by Paul Temple

The thing about golden ages is that people mostly don’t realise that they’re living through one, expecting the nice stuff that’s happening to go on for ever. In retrospect, the Institute of Education, when it was a more-or-less autonomous college of the University of London, was an almost-nearly-perfect university institution. It was big enough – about 400 academic staff when I was there – but not too big; although of course you didn’t know everyone personally, you were on a nodding acquaintance with a lot of them. It was academically-focused, naturally, on education, so there was a common intellectual thread, but, given the nature of education as an area of study, this meant that a range of disciplines – philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, history, and more – were in the mix, producing a stimulating creative setting. And that was before you counted the teacher-training specialists: I was in awe of my colleagues who were able to give fresh-faced graduates the confidence to stand in front of London school or college classes. So there was a lot going on, all packed into a few Bloomsbury buildings.

This function of scale, intellectual connectivity, and physical proximity produced a high level of social capital, in particular the kind that the political scientist Robert Putnam (2000) has called “generalised reciprocity”. This means that you are in a setting where people you don’t know personally will (probably) help you when required, and you in turn will do your best to help someone else who may be unknown to you. This implies the existence of large reserves of trust, which in turn (as many studies have shown – see for example Fukuyama (1995)) promotes organisational efficiency. Things get done quickly without lengthy discussion: I might ask the Academic Registrar to bend the rules on student admissions, for example, and she would probably agree because she thought I was a basically sensible bloke. Well, I think that’s what she thought: the example I have in mind involved accepting someone on to a master’s course whose highest academic achievement was five O-levels. As the student concerned went on, with a little help from us, to become a PVC in a major university, I think you might say that we called it right.

When the discussions began about the Institute merging with UCL – it finally took place at the end of 2014 – colleagues sometimes asked those of working on higher education policy and management what we thought of the idea: some of us had actually studied previous university mergers (for example, Shattock, 2010; Temple, 2002; Temple and Whitchurch, 1994). I usually replied that there would be good news and bad news. The good news was that we’d be part of a world-leading university in a global city, so that student recruitment problems would be a thing of the past, and it wouldn’t do research earnings any harm either. (While the Institute’s stand-alone reputation attracted plenty of interest from international students, the Curse of the Rankings – as a single-faculty institution, the IoE wasn’t included – meant that many found it difficult to obtain financial support from their home countries.) The bad news was that, as a small cog in a big machine, the IoE would have to fit in with UCL ways of working, which would be unlike those we had all been used to. Things would be done in more bureaucratic ways (I use the word in its sociological sense, not as a lazy insult), in a low-trust environment without the social capital-rich networks that we’d known previously. Also, the IoE top brass who had negotiated the merger deal (“Don’t worry, it’ll work out just fine”) would move on, and their replacements would be appointed by UCL to manage what had become just another UCL faculty. Sympathy with quirky IoE methods wouldn’t be in their job descriptions.

I think I’ve been proved right.

References

Fukuyama, F (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity London: Hamish Hamilton

Putnam, R (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community New York, NY: Simon and Schuster

Shattock, M (2010) Managing Successful Universities (2nd ed.) Maidenhead: SRHE & Open University Press

Temple, P (2002) ‘Reform in a Fragmented System: Higher Education in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ Higher Education Management and Policy, 14 (2), 87-98

Temple, P and Whitchurch, C (1994) ‘An International Perspective: Recent Growth Mergers in British Higher Education’ in Martin, J and Samels, J (eds) Merging Colleges for Mutual Growth Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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