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Tell it slant: what universities miss in the joins

by Joanne Irving-Walton

Universities are increasingly good at recording fragments of student experience. But fragments do not automatically make a whole. The work of connecting them remains stubbornly human.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” Emily Dickinson advises.

It is an odd instruction for universities increasingly committed to straight lines: lines of accountability, lines between strategy and delivery, pathways through programmes, and data intended to show, cleanly and conclusively, what is happening. Yet neither learning nor universities behave quite like this. Students move between modules, systems, academic staff, professional services, regulations, placements and increasingly distributed forms of provision. Each part of the institution sees something. None necessarily sees the whole.

At the same time, we are becoming increasingly accomplished at recording these fragments. Attendance is captured. VLE activity can be traced. Marks, referrals, extensions and interventions leave institutional records. Processes generate evidence that something has happened. Reliable systems, fair regulations, consistent decisions and clear routes to support all matter. The problem begins when increasingly detailed representations of student experience are mistaken for increasingly complete understanding of it. A university can know a great deal about what a student has done while understanding remarkably little about what is happening.

Students experience the joins

Students rarely experience universities as organisational charts. They encounter them at the joins: between module and course, academic and pastoral support, partner and university, attendance and wellbeing, policy and circumstance, one team’s responsibility and another’s. This is where seemingly small difficulties can accumulate.

A student is sent the correct information but does not understand what they need to do next. A concern is referred, but nobody knows whether they reached the service. Marks are recorded module by module, while the pattern across them goes unnoticed. One part of the university knows about caring responsibilities; another sees only absence. Nothing necessarily fails. The failure sits in the joins — and those are rarely what institutions measure.

Each part of the institution may have done what it was required to do. The record contains multiple fragments of truth, carefully documented and separately owned. The student lives them all at once. That mismatch will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat with a student while several perfectly reasonable institutional answers fail to add up. But for those fragments to become a coherent experience, someone has to connect them.

Course leaders, personal tutors, module teams, administrators and support staff notice when several small things form a pattern. They translate formal language, recognise when an apparently straightforward case is not quite straightforward, contact another team rather than simply redirecting the student, remember context that is not visible in the current system, and follow up after the formal handover.

This kind of work has a substantial intellectual lineage. Strauss described the ‘articulation work’ required to coordinate complex activity, while Star and Strauss (1999) examined how work essential to keeping systems functioning can remain invisible to formal accounts of what work is. More recent higher education research has similarly drawn attention to boundary-crossing work and the expertise required to operate across institutional divisions (Vere, Verney and Webster-Deakin, 2024).

Pugh (2024) uses the term connective labour for the relational work through which people recognise, read and respond to one another in professions such as teaching and care. The work I am interested in here operates at a different level. It is the interpretive and relational work of connecting the fragments of an institution so that students experience something more coherent than a series of separate systems, teams and processes. I call this institutional connective labour: recognising which elements belong together, what context matters, where apparently routine cases require another look, and when completing a process has not resolved the problem that prompted it.

The work that disappears when it succeeds

Institutional connective labour is remarkably difficult for organisations to see, particularly in the large and distributed environments of higher education. Successful repair tends to leave little trace. An experienced member of staff spots a problem before it escalates, finds the colleague who knows how to resolve it, explains an opaque process, reconciles contradictory information or prevents an administrative delay from affecting progression. Eventually, the student continues. On paper, very little happened. Indeed, the successful outcome can make the system itself appear to have worked. This creates an uncomfortable organisational paradox. The people who are best at compensating for fragmented systems may inadvertently make that fragmentation less visible. Their judgement, memory, relationships and persistence absorb the gaps.

Workload models record formal roles more readily than the accumulation of noticing, translating, connecting and following through around them. Restructures may identify apparent duplication without asking whether overlapping roles are providing connection or resilience. Processes can be streamlined without recognising the informal knowledge through which they were previously made workable.

The visible machinery remains. The less visible capacity that made it function is weakened. As universities become more distributed across campuses, partners, professional services, digital environments and different forms of provision, fragmentation is not necessarily evidence of poor organisation. Complex institutions will always distribute responsibility. But distribution creates a corresponding need for integration. We tend to design carefully for the former and assume the latter will happen.

Greater resolution is not greater understanding

Data and process offer partial institutional views. An attendance pattern can signal a problem without explaining it. A referral records movement through a system without showing whether useful support was reached. A completed process can demonstrate compliance while the original difficulty remains unresolved.

Learning analytics scholars have long warned against treating data as neutral representations of student experience. Signals require interpretation, context and attention to student agency (Slade and Prinsloo, 2013). The same problem extends beyond analytics. Rules, records and processes are representations of reality, not reality itself. Their application still requires decisions about relevance, context and meaning. Informal systems can reproduce inequality, make support dependent on encountering the right person and leave both students and staff unprotected. But neither can the need for context and interpretation simply be designed out.

The difficulty becomes clearest when several individually reasonable accounts do not quite align. Low attendance may indicate disengagement, but it may mean something else entirely. A missed deadline may be habitual delay or the point at which an otherwise successful student can no longer absorb a series of pressures. A student may appear to have been referred successfully while moving repeatedly between services without ever finding somewhere their problem fits. Greater resolution does not necessarily produce greater understanding. Sometimes it simply gives us a more detailed picture of the fragments. The difficulty is not that any one account is false. It is that each tells the truth from only one angle.

Seeing slant

Dickinson’s ‘slant’ offers a useful way of thinking about this. Seeing slant is not an argument for indecision, endless consultation or gathering every possible perspective before acting. It is the recognition that complex experience rarely arrives from one direction. For universities, two questions can help expose the joins:

  • What alternative stories could produce the pattern we can see?
  • Where are staff repeatedly having to translate, reconnect or repair what a formal process has separated?

These are questions about judgement rather than additional process. The aim is not to collect every possible view before acting. Universities must simplify, classify and make decisions. But credible judgement requires some awareness of what has been simplified in doing so. The more useful institutional question may therefore be not simply whether a process has been completed, but what had to happen around that process to make it work.

The institution between the boxes

The point is not simply that this work should be recognised. It should tell us something. If staff repeatedly have to reconnect the same processes, translate the same information or recover context lost at the same handover, those interventions are evidence. They show where the formal account of how the institution works diverges from how it works in practice.

That makes institutional connective labour potentially diagnostic. A workaround may solve an immediate problem, but repeated workarounds reveal something more useful: where information stops travelling, where responsibilities do not quite meet, or where a process produces completion without resolution. That does not mean turning connective labour into another metric. Formalising it too heavily would risk flattening the very context and interpretation that make it useful. The point is to create ways for recurring patterns noticed through this work to inform institutional learning without reducing them to another dashboard. Nor should institutions depend on a few experienced individuals to hold the system together. The challenge is to make the conditions for noticing, connecting and escalating less accidental — and the knowledge generated through that work less private.

A practical starting point is to ask, in course reviews, service reviews or handover discussions: where are staff repeatedly having to reconnect what the formal process separates? Then take one recently ‘resolved’ case and ask a simpler question: what had to happen outside the formal process for this to reach a workable outcome? If the same kinds of repair appear repeatedly, that is not merely evidence of helpful staff. It is evidence about where the institution itself needs attention. For the student, the difference between a fragmented institution and a coherent one may simply be whether somebody noticed the joins.

Joanne Irving-Walton is a Principal Lecturer at Teesside University, working across learning and teaching and international partnerships. She is particularly interested in how academic judgement and professional identity develop through the emotional realities of higher education.


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“Network Rail”: postmodern irony defined

by Paul Temple

We left the pub in good time to walk to Waverley station to catch the 18.52 Avanti West Coast train to Euston. The departure board told of signalling problems on the East Coast mainline, but as we weren’t heading for King’s Cross that didn’t bother us. We even remained relaxed when the display didn’t give a platform for our train, as it was still shown as being on time. Until it wasn’t. Damage to the overhead wires just south of Carstairs Junction meant that no trains from either Edinburgh or Glasgow could travel south on the West Coast mainline. A broken-down train in the Scottish borders added to the fun. The apocryphal London newspaper headline, “Fog in the Channel, Continent isolated”, came to mind, but black humour about England being cut off took us only so far. Railway staff advice varied between “Wait to see if trains start running” and “There may be a rail-replacement bus to Manchester” – I thought, wouldn’t a hot-air balloon be a more realistic option?

There was certainly no shortage of railway staff on the Waverley concourse that evening: the crews of non-running trains gossiping among themselves; station staff in high-vis jackets with not much to do; bored-looking coppers … what there wasn’t was anyone who looked as if they might be doing a spot of managing, perhaps even providing up-to-date news to a generally good-humoured crowd of would-be travellers. It wasn’t hard to understand why this element was missing: the situation involved four train companies, Network Rail fixing (we hoped) the overhead wires and the signalling, and another part of Network Rail running the station. Take a look at the Network Rail organisation chart and tell me whose job it would be to take action over the effective closure of the main station of Scotland’s capital.

Not that long ago, there was a notion that higher education might work better if universities were ”unbundled”, to use the then-fashionable term. After all, went the argument, university finance or HR departments aren’t specialists in medieval history or particle physics, so they could provide professional services to random academic departments from what are currently different universities, so gaining economies of scale. Potential history students would be unlikely to be interested in a physics course, so why make them apply to an institution teaching a range of subjects? Let academic faculties do their own things in teaching and research, paying for the support services they need from the fees they receive, from whichever providers of services and infrastructure can offer the best deal. The academic units that prove to be good at operating in this new environment will grow, others will fail, but overall students, and some staff members, will benefit. The comprehensive, unitary university, went the argument, was a carry-over from the days of small, elite institutions, outdated in today’s mass higher education environment, and missed important efficiency gains. Modern corporations generally outsource non-core functions such as logistics and property services; academic units could do likewise. (Older readers may recall that the late Charles Handy described the unbundled corporation, employing a minimal group of core staff, on these lines.)

The case for the break-up of British Rail in the mid-1990s was, as I recall, less sophisticated than this, relying largely on lazy thinking about the supposed bureaucratic inflexibilities of state-owned businesses. There was certainly no suggestion then of state rail companies from other European countries becoming shareholders in the new UK train companies, in most cases receiving substantial subsidies from British taxpayers. The results of unbundling in the rail industry were on display during my recent prolonged stay at Waverley station: what privatisation had apparently overlooked is that railways are network organisations, where each element interacts with many others, and the failure of one ripples out across the network. Burton Clark in his 1983 classic, The Higher Education System, argued that the idea of integration was central to understanding how universities worked; they “symbolically tie together their many specialists” (p136): they are, in other words, network organisations, not simply collections of different disciplinary groups. We shall have to see if the promised Great British Rail can recapture the benefits of an integrated organisation, with managers having the responsibility for the functioning of the whole network, not just one part of it. Perhaps some university managers could offer advice.

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


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Restoring academic values: a key for university effectiveness

by John Kenny

This blog post is based on research into the effectiveness of higher education policy, published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education. The article, ‘Effectiveness in higher education: What lessons can be learned after 40 years of neoliberal reform?’, takes a systemic perspective to consider a range of roles needed for HE to function effectively in the more accountable HE environment of today (Kenny, 2025).

It focusses on three key stakeholder groups arguably most pertinent to effectiveness: government policy makers, university corporate leaders and the academic profession, with a particular focus on the academic role, as this is typically overlooked in much of the research into higher education policy, yet we argue critical to the effectiveness of the system.

A systemic approach to HE policy assumes that reform in educational systems is complex and unpredictable. It also accepts that different stakeholders may experience change differently, there needs to be an understanding of the different roles played within the system and how they interact. Of particular concern in this article is how the academic role interacts with other stakeholders, especially the government regulators and university corporate leaders.

For over 40 years, a top-down ‘command and control’ approach to change has been adopted in HE. Typically, when this mind-set drives change, the inherent complexities of systemic change are disregarded, and it is assumed the outcomes of a reform can be pre-determined. It largely ignores the relationships, values and experiences of other stakeholder groups, which systems theory suggests is not appropriate for effective educational reform (Checkland, 2012; OECD, 2017).

By contrast, this article points to research into effective organisations that identified four ‘culture groups’ as present in any organisation: the Academic, the Corporate, the Bureaucratic and the Entrepreneurial. Each of these has a unique values perspective from which it approaches the decision-making process. These ‘competing values’ determine the organisational values, but with the values of the dominant group tending to prevail. The research linked organisational effectiveness (or performance) to a “strong culture” defined as one in which the practices and processes are in alignment with the espoused values position of the organisation (Smart & St John, 1996; Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1981).

For academic institutions such as universities, HE policy specifically identifies both Corporate and Academic governance as the two most important (Gerber, 2010; MCU, 2020; TEQSA, 2019a; 2019b; 2023). It follows that, in an effective organisation, a “strong culture” would be based on both the corporate and academic values having a more equal influence over decision-making.

Many of the current problems have arisen because, under the neoliberal reform agenda, with government policymakers aligned with corporate values, a corporate culture has dominated for the last 40 years. This has led to a situation in universities where corporate leadership dominates and academic leadership has been diminished (Gerber, 2010; Magney, 2006; Yeatman & Costea (eds), 2018).

The intention of this work is not to demonise any culture group nor argue for a return to a ‘Golden Age’ where academics tended to dominate. It proposes that, in the more accountable HE environment of today, from a systemic perspective the unique nature and purposes of universities as trusted organisation means each of these roles is important. It argues that across the system the government, corporate leaders and Academia, each play an important, but distinct role in ensuring the system, and universities, function effectively. For the HE system and universities to be effective, as opposed to more efficient, we need better understanding of these distinctions and more clarity about the accountabilities that should apply to each group (Bovens, 2007; Kearns, 1998).

This work pays particular attention to understanding the academic role. It argues that, with the domination of a corporate mind-set, which values control, compliance, competitiveness and productivity, academics are seen as “mere employees” (Giroux, 2002; Harman 2003), whose autonomy and academic freedom need to be curtailed (Hanlon, 1999).

This paper argues this situation has been exacerbated by the failure of the academic profession to define their role in this more accountable HE environment. The paper points to research that aims to fill this gap by re-defining academic professionalism in the more accountable HE environment, but in a way that does not sacrifice its essential ethical and autonomous underpinnings.

It further argues these unique characteristics of academic work, which have compelling implications for the overall quality of university education, have come under sustained attack from the rise of political populism (Hiller et al, 2025), increased disinformation and misinformation on social media, and the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

An extensive review of national and international literature identified four ‘foundational principles’ (Kenny et al, 2025) which present a definition of the academic role involving a holistic combination of academic leadership, shared professional values, and independence in scholarship, underpinned by a “special” employment relationship. The historical, political, legislative, educational and cultural context of any particular HE system, however, requires these ‘foundational principles’ to be translated into a set of ‘enabling principles’ to suit that HE context (Freidson, 1999; Kenny & Cirkony, 2022).

To test this empirically, a set of ‘enabling principles’ were developed for the Australian HE context as a case study. Kenny et al (2024) described how, in the three phases of this action research study already completed, a set of ‘enabling principles’ has been developed and incorporated into a Professional Ethical Framework for Australian Academics (The Framework).

This case study aims to re-define the nature of academic work to re-emphasise its contribution to the effectiveness of HE, both in Australia and around the globe. The Framework represents our current re-definition of the academic profession in the more accountable Australian HE context. However, the universality of the foundational principles suggests this approach might be replicable by researchers in other HE contexts (Kenny et al, 2025).

This work addresses the compelling question of the sustainability of the academic profession by:

  1. Providing greater alignment across the HE system between the broader social purpose of universities and the important role that academics play.
  2. Unifying individual academics as professional scholars through a set of common professional values and a justification for their professional autonomy and academic freedom.
  3. Contributing to the sustainability of the academic profession by enabling individual academics to better navigate the competing tensions within their institutions as they build their professional identity based-on transparent professional standards, adequate resourcing and accountability mechanisms that will minimise exploitative practices currently evident in the system (AUA, 2024).
  4. Providing a common language that enables non-academic stakeholders, including governments, university management, industry, students, etc, to better understand the unique role academics play in ensuring the HE system and universities are effective in meeting their obligations to Society.
  5. Providing foundational principles that can be adapted to other HE contexts and facilitate the creation of a global academic community of practice through which the profession can enhance is voice in shaping the future of HE around the globe.

This work should help to restore a balance of power between the academic and corporate leadership in the governance of universities by facilitating more purposefully designed governance structures and accountability mechanisms that enable academic staff to influence HE policy formation, decision-making and resource allocation, which is especially important against a backdrop of growing political and economic challenges to universities.

Feedback from our national and international academic colleagues is encouraged. Those wishing to find out more are directed to the website of the Australian Association of University Professors (AAUP) at https://professoriate.org, where more information can be found about this research and how you might participate in the further development of The Framework,which has been made available for consultation with and feedback from a broader national and international academic audience.

John Kenny has extensive experience as a teacher and teacher educator and leadership in academic professional issues. His growing concern over the long-standing systemic issues in higher education, loss of independence for universities and loss of prestige for the academic profession led him to take a more systemic perspective and initiate this research looking into the role of academia in the effectiveness of higher education.

The author may also be contacted directly by email (John.Kenny@utas.edu.au).