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Reclaiming the academic community: why universities need more than metrics

by Sigurður Kristinsson

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

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

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

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

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

The pressures pulling academic life apart

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

Organisational (not occupational) professionalism

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

Managerialism

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

Individualism

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

Retreat from academic citizenship

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

Troubled collegiality

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

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

Why academic community matters

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

Community as instrumentally valuable

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

Community as constitutive of academic values

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

Community as intrinsically valuable

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

How community shapes academic life

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

Debates about educational values

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

Scientific knowledge and academic freedom

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

Teaching as communal practice

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

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

Rebuilding scademic community: structural and cultural change

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

Structural reform

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

Cultural renewal

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

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

A moral case for academic community

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

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

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

Conclusion: the future depends on community

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

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

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

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


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‘It’s different when they’re in their office’: the disconnect in student perceptions of academic meetings

by Stacey Mottershaw and Anna Viragos

As we approach the five-year anniversary of the closure of UK university campuses for the Covid-19 pandemic, we thought it might be interesting and timely to reflect on the way that the sector adapted to educational delivery, and which innovations remain as part of our new normal.

One key aspect of educational delivery which has remained to varying extents across the sector is the move to online student meetings. This includes meetings for academic personal tutorials, dissertation supervisions and other one-to-one meetings between students and staff. The Covid-19 lockdowns necessitated the use of online meetings as the only available option during this time. However, even post-lockdown, students and staff have continued to request online meetings, for reasons such as flexibility, privacy and sustainability.

To explore this further, we conducted a small mixed-methods study with students from Leeds University Business School to consider their preferences for online or in-person meetings, utilising a faculty-wide survey for breadth and short semi-structured interviews for depth.

We designed a questionnaire including questions on demographic (eg gender, home/international, whether they have caring responsibilities) and situational questions regarding their preference for face-to-face only, hybrid, or online meetings. We also included some questions around the ‘Big Five’ personality traits, to better understand factors that influence preferences.  We then distributed this online questionnaire, using the Qualtrics questionnaire software.

Based on our findings, 15% of respondents preferred face-to-face only, 31% online only, with the remaining 54% preferring to have the option of either face-to-face or online.

We also found that international students had a stronger preference for online meetings compared to non-international students. Whilst we had a relatively small sample of students on the Plus Programme (our institutional programme targeted to under-represented students); they had a stronger preference for in-person meetings. In terms of the Big Five traits, this student sample was highest on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and lowest on extroversion.

In addition to the questionnaire, we ran seven one-to-one interviews with students from a mix of second year, the year in industry and final year, who had all experienced a mix of both online and face-to-face meetings throughout their studies.

In reviewing the data, we identified five core themes of student preferences around meeting modes:

  • Connection and communication: Participants felt that the type of meeting affected connection and communication, with in-person meetings feeling more authentic.
  • Privacy/space: Participants felt that the type of meeting was influenced by factors including their access to private space, either at home or on campus.
  • Confidence: Some participants felt that the type of meeting could affect how confident they would feel in interactions with staff, with online meetings in their own environment feeling more comfortable than in spaces on campus.
  • Time: Participants discussed the amount of time that they had for each type of meeting, with online meetings deemed to be more efficient, due to the absence of travel time.
  • Flexibility: Participants demonstrated a strong preference for flexibility, in that they value having a choice over how to meet, rather than a meeting mode being imposed upon them.

Through cross-examination of the core themes, we also identified something akin to a meta-theme, that is a ‘theme which acquire[s] meaning through the systematic co-occurrence of two or more other themes’ (Armborst, 2017 p1). We termed this meta-theme ‘The Disconnect’, as across each of the core themes there seemed to be a disconnect between student expectations of APT and what is typically provided, which ties in with existing literature (Calabrese et al, 2022).

For example, one participant suggested that:

It’s different when they’re in their office like popping there and asking a question for the lecture or even like the tutorials rather than having to e-mail or like go on a call [which] feels more formal.

Whilst this comment seems to lean more towards other types of academic teaching (eg module leadership, lecture delivery or seminar facilitation), it can also translate to availability of staff more broadly. The comment suggests that students might expect staff to be available to them, on site, as and when they are needed. Yet in reality, it is unlikely that outside of set office hours academic staff will be available to answer ad hoc questions given their other commitments and particularly given the increased proportion of staff regularly working from home since the pandemic. This perspective also seems to contradict the perception that staff are much more available now than ever before, due to the prevalence of communications administered via email and online chat and meeting tools such as MS Teams. Staff may feel that they are more available as online communication methods increase in availability and use, but if students do not want ‘formal’ online options or prefer ad hoc on-site provision, then there may be a disconnect between student expectations and delivery, with all stakeholders feeling short-changed by the reality.

Another disconnect between expectations and reality became apparent when another participant commented:

[…] online it was more rushed because you have the 30 minutes and you see the time going down and in the Zoom you will see like you have 4 minutes left to talk and then you’re rushing it over to finish it.

Whilst this clearly relates to the core theme of time, it also seemed to be correlated with participant understanding of staff roles. It is difficult to understand how the time limitation for online and in-person meetings is different when the meetings are of the same duration, except that in the case of in-person meetings the student may be less aware of timings, due to not having the time physically visible on the screen in front of them. This might be reflected in the student-staff dynamic, where managing online meetings might be seen to be a joint and equal endeavour, with the responsibility for managing in-person meetings being skewed towards the staff member. Whilst it can be argued that staff should take responsibility for managing the meeting, in a time of increased narratives around student-led tutoring, it may be worth exploring the possible knock-on effects of students passively allowing the meeting to happen, rather than actively owning the meeting.

Final thoughts

A limitation of this study was the low response rate. At the point of dissemination, there were approximately 2,000 students in our faculty. However, we received just 198 survey responses (9.9%), and only seven people took part in the interviews, despite repeated calls for participants and generous incentives. Although this was a smaller sample than we had hoped for, we are confident that our study makes a timely and relevant contribution to discussions around delivery of APT, both within our faculty and beyond.

As a starting point, future research could seek to generate responses from a broader pool of participants, through both a quantitative survey and qualitative methods. Based on our findings, there may also be scope for further research exploring student expectations of staff roles, and how these match to institutional offerings across the sector. Ultimately, universities need to do more to investigate and understand student preferences for educational delivery, balancing this alongside pedagogical justifications and staff circumstances.

Stacey Mottershaw is an Associate Professor (Teaching and Scholarship) at Leeds University Business School and an EdD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her research predominantly seeks to understand the needs of marginalised groups in higher education, with a particular focus on equitable and socially just career development. 

Dr Anna Viragos is an Associate Professor in Organizational Psychology at Leeds University Business School, and a Chartered Psychologist of the BPS. Her research focuses on a variety of topics such as stress and wellbeing, creativity, and job design.


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Ethicality in academic knowledge production

by Dina Zoe Belluigi

‘Research cultures’, and their problematics, have received sufficient attention to have been delineated various definitions by authoritative groups within the university/ research ecology in the United Kingdom, and amongst scholars in our field of enquiry. Raising questions about ethicality within research cultures, in a recent paper I explored dys/consciousness and its effects on research production and the formation of academic researchers. The focus of the empirical component was on one part which falls within the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland (NI).

How to conceptualise thinking and seeing for the study of UK universities?

The paper begins with a mapping of conceptualisations of consciousness. It does so through their application, by those who have studied dynamics of racism in universities and educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA. The mapping includes scholars’ arguments about the persistence of not unconscious but dysconscious racism, the limits of critical consciousness, the necessity for anti-racism, and the constraints to realising decolonisation, when faced with janiform approaches to structural, institutional and scientific racism in academia.

Methodological approach

The conceptual mapping served as a sensitisation device through which to explore academic research cultures, about enquiry on social groups who were and are marginalised due to perceptions of their ‘otherness’ to dominantly-placed Northern Irish groups. Difference is indexed through constructions of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘migration’, underpinned by whiteness.

A Critical Discourse Analysis, undergirded by Critical Race Theory, was undertaken of 200 published research items that related to this area of enquiry, which were found to extend from 1994 to 2022, and were spread across disciplines. These were sourced from the repositories of the research-intensive universities in Northern Ireland. Qualitative reflections enriched the analysis. These included the participation of the related academic-authors, and report-and-respond insights from institutional research officers, and non-academic partners of such studies (n=37). Combining these sources was to probe more deeply the ways in which such outlier practices of knowledge production reinforced, evaded or resisted dominant frames and norms of conduct.

Signs of dysconsciousness

The paper’s analysis unpacks 5 signs of what was interpreted as dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism in the context. The first sign was the under-study and under-funding of local research enquiry on/ about/ and by so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’. Secondly, were the skewed dynamics within the politics of participation and of authorship, wherein those studied were rarely positioned as authorities of knowledge produced. Thirdly, the ethicality of authors’ interests and motivations in undertaking such research were found to be complicated and undermined by strategic, and often self-serving, goals imposed by the academic research ecology. Problematics in the data collected and held by public authorities, was the fourth sign. The article culminates in the fifth sign: that the threats of risk, social sanction and double-speak related to such research, were not only exogenous to universities, but endogenous too.

Insights for further explorations

In the current neoliberal milieu, the enablers of research – such as funding, social validation or career rewards – were of such a techno-rational nature that the depth of theorisation, complexity and intellectual debate necessary to challenge the existing dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism remained under-supported. Moreover, the article confirms observations that – rather than enrich or catalyse criticality and plurality within the dominant formations of academic knowledge and of scholars – risk-avoidance of (perceived) controversial issues is compounded when institutions are situated within complicated local socio-political conditions. This places limits on, and indeed de-idealises, promotional social responsibility imaging of ‘anchor’ universities.

Participants’ counter-narratives provided insights about the production of enquiry despite, and in some cases because of, such dominant dynamics. Of interest is that many of the authors were women (in far higher proportions than the staff composition of those institutions); and many of the authors self-identified as migrant academics. In addition to external migrants to the British Isles, this included those from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, providing a sense of how alienated ‘outsiders’ were often made to feel within that academic ‘community’. Avoiding hero narratives, the article points to the politics of authorial agency within academic practices when individuals negotiate insider-outsider, minority-majority dynamics of academic research cultures hostile to such enquiry.

The article concludes by raising questions about the mantle of ethical responsibility to justice, truth, and dissent within such constraining, homogenising conditions. While it is tempting to read this as an exceptional or peculiar case, references to related studies are included throughout the article to demonstrate that similar problematic dynamics within research cultures have been observed across university spaces in the Global North, and warrant further enquiry.

Professor Belluigi is a Council member of SRHE; Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation at Queen’s University Belfast; and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.


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The ongoing saga of REF 2028: why doesn’t teaching count for impact?

by Ian McNay

Surprise, surprise…or not.

The initial decisions on REF 2028 (REF 2028/23/01 from Research England et al), based on the report on FRAP – the Future Research Assessment Programme – contain one surprise and one non-surprise among nearly 40 decisions. To take the second first, it recommends, through its cost analysis report, that any future exercise ‘should maintain continuity with rules and processes from previous exercises’ and ‘issue the REF guidance in a timely fashion’ (para 82). It then introduces significant discontinuities in rules and processes, and anticipates giving final guidance only in winter 2024-5, when four years (more than half) of the assessment period will have passed.

The second surprise is, finally, the open recognition of the negative effects on research culture and staff careers of the REF and its predecessors (para 24), identified by respondents to the FRAP consultation about the 2028 exercise. For me, this new humility is a double edged sword: many of the defects identified have been highlighted in my evidence-based articles (McNay, 2016, McNay, 2022), and, indeed, by the report commissioned by HEFCE (McNay, 1997) on the impact on individual and institutional behaviour of the 1992 exercise:

  • Lack of recognition of a diversity of excellences including work on local or regional issues because of the geographical interpretation of national/international excellence (para 37). Such local work involves different criteria of excellence, perhaps recognised in references to partnership and wider impact.
  • The need for outreach beyond the academic community, such as a dual publication strategy – one article in an academic journal matched with one in a professional journal in practical language and close to utility and application of a project’s findings.
  • Deficient arrangements for assessing interdisciplinary work (paras 60 and 61)
  • The need for a different, ‘refreshed’, approach to appointments to assessment panels (para 28)
  • The ‘negative impact on the authenticity and novelty of research, with individuals’ agendas being shaped by perceptions of what is more suitable to the exercise: favouring short-term inputs and impacts at the expense of longer-term projects…staying away from areas perceived to be less likely to perform well’. ‘The REF encourages …focus on ‘exceptional’ impacts and those which are easily measurable, [with] researchers given ‘no safe space to fail’ when it came to impact’.
  • That last negative arises in major part because of the internal management of the exercise, yet the report proposes an even greater corporate approach in future. The evidence-based articles and reports, and innovative processes and artefacts that arise from our research will have a reduced contribution to published assessments on the quality of research, though there is encouragement of a wider diversity of research outputs. More emphasis will be placed on institutional and unit ‘culture’ (para 28), so individuals disappear, uncoupled from consideration of culture-based quality. That culture is controlled by management; I spent several years as a Head of School trying to protect and develop further a collegial enterprise culture, which encouraged research and innovative activities in teaching. The senior management wanted a corporate bureaucracy approach with targets and constant monitoring, which work at Exeter has shown leads to lower output, poorer quality and higher costs (Franco-Santos et al, 2014).

At least 20 per cent of the People, Culture and Environment sub-profile for a unit will be based on an assessment of the Institutional Level (IL) culture, and this element will make up 25 per cent of a unit’s overall quality profile, up from 15 percent from 2021. This proposed culture-based approach will favour Russell Group universities even further – their accumulated capital has led to them outscoring other universities on ‘environment’ in recent exercises, even when the output scores have been the other way round. Elizabeth Gadd, of Loughborough, had a good piece on this issue in Wonkhe on 28 June 2023. The future may see research-based universities recruiting strongly in the international market to provide subsidy to research from higher student fees, leaving the rest of us to offer access and quality teaching to UK students on fees not adjusted for inflation. Some recognition of excellent research in unsupportive environment would be welcome, as would reward for improvement as operated when the polytechnics and colleges joined research assessment exercises.

The culture of units will be judged by the panels – a separate panel will assess IL cultures – and will be based on a ‘structured statement’ from the management, assessing itself, plus a questionnaire submission. I have two concerns here: can academic panels competent to peer-assess research also judge the quality and contribution of management; and, given behaviours in the first round of impact assessment (Oancea, 2016), how far can we rely on the integrity of these statements?

The sub-profile on Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding sub-profile will make up 50 per cent of a unit’s quality profile – down from 60 per cent last time and 65 per cent in 2014. At least 10 per cent will be based on the structured statement, so Outputs – the one thing that researchers may have a significant role in – are down to only 40 per cent, at most, of what is meant by overall research quality (the FRAP International Committee recommended 33 per cent). Individuals will not be submitted. HESA data will be used to quantify staff and the number of research outputs that can be submitted will be an average of 2.5 per FTE. There is no upper limit for an individual, and staff with no outputs can be included, as well as those who support research by others, or technicians who publish. Research England (and this is mainly about England; the other three countries may do better and certainly will do things differently) is firm that the HESA numbers will not be used as the volume multiplier for funding (still a main purpose of the REF), though it is not clear where that will come from – Research England is reviewing their approach to strategic institutional research funding. Perhaps staff figures submitted to HESA will have an indicator of individuals’ engagement with research.

Engagement and Impact broadens the previous element of simply impact. Our masters have discovered that early engagement of external partners in research, and 6 months attachment at 0.2 contract level allows them to be included, and enhances impact. Wow! Who knew? The work that has impact can be of any level to avoid the current quality level designations stopping local projects being acknowledged.

The three sub-profiles have fuzzy boundaries and overlap. Not just in a linear connection – environment, output, impact – but, because, as noted above, for example, engagement comes from the external environment but becomes part of the internal culture. It becomes more of a Venn diagram, that allows the adoption of an ‘holistic’ approach to ‘responsible research assessment’. We wait to see what those both mean in practice.

What is clear in that holistic approach is that research has nothing to do with teaching, and impact on teaching still does not count. That has created an issue for me in the past since my research feeds (not leads) my teaching and vice versa. I use discovery learning and students’ critical incidents as curriculum organisers, and they produce ‘evidence’ similar to that gathered through more formal interview and observation methods. An example. I recently led a workshop for a small private HEI on academic governance. There was a newly appointed CEO. I used a model of institutional and departmental cultures which influence decision making and ‘governance’ at different levels. That model, developed to help my teaching is now regarded by some as a theoretical framework and used as a basis for research. Does it therefore qualify for inclusion in impact? The session asked participants to consider the balance among four cultures of collegial, bureaucratic, corporate, entrepreneurial, relating to the degrees of central control of policy development and of policy delivery (McNay, 1995).  It then dealt with some issues more didactically, moving to the concept of the learning organisation where I distributed a 20 item questionnaire, (not yet published, but available on request for you to use) to allow scoring out of 10 per item, of behaviours relating to capacity to change, innovate and learn, leading to improved quality. Only one person scored more than 100 in total and across the group the modal score was in the low 70s, or just over 35%. That gave the new CEO an agenda with some issues more easily pursued than others and scores indicating levels of concern and priority. So my role moved into consultancy. There will be impact, but is the research base sufficient, was it even research, and does the use of teaching as a research transmission process (Boyer, 1990) disqualify it?

I hope this shows that the report contains a big agenda, with more to come. SRHE members need to consider what it means to them, but also what it means for research into institutions and departments to help define culture and its characteristics. I will not be doing it, but I hope some of you will. We need to continue to provide an evidence base to inform decisions even if it takes up to 20 years for the findings to have an impact.

SRHE itself might say several things in response to the report:

  • welcome the recognition of previous weaknesses, but note that a major one has not been recorded: the impact of RAE/REF on teaching, when excellent research has gained extra money, but excellent teaching has not, leading to an imbalancing of effort within the HE system. The research-teaching nexus also needs incorporating into the holistic view of research. Teaching is a major element in dissemination of research (Boyer, 1990) and so a conduit to impact, and should be recognised as such. That is because the relationship between researcher/teacher and those gaining new knowledge and understanding is more intimate and interactive than a reader of an article experiences. Discovery learning, drawing on learners’ experiences in CPD programmes can be a source of evidence, enhancing the knowledge and understanding of the researcher to incorporate in further work and research publications.
  • welcome the commitment to more diversity of excellences. In particular, welcome the commitment to recognise local and regionally directed research and its significant impact. The arguments about intimacy and interaction apply here, too. Research in partnership is typical of such work and different criteria are needed to evaluate excellence in this context.
  • welcome the intention to review panel membership to reflect the wider view of research now to be adopted.
  • urge an earlier clarification on panel criteria to avoid another 18 months, at least, trying, without clarity or guidance, to do work that will fit with the framework of judgement within which that work will be judged.
  • be wary of losing the voice of the researchers in the reduction of emphasis on research and its outputs in favour of presentations on corporate culture.

References

McNay, I (1997) The Impact of the 1992 RAE on Institutional and Individual Behaviour in English HE: the evidence from a research project Bristol HEFCE


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‘Academics in the arena’ – showcasing conferences research at SRHE 2017

Emily Henderson writes on fulfilling her dream of convening a symposium on conferences research at the Society for Research into Higher Education annual conference.

This post was first published on Emily’s blog, https://conferenceinference.wordpress.com and is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

When we set out to create an academic blog on conferences, it was in part because conferences research is so disparate – in terms of discipline and geographical location. The Conference Inference blog has provided us with a wonderful platform to share research and comment on conferences over the course of 2017, including from a fantastic array of guest contributors – and we will be thinking more about this first year in our 1-year anniversary celebrations in early 2018. However this post reports back from a very special treat – namely, five papers on conferences grouped together in the same room at a conference! The symposium, entitled ‘Academics in the Arena: Foregrounding Academic Conferences as Sites for Higher Education Research’ (see information here, pp. 25-27) brought together a variety of critical perspectives on conferences, along with a discussant contribution from Helen Perkins, Director of SRHE (Society for Research in Higher Education).

The first paper presented early analysis from an ongoing research project on fictional representations of conferences by Conference Inference co-editor Emily F Henderson and guest contributor Pauline Reynolds (see Pauline’s guest post). The paper, entitled ‘“Novel delegates”: representations of academic identities in fictional conferences’, focused in particular on academic identities at conferences as they are portrayed in novels, short stories and graphic novels. Fictional conferences act to both equalise and reproduce academic hierarchy; delegates are homogenised as masses and crowds, uniformly badged and seated, just as delegate-professors are singled out for VIP treatment and delegate-students are denied access to certain spaces and conversations. Continue reading →

BruceMacfarlane


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Academic practice, identity and careers

By Bruce Macfarlane

The word ‘traditional’ is possibly the most over-used term in the higher education discourse. In common with nearly all institutions that have endured for any substantial length of time, such as the Church of England or the Conservative Party, the University has been adroit at re-inventing itself. The latest re-imagining is that ‘traditional’ universities are research-led institutions. This myth has comparatively recent roots linked to the growth of an audit culture, expansion and stratification on an international basis, and academic performativity at an individual level. These trends have collectively re-shaped the nature of academic practice and identity over the last 50 years.

An insight into how priorities have changed among academics during the recent past is provided by Halsey and Trow’s seminal study, published in 1971, of a then still small and elite British higher education sector drawing on data gathered in the mid-1960s (at a time when the SRHE was being formed). They found that British academics were overwhelmingly oriented towards teaching rather than research. A mere 10 per cent were even ‘interested’ in research while just 4 per cent regarded research as their primary responsibility (Halsey & Trow, 1971). The study concludes Continue reading →

Ian Mc Nay


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Applications to UK universities: digging beyond the headlines…

By Ian McNay

‘Record numbers apply to enter higher education’ was the good news reported at the end of the first application period in January by most papers – I have not seen one to query this, but I have not checked them all. The March figures are now out, almost unreported, and confirm what was true in January: applications are up on last year, by just over 2 per cent. The increase for the UK is lower than that, at about 1.6 per cent.

That is good, but the claim of a record depends what you count and compare with. The secondary headline was that this record showed that high fee levels had had no impact, implying that the record applied where fees had been raised. Not true. Continue reading →

Julie Bounford UEA


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It’s about the (academic) community, stupid!

By Julie Bounford

This blog first appeared on 23 February 2014 on Julie Bounford’s personal blog at http://jebounford.net/its-about-the-academic-community-stupid/

I recently had a conversation about my doctoral research with an acquaintance I met at a dinner dance who asked, ‘what are you doing it in, what are you doing it for?’ Not an unreasonable question. I began my reply by saying that it was in the sociology of education and whilst I was conjuring up an answer to the latter question (it changes from day to day), they retorted in a jocular fashion, ‘the sociology of vegetation? You’re researching vegetables?’ The acquaintance laughed, a little uneasily. Perhaps they had misheard me.

My sense of humour is reasonably well honed but at that particular moment I was not in a frame of mind to see the joke; on them or on me. Continue reading →