, capable of turning normally well-behaved young Hong Kongers into raging mobs? Liberal studies in high schools, covering topics such as “Hong Kong today”, “globalisation”, “energy technology”, and “public health”, are apparently behind a lot of the trouble. Well, the very titles fairly set your pulse racing, don’t they? I’m planning to get one of these Hong Kong teachers, who can apparently turn a class on public health into an incitement to confront the riot police, to share some tips on stopping a class drifting off when one of my own presentations somehow fails to energise them.
But perhaps the real villain of the piece is the
teaching of what is described as critical thinking where, to China Daily’s obvious bafflement,
“different [textbook] publishers have different political views”. What’s
needed, clearly, is for “The government [to] either directly provide contents
for the publishers, or establish an official scrutiny mechanism”. I may have
missed some nuances in the various posters I saw plastered around Hong Kong
during a visit in early September, but I’m pretty sure that “More intervention
by Beijing in textbook publishing” wasn’t a key demand of students who have
regularly formed peaceful, dignified human chains encircling their university
or high school campuses as a gesture of support for democratic values.
This detail perhaps helps illuminate the widening gulf between the Party bureaucrats in Beijing and their local enforcers in the shape of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and the pro-democracy activists, with the Hong Kong Chief Executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, routinely described in the local press as “embattled”, caught in the crossfire. Local opinion varies on whether she defied Beijing in withdrawing the extradition bill at the centre of the storm, or whether Beijing decided on a tactical retreat which she executed. Both explanations may be partly true.
Either way, “too little, too late” seems to sum up
the situation: withdrawal of the extradition bill has done nothing to prevent
the protests, which seem to have developed a momentum of their own. Investigations
into allegations of police brutality at earlier demonstrations are now a
demand, with placards simply saying “831” (a reference to injuries sustained by
protestors at an event on 31 August) being displayed at later protests – and so
on, and on. Both sides are digging in. Beijing is said to be determined to stop
Hong Kong sliding into what is called a “colour” revolution (Georgia and
Ukraine being examples, involving massive largely non-violent street
demonstrations), but there are also parallels with the 1989 revolutions in
Eastern Europe. There, concessions made by the communist regimes that would,
only months before, have been regarded as major achievements by reformers were,
by the time they were made, dismissed as mere stages on the way to wider
change. In Eastern Europe, the demand was to return to pre-1945 national democratic
(more or less) structures that hardly anyone could remember. The Hong Kong
equivalent is to look back fondly on colonial structures and processes. It is a
strange feeling for a visiting Brit to see young people, born after British
rule had ended in 1997, waving the colonial-era Hong Kong blue ensign as a
gesture of defiance. Nothing could be more calculated to enrage Beijing
apparatchiks. It is difficult, at the moment, to see this ending well.
SRHE member Paul
Temple, Centre
for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University
College London.
There has been much discussion on academic capitalism, the neo-liberalism of universities, the new entrepreneurial management which is transformative rather than transactional. Much has been done to reinforce this change and self-perception by government (in the UK) from the creation of the HE market, the panoply of measuring instruments (however flawed) and the imperative of third stream income to compensate for the loss of state funding.
However, ‘academic capitalism’ is a misnomer: it does not and cannot exist except in the ‘for profit’ sector. Exogenous forces require universities to generate income, sometimes leading to operational surpluses, making universities appear to act as if they are for profit. This is seen in two ways, neither of which are endogenous: the need for growth to remain operationally viable, and the imposition of regulatory controls of quality, responsiveness to ministerial opinions etc, as a consequence of the irony of a Hayekian model of the public sector[2]. But this is appearance and not reality. The marketisation of HE is an outcome of applying Hayekian principles to the public sector; it is not in itself capitalism. Academics are employees who may have ‘professional ethics’ and hard-earned specialisms which are bought in the labour market. Nevertheless, universities are not generating surplus value, a necessary condition for capitalism, as they have no shareholders with which to extract value from the means of production as capital which can become independent of the labour that produces the profit/surplus. The substantial critique of capitalism was that surplus value could be lost or expropriated from the locale of production and converted into more capital. No matter how much university management and governance may copy, or are required by government to enact, business practices in the neoliberal era (measuring performance, contracting out, international competition, and general entrepreneurialism), the challenge to produce operating surpluses is no different for the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other large charities which ‘gift back’ the surplus to the charity from trading activities. Students’ Unions as social enterprises have been doing this for decades with their wet sales supporting their charitable purposes. Perhaps a discursive view of universities as social enterprises tout court may be helpful for their governance and for deciding how operational surpluses should be applied, perhaps ring-fencing cost centres of undergraduate teaching and research.
Nor is the call for a more skilled and ‘employment ready’ workforce a lowering of universities by promoting an HE sector relevant to and supporting the economy. This purpose was one of the planks of the Robbins Report[3]. This instrumentalist view of education is not new; and this knowledge-servicing role applies to the students as well as the institutional purpose. The polytechnics, and their actual geography, were intended to support the industries of the time, particularly aerospace, steel, chemicals, shipbuilding, mining and the motor industry. What is new is the dissidents’ complaint about the new capitalism of universities, which perhaps obscures some deeper and more disturbing concerns about the situation of universities in the knowledge economy.
The complaints are familiar: a dystopian decline of Western civilisation; the creation of the academic precariat; jeopardising the academic mission; moral decay; avarice; Faustian bargains; dumbing down with student-consumer as sovereign; and so on. But the symptoms of capitalism in HE are shared with other sectors; the precariat as an outcome of the loss of employees’ rights or employers’ opportunities in a flexible labour market; new management systems, and so on. Globalisation is not an essential condition of capitalism but is a late capitalism feature. Global reach has long been a feature of imperial higher education, as in the founding of the LSE, sans academic capitalism. Big science has been international and collaborative for more than a century.
The trappings of capitalism – changes to employment practices, the Taylorism of activity measurement, the creation of a market and the management response, including branding strategies for competitive survival – do not make higher education a capitalist system. The extremes of private enterprise branding go further than universities striving to gain market share and a sense of corporate identity. For example, Sir Philip Green’s channelling money out of BHS ‘in effect monetised the firm’s history as a reliable counterpart for workers and lenders’ (Woodruff, 2018). There are close comparisons in the HE sector in monetising heritage/status: the 100-year financing bonds of Oxbridge suggest a strong leverage through historical branding, compared to say the ability of the University of West London to borrow. Marketisation or branding reinforces the stratified inequalities of the HE system and entrenches the market (Brown, 2018). Nevertheless, this is still not extracting surplus value. Similarly, the contracting out of cleaning services in a local hospital does not make the hospital capitalist. It is the surplus value extracted by the contractor that is capitalist in that, again, the net profit creates capital. Building roads, providing a police force, maintaining state schools etc, are essential for the existence of capitalism (and much else): they are not intrinsically capitalist but act as support services for capital.
Sheldon Rothblatt’s (1997) heart-warming celebration of universities as the second oldest western tradition, that has offered so much in our journey of progress and civilisation, begs the debatable current status of universities as capitalist or indeed even as enduring institutions. (I am reminded of Hobbes’ (1655) paradox of the ship of Theseus which each year came into harbour for a refit: when is it no longer the same ship? Rothblatt sees similar changes in society and universities but doesn’t argue for a causal relationship.) Universities mutate or emerge over time within the material conditions of power and the economy – from Papal Bull and Royal Charter through Parliamentary legislation, ministerial statutory instruments and finally independent (sic) agency. Will their function and form now will mirror the current neoliberal conditions of globalisation, public sector regulation and deregulation of the private sector? Not quite. The new cycle of knowledge economies is unlike previous regimes for the supporting universities. It is a different economy for universities and for all of us in some deeper ways.
Universities were, and in some respects still are, the providers of new technologies which advance production and manufacturing processes, new materials and industries as well as long term global opportunities and risk assessments via scientific understanding. Universities have fulfilled that role since the late nineteenth century. What is different is specifically the nature of the new economy which is a new form of market, as capital must search for new markets. This is a new model of business enterprise distinct from manufacturing and traditional service industries – the mining or rather possession (as intellectual property) and exploitation of data as privately-owned property. The case for knowledge as a public good is strong (Marginson, 2013) but the change in what counts as knowledge comes with a stricter control of social conditions. The possession of knowledge begets a new ontology and epistemology. It is the thread that runs through capitalism: the transfer of the public good to the private, from the enclosures onwards, so that old ontological claims appear as delusional, fictions and myths. Universities and their students are both agents within the knowledge economy and the raw materials.
Universities have been exploited by business in the new technologies with significant growth in profit margins for business, which has enabled the financialisation of business rather than its technological development. The exhortations for universities to provide the materiel for innovation and development obscures another trend. This is eloquently and passionately explained by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State (2013). Businesses reduce research costs by contracting out to universities, whilst reaping the major and rapidly increasing profit share which is then used to buy back stockholdings to increase share value. This process continues as competition continues to drive down business research costs , increasing share value (which is capital), and increasing reliance on universities as subcontractors to allow for this business strategy. The knowledge economy is ‘cutting edge’ but universities become a contracting out service industry not just for ‘pushing the technological boundaries’ per se but to be used for capital gain (which is then ‘lost’ to the production process and to the universities’ research centres as surplus value). As Mazzacuto might say, the universities become not so much capitalist agents of the new economies as the exploited.
The knowledge economy flowed from state intervention in the US and the UK but is invisible in plain view. Large corporate R&D centres (Bell, Dupont, Xerox, et al) have largely disappeared and university research in the public domain is used by the new technological businesses. For example, all the Apple innovations of touch screen, GPS, internet, microelectronics, and voice activation were government funded developments.
There is another aspect of the cognitive economy of data and intellectual property ownership which is intimately connected to universities in the new wave of entrepreneurism. This is the monetisation of data within the sector. Not the creation and control of patents resulting from research, but the monetisation of data not previously considered. This new wave of capital is not limited to education. The harvesting of data in the health sector (and the contingent insurance industry) has been a site of contention and dispute in several countries in the last five years[4].
The sale of tranches of the student loan book (losses to the Treasury estimated by the National Audit Office for one tranche as over £600 million) will be a carefully calculated risk for the buyers. In the US student loans are considered as approaching sub-prime liabilities, now with more than a trillion dollars of debt. In the UK part of the value of purchasing student loans stems from the personal data to be harvested for the next 40 years in the interchange between the debtor and the new loan-holders. A more spectacular example of information converted to a form of capital is the sale of Turnitin. This is no elevated concept of innovation and development other, simply the ability of capital to create a new ontology of products to be marketed within the cognitive economy. Turnitin was sold in 2008 to Warburg Pincus, then in 2014 to a Singapore-based wealth fund (for $752 million) and finally to a holding company of Condé Nast in 2018 for $1.75 billion. Turnitin has itself acquired other companies in 2018 such as Vericite and Gradescope. Jesse Stommel of the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, noted: “How much of that $1.75 billion is going to the students who have fed their database for years? I have a pretty good guess; zero billion.”
The charge of academic capitalism is misplaced when there should be a growing concern about how late capital will find new ways and practices to exploit the university sector.
Phil Pilkington is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.
References
Brown R (2018) ‘Neoliberalism, Marketisation and Higher Education’, Professorial Lecture, University of West London
Hobbes T (1655) De Corpore
Marginson S, (2013) ‘The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education’, Journal of Education Policy 28(3)
Mazzucatto, M (2013) The Entrepreneurial State, Anthem Press
Rothblatt S (1997) The Modern University and its Discontents, Cambridge
Woodruff D (2018) ‘Profits Now, Costs Later’, London Review of Books 40(22)
[1] I am extremely grateful to Ian McNay for his advice and support; the faults here remain mine
[2] Hayek F (1944) The Road to Serfdom. It is difficult not to take an ad hominem approach to Hayek as a friend of dictators, but also as a paradoxical, confused and failed political theorist; his concept of price as information when human thought is irrational is a foundation of the current dispensation. For neo-liberal policy makers (ie the government/OfS) the uniformity of price in the UK HE sector offends against rational market efficiencies driving down prices. The consequent conspiracy hypothesis of cartel price fixing is another neo-liberal trope: the sabotage of government policies by self-interested public sector management and civil servants. Some university leaders have supported the neo-liberal project on the rationality of price levels by suggesting that the artificial limit set by government at the top end should be lifted and the market could be liberated to compete with Ivy League fee levels (prices). There are alternative models of pricing: a holistic model for price for HE could include prior costs (school fees, private tuition, the housing market reflecting catchment areas, etc).
[3] My thanks to Ian McNay for a reminder that the Robbins Report included ‘the instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour…’ and pointing out the skills support by polytechnics for the heavy industries in the north and north east of England. The assumption throughout the 1940s and 50s, from the 1944 Education Act and Claus Moser’s statistical planning of HE for Education Minister David Eccles, was that 80% of the workforce would be engaged in manufacturing and manual work.
[4] In the UK, following the Health and Social Care Act (2012) there was a requirement that all GPs’ case notes be returned to the central care.data to be exploited commercially, this appears to have been abandoned in 2016 after a campaign in part organised by GPs. In Denmark there was a rescinding of a similar arrangement. Data sharing (sic) between Deep Mind (the AI branch of Google) and a London NHS Trust was considered by the Information Commissioner’s Office to be a breach of law. In Italy a deal was made with IBM in 2016 for access to health data (Source: New Scientist, April 2016).
Our late and much-missed friend David Watson used to say that every government department should have an office marked “Cassandra”. Whenever a new policy was proposed, someone had to poke their head round the door and say, “Cassandra, what went wrong when we last tried this?”. David went on to point out that, just as the mythological Cassandra was cursed to make accurate predictions that were never believed, so policy-making would plough ahead regardless of what the Cassandra down the corridor told them about last time’s mistakes. Still, he thought, it would be nice to know in advance in just what respect a policy was going to fail.
A number of Cassandras predicted, in general terms, the disaster – or “material negative impact” [1] , in OfS-speak – that has now overtaken the 3,571 students of for-profit GSM in London. This was one of the “alternative providers”, so enthusiastically promoted by David Willetts following the 2011 White Paper. In my chapter on private sector higher education in Claire Callender’s and Peter Scott’s Browne and Beyond: Modernizing English Higher Education (2013), I invented the conditional-optimistic tense to describe the White Paper’s language about “alternative providers”: “new entrants to the sector…may have different strengths…they may offer particular well-honed teaching models…” (2011 White Paper, para 4.5). They would shake up the stuffy old university sector with a bracing private-sector ethos – although the exact problem to which they would provide the answer was never precisely set out. This was evidence-free policy-making, but with a blithe assurance that everything would turn out for the best (remind you of anything?). I suspect that the unlucky GSM 3,571 would now prefer to have been at a university with some of the boring old strengths.
The
OfS email to other universities about the GSM collapse could serve as a text
for a doctoral class on bureaucratic buck-passing: its message might be
summarised as, “We’re only the regulator; can the rest of you do something? No,
we won’t do anything to help.” The GSM 3,571 are, it is clear, on their own; OfS
isn’t going to do anything constructive to clear up the mess. On the contrary,
when asked “whether
transferred students can be subject to special arrangements relating to the
reporting of their progression, completion or in respect of other outcome
data/metrics…The answer is no.” Nice.
As
I noted in my 2013 chapter, you didn’t need particular insights, let alone
Cassandra’s skills of prophecy, to foresee problems ahead in the “alternative”
sector – because we had the worked example of the United States before us. A
devastating critique of for-profit higher education there was made in 2012 in a
report by Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor
and Pensions Committee. “In this report”, Senator
Harkin was reported as saying, “you will find overwhelming documentation of
exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes,
taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory
evasion and manipulation”. The for-profit sectors in the US and the UK depend
on easily-available public funding to cover student fees and light-touch
regulation of institutions with minimal records of achievement and limited
accountability. It is a tragedy that British politicians, driven by free-market
ideology, and regulators, following politicians’ biddings, failed GSM’s
students so comprehensively.
SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.
This is written just as Boris Johnson is declared the new leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the new occupant of No 10 Downing Street. All of the jockeying for prime ministerial position has made our national Brexit-obsessed politics even more bizarre than before but, not far below the surface, some semblance of normal policymaking struggles to carry on, not least in higher education. When the much-delayed Augar report finally appeared on 30 May 2019 it had even more than the usual treatment from the policy wonks.
The good news was that at least the Report aimed to take in the
whole of post-18 education, and it started by setting out eight principles:
Post-18
education benefits society, the economy, and individuals.
Everyone
should have the opportunity to be educated after the age of 18.
The decline
in numbers of those getting post-18 education needs to be reversed.
The cost of
post-18 education should be shared between taxpayers, employers and learners.
Organisations
providing education and training must be accountable for the public subsidy
they receive.
Government
has a responsibility to ensure that its investment in tertiary education is
appropriately spent and directed.
Post-18
education cannot be left entirely to market forces.
Post-18
education needs to be forward looking.
It seems to be a rule that national reports identify a steadily
increasing number of purposes for post-18 education. Robbins needed only four;
Dearing had five. Augar has six:
Promote citizens’ ability to realise their full
potential, economically and more broadly.
Provision of a suitably skilled workforce.
Support innovation through research and development,
commercial ideas and global talent.
Contribute scholarship and debate that sustain and
enrich society through knowledge, ideas, culture and creativity.
Contribute to growth by virtue of post-18
institutions’ direct contributions to the economy.
Play a core civic role in the regeneration, culture,
sustainability, and heritage of the communities in which they are based.
So far so good; then the bunfighting begins: “We make
recommendations intended to encourage universities to bear down on low value
degrees and to incentivise them to increase the provision of courses better
aligned with the economy’s needs … Universities should find further efficiency
savings over the coming years, maximum fees for students should be reduced to
£7,500 a year, and more of the taxpayer funding should come through grants
directed to disadvantaged students and to high value and high cost subjects. “
(p10) ‘Low value’ degrees?! How shall we define them? Augar seemed to identify
value only (for students) with graduate earnings, and (for everyone else) with
‘courses better aligned with the economy’s needs’.
The traditionalists were quickly into the fray. Indeed, the
Russell Group got its retaliation in first (20 March 2019) – “Reports suggest
the Prime Minister’s review of post-18 education and funding could recommend
cutting tuition fees from £9,250 to £7,500 or even lower. We are concerned such
a cut would not be fully compensated and could have a devastating impact on our
universities.” It was therefore ready to cut and paste its response on the day of publication: “It is
imperative the next Prime Minister provides students, businesses and
universities with a cast-iron guarantee that, in the event of a fee cut,
teaching grants will fully cover the funding shortfall and meet future demand
for higher education places.”
Nick Hillman of HEPI blogged on the same day with ‘ten
points to note’ as ‘lunchtime takeaways’. Debbie McVitty on 29 May 2019 offered the ‘essential
overview’ of Augar, and her WonkHE
colleagues followed up with their usual assiduity. David
Kernohan argued
for WonkHEon
3 June that the underpinning evidence for a £7500 fee level was weak, and he
was back
on 6 June 2019 “unable to find the evidence that
backs up Augar’s rationale for recommending the end of the foundation year.”
“Whether or not there is any evidence that
providers are seeing the foundation year as a cash cow, or that it offers a
poor deal for students, we are not getting to see it. The data that does exist
does not support the Augar conclusions, even when it is directly cited as doing
so.” Mark Corney (independent) pointed out the logical errors in the
Augar proposal to end support for Foundation Years in
his blog for HEPI on 21 June 2019, saying that abolishing Foundation
Years would not lead to a surge in Access to HE course enrolments.
David
Midgley (Cambridge) supplied a
balanced précis on the CDBU website on 5 June 2019; Lizzy Woodfield (Aston)
provided a useful
analysis for WonkHE on 3 June
2019 of the impact on widening participation for her university, but slowly the
economists and the accountants took over. Gavin
Conlon and Maike Halterbeck of London Economics had already blogged for WonkHE on 30 May 2019 about winners
and losers from the Augar Review. Andrew Bush
(KPMG) wrote about how
Augar analysed costs, for WonkHE on 10 June
2019. An Institute for Fiscal Studies Note on 30 May 2019 argued that the “Augar Review aims to rebalance
funding to FE and give government more control over HE funding”, authored by
IFS regulars Jack Britton, Laura
van der Erve and Paul
Johnson.
The financial arguments were subject to increasing critique, with
Greg Walker of MillionPlus supplying a well-considered
analysis on the HEPI blog on 15 July 2019 – ‘Does Augar
present evidence-based policy or policy-based evidence?’
– suggesting that the HE fees cut was intended and inevitable. Tim Blackman
(Middlesex) then argued (for WonkHE on
4 June 2019) that Augar
is technocratic rather than visionary: “Augar navigates awkwardly
between the pros and cons of planning or market forces as the drivers of
tertiary education … I get the impression the authors would have liked to have
gone further with reintroducing more planning. They point out that some of the
most problematic features of how universities behave are a product of
marketisation, and make recommendations for rejuvenating further education colleges
that amount to national planning of the sector. Why not the same planning
paradigm for higher education? The answer would appear to be that sticking with
the market conveniently allows Augar to claim that academic autonomy has been
protected despite an agenda of major change and austerity.”
In similar vein, Mark Leach of WonkHE,
arguing on 3 June that the true challenge in Augar was bridging
the gulf between FE and HE, identified the chasm between the
two: “One way to read the underlying narrative of the Augar report is that it
represents an indictment of two parallel education policy approaches, pursued
by multiple, and politically different, governments over the last fifteen or so
years. These parallel approaches have treated higher education and further
education in radically divergent and – the report implies – radically
incompatible ways. In short, the parallel policy approaches can be summed up as
follows: The government has pushed higher education towards a more market-like
system, which Augar says has gone so far as to become dysfunctional (with
symptoms ranging from the total lack of price competition to grade inflation,
unconditional offers and other much-discussed system problems). But he also
says that, in parallel, further education has been subjected by governments to
a policy of intense, highly bureaucratic central planning, tinkering and
micro-management, which has also become dysfunctional.”
Thus
the commentariat has already supplied analyses an order of magnitude beyond the
Review’s 200 pages. So far, so much like normal policymaking – a Review based
on considerable thought and analysis, by a significant group, taking positions
and making proposals which have properly been subject to much comment and
counter-analysis. But in our current abnormal times we can have no confidence
that the Review will even be taken into consideration by the about-to-be-formed
new administration. Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds and
Universities minister Chris Skidmore have perhaps done better than most at
trying to maintain some kind of business as usual, with a comparatively low
profile in the choose-your-side battles to become the next prime minister. However
there can be no certainty that either will still be in post even by the end of
the week, and the Augar Review itself was very much a creation of No 10 during
Theresa May’s tenure.
No doubt this encouraged Liz Morrish on her Academic Irregularities blog on 11 June 2019 to
pronounce that Augar was ‘dead on arrival’, concluding that “Augar
has thrown universities to the wolves of a rather rigged market at this point.
Nobody – neither staff nor student – can enter a university with any certainty
that their career or course of study will be fulfilled without interruption or
derailment.” For Morrish, Augar is likely to be no more than background mood
music, while the new Johnson administration decides anew what to do with
post-18 education – although we can expect, as usual with national reviews,
that the government will choose the proposals that suit its purpose, while
ignoring the rest of what is, as usual, presented as a package deal. No-one
will be betting against a £7500 fee, but no-one will expect the Treasury to
stump up the balance lost in the fees cut, especially since so many spending
promises have already been made by prime ministerial contenders in recent weeks
– none of them for post-18 education.
John Morgan reported on 11 July 2019 for Times Higher Education that former education secretary Justine Greening had said it was “inconceivable” that the new Prime Minister would adopt the Augar review plans. She “believes that the model she explored in government of funding English universities through a graduate contribution plus a “skills levy” on employers could be taken up by the next prime minister.” Her plan would abolish tuition fees and loans: “I think it’s probably the only higher education bill that could get through Parliament.” This is because she says the Augar review’s recommendations were “hugely regressive” in increasing the burden on low- and middle-earning graduates, while lowering it for those on higher incomes: “I find it inconceivable that any future Conservative government that cares about … progressive funding of higher education and social mobility could take that kind of proposal forward”. It is possible to take a very different perspective on Augar, as Nick Barr (LSE) did in declaring it progressive rather than regressive, simply because it proposed to redress the balance between FE and HE. But Greening’s comments are directed more towards heading off the Labour Party’s putative promises on tuition fees, returning to a pre-Augar position which re-institutionalises the chasm between the HE market and the micromanagement and planning of FE. An augur was “a priest and official in the classical Roman world. His main role was the practice of augury: interpreting the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds – whether they were flying in groups or alone, what noises they made as they flew, direction of flight, and what kind of birds they were”. (Wikipedia) The media’s augurs have for months been studying the noises Boris Johnson has made, the groups he is travelling in, his direction of flight, and what kind of bird he will turn out to be. The Tory press will announce the eagle has landed; he may of course turn out to be a different bird. A cuckoo, temporarily occupying a place where he doesn’t belong? A swallow who cannot make the summer on his own? Or a parrot, saying only what it has heard someone say before? We may hope that a bird in No 10 is worth two in the prime ministerial hustings, but no-one in HE should be counting chickens before a new policy hatches.
Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner,Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com.
“…problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, para 38 (original emphasis)
The paradigm shift of students to customers at the heart of higher
education has changed strategies, psychological self-images, business models
and much else. But are the claims for and against students as customers (SAC)
and the related research as useful, insightful and angst ridden as we may at
first think? There are alarms about
changing student behaviours and approaches to learning and the relationship
towards academic staff but does the naming ‘customers’ reveal what were already
underlying, long standing problems? Does the concentrated focus on SAC obscure rather
than reveal?
One aspect of SAC is the observation that academic performance
declines, and learning becomes more surface and instrumental (Bunce, 2017).
Another is that SAC inclines students to be narcissist and aggressive, with HEI
management pandering to the demands of both students and their feedback on the
NSS, with other strategies to create iconic campus buildings, to maintain or
improve league table position (Nixon, 2018).
This raises some methodological questions on (a) the research on
academic performance and the degree of narcissism/aggression prior to SAC (ie around 1997 with the Dearing Report); (b) the scope and range of
the research given the scale of student numbers, participation rates, the
variety of student motivations, the nature of disciplines and their own
learning strategies, and the hierarchy of institutions; and (c) the combination
of (a) and (b) in the further question whether SAC changed the outlook of students to their education – or is it that
we are paying more attention and making different interpretations?
Some argue that the mass system created in some way marketisation of
HE and the SAC with all its attendant problems of changing the pedagogic
relationship and cognitive approaches. Given Martin Trow’s definitions of
elite, mass and universal systems of HE*, the UK achieved a mass system by the
late 1980s to early 1990s with the rapid expansion of the polytechnics;
universities were slower to expand student numbers. This expansion was before
the introduction of the £1,000 top up fees of the Major government and the
£3,000 introduced by David Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education in the
new Blair government) immediately after the Dearing Report. It was after the
1997 election that the aspiration was for a universal
HE system with a 50% participation rate.
If a mass system of HE came about (in a ‘fit of forgetfulness’ ) by
1991 when did marketisation begin? Marketisation may be a name we give to a
practice or context which had existed previously but was tacit and culturally and
historically deeper, hidden from view. The unnamed hierarchy of institutions of
Oxbridge, Russell, polytechnics, HE colleges, FE colleges had powerful cultural
and socio-political foundations and was a market of sorts (high to low value
goods, access limited by social/cultural capital and price, etc). That hierarchy was not, however,
necessarily top-down: the impact of social benefit of the ‘lower orders’ in
that hierarchy would be significant in widening participation. The ‘higher
order’ existed (and exists) in an ossified form. And as entry was restricted,
the competition within the sector did not exist or did not present existential
threats. Such is the longue durée when trying to analyse marketisation and the
SAC.
The focus on marketisation should help us realise that over the long
term the unit of resource was drastically reduced; state funding was slowly and
then rapidly withdrawn to the point where the level of student enrolment was
critical to long term strategy. That meant not maintaining but increasing
student numbers when the potential pool of students would fluctuate – with the present demographic trough ending in 2021
or 2022. Marketisation can thus be separated to some extent from the cognitive
dissonance or other anxieties of the SAC. HEIs (with exceptions in the
long-established hierarchy) were driven by the external forces of the funding
regime to develop marketing strategies, branding and gaming feedback systems in
response to the competition for students and the creation of interest groups – Alliance,
Modern, et al. The enrolled students
were not the customers in the marketisation but the product or outcome of
successful management. The students change to customers as the focus is then on
results, employment and further study rates. Such is the split personality of institutional
management here.
Research on SAC in STEM courses has a noted inclination to surface
learning and the instrumentalism of ‘getting a good grade in order to get a
good job’, but this prompts further questions. I am not sure that this is an
increased inclination to surface learning, nor whether surface and deep are
uncritical norms we can readily employ. The HEAC definition of deep learning
has an element of ‘employability’ in the application of knowledge across
differing contexts and disciplines (Howie and Bagnall, 2012). A student in 2019
may face the imperative to get a ‘degree level’ job in order to pay back
student loans. This is rational related to the student loans regime and widening participation, meaning this
imperative is not universally applied given the differing socio-economic
backgrounds of all students.
(Note that the current loan system is highly regressive as a form of
‘graduate tax’.)
And were STEM students more inclined toward deep or surface learning
before they became SAC? Teaching and
assessment in STEM may have been poorand
may have encouraged surface level learning (eg
through weekly phase tests which were tardily assessed).
What is deep learning in civil engineering when faced with stress
testing concrete girders or in solving quarternion equations in mathematics: is
much of STEM actually knowing and processing algorithms? How is such learnable
content in STEM equivalent in some cognitive way to the deep learning in modern
languages, history, psychology et al?
This is not to suggest a hierarchy of disciplines but differences, deep
differences, between rules-based disciplines and the humanities.
Learning is complex and individualised, and responsive to, without
entirely determining, the curriculum and the forms of its delivery. In the
research on SAC the assumptions are that teaching and assessment delivery is both
relatively unproblematic and designed to encourage deep, non-instrumental
learning. Expectations of the curriculum delivery and assessment will vary
amongst students depending on personal background of schooling and parents, the
discipline and personal motivations and the expectations will often be
unrealistic. Consider why they are unrealistic – more than the narcissism of
being a customer. (There is a very wide range of varieties of customer: as a
customer of Network Rail I am more a supplicant than a narcissist.)
The alarm over the changes (?) to the students’ view of their learning
as SAC in STEM should be put in the context of the previously high drop-out
rate of STEM students (relatively higher than non-STEM) which could reach 30%
of a cohort. The causes of drop out were thoroughly examined by Mantz Yorke(Yorke and Longden, 2004), but as
regards the SAC issue here, STEM drop outs were explained by tutors as lack of the
right mathematical preparation. There is comparatively little research on the
motivations for students entering STEM courses before they became SAC; such research is not over the long term or longitudinal.
However, research on the typology of students with differing motivations for
learning (the academic, the social, the questioning student etc) ranged across
all courses, does exist (a 20 year survey by Liz Beatty, 2005). Is it possible that after widening
participation to the point of a universal system, motivations towards the
instrumental or utilitarian will become more prominent? And is there an
implication that an elite HE system pre-SAC was less instrumentalist, less
surface learning? The creation of PPE (first Oxford in 1921 then spreading
across the sector) was an attempt to produce a mandarin class, where career
ambition was designed into the academic disciplines. That is, ‘to get a good
job’ applies here too but it will be expressed in different, indirect and
elevated ways of public service.**
There are some anachronisms in the research on SAC. The acceptance of
SAC by management, by producing student charters and providing students places
on boards, committees and senior management meetings is not a direct result of students or management
considering students as customers. Indeed, it predates SAC by many years and
has its origins in the 1960s and 70s.
I am unlikely to get onto the board of Morrisons, but I could for the
Co-op – a discussion point on partnerships, co-producers, membership of a community
of learners. The struggle by students to get representation in management has taken
fifty years from the Wilson government Blue Paper Student Protest (1970) to today. It may have been a concession, but
student representation changed the nature of HEIs in the process, prior to SAC.
Student Charters appear to be mostly a coherent, user-friendly reduction of
lengthy academic and other regulations that no party can comprehend without
extensive lawyerly study. A number of HEIs produced charters before the SAC era
(late 1990s). And iconic university buildings have been significantly
attractive in the architectural profession a long time before SAC –
Birmingham’s aspiration to be an independent city state with its Venetian
architecture recalling St Mark’s Square under the supervision of Joseph
Chamberlain (1890s) or Jim Stirling’s post-modern Engineering faculty building
at Leicester (1963) etc (Cannandine 2002).
Students have complex legal identities and are a complex and often fissiparous
body. They are customers of catering, they are members of a guild or union, learners,
activists and campaigners, clients, tenants, volunteers, sometimes disciplined
as the accused, or the appellant, they adopt and create new identities
psychologically, culturally and sexually. The language of students as customers
creates a language game that excludes other concerns: the withdrawal of state
funding, the creation of an academic precariat, the purpose of HE for learning
and skills supply, an alienation from a community by the persuasive self-image
as atomised customer, how deep learning is a creature of disciplines and the changing job market, that
student-academic relations were problematic and now become formalised ‘complaints’.
Students are not the ‘other’ and they are much more than customers.
Phil Pilkington
is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former
CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of
Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.
*Martin Trow
defined an elite, mass and universal systems of HE by participation rates of
10-20%, 20-30% and 40-50% respectively.
** Trevor
Pateman, The Poverty of PPE, Oxford, 1968; a pamphlet criticising the course by
a graduate; it is acknowledged that the curriculum, ‘designed to run the Raj in
1936’, has changed little since that critique. This document is a fragment of
another history of higher education worthy of recovery: of complaint and
dissatisfaction with teaching and there were others who developed the
‘alternative prospectus’ movement in the 1970s and 80s.
References
Beatty L,
Gibbs G, and Morgan A (2005) ‘Learning orientations and study contracts’, in Marton, F, Hounsell, D and
Entwistle, N, (eds) (2005) The Experience
of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education, 3rd
(Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching,
Learning and Assessment.
Bunce,
Louise (2017) ‘The student-as-consumer approach in HE and its effects on
academic performance’, Studies in Higher Education,
42(11): 1958-1978
Howie P and Bagnall R (2012) ‘A critique of
the deep and surface learning model’, Teaching
in Higher Education 18(4); they state the distinction of learning is
“imprecise conceptualisation, ambiguous language, circularity and a lack
of definition…”
Nixon, E, Scullion, R and Hearn, R (2018) ‘Her majesty the student:
marketised higher education and the narcissistic (dis)satisfaction of the
student consumer’, Studies in Higher
Education 43(6): 927-943
Cannandine, David (2004), The ‘Chamberlain Tradition’, in In Churchill’s Shadow, Oxford: Oxford
University Press; his biographical sketch of Joe Chamberlain shows his vision
of Birmingham as an alternative power base to London.
Yorke M and Longden B (2004) Retention
and student success in higher education, Maidenhead: SRHE/Open University
Press
The Financial Sustainability Strategy Group, a dedicated bunch of HE nerds, has churned out 90 pages on the funding model of UK universities (February 2019), based on TRAC data (Transparent Approach to Costing, as compiled and collated since 1999).
The core activity of teaching
UK/EU undergraduates brings in c£13.25billion of income and covers its full
economic cost (FEC). Within that overall picture, subjects vary in matching fee
income to their FEC. Even after some (HEFCE) top-up grant subsidy for STEM,
there is an internal transfer as subsidy to STEM from the cheap-to-teach and
massively expanded subjects such as Law and Psychology, as well as the cheap
but less expanded Humanities. International student fee income is
c£4.5billion, with a third of such high fee-payers coming from China. The FEC
is more than covered – leaving a 40% surplus transferred to subsidise
research.
Research generates c£9.25billion
(£1.5billion as HEFCE QR and the rest as grants/contracts from various sources)
but recovers only about 75% of its FEC. Research grants from Government cover
80% of their FEC, from industry and the Research Councils 75%, from the EU 65%,
and from charities 60%. The overall loss on research will, therefore, vary
according to the mix of research funding from these various sources. The
Russell Group lose the most but are best placed to attract more international
student fees. A thing called ‘Other Activities’ generates c£5.5billion and
has a 15% profit on its FEC – again a source of subsidy for over-trading in
under-priced research.
What are the challenges and
threats to this financial model?
Any wobble in the UK share of the global student market –
especially since most universities in their financial projections make happy
assumptions about growing their International fee income.
The hikes due in employer contributions to USS (c5%) and to TPS
(c8%).
The freezing of the £9250 UK/EU UG fee.
The impact of (now unlikely?) Brexit on EU undergraduate numbers
and their fee income – although the loss of EU research grants when every one
involves a subsidy of 35% of the FEC would be no bad thing!
Whether the Augar Review will recommend UK undergraduate fees
should be cut from £9250 to, say, £7500 – and, even if it does, whether any
Government ever implements the proposal.
How those universities that have borrowed massive amounts will
be able to service the interest payments as the above happens – let alone save
up so as one day to repay the capital.
In the current financial year
English universities get c£1.5billion of funding from the OfS, mainly for the
extra cost of STEM teaching over and above the £9250 tuition fees but also for
various specialist programmes. Then some £1.6billion is shared out by UKRI to
all UK universities as support for research (based on the REF). The OfS and
UKRI funding is the job HEFCE used to do before the 2017 Higher Education and
Research Act. So the direct taxpayer spend on HE is c£3billion pa, plus
spending on support for teaching in UK universities beyond England – and not
counting the cost of the subsidy to the student loans system, nor the financing
of the various research councils.
We await the Augar Review; meanwhile
the supply of UK 18-year olds continues to decline until the early 2020s, which
can be bad news for some universities, as the OfS warned in its analysis of Financial Sustainability of Higher Education Providers in
England on 4 April 2019. The flow of EU students may reduce IF Brexit
ever happens, and on the spending side institutions face significant increases
in employer contributions to pensions. All in all, this is not a rosy picture
in the short term and potentially grim in the medium term – unless, of course,
the Augar Review gets lost in the context of Brexit-induced government chaos or
the Treasury generously substitutes extra grant funding for any Augar reduction
in the £9250. Unless indeed any ‘Brexit dividend’ leaves room for more public
spending on HE as a call on taxpayer largesse alongside the NHS, social care
for the elderly, the funding of schools, etc etc…
SRHE Treasurer David Palfreyman is Bursar, New
College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre
for Higher Education Policy Studies (OxCHEPS), and a member of the Board of the Office for
Students. He writes in a personal capacity.
People on both sides argue passionately about what they see as the
biggest change in their working lifetimes. The present situation is flawed, but
some believe the best way forward is to work within the system for continuing
improvement. However others believe with equal passion that the best way is to
crash out, with no deal for the big unaccountable bureaucracy on the continent.
The European Commission is heavily involved. The debate has run for years, but then
the powers that be announced that they would implement a phased transition to completely
new trading arrangements. Battle lines were drawn and both sides dug in for a
conflict which so far shows no sign of resolution.
Plan S is higher education’s version of Brexit. It may not have
generated quite as much media coverage as that unreal thing, but it has its
full share of intransigent minorities, suspicion on all sides, special pleading,
accusations that the elite is merely looking after its own interests, and
claims that a voiceless majority will be the ones who suffer the most.
Everyone is in favour of open access,
in much the same way as everyone is in favour of free trade, but it turns out
that neither concept is as clear-cut as it first appears. Academics’ guerrilla warfare campaign against what they saw
as the exploitative practices of some publishers has now led to some major
cancellations of contracts, the biggest and best-known being the decision by
the University of California system to cancel its
contract with Elsevier. Such
legal opposition runs alongside illegal but massive file-sharing operations,
the biggest being the Eastern-European based SciHub. Meanwhile the launch of
open access journals such as PlosOne
has not dented the supremacy of the major publishers: such journals may already
have peaked with a very small proportion of the total publishing market.
Hence Plan S, an
initiative by 13 European funders, the European Commission and charitable funders
including Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This group,
known as cOAlition S, want all scientific publications
arising from research they fund to be published in compliant open access
journals or on compliant open access platforms from 2020. They launched a
consultation on their proposals which generated a huge worldwide response from
academics and academic publishers.
The UK entered the field early with the 2012 Finch
Report (see SRHE News 9, July 2012), which controversially led
government to choose Gold Open Access (OA) as its primary route, with the REF
embodying this requirement. This means that ‘article processing charges’ (APCs)
have to be paid up front, whether by the author(s), the institution or the
research funder. It was envisaged that APCs would fall over time thanks to
competition between publishers, but in fact there has been a 16% rise since
then, as David
Kernohan reported for WonkHE on 20 February 2019. The last-but-one HE Minister Jo Johnson
asked Sussex VC Adam Tickell in 2016 to advise further – thatadvice and an Open Research Data Task Forcereporthave
now been published. Kernohan reported that: “the UK hit 54% of
outputs as OA in 2016, up from 15% in 2012. We are firmly on track to achieve
the target. And there is substantial evidence that OA articles are downloaded
more, cited more, and used more than their non-OA counterparts, both from
journals and repositories.” The upfront cost of
Gold OA is a clear disincentive for many researchers despite REF requirements:
grants may not cover publication costs and research may be unfunded. The
research councils currently provide block funding for APCs, but this is
unlikely to be permanent, and Kernohan suggests total expenditure on APCs could
triple in real terms from the 2016 figure, to £818million by 2028 if gold OA
achieves 100% take-up. Something has to give, and a policy initiative is keenly
awaited.
Robert Harington (American
Mathematical Society) asked ‘Plan S: what about researchers?’ on the LSE
Impact Blog on 17 January 2019. On 21 January 2019 University College London (UCL) said Plan S was
“heavy-handed”, the Plan S coalition should engage more with universities and
researchers, and the requirements of individual subject areas need to be more
precisely understood, as Ashleigh
Furlong reported for *Research on 21 January 2019.
Jeffrey
Brainard wrotein Science on 25 January
2019 that scientific societies supported by journal
subscriptions describe Plan S as “an existential threat … Many journals now
follow a hybrid model, publishing individual papers open access for a fee but
deriving most of their income from subscriptions … Plan S’s requirements will
disproportionately hurt the journals that many societies publish … Such
journals typically have high [APCs] … and the societies typically have lower
profit margins than … commercial publishers … The largest, Elsevier, based in
Amsterdam, publishes more than 2500 journal titles; scientific societies each
publish at most a few dozen.”
Steven Inchcoombe of Springer Nature said
Plan S might put Nature out of
business, as Rachael
Pells reported in Times
Higher Education on 13 February 2019: “All the focus [of Plan S] is on the
supply side and we think a lot more focus should be on demand – by which I mean
the researchers themselves, and other funding agencies that are not yet signed
up with Plan S”. Springer Nature then resorted to special pleading, saying titles
such as Nature should
be treated differently under Plan S: the cost per article of in-house
professional editors and the high refusal rate means average APCs are between
€10,000 and €30,000 (£8,770 and £26,300), which would be “very difficult” to
recover via an article processing charge.
Without carefully paced transition to allow for the emergence of new
titles, is there a risk of unusual constraints and disjunctions in publishing
opportunities in affected subjects?
Might restructuring the spread of well-cited papers have unplanned
contingent consequences?
How can the shift to Gold Open Access and associated APCs be managed
equitably to protect the positions both of unfunded researchers in G20
economies and of a wider spread of authors in emergent research regions, especially
given the collaborative nature of academia?
There
are many small publishers, including those linked to learned societies, who
publish an important part of the Plan S funded output in serials central to
their discipline. Will transition be more difficult for them and, if so, can this be
managed effectively but flexibly?
Jon Tennant (independent) wrote for
The Impact Blog on 5 March 2019: “The whole point
of Plan S was to disrupt the status quo and transform the world of scholarly
publishing. If it yields to those who it is trying to disrupt, at the cost of
the greater good, than that’s not exactly progress. Open Access is not a
business model, so let us stop treating it as such. I believe that science can
help us shape the world to be better, and can help solve the enormous problems
that our planet currently faces. I do not believe that having it under the
control of mega-corporations and elite individuals or institutes helps to
realise this, or is in the principles of fundamental human rights.”
Richard Poynder(independent), who has been called the “chronicler,
conscience, and gadfly laureate” of the Open Access movement, wrote for The
Impact Blog on 6 March 2019: Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in
the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access
strategy? He noted that “Plan Sraises challenging
questions for the Global South … To succeed, Plan S will need other countries to commit
to the initiative. To this end, Plan S architect Robert-Jan Smits spent
considerable time last year lobbying
funders around the world. But should countries in the Global South sign up? Perhaps not … legacy
publishers would have little choice but to replace current subscription
revenues with article-processing charges (APCs) … Plan S would lead to a near
universal pay-to-publish system. APCs range in price from
several hundred to over $5,000 per article. This is unfeasible for
the Global South and so researchers would be excluded in a different (but more
pernicious) way than they are under the subscription system: free to read
research published in international journals but unable to publish in them.”
Clearly Plan S poses a host of
difficult moral, ethical and financial challenges for all learned societies,
including SRHE. Like most societies SRHE joined in a collective response from the
Academy of
Social Sciences response in February 2019, to which
SRHE Director Helen Perkins contributed significantly. That response said:
“3. The AcSS supports the principle of open access as an
important public benefit. A key question though is how best to implement this
principle, and how to balance it against other principles (academic excellence,
autonomy and freedom). Balancing open access is not just a question of
balancing one principle against another but considering how in practice open
access can be broadened, while not undermining the conditions for producing
excellent research and ensuring that an appropriate degree of academic autonomy
is supported.
4. Like many other respondents, the Academy of Social
Science has concerns about the method and speed of implementation proposed both
by cOAlition S and, in the UK, UKRI. We are concerned that these plans are
still accompanied by little detail in many important areas, and little
empirical evidence about possible effects on the wider systems and structures
within which academic research in produced (as well as consumed), or of the
effects on different disciplines. We do not believe that ‘Gold’ access is the
best solution in all cases; we think that Green (and hybrid) journals are capable
of meeting aspirations for wider access.
5. We believe that cOAlition S, and in the UK, UKRI and
others, should engage more widely with a range of stakeholders to consider
relevant evidence about systemic effects, looking also at distributional effects
(between early career and established researchers; research in different parts
of the world; and researchers from different disciplines) and a range of
possible
unintended consequences, including the effects on the social sciences. This
should inform proposals about how to implement aims to improve open access, but
would require changes to the timetable announced by cOAlition S.”
The British
Academy response in February 2019 was blunt:“ … our
initial response … set out our concerns about Plan S’s antipathy to hybrid
journals … these concerns are not allayed by the new Guidance. … cOAlition S’s
hostility to all forms of hybridity will have precisely the opposite result to
its stated intentions.” Meanwhile Euroscepticism persists in Brussels, with
Robert-Jan Smits, described as the European Commission’s ‘open access envoy’
declaring there is ‘something
fishy’ about publishers setting up mirror journals to
get past Plan S proposals about hybrid journals, while publishers protest that
mirror journals are simply a necessary part of hybridity.
Echoing Brexit, it seems the divide between the proponents of Plan S and the defenders of the status quo has not diminished, and the initial response to the deadlock may well be to extend the deadline. Elites may be divided, but no doubt they will still emerge unscathed; the price of any change will be paid by marginal communities in the North and the global South. With Brexit many academics, bolstered by overwhelming academic belief in the rightness of their cause, have seized on every shred of evidence to dismiss the alternative. Will Plan S be able to exploit its superficial appeal to the evident rightness of open access, or will academics be willing to engage with the difficult ethical and moral questions which Plan S poses? It may be time for the Creative Commons to take control.
Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com.
I’m walking through central London on a bright, warm, sunny day, people sitting outside at pavement cafes, and I’m thinking, this is nice – then thinking, this isn’t nice at all, this is February, the temperature shouldn’t be in the low 20s. Sunshine – oh, the irony for people on a damp, cloudy, island in the North Atlantic – is now a further unwelcome reminder that my generation has comprehensively failed in its – our – responsibility for the biggest problem, by far, facing us all. There is no technological fix for climate change that is even remotely in sight. Nor can I see a way of evading our responsibility: our generation, the baby-boomers, was of voting age – to set the bar at its lowest – when the damage that humans were doing to the climate became apparent in the later twentieth-century; and nothing much was done.
The evidence mostly wasn’t available for our parents to act on; and the die was already cast (a lot of global warming now being “baked-in”, to use the unfortunate metaphor popular with climate scientists) by the time the generation after us reached voting age. So responsibility for the state of the planet around the turn of the next century, maybe much sooner (and it’s hard to find an informed estimate that isn’t somewhere between unbelievably terrible and plain apocalyptic), rests squarely with us. I’m glad I won’t be around to have to try to explain how we managed to make such a mess of things.
If universities can’t help with what now seems
to be mainly a damage-limitation exercise, I’m inclined to think that we should
just pack up and go home. The more positive view, presented cogently by Neil
Harrison in his 20 February SRHE blog, is
that: “We need to reoccupy public spaces and reassert our expertise …. Why would someone want to spend valuable time that
could be spent on developing further expertise in dialogue with those seeking
to undermine their authority from a position of relative ignorance? … However,
this impulse to disengage must be resisted, with educators needing to reassert
their expertise in public forums … Relevance
can only be rediscovered by finding new ways of working together to reapply our
expertise to the world’s wicked problems.”
And while resisting the huge temptation to say “I told you so” to the climate-deniers and climate-delayers (“Yes, we must act, but not just yet…”), universities are in a uniquely strong position to press for global action. They possess both the necessary knowledge base and a non-partisan status. The actions needed are, however, going to be uniquely difficult politically – though perhaps less so as the decades pass and coastal cities flood (see the Environment Agency’s handwringing about the expected future ineffectiveness of the Thames Barrier) and the equatorial belt becomes uninhabitable, driving mass migration. But universities, certainly in Britain, have been notably timid in speaking truth to power, even where the research evidence is overwhelming.
Take an education example: the empirical case against selection at 11+ is as unarguable as anything can be in social research, but I think many parents could be forgiven for assuming that a grammar school/other divide reflects some kind of natural educational order. Have I missed hearing our university leaders saying, minister, your schools policy is just plain wrong? If universities, individually or collectively, can’t make a powerful public case for policy change where the rock-solid research evidence shows that everyone will benefit, what chance is there of them engaging in a difficult debate where politicians need to tell people that they have to put up with uncongenial changes for the benefit of their grand-children?
I really do hope that I’m
being far too pessimistic, and that Neil Harrison’s call to arms will be
answered by academics taking the fight to public forums and to politicians with
the full backing of their vice-chancellors and universities. But if university
leaders don’t rally round, well, it’s not the end of the world. Oh, sorry, it
is, isn’t it?
SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education,
University College London.
The
theme of the 4th Annual Conference of the Centre for Global Higher
Education (CGHE) was Challenging Higher
Education: it did not disappoint.
The
opening remarks by CGHE Director Simon Marginson (Oxford) were a rousing call
to arms, urging universities to look beyond current bipolar conflicts to
develop a more collaborative world, in which UK universities would do more than
just “work the British colonial circuit”, in a post-Brexit world of regions
where UKHE might not have a region any more. Marginson segued into his
introduction of the Burton R Clark Lecture, now a fixture in the CGHE
Conference, and delivered this year by Bob Clark’s good friend Michael Shattock
(UCL).
In
his lecture on ‘University governance and academic work: the ‘business model’
and its impact on innovation and creativity’ Shattock previewed some findings
from his latest book, to be published in July 2019. His research with
co-authors Aniko Horvath (King’s College London) and Ellen Hazelkorn (Dublin
Institute of Technology) in a range of universities in the UK had revealed accelerating
diversity of modes and missions, and a trend towards ever more intrusive government
policymaking. Governors who might once have been critical friends were now
obliged to enforce regulatory guidance from the Office for Students, perhaps
the thin end of a wedge of more lay intrusion into what is taught, and how.
Paradoxically the idea of the student as customer barely featured in the almost
dystopian landscape he painted, first of teaching and then of research. The
metric-driven pressure to perform should not, said Shattock, be confused with
Clark’s identification of a ‘strengthened steering core’ in the entrepreneurial
university. (He would say that, of course, since the original strengthened
steering core was probably Warwick’s during Shattock’s towering tenure as
Registrar, but it doesn’t make it less true.) That core was closely connected
to the academic community, whereas the current academic climate risked
repressing rather than fostering academic innovation and creativity. The
‘English experiment’ with HE marketisation had reinforced executive governance;
it was time to restore the academic community to its proper role as a key
partner in governance. Questions and discussion pushed Shattock to a ‘back to
the future’ position somewhat removed from his argument, as he was reluctantly driven
to extol an Oxbridge model of governance by academics in contrast to the unduly
top-down executive management and governance searingly exposed by his research.
It was, nevertheless, a lecture which in a fitting way did justice to Clark’s
legacy.
Next
up the organisers had conceived a panel discussion on ‘Brexit, UK and Worldwide
Higher Education’, not – as no doubt first planned – days after Brexit had
actually happened, but on the day after a seven-hour Cabinet meeting had led to
proposals for a further meeting, something Cornford surely wrote in Microcosmographia Academica. A
post-Brexit Panel would have seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it
fell rather flat, despite the best efforts of chair Ellen Hazelkorn (Dublin
Institute of Technology) and engaging contributions from Nick Hillman (HEPI)
and David Palfreyman (New College, Oxford and an OfS Board member), arrayed
perhaps symbolically on the right wing of the panel (as seen from the floor).
Lunch intervened before the second keynote from Marijk van der Wende (Utrecht):
‘On a Learning Curve: New Realities for HE in a Changing Global Context’. Her
theme was the rise of China, probably soon to become the world leader in HE,
and already surpassing the European Union in R&D spend, and the US in
scientific output. It was a presentation informed and enlightened by much first
class research evidence, but hindered by unreadably small text in many
powerpoints, problems with the sound system, and a fire alarm which forced the
hall to empty for 30 minutes halfway through her presentation. She was however
able to rally and finish with an upbeat quote by the Rector of Leiden about
Brexit not holding back the progress of scientific collaboration.
The
CGHE team decided to make no concessions for time lost, their judgment
vindicated by the continuing presence of most participants staying for the
delayed finishing time after 6pm. They were drawn first by the parallel
sessions reporting work in progress on some of the many CGHE projects, living
up to the Director’s prospectus by offering multi-level global perspectives on
public good, graduate skills and careers, sectoral evolution, participation,
financing and equity, management and academic work, and more. Golo Henseke and
Francis Green of UCL were developing a thesis that social skills were
increasingly important for graduate earnings, drawing economic comparisons
across Europe, and comparing European and US experiences. Vassiliki Papatsibas
(Sheffield) and Simon Marginson were in the early stages of a project on ‘Brexit,
emotions and identity dynamics’, where they had been taken aback by the
emotional ‘turn’ their data had forced upon them. Does reason enable and
passion disable? they speculated. (How else, I wonder, can we account for the
flood of academic tweets seizing on every lone shred of evidence pointing to
the iniquity of Brexit, from those who would otherwise be railing against
government’s own attachment to policy-based evidence?). Aniko Horvath reported
early stages in her research with Jurgen Enders (Bath) and Michael Shattock into
the scope for negotiated local orders in university governance, drawing
interesting comparisons between the UK’s legitimation of committees as part of
governance structures, and Germany’s attitude, which regards the role of
committees and working groups as at best questionable.
In
the final plenary Paul Ashwin (Lancaster) spoke with research-informed passion on
‘Transforming University Teaching’. Oversimplified accounts of the educational
process make us lose sight of the educational arguments for undergraduate
education. Too often we mistake privilege for ability, and prestige for
quality. Justifying HE in terms of generic skills is reductionist, and
purporting to explain HE in terms of signalling for employers simply reinforces
the iniquitous force of global rankings and institutional prestige. Instead we
should recognise that universities are the distinctive custodians of structured
bodies of knowledge, and teaching is about designing ways for students to
develop access to one or other of those bodies of knowledge – that is how teaching may truly be
transformational. This is a continuing process of hard intellectual work: we
need to change ourselves and our curriculum, not expect students, managers and
policymakers to change so we can stay the same.
Thus
the conference ended as it had begun, with a call to put education back on centre
stage – in these troubled times that is indeed challenging higher education.
SRHE member Rob Cuthbert is editor of
SRHE News and Blog.
This is a long overdue blog on my keynote Higher Education Research: A Personal Reflection on Policy and Practice at the 2017 SRHE Newer Researchers Conference (available on the SRHE website as well as a post-Keynote interview). In my defence, I was 8 months pregnant at the time and am starting a new job at Imperial College London. Which means that I have been reflecting on these insights myself, and in relation to colleagues (including those newer and emerging in their higher education careers as well as some very well-established).
Develop skill sets
Personal skills: A research career always starts with your personal skills.
Through hundreds of interviews with academics and professional leaders, I have
learned that research careers are hard work. A journal publication is akin to
the tip of an iceberg of activity. Research requires tenacity, perseverance and
loads of patience (from delayed trains to waiting for reviews to come back).
Good public speaking requires a lot of practice (and do not read from your
slides).
Collaboration
skills: Find
ways to work with those within your institution. This may be on projects
related to your job or be more practical in nature. To progress you will need
to work across institutions. This may be strategically for multi-institutional projects
or to leverage resources. International collaborations are vital for niche
expertise and comparative research. As you narrow your research specialism you
will find there are usually a handful of people exploring similar topics. And
working internationally does not need to entail a massive budget—I have
long-term collaborators I have only met via Skype. Tip: this is a great website to find time zones to connect.
Methodological
skills: Develop
your methodological toolkit. This means going beyond a simplistic
quantitative/qualitative divide. The methods should follow from the research
questions and the best way to address them. I use various quantitative and
qualitative analyses as appropriate, as well as concept mapping (and developed concept-map
mediated interviewing), cognitive interviewing techniques, focus groups (I am a
fan of 4-6 people, more than that and voices get lost) as well as interviews.
Even more creative methods are being used – from photo elicitation to dance and
Lego (which I personally get enough of at home). Tip: distinctive methods can
go a long way in selling a research bid.
Writing
skills for different audiences: There is no point in doing research if you cannot
communicate the findings. There are very different writing styles for different
audiences. Academic writing can be heavily referenced and jargon-heavy. The
practitioner audience wants to hear the ‘so what’ answered. Writing for
policymakers is tough, but at least is always brief. The public is a whole other
beast – if your work has public interest I recommend professional media
training, it really helped me with live radio broadcasts when you get five
minutes to prepare. And when writing for students, it helps to “show your
work”, not just the conclusion. I am still working on the skill of taking one
piece of research and ‘translating’ it for different audiences (hence a massive
pile of rejected journal articles from policy-oriented research projects).
Building a career
Be strategic: Be creative in approaches to roles and
responsibilities to build longer term success. Can you turn an internal project
evaluation into a research project? Can you repeat a pedagogical intervention
each term to build up a longitudinal dataset? Or have a colleague to the same
and work together?
Be green: Re-use resources and recycle your data.
Within ethical boundaries, you can continually mine your own data. I managed to
draw out the theme of ‘creativity’ for a journal special issue from a large dataset on leadership.
Be free: You do not need external funding to
do HE research (although it helps!). If you do not have, or are in between,
funded projects, carry on small
bits of longitudinal research or pet projects. I have seen full professors
present on research they did ‘on the side’ over 5-10 years.
Be you: Develop your own strand or niche
within a larger project. This may be within a professional position or a funded
research project. You will always be assigned some roles, but seek out related
activities that allow you some freedom to pursue your own interests.
Be savvy: This is not for novices, but if
you start early it is a lot easier. Conducting a meta-analysis across projects
and strands of research allows you to inform policy and have high impact. This
can start with high-quality literature reviews or cataloguing studies in your
research area.
Research impact
It used to be ‘publish or perish’. For better or
worse, impact is the new name of the game now. Think of multiple audiences and
what aspects of your research they may be interested in – this may differ for students,
academics, institutions, government policy and the wider public. A
straightforward way to have research impact is to bid for commissioned research
projects: an eager audience already awaits.
Impact means getting your boots dirty – hit the
rails, the road, the sky. You need to get your message out there. A tip for
research bids – set aside plenty of funding to support dissemination. In
addition to the SRHE blog,
use Twitter
to get your findings out, Wonkhe
is great for policy, Times
Higher Education has
a wide readership and University World News has international reach.
Forging your own path
In the absence of large
student cohorts, there are very few ‘traditional’ academic jobs in higher
education studies; exceptions are the Master’s in Higher Education courses in
the US or a few large-scale doctoral programmes. That means most higher
education researchers have their own unique career path, often in hybrid roles
with a mix of academic, professional services and managerial responsibilities.
To keep moving ahead in your
career, build research networks across institutions and countries. If you do
not know where to start, ask questions about someone’s research. Develop broad
networks, including for professional work, research, across the sector, as well
as policy influencers.
Get off your phone and email
and be present and active at conferences; develop a public profile; request
coffee chats with those whose work you like. Draw others in to your area of
interest. I suggest informal mentors and champions as I have never found a
formal scheme that seemed to work out. Find commonalities with others in
related and semi-related areas (methods is always a good start). Tip: Write half
an article then ask for collaborators rather than starting from scratch.
Challenges and opportunities
Sustaining a research career is not easy. You may
encounter research and policy fads. There are endless calls for accountability
and the resulting need to translate outputs to meet targets for your
institution, REF and impact. It is also a lot easier to publish some kinds of
research than others. Building networks can be daunting, and you will encounter
tribes and territories and the intimidating disciplinary ‘old guard’ or ‘Mean
Girls’-style cliques.
I know several colleagues who have built up
professional and research expertise in a niche area or in a specific
institutional context, and then feel stuck or are afraid to let go of what they
have achieved to move on.
There is also the challenge of positional power in
higher education. You might know more than your VC about access, but best not
tell her that. Expertise and knowledge can be threatening to those above and
around you – academia is not immune to the cry of “enough of experts”. Your
research will always be more respected outside your institution.
However, chin up, as they say. Keep the big picture
in mind and play the long game. Keep multiple strands of work going. Build
supportive networks. Play to your strengths and build on your weaknesses. I
need to force myself to stop and write instead of chasing the next grant
sometimes. When tensions get tight, speak to facts. And be humble (at least on
the outside).
Final points of wisdom
Your specialism will only ever be part of what your
day job is; every HE role has its “bread and butter” elements (what pays your
salary). Keep your career goals in mind (do you want to be a REF star? Do you
want to have policy impact? Or institutional impact? Do you love teaching?
Don’t pull up the ladder behind you, build new ones to drop down. Provide and pass on opportunities to others. Some activities pay your salary, some offer generous or pitiful compensation, others offer prestige, networking, goodwill or, if lucky, a cup of tea and some biscuits. And a random one to finish, never put a country name or a discipline in a title (it is a turn-off to everyone else).
SRHE member Camille Kandiko Howson is Associate Professor of Education in the Centre for Higher Education Research & Scholarship at Imperial College London. Camille is also a member of the SRHE Research & Development Committee
