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Pragmatic problem-solving for inclusive doctoral admission

by Bing Lu, Rebekah Smith McGloin and Scott Foster

This blog post reflects on ongoing collaborative efforts to advance more equitable doctoral admissions between a group of UK institutions. It argues that transforming graduate admissions is not simply driven by competitive logic, nor by a search for a single, universal framework that can be applied across the sector. Instead, sector-level change emerges through collective, interactional, and often emotional work.

Inclusive postgraduate research (PGR) admission and recruitment have become an increasing global concern (Posselt, 2016; Bastedo, 2026; Boghdady, 2025). Drawing on ongoing collaborative work between a group of UK institutions, this blog post reflects on collective efforts to advance more equitable doctoral admissions. We argue that inclusive doctoral admission is not a competition to produce an exhaustive, finished framework, but an ongoing process of collective problem solving, one that requires humility, openness, and sustained commitment across institutional boundaries.

PGR students are strategically vital to the UK’s research capacity, innovation and future academic workforce. PhD programmes increasingly function as the primary entry route into academic careers and shape who is able to imagine themselves, and be recognised, as future researchers. Within the doctoral lifecycle, admission is a particularly critical intervention point. Yet, compared with undergraduate or taught postgraduate recruitment, the mechanisms shaping PGR admissions have historically received less sustained scrutiny.

A report commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in 2014 highlighted that UK institutions primarily value academic attainment, the quality of research proposals, and evidence of prior research skills when selecting candidates (Mellors-Bourne et al, 2014). Since 2020, a growing body of UK-based scholarship has begun to highlight equity issues in doctoral selection (McGloin & Wynne, 2022; Oyinloye & Wakeling 2023; Mateos‑González & Wakeling, 2022; Britton et al, 2020), and has sought to explore the ascriptive nature of systems and processes that underpin doctoral recruitment and admission.  Together, these studies identify a range of barriers. These include the persistence of ‘elite pipelines’, whereby attending a Russell Group university at undergraduate level strongly predicts access to elite postgraduate education, as well as the significant under-representation of British candidates from minoritised backgrounds at doctoral level, particularly within funded studentships. These patterns underscore the need to interrogate how merit, potential, and excellence are operationalised in practice.

The initiatives and the community of practice

Initiatives funded by Research England and Office for Students, including the Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation (EDEPI) programme, represent important attempts to push forward the agenda of inclusive PGR admissions in English Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In 2022, EDEPI conducted a national survey on PGR admissions practices in UK HEIs. The study identified ten key barriers to inclusive admission in its final report EDEPI Postgraduate Researcher Admission Framework and led to the development of the Postgraduate Researcher Competency-Based Admission Framework. This framework deliberately shifts focus away from previous institutional prestige and historical academic attainment towards the specific skills, experiences and competencies which demonstrate future potential for doctoral research.

From 2024, EDEPI has fostered an inter-institutional Community of Practice involving a group of international and UK institutions to explore approaches for enhancing inclusive PGR admissions collectively. Within this community, three institutions engaged as case studies to trial new approaches to evaluating applicants beyond conventional academic metrics, building on the Competency Framework. Through regular facilitated discussions, shared reflective practices, collaborative webinars and a jointly organised symposium on Fostering inclusive doctoral admission, participating institutions work alongside the EDEPI team to explore challenges and embed equity-driven principles into their PGR admissions processes.

Key learning from collective work

One of the most important lessons drawn from this collective institutional effort is that, while institutions hold different conceptions of fairness and merit shaped by their unique contexts, they nonetheless share a commitment to addressing persistent equity issues. This aligns with the findings of the sector survey (Smith McGloin et al, 2024) which found an overwhelming commitment to inclusive practice, an awareness of the need for change and huge complexity in existing processes with multiple stakeholders and drivers. This work is neither straightforward nor purely normative; it is complex, negotiated, and deeply pragmatic.

For example, in staff training workshops, academic colleagues described their deliberate efforts to apply equity principles when making departmental admissions decisions. Professional services staff, meanwhile, highlighted their role in carefully matching applicants’ proposals and disciplinary backgrounds to appropriate departments, ensuring that applications reach the review stage rather than being filtered out prematurely. Where resistance or hesitation arose around the introduction of yet another ‘framework’, this was less about rejecting equity goals and more about uncertainty regarding feasible, appropriate, and sustainable implementation.

Debates around distributive fairness versus procedural fairness illustrate this tension clearly (Boliver et al, 2022). Graduate admissions are not objective measurements of worth but sites of intense organisational boundary work, where judgements about potential, fit, and excellence are continuously negotiated. These discussions echo longstanding sociological insights into academic evaluation. Lamont (2009), for instance, argues that in real-world academic review, excellence and diversity are not alternative principles but additive ones. Staff involved in PGR admissions are often guided by pragmatic, problem-solving considerations, caught between institutional principles, personal commitments, and procedural constraints. Panels are typically required to reach consensus on a limited number of candidates within tight timeframes, and these practical pressures shape how fairness is understood and enacted.

Within this ‘black box’ of academic decision-making, Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus is frequently cited to explain how scholars’ legitimate visions of high-quality research and defend disciplinary boundaries, with conflicts often most pronounced among those occupying similar positions. Our collective work over the past 12 months, however, suggests a more nuanced picture. Admissions staff, both academic and professional, are motivated not only by positional interests but also by a shared, pragmatic curiosity about how to solve persistent problems together. The Community of Practice created space for dialogue, uncertainty, and learning, enabling participants to reflect on their own assumptions while engaging with others’ institutional constraints.  Transforming graduate admissions, then, is not simply driven by competitive logic, nor by a search for a single, universal framework that can be applied across the sector. Instead, sector-level change emerges through collective, interactional, and often emotional work. A recent WonkHE article, How to level the PhD playing field, posed a critical question: does the sector have the collective will to move beyond well-intentioned initiatives towards the structural changes required to address inequities among PGRs?

The experiences emerging from EDEPI offer cautious but promising evidence. They demonstrate how institutions with differing histories, resources, and institutional affordances can nonetheless work together pragmatically to enhance admissions practices. Inclusive doctoral admission, in this sense, is not a finished model to be adopted but an ongoing process of collective problem solving, one that requires humility, openness, and sustained commitment across institutional boundaries. Through the established Community of Practice, the EDEPI framework has also begun to attract interest from institutions in international contexts, despite differing governance structures, as a means of collectively developing equity-oriented approaches to PGR admissions through shared learning.

Closing summary

Inclusive PGR admissions require ongoing, collaborative work, as shown through EDEPI’s efforts to help institutions rethink how fairness, potential, and merit are assessed. Colleagues across academic and professional roles demonstrate that excellence and diversity can be mutually reinforcing when supported by reflective practice and shared experimentation. Future progress depends on refining competency-based approaches, tracking applicant journeys, expanding training and co-creation, and translating these insights into clearer sector guidance and policy.

Dr Bing Lu is a higher education scholar based at Nottingham Trent University and University of Warwick. Bing’s research critically engages with access, equity, and sustainability in postgraduate education, focusing particularly on underrepresented groups and the global flows of academic labour. Bing is currently guest editing a Special Issue on Taboos in Doctoral Education Across Cultures hosted by Higher Education Quarterly.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of Research Culture and Environment at Nottingham Trent University and Chair of the UK Council for Graduate Education. Her focus is on innovations in practice and national policy work related to new and emerging forms of doctorate that align with the changing research, innovation and skills policy landscape; including research culture reform, civic-engaged and inclusive doctoral education and equity-focused admissions.

Scott Foster is a professor specialising in postgraduate research culture and academic leadership. He has published extensively on equity, well-being, and innovation in doctoral education. Through influential articles and forthcoming book projects, he advances global research culture while supporting institutions to strengthen policy, supervision, and the doctoral experience.


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Higher education’s postcode lottery: How geography and disadvantage shape university access in England

by Frances Sit and Graeme Atherton

Across the world, access to higher education is often shaped as much by geography as by ability or aspiration. For many students, this can be starkly literal: the distance to a campus, the availability of local courses, and the time, travel, and financial costs of attending university determine whether learners can study close to home, work, care for family, or take the first steps toward the careers and social mobility that higher education uniquely enables.

In England, this reality is recently brought into sharp focus when the University of Essex announced the closure of its campus in the coastal city of Southend-on-Sea. By August 2026, the nearest routes into higher education for local students will be further away, harder to reach, and more costly. What will disappear is not just a campus, but a locally anchored gateway to opportunity.

The story of Southend matters because it reflects a broader national pattern. Across England, learners from coastal areas like Southend, smaller towns, rural communities or other ‘cold spots’ are facing similar barriers, making them systematically less likely to progress to higher education than their peers in cities or more well-served regions. Our report Coast and Country: Access to Higher Education Cold Spots in England lays bare the scale of these disparities, highlighting how geography continues to shape opportunity – and what must be done to address it.

A national picture that hides local realities

Drawing on ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data published annually by the Department for Education, our report examines the differences in higher education participation by age 19 for state-funded pupils living in different types of places in England. We focus specifically on learners eligible for free school meals (FSM), who are among the most disadvantaged in the education system and a critical group for understanding equity in higher education.

At a national level, higher education participation for FSM learners stood at 29% in 2022/23. But this headline figure masks stark geographical variation. Excluding London areas, which account for only 16% of England’s population, the average progression rate outside the capital fell to just 23%. London’s strong performance is obscuring a far more challenging situation across much of the rest of the country.

Disparities become sharper as places become smaller. In 2022/23, the average higher education progression rate for FSM learners fell steadily from 42% in core cities to just 19% in villages and rural areas. Coastal communities see notably lower progression as well. Their average higher education progression rate for FSM learners in 2022/23 was 11 percentage points lower than in inland areas, with pupils in many coastal areas having less than a one-in-five chance of going on to higher education.   

All in all, as depicted in Diagram 1, it is in rural villages where FSM learners had the least chance of progressing to higher education. Coastal locations also tend to have lower participation rates compared to their inland counterparts, even when the areas are similar in size and settlement type.

Diagram 1: Average FSM higher education participation rates in different area types in 2022/23

Explaining the gaps – and why place matters

It is often argued that disparities in HE progression are largely explained by attainment in schools, and for a number of years increasing attainment was the priority where widening access work was concerned for the Office for Students. In the report, we mapped GCSE attainment at the area level against FSM higher education progression rates in 2022/23 and we indeed found a strong correlation (𝑟=0.9001). However, that relationship between prior attainment and FSM higher education participation becomes much weaker when it comes to rural villages and coastal areas (𝑟=0.4181 for rural villages; 𝑟=0.4733 for coastal areas). In these communities, improving attainment alone does not fully address low higher education participation.

The presence of a higher education provider can also be a decisive factor in participation. In our report, we mapped the distribution of universities and colleges in England. HE providers are heavily concentrated in core cities, and 39 of the 42 core city areas are situated inland. London alone is home to over 40 universities and HE institutions, plus numerous smaller providers, while half of the 18 rural villages in our study have only one or two universities – and the other half have none. This uneven distribution underscores how profoundly that where you live can shape whether higher education feels accessible. That said, it is not possible to say the extent to which the level of higher education provision or its supply affects the demand for it.

The limits of attainment and provider distribution in explaining disparities in HE participation underline the need for education policy that truly takes place into account. Effective approaches must go beyond national and regional averages, and at times operate at a finer level of granularity than broad place labels like ‘rural’ or ‘coastal’ can capture. Low participation is not confined neatly to rural villages or seaside towns, nor does urban location in itself guarantee access. In 2022/23, for example, the local authority area with the second lowest FSM higher education progression rate nationally was South Gloucestershire, an urban core city area. Places that appear to have similar characteristics can also experience vastly different outcomes: for instance, Oldham and Blackpool are both large towns located just over 50 miles apart, yet FSM progression rates stood at 36.2 percent in Oldham compared to just 16.2 percent in Blackpool.

These contrasts highlight why widening participation policy and efforts must engage with local conditions in a more nuanced way. Factors such as transport connectivity, the availability of part-time or flexible study, alignment with local labour markets, cultural expectations around higher education, and the strength of local support networks all shape whether HE feels achievable. It is the combination of structural, logistical and social factors that shape whether HE is genuinely within reach. Without attention to these finer-grained dynamics, place-based policy risks remaining too blunt to reach the communities most in need.

Breaking the postcode lottery

Since our report was published, the latest ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data, covering up to 2023/24, have become available. Patterns of disparities in FSM higher education participation between different types of places in England have remained unchanged. And as shown in Diagram 2, gaps between different types of places have continued to grow over the past decade, under a widening participation approach that emphasises individual institutions over the collaborative, place-based, cross-sector strategy previously used.

Diagram 2: Gaps in average FSM higher education participation rates between different types of places in 2013/14 and 2023/24

It is therefore welcome that the government has begun to acknowledge these challenges. Its Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper commits to addressing higher education cold spots, improving understanding of local supply and demand, and tackling systemic barriers faced by disadvantaged learners. The creation of a Higher Education Access and Participation Task and Finish Group focused on tackling regional gaps and barriers across the student journey is a positive step in this direction, and one of our report’s authors, Professor Graeme Atherton, is sitting on the group.

However, recognition must translate into delivery. Our report sets out key recommendations, including setting local education participation targets as part of the government’s devolution strategy, auditing post-16 provision by place, and shifting the focus of widening access strategy from individual providers’ approach to local participation outcomes.

The evidence is clear: without a place-sensitive approach, existing gaps in HE participation will continue to widen. The closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus illustrates what is at stake. If place continues to dictate access to higher education, individuals and the communities they call home risk being shut out, not just from higher education, but from the opportunities, skills and futures it makes possible.

Frances Sit is Research and Policy Officer at the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE), which produces policy-relevant research related to inequality in the UK and focuses particularly on place-based inequality, education and skills, work/labour market and the role of business. Frances supports RISE’s policy and research initiatives and coordinates the planning, promotion and delivery of its events. Previously, she served as the Policy and Communications Officer at the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), the UK’s professional organisation supporting those involved in widening access to higher education. Before that, Frances worked as a journalist, reporting on education, politics, social movements.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement at the University of West London, Vice-Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford and the Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Trinity College Oxford and has been working in the field of education research and management since 1995. An international leader and researcher in access to higher education and social mobility, Graeme has produced over 200 conference papers and publications, led regional, national and international initiatives to increase opportunity in higher education and frequently comments on social mobility and education in the UK and internationally. He founded AccessHE and the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), and now leads the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE).


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The Tao of plagiarism: when chi achieves enlightenment without you

by a mildly surprised emeritus professor

Academics are taught many things over the years. How to write grant applications in a tone of sober optimism. How to disagree politely while eviscerating an argument. How to pretend that Reviewer 2’s comments are ‘helpful’. But we are rarely prepared for the moment when our own work achieves enlightenment and returns to the world under a different name.

It began, as these things often do, with Google Scholar. Browsing innocently, I discovered that a paper I had written many years ago, first author with two colleagues, had been reborn. Here it was miraculously renewed: Freeing the chi of change: The Higher Education Academy and enhancing teaching and learning in higher education. Same title. Same argument. Same metaphors. Different authors. Different journal. Different universe.

This was not mere influence. Nor was it scholarly dialogue. This was something more metaphysical. The article had apparently passed through the cycle of samsara, shedding its original authorship like an old skin, and had re-emerged – serene, confident, and wholly unburdened by attribution.

Opening the paper produced a strange sense of déjà vu. Paragraphs unfolded exactly as I remembered writing them. The argument progressed through familiar analytical levels. The meso level was, once again, mysteriously absent. And there it was: the metaphor of chi – blocked, stagnant, yearning to be freed – flowing unimpeded across two decades and several thousand miles.

One could not help but admire the fidelity. This was not slapdash copying. This was careful stewardship. A lightly paraphrased abstract here, a synonym substituted there. “Examines” had matured into “takes a look at”. “Work intensification” had achieved inner peace as “an increase in workload”. The original prose had been gently guided toward a simpler, more mindful state.

The production values added to the sense of cosmic theatre. Running headers attributed the article to someone else entirely, suggesting either deep enlightenment or mild confusion. Words occasionally developed spontaneous internal spacing, or none at all, as if even the typography were observing a vow of non-attachment. Peer review, meanwhile, appeared to have transcended physical form altogether.

At moments like this, one is tempted to ask philosophical questions. What is authorship, really? If an argument is copied perfectly, does it still belong to its original creator? If a journal publishes without editors in the room to hear it, does it still make a sound? If a metaphor about blocked chi appears in the forest of academic publishing, does anyone notice?

And then there is Google Scholar, calmly indexing it all, like a Zen monk sweeping leaves while entire epistemologies collapse around him.

The emotional journey is predictable. Surprise gives way to irritation, which in turn yields to a kind of exhausted amusement. After all, it is not every day one gets to read one’s own work as if it were new – especially when it has been thoughtfully simplified for contemporary consumption.

Correspondence followed. Screenshots were taken. Appendices multiplied. Examples of verbatim overlap were laid out with the careful precision of a tea ceremony. The original article was cited. The reincarnated article was cited. Karma, it seemed, was being documented.

What lingers after the initial absurdity is not just concern about misconduct, but about the ecosystems that allow such reincarnations to flourish. Journals without editors. Publishers without addresses. Ethics policies without enforcement. A publishing landscape in which the appearance of scholarship is often sufficient, and coherence is optional.

Perhaps this is the true lesson of Eastern philosophy for higher education. When systems lose balance, chi stagnates. When oversight weakens, energies flow in unexpected directions. When scholarly publishing detaches from accountability, articles achieve nirvana without the inconvenience of authorship.

The good news is that the chi remains remarkably resilient. Even when blocked, it finds a way. It circulates. It reincarnates. It reappears – sometimes with better spacing, sometimes with worse.

As for me, I have learned a valuable lesson. Should I ever wish to republish my earlier work, there are evidently paths that require no revision, no peer review, and very little effort. I will not be taking them. But it is oddly comforting to know that my chi, at least, is doing well.

SRHE Fellow Paul Trowler is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University. His work focuses on teaching, learning, and organisational change, with a long-standing interest in how academic practices operate in everyday settings. More recently, he has been working on doctoral education and the practical use of AI within learning architectures that support research and learning. He continues to write and develop tools that emphasise dialogic, theory-informed approaches rather than transmission-led models.


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Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

by Joy Garfield and Amrik Singh

As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1986) has been successfully used in many different contexts for complex problem-solving. With its seven-stage structure it provides a framework for structuring/framing wicked problems by initially thinking about what is happening in the real world from the point of view of different stakeholders. An idealised world without any constraints is then explored from different stakeholder perspectives so that different wants/needs for a new system can be considered. Students are encouraged to use empathetic discourse to understand the multiple perspectives of the stakeholders in the problem situation. The comparison between the real world and idealised worlds allows for an eventual accommodation of future ways forward.

Soft Systems Methodology is currently used to teach complex problem solving to postgraduate students at Aston. The module team have developed a group-based approach that has been found to produce a deeper understanding of concepts and yield better overall results, particularly given that students are mostly international postgraduate students. For most of the students their first language is not English, and they are new to complex problem-solving.

Teaching sessions are structured around the different stages of the Soft Systems Methodology. Group work is used so that students support one another in their learning of the concepts and then apply these individually to their chosen assessment topic. The UK criminal justice system is taken as an in-class example and students are asked to think about a particular complex area to focus on, eg overcrowding in prisons in a particular city. Terminology can be particularly complex and hard to grasp if your first language is not native English, so the language used to explain concepts is kept simple and a number of areas of scaffolding are used to help to support the learning.

The first task related to SSM involves students identifying the stakeholders and their power/interest in the complex situation. Students are then taught the concepts of a rich picture and they draw a rich picture as a group for their chosen problem situation using white board paper (example below). The rich picture itself enables students to understand the real world, stakeholder issues, conflicts, and relationships together with who interacts with the problem from outside of its boundary.  Students present their rich pictures to the wider group for formative feedback.

This helps with constructive feedback and a deeper understanding of the complex issue. The rich pictures may seem simple, but simplifying a complex problem is complex in itself! This helps students to understand and tease apart the complexities of the problem situation. The rich picture depicts the problem situation better than just making notes alone.

For the realisation of the idealised world, students put themselves in the shoes of the stakeholder.  This involves empathetic discourse whereby students interview one another about what they would want for a system, without taking into consideration any constraints from different stakeholder perspectives. Students are then able to expand these statements as a group to take into consideration the different aspects. From this, students construct a model which helps depict the transformation activities that the stakeholders wish to conduct to reach their desired output.

By gaining a better understanding of the real world from drawing the rich picture and thinking about an idealised world and possible transformation activities, students can then gain an understanding for the changes going forward.

Topics chosen by students for their assessment have included: housing refugees in the UK; online exams or in person exams at university; homelessness; impact of the pandemic on tourism; child marriages in India; a start up in France to reduce plastic packaging; finding the appropriate route for a railway between two cities in Germany. These are all complex and ambiguous problems that need to be understood before any potential solutions are made.

During the module students develop confidence in the application of SSM and come to a true understanding of the process of accommodating different stakeholder perspectives – especially when consensus is not always possible. What we understand from this journey is that there is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution when understanding complex ambiguous problems.

Empathy enriches the SSM process by ensuring the human side of systems is as important as the technical side. It helps to create solutions that work not just in theory but in real, messy, human-centric environments. Empathetic discourse is very valuable to understand the voice of the stakeholders. What we have learned from the delivery of the module is that when complex ambiguous problems are human centric, then the solutions are human centric also.

Checkland, P (1986) Systems thinking, systems practice Chichester: Wiley

Dr Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly systems modelling and complex problem solving. With just over 20 years of experience in academia, she has worked at a number of UK universities. Joy is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster. 

Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 

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The Society for Research into Higher Education in 2015

by Rob Cuthbert

In SRHE News and Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times. This is the last of the series.

2015 was a troubled year, as wars and terrorist outrages proliferated. Russia had invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and a supposedly agreed ceasefire in 2015 broke down within days, as had a previous agreement in 2014. The war in Iraq involving Islamic State, which had started in 2013, would not end until 2017. Islamic State were also involved in the Syrian civil war, drawing in more and more major powers on opposite sides. It would continue until the Assad regime was overthrown in 2024, but elsewhere the Arab Spring popular uprisings had mostly faded. Massacres in Nigeria by Boko Haram killed more than 2,000 people. Al Qaeda gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 more in Paris at the offices of newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Al-Shabaab killed 148 people, mostly students, at the Garissa University College in Kenya. A terrorist bomb probably brought down Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321 airliner which crashed in Sinai, killing 224 passengers and crew. Another Airbus was deliberately crashed by its first officer in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. An earthquake in Nepal killed 9000 people, and at least 2200 people died in a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.

Xi Jinping had been leader of China since 2012, as had François Hollande in France; Angela Merkel was in her tenth year as German Chancellor and Barack Obama was halfway through his second term as US President. The UK general election in 2015 was won by the Conservatives under David Cameron; their former coalition partners the Liberal Democrats suffered their worst result in recent history, paying for their betrayal of Nick Clegg’s “pledge” before the 2010 election to abolish HE tuition fees, even though they almost said sorry. The Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Queen Elizabeth II became the longest-serving British monarch. The Paris Agreement at COP 21 saw countries agreeing to “do their best” to keep global warming to “well below 2 degrees C” and Greece became the first advanced economy ever to default on a payment to the International Monetary Fund.

Australia beat New Zealand to win the Cricket World Cup, jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. The Rugby World Cup was held in England but the hosts flopped as New Zealand beat Australia in the final. Microsoft launched Windows 10, and a new startup called OpenAI was founded.

Higher education in 2015

In 2015 the dominant theme in higher education was internationalisation. A 2016 book by Paul Zeleza (Case Western Reserve University, US), The Transformation of Global Higher Education 1945-2015 argued that “Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fueled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.”

The Economist leader in March said the world was going to university but: “More and more money is being spent on higher education. Too little is known about whether it is worth it”. Students in Canada, Netherlands, UK and elsewhere were still protesting, trying to hold back the river of commercialisation, but they were just washed away.

Simon Marginson (by then at the UCL Institute of Education) naturally provided the authoritative commentary in his 2016 article in Higher Education: “Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions.“

The Going Global conference in 2015 in London had 1000 VCs and others debating “the impact of the greatest global massification of higher education ever experienced”, as NV Varghese, Jinusha Panigrahi and Lynne Heslop reported for University World News on 27 February 2015. Oxford University provided its own report on International Trends, and there was continuing progress towards a common European Higher Education Area, as the 2015 Implementation Report said: ““The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has evolved towards a more common and much more understandable structure of degrees. There is, however, no single model of first-cycle programmes in the EHEA.” No single model for pop music either, as the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna was won by Sweden with “Heroes” (no, me neither) and George Ezra’s European tour included Budapest.

UK HE in 2015

In 2015-2016 there were 162 publicly-funded HE providers in the UK; HESA held data on all of them, plus the decreasingly private University of Buckingham. In addition there was HE provision in FE colleges and other places. Of the 2.3million HE students, 60% were full-time undergraduates. 56.5% of all students were female, 43.5% male. Total numbers had been falling since 2011-2012, because the decline in part-time numbers had outstripped the continuing growth of full-time and sandwich student numbers, up by 5.8% over the same period. Business and administrative studies was the most heavily populated at both UG and PG levels, as in previous years; at PG level Education was second. Reflecting the globalisation of HE, UK universities in 2015-2016 had over 700,000 students registered in transnational education.

The 2004 Higher Education Act (2004 c. 8) had established the Arts and Humanities Research Council and provided for the appointment of a Director of Fair Access to Higher Education. It set out arrangements for dealing with students’ complaints about higher education institutions and made provisions on grants and loans for FHE students. Then came the 2005 Education Act (2005 c. 18), which renamed the Teacher Training Agency (established by the 1994 Education Act) as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). The Learning and Skills Council was set up by the 2007 Further Education and Training Act (2007 c. 25) and the 2008 Sale of Student Loans Act (2008 c. 10) allowed the government to sell student loans to private companies. The school leaving age went from 16 to 18 under the 2008 Education and Skills Act (2008 c. 25) and the2009 Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act (2009 c. 22) created a statutory framework for apprenticeships, and established among other things the Young People’s Learning Agency for England (YPLA), the office of Chief Executive of Skills Funding and the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual).

Labour might have had a head full of dreams, but many of their new structures were dismantled after the coalition government was elected in 2010. There was bad blood between Education Secretary Michael Gove and the teacher unions’ ‘blob’; his 2011 Education Act (2011 c. 21) put an end to the General Teaching Council for England, the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency for England. The Act also ended the diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds and abandoned Labour’s aim of making 18 the upper age limit for participation in education.

The tortuous rise of HE fees for undergraduates was usefully summarised in a 2015 House of Commons Library Briefing Note. The £1000 fee introduced in 1998 had risen to £3000 after 2006, in a move which almost brought down the Labour government. The 2010 election saw the Liberal Democrats renege on their pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish tuition fees, instead agreeing with their Conservative coalition partners to triple them instead, which had many asking ‘What do you mean?’ The £9000 fees were partly a consequence of the Browne Review, but the government as always cherry-picked the recommendations it liked and ignored the package which was proposed. A 2010 vote set fees at between £6000 and £9000, but as everyone had predicted – except the Universities Minister David Willetts – English universities scrambled en masse to charge £9000, for fear of otherwise being labelled as inferior. The £9000 fees took effect in September 2012, while in other parts of the UK tuition fee arrangements increasingly diverged from England’s world-beating fee levels. The fee rose with inflation to £9250 but was then frozen, fiscal drag which would cost HE many £billions in revenue and lead to today’s widespread financial problems.

In June 2011 the government published the White Paper Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System, but the anticipated Higher Education Bill did not follow. Minister David Willetts was not letting go; he brought forward a package of reforms to change HE regulation: placing the funding council in an oversight and coordination role; establishing a Register of Higher Education Provision; introducing designation conditions for HEIs, and a new designation system for alternative providers; updating the Financial Memorandum; reforming student number controls, including a system for alternative providers; and creating a Designation Resolution Process. Once again Sue Hubble of the House of Commons Library provided a definitive record in September 2013, noting some commentators’ criticisms that such sweeping changes had been achieved by administrative procedures rather than primary legislation.

In July 2015 DBIS updated the statistics on widening participation, which showed continuing but erratic progress despite too many policy interventions. We had to wait until November 2015 for a Green Paper, Fulfilling Our Potential, which proposed establishing a Teaching Excellence Framework, abolishing the Higher Education Funding Council for England and replacing it with the Office for Students. It would not be until 2017 that the Higher Education Reform Act confirmed and enshrined these changes in statute. HEPI Report 161, edited by SRHE member Helen Carasso (Oxford), looked back on the 20 years since HEPI’s formation in 2022-2023. It included a chapter by SRHE Fellow Michael Shattock (UCL) on how ‘self-governed’ universities (I doubt if we’ll see you again) were forced to say Hello to a ‘regulated’ university system: “The year 2003 can be seen as starting point in a process of systemic governance change in UK higher education.”

SRHE and research into higher education in 2015

By 2015 research into higher education had been noticed even in the furthest corners of academe. A 2012 book chapter by philosopher Andre V Rezaev (St Petersburg State University) was thinking out loud: “… to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education. This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.” Even latecomers were of course welcome.

With due ceremony SRHE staged a 50th Anniversary Colloquium in London on 26 June 2015. The congregation of more than 200 people included almost everyone who had been anyone in HE research in the UK, and many places beyond, gathered in Westminster for discussion and celebration, primed by ‘think pieces’ from SRHE Fellows past and future. The themes encapsulated the scope of research into HE: Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum (Marcia Devlin); Academic Practice, Identity and Careers (Bruce Macfarlane); The Student Experience (Mary Stuart); Transnational Perspectives (Rajani Naidoo); Research on HE Policy (Jeroen Huisman); Going Global (Paul Ashwin); Access and Widening Participation in HE (Penny-Jane Burke); and, Reflective Teaching in HE (Kelly Coate).

The Society had managed to shake off its financial woes and was flourishing in financial and academic terms. The chairs from 2005 were Ron Barnett (UCL), George Gordon (Strathclyde), Yvonne Hillier (Brighton), and Jill Jameson (Greenwich). The successful series of books published by the Open University Press had ended when it was swallowed by McGraw-Hill, but a seamless change led to a new and even more successful series with Routledge from 2012. SRHE News was reimagined and relaunched in February 2010, and the SRHE Blog followed from 2012. The Society’s office moves continued, switching in 2009 from the Institute of Physics in Portland Place to a brief sojourn at Open University offices in 44 Bedford Row, London, before finding a longer-term home on the second floor at 73 Collier Street in London. In 2009 the annual Research Conference was held for the first time at Celtic Manor in Newport, Wales (where François Smit might often have said shut up and dance). It would return every year until 2019, just before Covid disrupted the world, including the world of research into higher education. The Society would however emerge even stronger, having discovered the power of online meeting (if you don’t believe me, just watch) to expand its global reach, as a more prominent complement to the still essential face-to-face meetings in networks and conferences.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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One Nation, One Subscription: why it matters for India’s researchers

by Satveer Singh Nehra, Saloni Chaudhary, and Kanchan Nagpal

India’s One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) scheme is one of the most ambitious initiatives in reshaping global access to scholarly knowledge. Approved as a central scheme in November 2024 and rolled out from January 2025, ONOS promises nationwide access to around 13,000 international journals from 30 major publishers for publicly funded higher education and research institutions. Our study aimed to critically examine the potential of this new scheme in transforming India’s research landscape, alongside the challenges involved in its implementation and the opportunities for global accessibility that lie ahead. This blog post abridges the key findings of our study, published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education and highlights how ONOS can foster inclusive growth and research activities.

While India is among the largest producers of scientific and engineering papers globally, its academic institutions have historically faced significant barriers to accessing high-impact international journals due to restrictive paywalls and exorbitant subscription costs. While premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) possess the financial capacity to procure these expensive databases, a vast majority of universities and colleges struggle to provide even rudimentary access to cutting-edge research. This groundbreaking policy seeks to bridge the urban-rural knowledge divide, reduce institutional costs, and position India as a global research leader by integrating paywalled content into the country’s academic mainstream.

The ONOS initiative is a central scheme formally approved by the Union Cabinet on November 25, 2024. It is administered under the supervision of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India (PIB, 2025). Implementation of the first phase commenced on 1 January 2025. The scheme is executed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an Inter-University Centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC), which manages the subscriptions via a centralised portal.

The financial commitment to this initiative is substantial, with an allocation of approximately ₹6,000 crore ($715 million) for the calendar years 2025, 2026, and 2027. Additionally, the policy includes a central fund of ₹150 crore ($16.9 million) per annum to support authors in paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) for publishing in selected high-quality Open Access journals, thereby aiding researchers who previously had to pay these high costs themselves.

The scale of ONOS is vast, comprising agreements with 30 leading international publishers, including major entities such as Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier ScienceDirect, IEEE, and the American Chemical Society. Through these agreements, approximately 13,000 e-journals across 27 subject categories, ranging from STEM to humanities and social sciences, are made available to institutions. Currently, the initiative encompasses over 6,500 research and development institutes, as well as central and state government universities and colleges. The access mechanism utilises the ONOS portal, where users can access resources on campus via institutional IPs or off campus using the Indian Access Management Federation (INFED) for authentication.

ONOS as a catalyst for NEP 2020

The ONOS initiative is not an isolated measure but a strategic enabler of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions transforming India into a global knowledge superpower. The NEP 2020 prioritises universal access to quality education and the fostering of a vibrant research ecosystem (Ullah, 2024). By centralising subscriptions and removing paywalls, ONOS directly supports the NEP’s equity mandate, ensuring that students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities have access to the same prestigious scholarly journals as those in elite institutions.

Furthermore, the NEP emphasises multidisciplinary learning, encouraging students to break existing boundaries between disciplines (Kasturirangan, 2019). ONOS supports this pedagogical shift by providing access to a diverse array of multidisciplinary resources, allowing, for instance, engineering students to access social science literature. This aligns with the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), which aims to foster an innovative culture across Indian universities and research laboratories through financial assistance. The primary impact of ONOS is the democratisation of information, potentially benefiting nearly 1.8 crore (18 million) students, faculty, and researchers. By negotiating collective licenses, the government aims to resolve accessibility issues while ensuring compliance with copyright laws (Nithila Kovai, 2025).

Prior to ONOS, the country’s collective expenditure on academic journals was estimated at over ₹1,500 crore annually. Through bulk licensing, ONOS aims to reduce these national expenditures on journal access by 30–40% (Chakraborty et al, 2020). By ensuring immediate dissemination of global research to the wider community, the initiative is expected to boost India’s research productivity and citation rates, thereby enhancing the nation’s visibility in the global academic discourse.

Consequently, ONOS is viewed as a well-thought-out investment in India’s research capacities, designed to create a level playing field for innovation nationwide through enhanced digital infrastructure.

Possible roadblocks

Despite its transformative potential, the ONOS initiative faces significant challenges in implementation. A primary concern is the “digital divide” and infrastructure gaps. Over 70% of rural Indian colleges lack reliable internet access, which severely limits the reach of this digital-first scheme. Without robust digital infrastructure and literacy training, the benefits of ONOS may remain concentrated in urban centres, undermining its goal of inclusivity.

Financial sustainability is another critical issue. Unlike global open-access initiatives such as the EU’s “Plan S“, which mandate freely available research, ONOS relies on a recurring subscription model. Critics argue that this perpetuates dependency on commercial publishers and may strain public finances during economic downturns. There is also concern regarding the dominance of Western publishers, whose profit margins can reach 35–40% (Fazackerley, 2023), potentially reinforcing a system where public funds subsidise corporate profits (Olsson et al, 2020). Furthermore, the current focus is predominantly on STEM disciplines, with insufficient coverage for social sciences, humanities, and regional language scholarship.

Institutional eligibility also remains a point of contention. There is ambiguity regarding the inclusion of private higher education institutions, which enrol over half of India’s students. Excluding these institutions would significantly diminish the scheme’s impact and reinforce inequities in scholarly access.

Concluding Remarks

India’s One Nation One Subscription initiative represents a bold paradigm shift in research policy, moving from fragmented, institution-based access to a unified national entitlement. By guaranteeing access to over 13,000 global journals for millions of users, it promises to catalyse a transformation in the country’s research ecosystem and support the ambitious goals of NEP 2020. However, for ONOS to truly democratise knowledge, it must navigate the challenges of digital infrastructure in rural areas, ensure sustainable funding, and eventually evolve towards a hybrid model that strengthens India’s domestic open-access publishing capabilities alongside these international subscriptions. Success will depend on overcoming publisher resistance, ensuring inclusive coverage across all disciplines and institutional types, and integrating this access with robust support for the dissemination of indigenous research.

Satveer Singh Nehra is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Library and Information Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune. His doctoral research focuses on Open Research Data and Research Data Management, emphasising the need for a national policy framework to strengthen open science initiatives in India. In addition to his primary research area, he actively explores emerging fields such as Digital Humanities and the application of Artificial Intelligence in library environments.

Dr Saloni Chaudhary is an academic and researcher dedicated to the evolving landscape of Library and Information Science. She currently serves as an Assistant Librarian at the University of Delhi and holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Scientometrics, Digital Literacy, and Digital Humanities, where she explores the impact of digital advancements on knowledge systems.

Dr Kanchan Nagpal is a library and information science professional and works as an Assistant Librarian at the India International Centre.  She holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science. She is a council member of the Indian Library Association. 


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Teaching students to use AI: from digital competence to a learning outcome

by Concepción González García and Nina Pallarés Cerdà

Debates about generative AI in higher education often start from the same assumption: students need a certain level of digital competence before they can use AI productively. Those who already know how to search, filter and evaluate online information are seen as the ones most likely to benefit from tools such as ChatGPT, while others risk being left further behind.

Recent studies reinforce this view. Students with stronger digital skills in areas like problem‑solving and digital ethics tend to use generative AI more frequently (Caner‑Yıldırım, 2025). In parallel, work using frameworks such as DigComp has mostly focused on measuring gaps in students’ digital skills – often showing that perceived “digital natives” are less uniformly proficient than we might think (Lucas et al, 2022). What we know much less about is the reverse relationship: can carefully designed uses of AI actually develop students’ digital competences – and for whom?

In a recent article, we addressed this question empirically by analysing the impact of a generative AI intervention on university students’ digital competences (García & Pallarés, 2026). Students’ skills were assessed using the European DigComp 2.2 framework (Vuorikari et al, 2022).

Moving beyond static measures of digital competence

Research on students’ digital competences in higher education has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Yet much of this work still treats digital competence as a stable attribute that students bring with them into university, rather than as a dynamic and educable capability that can be shaped through instructional design. The consequence is a field dominated by one-off assessments, surveys and diagnostic tools that map students’ existing skills but tell us little about how those skills develop.

This predominant focus on measurement rather than development has produced a conceptual blind spot: we know far more about how digital competences predict students’ use of emerging technologies than about how educational uses of these technologies might enhance those competences in the first place.

Recent studies reinforce this asymmetry. Students with higher levels of digital competence are more likely to engage with generative AI tools and to display positive attitudes towards their use (Moravec et al, 2024; Saklaki & Gardikiotis, 2024). In this ‘competence-first’ model, digital competence appears as a precondition for productive engagement with AI. Yet this framing obscures a crucial pedagogical question: might AI, when intentionally embedded in learning activities, actually support the growth of the very competences it is presumed to require?

A second limitation compounds this problem: the absence of a standardised framework for analysing and comparing the effects of AI-based interventions on digital competence development. Although DigComp is widely used for diagnostic purposes, few studies employ it systematically to evaluate learning gains or to map changes across specific competence areas. As a result, evidence from different interventions remains fragmented, making it difficult to identify which aspects of digital competence are most responsive to AI-mediated learning.

There is, nevertheless, emerging evidence that AI can do more than simply ‘consume’ digital competence. Studies by Dalgıç et al (2024) and Naamati-Schneider & Alt (2024) suggest that integrating tools such as ChatGPT into structured learning tasks can stimulate information search, analytical reasoning and critical evaluation—provided that students are guided to question and verify AI outputs rather than accept them uncritically. Yet these contributions remain exploratory. We still lack experimental or quasi-experimental evidence that links AI-based instructional designs to measurable improvements in specific DigComp areas, and we know little about whether such benefits accrue equally to all students or disproportionately to those who already possess stronger digital skills.

This gap matters. If digital competences are conceived as malleable rather than fixed, then AI is not merely a technology that demands certain skills but a pedagogical tool through which those skills can be cultivated. This reframing shifts the centre of the debate: away from asking whether students are ready for AI, and towards asking whether our teaching practices are ready to use AI in ways that promote competence development and reduce inequalities in learning.

Our study: teaching students to work with AI, not around it

We designed a randomised controlled trial with 169 undergraduate students enrolled in a Microeconomics course. Students were allocated by class group to either a treatment or a control condition. All students followed the same curriculum and completed the same online quizzes through the institutional virtual campus.

The crucial difference lay in how generative AI was integrated:

  • In the treatment condition, students received an initial workshop on using large language models strategically. They practised:
  • contextualising questions
  • breaking problems into steps
  • iteratively refining prompts
  • and checking their own solutions before turning to the AI.
  • Throughout the course, their online self-assessments included adaptive feedback: instead of simply marking answers as right or wrong, the system offered hints, step-by-step prompts and suggestions on how to use AI tools as a thinking partner.
  • In the control condition, students completed the same quizzes with standard right/wrong feedback, and no training or guidance on AI.

Importantly, the intervention did not encourage students to outsource solutions to AI. Rather, it framed AI as an interactive study partner to support self-explanation, comparison of strategies and self-regulation in problem solving.

We administered pre- and post-course questionnaires aligned with DigComp 2.2, focusing on five competences: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, safety, and two aspects of problem solving (functional use of digital tools and metacognitive self-regulation). Using a difference-in-differences model with individual fixed effects, we estimated how the probability of reporting the highest level of each competence changed over time for the treatment group relative to the control group.

What changed when AI was taught and used in this way?

At the overall sample level, we found statistically significant improvements in three areas:

  • Information and data literacy – students in the AI-training condition were around 15 percentage points more likely to report the highest level of competence in identifying information needs and carrying out effective digital searches.
  • Problem solving – functional dimension – the probability of reporting the top level in using digital tools (including AI) to solve tasks increased by about 24 percentage points.
  • Problem solving – metacognitive dimension – a similar 24-point gain emerged for recognising what aspects of one’s digital competences need to be updated or improved.

In other words, the AI-integrated teaching design was associated not only with better use of digital tools, but also with stronger awareness of digital strengths and weaknesses – a key ingredient of autonomous learning. Communication and safety competences also showed positive but smaller and more uncertain effects. Here, the pattern becomes clearer when we look at who benefited most.

A compensatory effect: AI as a potential leveller, not just an amplifier

When we distinguished students by their initial level of digital competence, a pattern emerged. For those starting below the median, the intervention produced large and significant gains in all five competences, with improvements between 18 and 38 percentage points depending on the area. For students starting above the median, effects were smaller and, in some cases, non-significant.

This suggests a compensatory effect: students who began the course with weaker digital competences benefited the most from the AI-based teaching design. Rather than widening the digital gap, guided use of AI acted as a levelling mechanism, bringing lower-competence students closer to their more digitally confident peers.

Conceptually, this challenges an implicit assumption in much of the literature – namely, that generative AI will primarily enhance the learning of already advantaged students, because they are the ones with the skills and confidence to exploit it. Our findings show that, when AI is embedded within intentional pedagogy, explicit training and structured feedback, the opposite can happen: those who started with fewer resources can gain the most.

From ‘allow or ban’ to ‘how do we teach with AI?’

For higher education policy and practice, the implications are twofold.

First, we need to stop thinking of digital competence purely as a prerequisite for using AI. Under the right design conditions, AI can be a pedagogical resource to build those competences, especially in information literacy, problem solving and metacognitive self-regulation. That means integrating AI into curricula not as an add-on, but as part of how we teach students to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning.

Second, our results suggest that universities concerned with equity and digital inclusion should focus less on whether students have access to AI tools (many already do) and more on who receives support to learn how to use them well. Providing structured opportunities to practise prompting, to critique AI outputs and to reflect on one’s own digital skills may be particularly valuable for students who enter university with lower levels of digital confidence.

This does not resolve all the ethical and practical concerns around generative AI – far from it. But it shifts the conversation. Instead of treating AI as an external threat to academic integrity that must be tightly controlled, we can start to ask:

  • How can we design tasks where the added value lies in asking good questions, justifying decisions and evaluating evidence, rather than in producing a single ‘correct’ answer?
  • How can we support students to see AI not as a shortcut to avoid thinking, but as a tool to think better and know themselves better as learners?
  • Under what conditions does AI genuinely help to close digital competence gaps, and when might it risk opening new ones?

Answering these questions will require further longitudinal and multi-institutional research, including replication studies and objective performance measures alongside self-reports. Yet the evidence we present offers a cautiously optimistic message: teaching students how to use AI can be part of a strategy to strengthen digital competences and reduce inequalities in higher education, rather than merely another driver of stratification.

Concepción González García is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Alicante. Her research interests include macroeconomics, particularly fiscal policy, and education.

Nina Pallarés is Assistant Professor of Economics and Academic Coordinator of the Master’s in Management of Sports Entities at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain. Her research focuses on applied econometrics, with particular emphasis on health, labour, education, and family economics.


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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.