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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Category Archives: Quality, Standards, Performance, Evaluation


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Redefining cultures of excellence: A new event exploring models for change in recruiting researchers and setting research agendas

by Rebekah Smith McGloin and Rachel Handforth, Nottingham Trent University

Research excellence’ is a ubiquitous concept to which we are mostly habituated in the UK research ecosystem.  Yet, at the end of an academic year which saw the publication of UKRI EDI Strategy, four UKRI council reviews of their investments in PGR, House of Commons inquiry on Reproducibility and Research Integrity and following on from the development of manifesto, concordat, declaration and standards to support Open Research in recent years, it feels timely to engage in some critical reflection on cultures of excellence in research. 

The notion of ‘excellence’ has become an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem over the last 20 years (OECD, 2014). The drivers for this are traced to the need to justify the investment of public money in research and the increasing competition for scarce resources (Münch, 2015).  University rankings have further hardwired and amplified judgments about degrees of excellence into our collective consciousness (Hazelkorn, 2015).

Jong, Franssen and Pinfield (2021) highlight that the idea of excellence is a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989) however. That is, it is a nebulous construct which is poorly defined and is used in many different ways. It has nevertheless shaped policy, funding and assessment activities since the turn of the century. Ideas of excellence have been enacted through the Research Excellence Framework and associated allocation to universities of funding to support research, competitive schemes for grant funding, recruitment to flagship doctoral training partnerships and individual promotion and reward.

We can trace a number of recent initiatives at sector level, inter alia, that have sought to broaden ideas of research excellence and to challenge systemic and structural inequalities in our research ecosystem. These include the increase of impact weighting in REF2021 to 25%, trials of systems of partial randomisation as part of the selection process for some smaller research grants, e.g. British Academy from 2022, the Concordats and Agreements Review work in 2023 to align and increase influence, capacity, and efficiency of activity to support research culture and the recent Research England investment in projects designed to address the broken pipeline into research by increasing participation of people from racialised groups in doctoral education.

At the end of June, we are hosting an event at NTU which will focus on redefining cultures of research excellence through the lens of inclusion. The symposium, to be held at our Clifton Campus on Wednesday 28 June, provides an opportunity to re-examine the broad notion of research excellence, in the context of systemic inequalities that have historically locked out certain types of researchers and research agendas and locked in others.

The event focuses on two mutually-reinforcing areas: the possibility of creating more responsive and inclusive research agendas through co-creation between academics and communities; and broadening pathways into research through the inclusive recruitment of PhD and early career researchers. We take the starting position that approaches which focus on advancing equity are critical to achieving excellence in UK research and innovation.

The day will include keynotes from Dr Bernadine Idowu and Professor Kalwant Bhopal, the launch of a new competency-based PGR recruitment framework, based on sector consultation, and a programme of speakers talking about their approaches to diversifying researcher recruitment and engaging the community in setting research agendas. 

NTU will be showcasing two new projects that are designed to challenge old ideas of research excellence and forge new ways of thinking. EDEPI (Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation Programme) is a partnership with Liverpool John Moores and Sheffield Hallam Universities and NHS Trusts in the three cities. The project will explore how working with the NHS can improve access and participation in doctoral education for racially-minoritised groups. Co(l)laboratory is a project with University of Nottingham, based on the Universities for Nottingham civic agreement with local public-sector organisations. Collab will present early lessons from a community-informed approach to cohort-based doctoral training.

Our event is a great opportunity for universities and other organisations who are, in their own ways, redefining cultures of research excellence to share their approaches, challenges and successes. We invite individuals, project teams and organisations working in these areas to join us at the end of June, with the hope of building a community of practice around building inclusive research cultures, within and across the sector.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of the Doctoral School at Nottingham Trent University and is Principal Investigator on the EDEPI and Co(l)laboratory projects. 

Dr Rachel Handforth is Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement at NTU.


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Will universities fail the Turing Test?

by Phil Pilkington

The recent anxiety over the development of AI programmes to generate unique text suggests that some disciplines face a crisis of passing the Turing Test. That is, that you cannot distinguish between the unique AI generated text and that produced by a human agent. Will this be the next stage in the battle of cheating by students? Will it lead to an arms race of countering the AI programmes to foil the students cheating? Perhaps it may force some to redesign the curriculum, the learning and the assessment processes.

Defenders of AI programmes for text generation have produced their own euphemistic consumer guides. Jasper is a ‘writing assistant’, Dr Essay ‘gets to work and crafts your entire essay for you’, Article Forge (get it?) ‘is one of the best essay writers and does the research for you!’.  Other AI essay forgers are available. The best known and the most popular is probably GPT-3 with a reported million subscribers (see The Atlantic, 6/12/2022). The promoters of the AI bots make clear that it is cheaper and quicker than using essay mills. It may even be less exploitative of those graduates in Nepal or Nottingham or Newark New Jersey serving the essay mills. There has been the handwringing that this is the ‘end of the essay’, but there have been AI developments in STEM subjects and art and design.

AI cannot be uninvented. It is out there, it is cheap and readily available. It does not necessarily follow that using it is cheating. Mike Sharples on the LSE Blog tried it out for a student assignment on learning styles. He found some simple errors of reference but made the point that GPT-3 text can be used creatively for students’ understanding and exploring a subject. And Kent University provides guidance on the use of Grammarly, which doesn’t create text as GPT-3 does ab initio but it does ‘write’ text.

Consumer reports on GPT-3 suggest that the output for given assignments is of a 2.2 or even 2.1 standard of essay, albeit with faults in the text generated. These seem to be usually in the form of incorrect or inadequate references; some references were for non-existent journals  and papers, with dates confused and so on. However, a student could read through the output text and correct such errors without any cognitive engagement in the subject. Correcting the text would be rather like an AI protocol. The next stage of AI will probably eliminate the most egregious and detectable of errors to become the ‘untraceable poison’.

The significant point here is that it is possible to generate essays and assignments without cognitive activity in the generation of the material. This does not necessarily mean a student doesn’t learn something. Reading through the generated text may be part of a learning process, but it is an impoverished form of learning. I would distinguish this as the learning that in the generated text rather than the learning how of generating the text. This may be the challenge for the post AI curriculum: knowing that is not as important as knowing how. What do we expect for the learning outcomes? That we know, for example, the War Aims of Imperial Germany in 1914 or that we know how to find that out, or how it relates to other aims and ideological outlooks? AI will provide the material for the former but not the latter.

To say that knowing that (eg the War Aims of Imperial Germany, etc) is a form of surface learning is not to confuse that memory trick with cognitive abilities, or with AI – which has no cognitive output at all. Learning is semantic, it has reference as rule-based meaning; AI text generation is syntactic and has no meaning at all (to the external world) but makes reference only to its own protocols[1]. As the Turing Test does not admit – because in that test the failure to distinguish between the human agent and the AI is based on deceiving the observer.

Studies have shown that students have a scale of cheating (as specified by academic conduct rules). An early SRHE Student Experience Seminar explored the students’ acceptance of some forms of cheating and abhorrence of other forms. Examples of ‘lightweight’ and ‘acceptable’ cheating included borrowing a friend’s essay or notes, in contrast to the extreme horror of having someone sit an exam for them (impersonation). The latter was considered not just cheating for personal advantage but also disadvantaging the entire cohort (Ashworth et al, ‘Guilty in Whose Eyes?’). Where will using AI sit in the spectrum of students’ perception of cheating? Where will it sit within the academic regulations?

I will assume that it will be used both for first drafts and for ‘passing off’ as the entirety of the student’s efforts. Should we embrace the existence of AI bots? They could be our friends and help develop the curriculum to be more creative for students and staff. We will expect and assume students to be honest about their work (as individuals and within groups) but there will be pressures of practical, cultural and psychological nature, on some students more than others, which will encourage the use of the bots. The need to work as a barista to pay the rent, to cope as a carer, to cope with dyslexia (diagnosed or not), to help non-native speakers, to overcome the disadvantages of a relatively impoverished secondary education, all distinct from the cohort of gilded and fluently entitled youth, will all be stressors for encouraging the use of the bots.

Will the use of AI be determined by the types of students’ motivation (another subject of an early SRHE Student Experience Seminar)? There will be those wanting to engage in and grasp (to cognitively possess as it were) the concept formations of the discipline (the semantical), with others who simply want to ‘get through the course’ and secure employment (the syntactical).

And what of stressed academics assessing the AI generated texts? They could resort to AI bots for that task too. In the competitive, neo-liberal, league-table driven universities of precarity, publish-or-be-redundant monetizing research (add your own epithets here), will AI bots be used to meet increasingly demanding performance targets?

The discovery of the use of AI will be accompanied by a combination of outrage and demands for sanctions (much like the attempts to criminalise essay mills and their use). We can expect some responses from institutions that it either doesn’t happen here or it is only a tiny minority. But if it does become the ‘untraceable poison’ how will we know? AI bots are not like essay mills. They may be used as a form of deception, as implied by the Turing Test, but they could also be used as a tool for greater understanding of a discipline. We may need a new form of teaching, learning and assessment.

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

[1] John Searle (The rediscovery of the mind, 1992) produced an elegant thought experiment to refute the existence of AI qua intelligence, or cognitive activity. He created the experiment, the Chinese Room, originally to face off the Mind-Brain identity theorists. It works as a wonderful example of how AI can be seemingly intelligent without having any cognitive content.  It is worth following the Chinese Room for its simplicity and elegance and as a lesson in not taking AI seriously as ‘intelligence’.


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Critically analysing EdTech investors’ logic in business discourse

by Javier Mármol Queraltó

This blog is based on a presentation to the 2021 SRHE Research Conference, as part of a Symposium on Universities and Unicorns: Building Digital Assets in the Higher Education Industry organised by the project’s principal investigator, Janja Komljenovic (Lancaster). The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The project introduces new ways to think about and examine the digitalising of the higher education sector. It investigates new forms of value creation and suggests that value in the sector increasingly lies in the creation of digital assets.

In the context of the current SARS-COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing process of digitalisation of education has become a prominent area for social, financial and, increasingly, (critical) educational research. Higher education, as a pivotal social, economic, technological and educational domain, has seen its activities drastically affected, and Universities and the multitude of people involved in them have been forced to adapt to the unfolding crisis. HE researchers agree both on the unpreparedness of countries and institutions faced by the pandemic, and on its potential lasting impact on the educational sector (Goedegebuure and Meek, 2021). In as much as educational technologies (EdTech) have been brought to the fore due to their pivotal role in the enablement and continuation of educational practices across the globe, EdTech companies and investors have also become primary financial beneficiaries of these necessary processes of digitalisation. The extensive use and adoption of EdTech to bridge the gap between HE professionals and students due to the application of strict social distancing measures has been welcomed by investors as an opportunity for EdTech to establish themselves as key players within an educational landscape under a process of assetisation (Komljenovic, 2020, 2021). Investors and EdTech are scaffolding new digital markets in HE, reshaping the conceptualisation of universities, HE and the sector itself more generally (Williamson, 2021; Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016). In this brief entry, I focus on EdTech investors’ discourses, owing to the potential of such discourses to shape the future of educational practices broadly speaking.

Within the ‘Universities and Unicorns’ ESRC-funded project, this exploratory research (see full report) aimed at unveiling the ideological uses of linguistic, visual and multimodal devices (eg texts and charts) deployed by EdTech investors in a variety of texts that have the potential, due to their circulation and goals, to shape public understandings of the role of Educational Technologies in the unfolding crisis. The research was conducted deploying a framework anchored in Linguistics, specifically cognitive-based approaches to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS; eg Mármol Queraltó, 2021b). A central assumption in this approach is that language encodes construal: the same event/situation can be alternatively linguistically formulated, and these can have diverse cognitive effects in readers (Hart, 2011). From a CL-CDS perspective, then, texts can potentially shape the way that the public think (and subsequently act) about social topics (cf Watters, 2015).

In order to extract the ideologies underlying discourse practices carried out by HE investors, we examined qualitatively a variety of texts disseminated in the public and semi-private domains. We investigated, for example, HolonIQ’s explanatory charts, interviews with professionals and blog entries (eg Charles MacIntyre, Alex Latsis, Jan Lynn-Matern), and global financial reports by IBIS Capital, BrightEye Ventures, and EdTechX, among several others. Our main goal was to better understand how EdTech investors operationalised discourse to shape the imageries of the future in the relationship between HE institutions, EdTech and governance. In line with CDS approaches, we examined the representations of social actors in context using van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework, and more in line with CL-CDS, we also operationalised the analysis of metaphorical expressions indexing Conceptual Metaphors, and Force dynamics. Force-dynamics is an essential tool deployed to examine how the tensions between actors and processes within business discourse are constructed (see Oakley, 2005).

Our study yielded important findings for the critical examination of discourse processes within the EdTech-HE-governance triangle of influences. In terms of social actor representation (whose examination also included metaphor), the main findings are:

  • EdTech investors and companies are rendered as opaque, abstract collectives, and are positively represented as ‘enablers’ and ‘disruptors’ of educational processes.
  • Governments are rendered as generic, collective entities, and depicted as necessary funders of process of digital transformation.
  • Universities or HE institutions are mainly negatively represented as potential ‘blockers’ of processes of digital transformation, and they are depicted as failing their students due to their lack of scalability and flexibility.
  • Individuals within HE institutions are identified as numbers and increasing percentages within unified collectives, students routinely cast as beneficiaries in ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ roles, while educators are activated as ‘content providers’.
  • Metaphorically, the EdTech sector is conceptualised as a ‘ship’ on a ‘journey’ towards profit, where HE institutions can be ‘obstacles along a path’ and the global pandemic and other push factors are conceptualised as ‘tailwinds’.
  • The EdTech market is conceptualised as a ‘living organism’ that grows and evolves independent of the actors involved in it. The visual representations observed reinforce these patterns and emphasise the growth of the EdTech market in very positive terms.

The formulation of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors is also essential to understand the discursively constructed ‘internal tensions’ within the sector. In order to examine these factors, we operationalised Force-dynamics analysis and metaphor, which allowed us to arrive to the following findings:

  • Push factors identified by investors driving the EdTech sector include the SARS-COVID19 global pandemic, the digital acceleration being experienced in the sector prior to the pandemic, the increasing number of students requiring access to HE, and investors’ actions aimed at disrupting the EdTech market.
  • Pull factors encouraging investment in the sector are conceptualised in the shape of financial predictions. The visions put forward by EdTech investors become instrumental in the achievement of those predictions.
  • The representation of the global pandemic is ambivalent and it is rendered both as a negative factor affecting societies and as a positive factor for the EdTech sector. The primary focus is on the positive outcomes of the disruption brought about by the pandemic.
  • Educational platforms are foregrounded in their enabling role and replace HE institutions as site for educational practice, de-localising educational practices from physical universities.
  • Students and educators are found to be increasingly reframed as ‘users’ and ‘content providers’, respectively. This discursive shift is potentially indicative of the new processes of assetisation of HE.

On the whole, framing business within the ‘journey’ metaphor entails that any entities or processes affecting business are potentially conceptualised as ‘obstacles along the path’, and therefore attributed negative connotations. In our case, those entities (eg governments and HE institutions) or processes (eg lack of funding) that metaphorically ‘stand in the way of business’ are automatically framed in a negative light, potentially affording a negative reception by the audience and therefore legitimising actions designed to remove those ‘obstacles’ (eg ‘disruptions’). EdTech companies and investors are represented very positively as ‘enablers’ of educational practices disrupted by the SARS-COVID19 pandemic, but also as ‘push factors’ in processes of digital acceleration within the ‘speed of action is speed of motion’ metaphor. In the premised, ever-growing EdTech sector, those actors and processes that ‘slow down’ access to profits (or processes providing access to profit) are similarly negatively represented. The conceptualisation of the SARS-COVID-19 global pandemic in this context reflects ‘calculated ambivalence’. This ambivalence was expected, as portraying the pandemic solely as a relatively positive factor for the HE sector would be in extreme detriment to EdTech investors’ activities. Our findings reflect that, while the global pandemic is initially represented as a very negative factor greatly disrupting societies and businesses, those negative impacts tend to be presented in rather vague ways and in most occasions the result of the disruption brought about by the pandemic is reduced to changes in the modality of education experienced by learners (from in-person to online education). We have found no significant mention of social or personal impacts of the pandemic (eg deaths and scenarios affecting underrepresented social groups), where the focus has been mainly on the market and the activities within it. Conversely, while the initial framing of the pandemic is inherently negative, we have seen in several examples above that the pandemic is subtly instrumentalised as a ‘push factor’, which serves to accelerate digital transformation and is hence a positive factor for the EdTech sector. In a global context of restrictions, containment measures and vaccine rollouts, it is especially ideologically relevant to find the pandemic instrumentalised as a ‘catalyst’, or as an important player in a ‘experiment of global proportions’. Framing the pandemic in such ways detaches the audience from its negative connotations, and serves to depict EdTech companies and investors as involved in high-level, complex processes that abstract the millions of diverse victims to the pandemic. Ultimately, in the ‘journey’ towards profit, the SARS-COVID-19 is a desired push factor, also realised as a ‘tailwind’, which facilitates the desired digital acceleration.

On the whole, our research demonstrated that social actor representation and the distinction between push/pull factors are crucial sites for the analysis of EdTech discourse. EdTech’s primary focus is on the positive outcomes of the disruption brought about by the pandemic. In this context, educational platforms are foregrounded in their enabling role and replace HE institutions as site for educational practice, de-localising educational practices from physical universities. Subsequently, students and educators are found to be increasingly reframed as ‘users’ and ‘content providers’ respectively. We argue that this subtle discursive shift is potentially indicative of the new processes of assetization of HE and reflects more broadly a neoliberal logic.

Javier Mármol Queraltó is a PhD candidate in Linguistics in Lancaster University. His current research deals with the multimodal representations of discourses of migration in the British and Spanish online press. He advocates a Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), and is working on a methodology that can shed light on how public perceptions of social issues might be influenced by both the multimodal constraints of online newspaper discourse and our shared cognitive capacities. He is also interested in the multimodal and cognitive dimensions of discourses of Brexit outside the UK, news discourses of social unrest, and the marketisation/assetisation processes of HE.


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Beware efficiencies! Assetisation as the future defraying of costs savings in the present

by Kean Birch

This blog is based on a presentation to the 2021 SRHE Research Conference, as part of a Symposium on Universities and Unicorns: Building Digital Assets in the Higher Education Industry organised by the project’s principal investigator, Janja Komljenovic (Lancaster). The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The project introduces new ways to think about and examine the digitalising of the higher education sector. It investigates new forms of value creation and suggests that value in the sector increasingly lies in the creation of digital assets.

What makes learning more efficient? And what makes teaching more effective? According to EdTech providers and their champions, it is the digital transformation of higher education. The consulting company Gartner – which releases regular EdTech industry reports – defines this transformation as a shift from a ‘collectively-defined’ quality model in which universities provide their services – theoretically – to anyone, to a model in which quality is personally defined and delivered at scale through MOOCs or other means. In fact, Gartner emphasize the importance of EdTech providing scalable technologies for ensuring ‘cost effective education for the benefit of society’. And this seems to be the concern of many EdTech firms themselves; they aim to provide technologies that make life and work more efficient and effective for higher education institutions, managers, faculty, students, and staff.

But what does this actually mean?

I am part of a project, led by Dr Janja Komljenovic, looking at how value is increasingly being created in the higher education sector through the transformation of ‘things’ into digital and other assets – it could be students’ data, it could be research, it could be lectures, and so on. Part of our concern about these changes is the way they can end up reconfiguring societal, public, or commonly held resources as private assets from which companies can exact an economic rent. An important reason for examining this assetisation process is to analyse exactly how things are turned into private assets as a way to open them up to public scrutiny, and political intervention, should we so desire. While assets are constituted by legal forms, like property rights, and technical changes, like digital rights management, they are also the result of broader narratives about how we should or should not understand the world. Epistemic justifications matter. The World Economic Forum highlights what I mean here. They support the deployment of education technology as a way to “create better systems and data flows”. And this means more efficient and effective learning and teaching. But, what does efficiency and effectiveness mean in the case of higher education?

As we have interviewed EdTech providers in our project, we have noticed how they emphasize ‘efficiency’ as one of the key contributions of their technology, where this seems to be equated with producing an outcome at lower cost, whereas this is understood – in common sense terms – as doing something ‘better’ than before. It is important to see how the concept of efficiency is enrolled in the transformation of higher education into a range of assets. Assetisation in higher education depends on the development and promotion of a set of analytics that can identify efficiencies, understood as cost savings that someone or some institution can benefit from. Key to this assetisation process is the characterisation of efficiency as a common-sense goal for universities, managers, faculty, students, staff, and governments; in fact, efficiency can appear to be the very thing that education technologies are turning into an asset. For example, making it cheaper for students to study by enabling them to rent their textbooks, rather than have to buy them. Or making it cheaper for universities to pay subscription only for those electronic texts – or even parts of those texts – that are actually read and used by their staff and students. But this raises an important question: how do EdTech companies make money, if they are simply reducing costs all around?

EdTech companies look to the future for their success. Assets are temporal entities, entailing the creation of a stream of future revenues that can be capitalised in the present, thereby enabling investors to put a value to them that does not depend on being profitable now, or even generate significant revenues now. Efficiencies in the present often end up as defrayed costs in the future as those cost savings today compound into increased revenues for someone (eg EdTech) in the future. The future revenue expectations of EdTech companies come from the illusion of efficiency as cost savings at this point in time; for example, students can save on textbooks now but will be induced to subscribe to lifelong learning resources, or their personal data might be exploited in the future in multiple ways, or their reading habits will be used to sell something to universities, or any manner of revenue generating schemes. Someone is paying in the future.

EdTech companies have to make money somehow, and how they make money is the interesting question. Ideas about the current and future state of higher education and EdTech matter as they provide imaginaries of what is possible and desirable, which we discuss in this report. Claims to efficiency are part of how they make money; they are part of the way that EdTech companies construct new asset classes out of universities and their students, faculty, and staff. Interrogating how these supposed efficiencies are monetised is critical for getting a grip on the implications of EdTech for higher education in the longer term. It is essential we analyse this dynamic now to allow for timely public scrutiny, democratic debate and social intervention.

Kean Birch is Associate Professor at York University, Canada. He is particularly interested in understanding technoscientific capitalism and draws on a range of perspectives from science & technology studies, economic geography, and economic sociology to study it. More specifically, his research focuses on the restructuring and transformation of the economy & financial knowledges, technoscience & technoscientific innovation, and the relationship between markets & natural environments. Currently, he is researching how different things (e.g. knowledge, personality, loyalty, etc.) are turned into ‘assets’ & how economic rents are then captured from those assets – basically, in processes of assetisation and rentiership.

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Quality and standards in higher education

By Rob Cuthbert

What are the key issues in HE quality and standards, right now? Maintaining quality and standards with the massive transition to remote learning? Dealing with the consequences of the 2020 A-levels shambles? The student experience, now that most learning for most students is remote and off-campus? Student mental health and engagement with their studies and their peers? One or more of these, surely, ought to be our ‘new normal’ concerns.

But not for the government. Minister Michele Donelan assured us that quality and standards were being constantly monitored – by other people – as in her letter of 2 November to vice-chancellors:

“We have been clear throughout this pandemic that higher education providers must at all times maintain the quality of their tuition. If more teaching is moved online, providers must continue to comply with registration conditions relating to quality and standards. This means ensuring that courses provide a high-quality academic experience, students are supported and achieve good outcomes, and standards are protected. We have worked with the Office for Students who are regularly reviewing online tuition. We also expect students to continue to be supported and achieve good outcomes, and I would like to reiterate that standards must be maintained.”

So student health and the student experience are for the institutions to worry about, and get right, with the Office for Students watching. And higher education won’t need a bailout, unlike most other sectors of the market economy, because with standards being maintained there’s no reason for students not to enrol and pay fees exactly as usual. Institutional autonomy is vital, especially when it comes to apportioning the blame.

For government, the new normal was just the same as the old normal. It wasn’t difficult to read the signs. Ever since David Willetts, ministers had been complaining about low quality courses in universities. But with each successive minister the narrative became increasingly threadbare. David, now Lord, Willetts, at least had a superficially coherent argument: greater competition and informed student choice would drive up quality through competition between institutions for students. It was never convincing, but at least it had an answer to why and how quality and standards might be connected with competition in the HE market. Promoting competition by lowering barriers to entry for new HE providers was not a conspicuous success: some of the new providers proved to be a big problem for quality. Information, advice and guidance were key for improving student choice, so it seemed that the National Student Survey would play a significant part, along with university rankings and league tables. As successive ministers took up the charge the eggs were mostly transferred to the Teaching Excellence Framework basket, with TEF being championed by Jo, now Lord, Johnson. TEF began in 2016 and became a statutory requirement in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, which also required TEF to be subject to an independent review. From the start TEF had been criticised as not actually being about teaching, or excellence, and the review by Dame Shirley Pearce, previously VC at Loughborough, began in 2018. Her review was completed before the end of 2019, but at the time of writing had still not been published.

However the ‘low quality courses’ narrative has just picked up speed. Admittedly it stuttered a little during the tenure of Chris Skidmore, who was twice briefly the universities minister, before and after Jo Johnson’s equally brief second tenure. The ‘Skidmore test’ suggested that any argument about low quality courses should specify at least one of the culprits, if it was not to be a low quality argument. However this was naturally unpopular with the narrative’s protagonists and Skidmore, having briefly been reinstalled as minister after Jo Johnson’s decision to step down, was replaced by Michele Donelan, who has remained resolutely on-message, even as any actual evidence of low quality receded even further from view. She announced in a speech to Universities UK at their September 2020 meeting that the once-praised NSS was now in the firing line: “There is a valid concern from some in the sector that good scores can more easily be achieved through dumbing down and spoon-feeding students, rather than pursuing high standards and embedding the subject knowledge and intellectual skills needed to succeed in the modern workplace. These concerns have been driven by both the survey’s current structure and its usage in developing sector league tables and rankings.”

UUK decided that they had to do something, so they ‘launched a crackdown’ (if you believe Camilla Turner in The Telegraph on 15 November 2020) by proposing, um, “a new charter aimed at ensuring institutions take a “consistent and transparent approach to identifying and improving potentially low value or low quality courses.” It’s doubtful if even UUK believed that would do the trick, and no-one else gave it much credence. But with the National Student Survey and even university league tables now deemed unreliable, and the TEF in deep freeze, the government urgently needed some policy-based evidence. It was time for this endlessly tricky problem to be dumped in the OfS in-tray. Thus it was that the OfS announced on 17 November 2020 that: “The Office for Students is consulting on its approach to regulating quality and standards in higher education. Since 2018, our focus has been on assessing providers seeking registration and we are considering whether and how we should develop our approach now that most providers are registered. This consultation is taking place at an early stage of policy development and we would like to hear your views on our proposals.”

Instant commentators were unimpressed. Were the OfS proposals on quality and standards good for the sector? Johnny Rich thought not, in his well-argued blog for the Engineering Professors’ Council on 23 November 2020, and David Kernohan provided some illustrative but comprehensive number-crunching in his Wonkhe blog on 30 November 2020: “Really, the courses ministers want to get rid of are the ones that make them cross. There’s no metric that is going to be able to find them – if you want to arbitrarily carve up the higher education sector you can’t use “following the science” as a justification.” Liz Morrish nailed it on her Academic Irregularities blog on 1 December 2020.

In the time-honoured way established by HEFCE, the OfS consultation was structured in a way which made it easy to summarise responses numerically, but much less easy to interpret their significance and their arguments. The core of the approach was a matrix of criteria, most of which all universities would expect to meet, but it included some ‘numerical baselines’, especially on something beyond the universities’ control – graduate progression to professional and managerial jobs. It also included a proposed baseline for drop-out rates. The danger of this was that it would point the finger at universities which do the most for disadvantaged groups, but here too government and OfS had a cunning plan. Nick Holland, the OfS Competition and Registration Manager, blogged on 2 December 2020 that the OfS would tackle “pockets of low quality higher education provision”, with the statement that “it is not acceptable for providers to use the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds they have as an excuse for poor outcomes.” At a stroke universities with large proportions of disadvantaged students could either be blamed for high drop-out rates, or, if they reduced drop-out rates, they could be blamed for dropping standards. Lose-lose for the universities concerned, but win-win for the low quality courses narrative. The outrider to the low quality courses narrative was an attack on the 50% participation rate (in which Skidmore was equally culpable), which seemed hard to reconcile with a ‘levelling up’ narrative, but Michele Donelan did her best with her speech to NEON, of all audiences, calling for a new approach to social mobility, which seemed to add up to levelling up by keeping more people in FE. The shape of the baselines became clearer as OfS published Developing an understanding of projected rates of progression from entry to professional employment: methodology and results on 18 December 2020. After proper caveats about the experimental nature of the statistics, here came the indicator (and prospective baseline measure): “To derive the projected entry to professional employment measure presented here, the proportion of students projected to obtain a first degree at their original provider (also referred to as the ‘projected completion rate’) is multiplied by the proportion of Graduate Outcomes respondents in professional employment or any type of further study 15 months after completing their course (also referred to as the ‘professional employment or further study rate’).” This presumably met the government’s expectations by baking in all the non-quality-related advantages of selective universities in one number. Wonkhe’s David Kernohan despaired, on 18 December 2020, as the proposals deviated even further from anything that made sense: “Deep within the heart of the OfS data cube, a new plan is born. Trouble is, it isn’t very good.”

Is it too much to hope that OfS and government might actually look at the academic research on quality and standards in HE? Well, yes, but there is rather a lot of it. Quality in Higher Education is into its 26th year, and of course there is so much more. Even further back, in 1986 the SRHE Annual Conference theme was Standards and criteria in higher education, with an associated book edited by one of the founders of SRHE, Graeme Moodie (York). (This was the ‘Precedings’ – at that time the Society’s practice was to commission an edited volume in advance of the annual conference.) SRHE and the Carnegie Foundation subsequently sponsored a series of Anglo-American seminars on ‘Questions of Quality’. One of the seminar participants was SRHE member Tessa, now Baroness, Blackstone, who would later become the Minister for Further and Higher Education, and one of the visiting speakers for the Princeton seminar was Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker. At that time the Council for National Academic Awards was still functioning as the validating agency, assuring quality, for about half of the HE sector, with staff including such SRHE notables as Ron Barnett, John Brennan and Heather Eggins. When it was founded SRHE aimed to bring research and policy together; they have now drifted further apart. Less attention to peer review, but more ministers becoming peers.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics


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From corona crisis management to ‘new normal’ – a Danish university educational perspective

by Helle Mathiasen

This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website. The statement by Helle Mathiasen can be found here.

This year, in many ways, we have all become richer with the transition of campus-based teaching to online teaching. However, it has also been a challenge for most educators and students, as explained in The evaluation of online teaching in Spring 2020 (published in Danish on 18 September 2020, to be translated to English this Autumn). Much of traditional teaching had to be quickly changed, which often resulted in digitalisation of the regular campus-based teaching without regard to the changing conditions of communication.

This type of teaching was called emergency teaching, which is important to keep in mind when planning and implementing teaching in coming semesters. Going forward, the path from emergency education to a ‘new normal’ needs to be critically and reflexively explored. There was rarely time among educators to reflect critically on the didactic choices they made in haste. The teaching had to be provided immediately but now we need to take time to reflect on our decisions, since Autumn teaching is already organized and currently being implemented. It may still be in a ‘state’ of ‘crisis’, but it is important that the solutions planned and implemented this Spring may not necessarily be able to draw the ‘new normal’. Surveys about students’ experiences of ‘emergency teaching’ tell about serious consequences, which result in low motivation, great frustration and explicit need for more interaction. 

Management is aware of the challenges posed by the digital transformation from technical, organizational, educational and strategic perspectives. 

Using a communication theoretical approach, we can open up an important discussion, focusing on the communicative possibilities when we are physically present (f2f) compared with net-mediated communication in its broadest sense. There are, so to speak, more communicative connectivity options compared to net-mediated communication, both with synchronous and asynchronous communication. Teaching is in this theoretical frame defined as a specific form of communication, whose underlying intention is to effect change by the students, who direct their attention toward the communication. It is the engineered context which brings about the possibility for the activation/ continuation of learning processes, hence knowledge construction. 

Together with the communicative perspective related to teaching, we can discuss the concept of ‘good teaching’. By good teaching we mean teaching in the presented theoretical framework, where students and educators have the opportunity to communicate. That is, both ways, and not just one-way communication. It is thus about focusing on the social dimension through communication (dialogue, plenary/group discussions). It is about providing the opportunity for social sparring and reflection – and the opportunity to ‘check’ one’s professionalism with fellow students and educators. It is about being able to immerse oneself professionally and actively participate in the social community. Being with others on campus is part of student identity building and their development towards professional people.

Increased online learning risks instrumentalising teaching to reduce it to a more or less rigid template, where time and activities are set and spontaneous discussions are tight. This may mean that the development of independence, autonomy, co-determination skills and academic bildung are given more difficult conditions in which to develop. We must pay close attention to when online teaching is more often suited to more factual knowledge and the lowest taxonomic levels, where to reach the higher levels of analysis, synthesis and creativity as well as deeper professional discussions, it is more difficult to get it to work online.

We need to think about what is teaching quality and use the knowledge/research that is in the field – so that we can offer students a variety of teaching and learning environments that provide students with the best conditions to learn what is required according to curricula. That may include online teaching, but in a critical reflective format and not with an approach where emergency teaching becomes the ‘new normal’. The digital tools and platforms are important to have access to, but indeed not enough. The attention for a didactical part is crucial, when redesigning courses into online environments and mixed f2f and online teaching environments. It requires renewed concrete attention to support the educators’ didactic development. It also requires support for students and educators when it comes to developing the opportunities for unfolding communication and knowledge sharing.

This is an invitation to discuss the communicative and educational perspective on the currently developmental digital transformation.

Helle Mathiasen is professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Science Education, Denmark. Her primary research interest lies currently within the field of communication forums: internet and computer-mediated, various forms of face-to-face communication forums as well as hybrid forms. This field is joined with the concepts of learning, teaching, pedagogy and didactics. The current focus of her research is on the themes of the organisation of teaching, communication environments, and learning perspectives


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The Impact of TEF

by George Brown

A report on the SRHE seminar The impact of the TEF on our understanding, recording and measurement of teaching excellence: implications for policy and practice

This seminar demonstrated that the neo-liberal policy and metrics of TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework) were not consonant with excellent teaching as usually understood.

Michael Tomlinson’s presentation was packed with analyses of the underlying policies of TEF. Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka considered  the theme of students’ perceptions of excellent teaching. Her research demonstrated clearly that students’ views of excellent teaching were very different from those of TEF. Stephen Jones provided a vibrant analysis of public discourses. He pointed to the pre-TEF attacks on universities and staff by major conservative politicians and their supporters. These were to convince students and their parents that Government action was needed. TEF was born and with it the advent of US-style neo-liberalism and its consequences. His final slide suggested ways of combating TEF including promoting the broad purposes of HE teaching. Sal Jarvis succinctly summarised the seminar and took up the theme of purposes. Personal development and civic good were important purposes but were omitted from the TEF framework and metrics.

Like all good seminars, this seminar prompted memories, thoughts and questions during and after the seminar. A few of mine are listed below. Others may wish to add to them.

None of the research evidence supports the policies and metrics of TEF (eg Gibbs, 2018). The indictment of TEF by the Royal Statistics Society is still relevant (RSS, 2018). The chairman of the TEF panel is reported to have said “TEF was not supposed to be a “direct measure of teaching” but rather “a measure based on some [my italics] of the outcomes of teaching” On the continuum of neo-liberalism and collegiality, TEF is very close to the pole of neo-liberalism whereas student perspectives are nearer the pole of collegiality which embraces collaboration between staff and between staff and students. Collaboration will advance excellence in teaching: TEF will not. Collegiality has been shown to increase morale and reinforce academic values in staff and students (Bolden et al, 2012). Analyses of the underlying values of a metric are important because values shape policy, strategies and metrics. ‘Big data’ analysts need to consider ways of incorporating qualitative data. With regard to TEF policy and its metrics, the cautionary note attributed to Einstein is apposite: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that is counted counts.”

SRHE member George Brown was Head of an Education Department in a College of Education and Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology of Education in the University of Ulster before becoming Professor of Higher Education at the University of Nottingham.  His 250 articles, reports and texts are mostly in Higher and Medical Education, with other work in primary and secondary education. He was senior author of Effective Teaching in Higher Education and Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education and co-founder of the British Education Research Journal, to which he was an early contributor and reviewer. He was the National Co-ordinator of Academic Staff Development for the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (now Universities UK) and has served on SRHE Council.

References

Bolden, R et al (2012) Academic Leadership: changing conceptions, identities and experiences in UK higher education London: Leadership Foundation

Gibbs, G (2017) ‘Evidence does not support the rationale of the TEF’, Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, 10(2)

Royal Statistical Society  (2018) Royal Statistical Society: Response to the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework, subject-level consultation

Vicky Gunn


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Notes from North of the Tweed: Valuing our values?

By Vicky Gunn

In a recent publication, Mariana Mazzucato1. pushes the reader to engage with a key dilemma related to modern day capitalist economics. ‘Value extraction’ often occurs after a government has valued work upfront through state investment and accountability regimes. The original investment was a result of the collective possibilities afforded by a mature taxation system and an understanding that accountability can drive positive social and economic outcomes (as well as perverse ones). The value that is extracted is then distributed to those already with both financial and social capital rather than redistributed back into the systems which produced the initial work via support from the state in the first place. This means that the social contract between the State and its workers (at all levels) effectively has the State pump prime activity, only to watch the fruits of these labours be inequitably shared.

I find this to be a useful, powerful and troubling argument when considering the current relationship between State funded activity and the governance of UK HE. As a recipient of multiple grants from bodies such as the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE) and the Quality Assurance Agency (now a co-regulatory body in a landscape dominated by the Office for Students), I have observed a similar pattern of activity. What this means is that after a period of state funding (ie taxpayers’ money), these agencies are forced through a change in funding models to assess the value of their pre-existing assets. The change in funding models is normally a result of a political shift in how they are valued by the various governments that established and maintained them. The pre-existing assets are research and policy outputs and activities undertaken in good faith for the purposes of open source communication to ensure the widest possible dissemination and discussion, with an attendant build up in expertise. After valuing these assets, necessary rebranding may obscure the value of this state-funded work behind impenetrable websites in which multiple prior outputs (tangible assets) are pulled into one pdf.  Simultaneously, the agencies offer intangible assets based on relationships and expertise networks back to membership subscribers through gateways – paywalls. This looks like the unregulated conversion of a value network established through the collaboration of state and higher education into a revenue generating system, restricting access to those able to pay.2. If so, it represents a form of value extraction which is limited in how and where it redistributes what was once a part of the common weal.

Scottish HE has attempted to avoid this aspect of changes in the regulatory framework in two ways:

  • Firstly, by maintaining its Quality Enhancement Framework (QEF) in a recognisable form.3. Thus: the state continues to oversee the funding of domiciled Scottish student places; the Scottish Funding Council remains an arms-length funding and policy agency which commissions the relevant quality assurance agency; Universities Scotland continues as a lobbying ‘influencer’ that mediates the worst excesses of external interventions; and the pesky Office for Students is held back at the border, whilst we all trundle away trying to second guess what role metrics will play in the quality assurance of an enhancement-led sector over the next five to ten years. Strategic cooperation and value co-creation remain core principles. And all of this with Brexit uncertainty.
  • Secondly, by refocusing the discussion around higher educational enhancement in the light of a skills agenda predicated not on unfettered economic growth, but on inclusive and sustainable economic growth.4.

Two recent outputs from this context demonstrate the value of this approach: The Creative Disciplines Collaborative Cluster’s Toolkit for Measuring Impact and the Intangibles Collaborative Cluster’s recent publication.5. Both of these projects were valued for the opportunity they provided of collaborative problem solving across Scottish HEIs. Their outputs recognise it is now more important than ever to demonstrate the impact of what we do. Technological advances in rapid, annualised data generation is driving demands to assess the  value of our higher education. The prospect of this demand requiring disciplinary engagement means academics leading their subjects (not just Heads of Quality, DVCs Student Experience, VPs Learning and Teaching) need to be more aware of frameworks of accountability than before. Underneath the production of these outputs has remained a belief in the value of cooperation over the values of competition.

However, none of this means that those of us trying to maintain a narrative of higher education as the widest possible state good can rest on our laurels. If we are to seize this particular moment there are some crucial tensions to problematise and, where appropriate, resolve. We need formal discussion around the following:

  • What is to be valued through State influence in Scottish HE? How does the ‘what is to be valued’ question relate to the values and value of this education socially, culturally and economically?
  • How are these values and value to be valued through the accountability framework for higher education in Scotland?
  • What will the disruptions created by a new regulatory framework in England (based on a particular understanding of value and values) mean for how Scottish institutions continue to engage with the QEF, when they will probably also have to respond to a framework that would like to see itself as UK-wide?
  • How can we protect years of enhancement work from asset stripping and value extraction? How can we continue with an enhancement framework with social, cultural, and economic benefits for Scotland and its wider relationship with the world, at the same time as supporting reinvestment into the enhancement of Scotland’s higher education?
  • There is a push to revalue ‘success’ as simple economic outcomes, away from inter-relational outcomes that capture intangible but nonetheless critical aspects of that education – social coherence, wellbeing, cultural confidence and vitality, collective expertise, innovation, responsible prosperity. That path of value extraction may result in more not less inequality: how can we mitigate it?
  • How can all of this be done without merely retreating to the local? Bruno Latour has noted how locality is a cultural player in the current political inability to engage effectively with the planetary issue of the day: climate crisis.6. He notes the sense of security in the local’s boundaries and a perception across Europe that we somehow abandoned the local in the push to be global. The local is important. Yet, he clarifies, climate regime change means withdrawal into the local in terms of value and values – without interaction across political boundaries at a global level – is tantamount to wilful recklessness. How we can enable higher education to secure the local and the global simultaneously is surely the big question with which we are grappling. How can Scotland’s HE leaders engage to ensure the value and values we embody through our accountability regime do not get mired in local growth agendas unable to measure the impact of that growth within a global ecology?

Sitting within a creative arts small specialist institution, these questions seem both overwhelmingly large (how can a minnow lead such a conversation, surely only a BIG university can do this?) and absolutely essential. In the creative arts our students are, in their own frames of reference, already challenging us on the questions of value, values, environmental sustainability and inequality through their artistry, designerly ethics, and architectural wisdoms. I am, however, yet to hear such a recognisable conversation occurring coherently across the various players (political, policy, institutional) in the wider sector, except in activities related to the localities of cultural policy, the creative economy, and HEI community engagement.7.

Perhaps it is time for sector leaders, social, cultural, and economic policy-makers, and student representatives to work together to identify the parameters of these questions and how we can move forward to resolve them responsibly.

SRHE member Professor Vicky Gunn is Head of Learning and Teaching at Glasgow School of Art.

Notes

  1. Mazzucato, M (2018) The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy,  Penguin, p xv
  2. Allee, V (2008) ‘Value network analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets’, Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9 (1): 5-25.
  3. This 2016 description of the sector’s regulatory framework of enhancement remains broadly the same:  https://wonkhe.com/blogs/analysis-devolved-yet-not-independent-tef-and-teaching-accountability-in-scotland/
  4. See the Scottish Funding Council’s latest strategic framework: http://www.sfc.ac.uk/about-sfc/strategic-framework/strategic-framework.aspx
  5. Enhancement Themes outputs: Creative Disciplines Collaborative Cluster: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/current-enhancement-theme/defining-and-capturing-evidence/the-creative-disciplines
    Intangibles Collaborative Cluster: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/current-enhancement-theme/defining-and-capturing-evidence/the-intangibles-beyond-the-metrics
  • Latour, B (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime Polity Press, p 26
  • Gilmore, A and Comunian, R (2016) ‘Beyond the campus: Higher education, cultural policy and the creative economy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22: 1-9


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Academic capitalism – or worse?

[1] By Phil Pilkington

There has been much discussion on academic capitalism, the neo-liberalism of universities, the new entrepreneurial management which is transformative rather than transactional. Much has been done to reinforce this change and self-perception by government (in the UK) from the creation of the HE market, the panoply of measuring instruments (however flawed) and the imperative of third stream income to compensate for the loss of state funding.

However, ‘academic capitalism’ is a misnomer: it does not and cannot exist except in the ‘for profit’ sector. Exogenous forces require universities to generate income, sometimes leading to operational surpluses, making universities appear to act as if they are for profit. This is seen in two ways, neither of which are endogenous: the need for growth to remain operationally viable, and the imposition of regulatory controls of quality, responsiveness to ministerial opinions etc, as a consequence of the irony of a Hayekian model of the public sector[2]. But this is appearance and not reality. The marketisation of HE is an outcome of applying Hayekian principles to the public sector; it is not in itself capitalism. Academics are employees who may have ‘professional ethics’ and hard-earned specialisms which are bought in the labour market. Nevertheless, universities are not generating surplus value, a necessary condition for capitalism, as they have no shareholders with which to extract value from the means of production as capital which can become independent of the labour that produces the profit/surplus. The substantial critique of capitalism was that surplus value could be lost or expropriated from the locale of production and converted into more capital. No matter how much university management and governance may copy, or are required by government to enact, business practices in the neoliberal era (measuring performance, contracting out, international competition, and general entrepreneurialism), the challenge to produce operating surpluses is no different for the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other large charities which ‘gift back’ the surplus to the charity from trading activities. Students’ Unions as social enterprises have been doing this for decades with their wet sales supporting their charitable purposes.  Perhaps a discursive view of universities as social enterprises tout court may be helpful for their governance and for deciding how operational surpluses should be applied, perhaps ring-fencing cost centres of undergraduate teaching and research.

Nor is the call for a more skilled and ‘employment ready’ workforce a lowering of universities by promoting an HE sector relevant to and supporting the economy. This purpose was one of the planks of the Robbins Report[3]. This instrumentalist view of education is not new; and this knowledge-servicing role applies to the students as well as the institutional purpose. The polytechnics, and their actual geography, were intended to support the industries of the time, particularly aerospace, steel, chemicals, shipbuilding, mining and the motor industry. What is new is the dissidents’ complaint about the new capitalism of universities, which perhaps obscures some deeper and more disturbing concerns about the situation of universities in the knowledge economy.

The complaints are familiar: a dystopian decline of Western civilisation; the creation of the academic precariat; jeopardising the academic mission; moral decay; avarice; Faustian bargains; dumbing down with student-consumer as sovereign; and so on. But the symptoms of capitalism in HE are shared with other sectors; the precariat as an outcome of the loss of employees’ rights or employers’ opportunities in a flexible labour market; new management systems, and so on. Globalisation is not an essential condition of capitalism but is a late capitalism feature. Global reach has long been a feature of imperial higher education, as in the founding of the LSE, sans academic capitalism. Big science has been international and collaborative for more than a century.

The trappings of capitalism – changes to employment practices, the Taylorism of activity measurement, the creation of a market and the management response, including branding strategies for competitive survival – do not make higher education a capitalist system. The extremes of private enterprise branding go further than universities striving to gain market share and a sense of corporate identity. For example, Sir Philip Green’s channelling money out of BHS ‘in effect monetised the firm’s history as a reliable counterpart for workers and lenders’ (Woodruff, 2018). There are close comparisons in the HE sector in monetising heritage/status: the 100-year financing bonds of Oxbridge suggest a strong leverage through historical branding, compared to say the ability of the University of West London to borrow. Marketisation or branding reinforces the stratified inequalities of the HE system and entrenches the market (Brown, 2018). Nevertheless, this is still not extracting surplus value. Similarly, the contracting out of cleaning services in a local hospital does not make the hospital capitalist. It is the surplus value extracted by the contractor that is capitalist in that, again, the net profit creates capital. Building roads, providing a police force, maintaining state schools etc, are essential for the existence of capitalism (and much else): they are not intrinsically capitalist but act as support services for capital.

Sheldon Rothblatt’s (1997) heart-warming celebration of universities as the second oldest western tradition, that has offered so much in our journey of progress and civilisation, begs the debatable current status of universities as capitalist or indeed even as enduring institutions. (I am reminded of Hobbes’ (1655) paradox of the ship of Theseus which each year came into harbour for a refit:  when is it no longer the same ship? Rothblatt sees similar changes in society and universities but doesn’t argue for a causal relationship.) Universities mutate or emerge over time within the material conditions of power and the economy – from Papal Bull and Royal Charter through Parliamentary legislation, ministerial statutory instruments and finally independent (sic) agency.  Will their function and form now will mirror the current neoliberal conditions of globalisation, public sector regulation and deregulation of the private sector? Not quite. The new cycle of knowledge economies is unlike previous regimes for the supporting universities. It is a different economy for universities and for all of us in some deeper ways.

Universities were, and in some respects still are, the providers of new technologies which advance production and manufacturing processes, new materials and industries as well as long term global opportunities and risk assessments via scientific understanding. Universities have fulfilled that role since the late nineteenth century. What is different is specifically the nature of the new economy which is a new form of market, as capital must search for new markets. This is a new model of business enterprise distinct from manufacturing and traditional service industries – the mining or rather possession (as intellectual property) and exploitation of data as privately-owned property. The case for knowledge as a public good is strong (Marginson, 2013) but the change in what counts as knowledge comes with a stricter control of social conditions. The possession of knowledge begets a new ontology and epistemology. It is the thread that runs through capitalism: the transfer of the public good to the private, from the enclosures onwards, so that old ontological claims appear as delusional, fictions and myths.  Universities and their students are both agents within the knowledge economy and the raw materials.

Universities have been exploited by business in the new technologies with significant growth in profit margins for business, which has enabled the financialisation of business rather than its technological development. The exhortations for universities to provide the materiel for innovation and development obscures another trend.  This is eloquently and passionately explained by Mariana Mazzucato in The Entrepreneurial State (2013). Businesses reduce research costs by contracting out to universities, whilst reaping the major and rapidly increasing profit share which is then used to buy back stockholdings to increase share value. This process continues as competition continues to drive down business research costs , increasing share value (which is capital), and increasing reliance on universities as subcontractors to allow for this business strategy. The knowledge economy is ‘cutting edge’ but universities become a contracting out service industry not just for ‘pushing the technological boundaries’ per se but to be used for capital gain (which is then ‘lost’ to the production process and to the universities’ research centres as surplus value). As Mazzacuto might say, the universities become not so much capitalist agents of the new economies as the exploited.

The knowledge economy flowed from state intervention in the US and the UK but is invisible in plain view. Large corporate R&D centres (Bell, Dupont, Xerox, et al) have largely disappeared and university research in the public domain is used by the new technological businesses. For example, all the Apple innovations of touch screen, GPS, internet, microelectronics, and voice activation were government funded developments.

There is another aspect of the cognitive economy of data and intellectual property ownership which is intimately connected to universities in the new wave of entrepreneurism. This is the monetisation of data within the sector. Not the creation and control of patents resulting from research, but the monetisation of data not previously considered. This new wave of capital is not limited to education. The harvesting of data in the health sector (and the contingent insurance industry) has been a site of contention and dispute in several countries in the last five years[4].

The sale of tranches of the student loan book (losses to the Treasury estimated by the National Audit Office for one tranche as over £600 million) will be a carefully calculated risk for the buyers. In the US student loans are considered as approaching sub-prime liabilities, now with more than a trillion dollars of debt. In the UK part of the value of purchasing student loans stems from the personal data to be harvested for the next 40 years in the interchange between the debtor and the new loan-holders.  A more spectacular example of information converted to a form of capital is the sale of Turnitin.  This is no elevated concept of innovation and development other, simply the ability of capital to create a new ontology of products to be marketed within the cognitive economy. Turnitin was sold in 2008 to Warburg Pincus, then in 2014 to a Singapore-based wealth fund (for $752 million) and finally to a holding company of Condé Nast in 2018 for $1.75 billion. Turnitin has itself acquired other companies in 2018 such as Vericite and Gradescope. Jesse Stommel of the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, noted: “How much of that $1.75 billion is going to the students who have fed their database for years? I have a pretty good guess; zero billion.”

The charge of academic capitalism is misplaced when there should be a growing concern about how late capital will find new ways and practices to exploit the university sector.

Phil Pilkington is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.

References

Brown R (2018) ‘Neoliberalism, Marketisation and Higher Education’, Professorial Lecture, University of West London

Hobbes T (1655) De Corpore

Marginson S, (2013) ‘The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education’, Journal of Education Policy 28(3)

Mazzucatto, M (2013) The Entrepreneurial State, Anthem Press

Rothblatt S (1997) The Modern University and its Discontents, Cambridge

Woodruff D (2018) ‘Profits Now, Costs Later’, London Review of Books 40(22)

[1] I am extremely grateful to Ian McNay for his advice and support; the faults here remain mine

[2]  Hayek F (1944) The Road to Serfdom. It is difficult not to take an ad hominem approach to Hayek as a friend of dictators, but also as a paradoxical, confused and failed political theorist; his concept of price as information when human thought is irrational is a foundation of the current dispensation. For neo-liberal policy makers (ie the government/OfS) the uniformity of price in the UK HE sector offends against rational market efficiencies driving down prices. The consequent conspiracy hypothesis of cartel price fixing is another neo-liberal trope: the sabotage of government policies by self-interested public sector management and civil servants. Some university leaders have supported the neo-liberal project on the rationality of price levels by suggesting that the artificial limit set by government at the top end should be lifted and the market could be liberated to compete with Ivy League fee levels (prices). There are alternative models of pricing: a holistic model for price for HE could include prior costs (school fees, private tuition, the housing market reflecting catchment areas, etc).

[3]   My thanks to Ian McNay for a reminder that the Robbins Report included ‘the instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour…’ and pointing out the skills support by polytechnics for the heavy industries in the north and north east of England. The assumption throughout the 1940s and 50s, from the 1944 Education Act and Claus Moser’s statistical planning of HE for Education Minister David Eccles, was that 80% of the workforce would be engaged in manufacturing and manual work.

[4] In the UK, following the Health and Social Care Act (2012) there was a requirement that all GPs’ case notes be returned to the central care.data to be exploited commercially, this appears to have been abandoned in 2016 after a campaign in part organised by GPs. In Denmark there was a rescinding of a similar arrangement. Data sharing (sic) between Deep Mind (the AI branch of Google) and a London NHS Trust was considered by the Information Commissioner’s Office to be a breach of law. In Italy a deal was made with IBM in 2016 for access to health data (Source: New Scientist, April 2016).

Paul Temple


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Merchant rankers

by Paul Temple

I blogged a while back on THE’s transformation from a publisher of news and opinions on higher education to a producer and vendor of rankings data. Every issue of the magazine it seems now comes with the latest rankings publication, often thicker than the parent publication. The latest one that I’ve seen gives the “2019 University Impact Rankings”. You’ve got to admire the ingenuity of THE’s Chief Knowledge Officer, Phil Baty, and his team in dreaming up ever-more varied ways of ranking universities – and the cleverness of these latest rankings, examining contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is that a wider range of universities than just the usual suspects can claim their place in the sun. So expect to see Kyung Hee University in South Korea boasting of its top world ranking under SDG 11, “Sustainable cities and communities”.

The UN has developed 17 SDGs taking in a wide sweep of worthwhile objectives, including peace, health, welfare, equalities, sustainability, and more. Probably all universities contribute in different ways to many of these goals, but how should their varying achievements in this field be ranked? Well, the difficulty of adding incommensurables together to produce a single number in order to create a league table has never so far got in the way of people with a ranking product to sell. So you won’t be surprised to hear that it turned out to be a piece of cake to add a university’s contribution to, say, “good health and wellbeing”, to a number reflecting its work on “gender equality”, to its number on “climate action”, to compare that total number to a number from a university on the other side of the world which says it contributes to a different set of SDGs – and to come up with a league table. (The University of Auckland came top, since you ask.)

As I said in my earlier blog about the THE annual university awards, you might think, where’s the harm in universities doing a bit of mild boasting about their contributions to perfectly worthwhile aims? Well, I think there are a couple of problems. One was brought home to me recently at a graduation ceremony, where the speech by the presiding member of the UCL brass was almost entirely about how well UCL and its constituent parts had done in the recent QS rankings. This both misleads families and friends, and probably many graduates, into thinking that rankings are some sort of unarguable, football league-style assessment, with a university’s work being counted in the same way as a team’s goals. But it also misses an opportunity to tell your own institutional story – “we are a terrific university, and this is why” – rather than sub-contracting the job to someone with a commercial axe to grind. What happened to institutional self-confidence?

The other problem is that the more universities appear to buy in to rankings like these, the more THE and other rankers are encouraged to offer consultancies based on their rankings. This is dangerous territory. Rather than claiming, however implausibly, that their consultancy services are entirely separate from their rankings activities, THE goes out of its way to link them. Imagine then a marketing director of a university in difficulties of some sort reading the several full-page ads for THE’s consultancy services in the Impact Rankings publication, with their offers of “expert guidance” and “tailored analysis for advancement” drawing on THE’s “deep expertise” with THE experts becoming “an extension of…universities’ marketing departments”. It wouldn’t be surprising if they thought, “Hmmm, maybe working with these guys might help us move up some of these rankings – at least we’d understand more about how they’re put together and we might then make some changes in what we do….”

So sets of methodologically worthless data become turned into income streams for rankings producers because university leaderships take them seriously, which in turn will drive universities’ policy-making in the direction of moving up one league table or another, which in turn will encourage rankers to produce even more league tables in order to exert more power. How on earth did we allow this to happen?

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.