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Tag Archives: The Model Statute


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Revealing university identity: a methodological reflection

by Michelangela Verardi

The blog is based on the outputs from my DBA in Higher Education Management (University of Bath) thesis entitled: ‘University identity: Statutes and Architectures”

Understanding what a university is – not only what it claims to be – requires a methodological approach capable of grasping identity in motion. Identity in higher education is rarely singular, it shifts across texts, spaces, and lived experience. To capture this complexity, I developed what I call the three‑card trick method: a triangulated approach designed to reveal organisational identity by examining how it is declared, embodied, and interpreted.

This method was tested through work with two Italian private universities that offered naturally contrasting contexts for methodological refinement. Their differences mattered only insofar as they enabled the method to be stretched, challenged, and sharpened.

The three‑card trick draws inspiration from the dynamic model of identity proposed by Hatch and Schultz (2001), who describes identity as a continuous movement between internal culture, expressed identity claims, and the images reflected back from external audiences. Identity, in this view, is not a fixed essence but a circulation. Their caution, following Baudrillard (1997), that identity signs can become detached from underlying reality – drifting into simulacra – reinforces the need for a method that can test alignment between what institutions say, what they materialise, and what people experience.

The three cards I propose are the statutes, the architectures, and the community narratives. Each represents a different mode of institutional expression. The method aims not simply to analyse each card but to understand the dynamics of identity produced by their interaction.

The first card, the normative corpus, includes statutes, codes of ethics, internal regulations, and other formal documents through which universities define their mission, values, and governance arrangements. These texts constitute the institution’s official voice. They are stable, durable, and often crafted with significant care, especially in systems where they must meet regulatory scrutiny. Analysing them involves reading not only what is said but how it is said, what is emphasised, and what is left unsaid. Rather than focusing on legal technicalities, the method treats these documents as identity artefacts: expressions of the university’s formal self‑understanding. To analyse this first card, I carried out a close textual reading guided by legal hermeneutics criteria, paying attention to wording, silences, and framing to uncover the identity logic embedded in formalised norms. The normative corpus provides the frame through which a university declares who it is, what it stands for, and how it intends to act. Yet these documents also reveal strategic adjustments, selective formulations, and silences that may reflect external pressures of bureaucratic control or evolving internal orientations.

The second card, architecture, concerns what the university expresses without words. Buildings, spaces, and material artefacts convey identity continuously, whether intentionally or not. Architecture shapes how people move, gather, celebrate, and learn; it anchors institutional memory; and it projects messages to newcomers, visitors, and the wider public. In this method, campuses are examined as symbolic landscapes. The analysis draws on a researcher‑generated visual archive – photographs, observations, and campus maps – to interpret space in terms of its semiotic and functional qualities. Three types of spaces are considered. Lived spaces are the places in which daily academic life unfolds: classrooms, courtyards, cantinas, shared areas. Representational spaces are used for ceremonies, governance, or ritual moments and often communicate concentrated symbolic meaning. Symbolic artefacts include statues, inscriptions, paintings, or any object that repeatedly signals aspects of identity. For this second card, I applied a visual‑interpretive method, using systematic photo‑analysis to understand how spatial arrangements and artefacts embody identity messages. Architecture is often where identity is most enduring – and where discrepancies become visible.

The third card, community narratives, focuses on identity as lived and interpreted. Through semi‑structured interviews, enriched by tools such as photo‑elicitation, participants are invited to interpret their own spaces and articulate what the university represents to them. This method avoids direct questions about identity, instead creating space for the emergence of themes related to belonging, values, distinctiveness, and institutional meaning. Narratives play a crucial role in understanding how identity circulates. They capture how members internalise or resist official claims, how they interpret symbolic spaces, and how they perceive the institution’s evolution. For this card, I used thematic analysis to draw out recurring patterns across interviews, tracing how individuals make sense of the university’s character and development. Community narratives sit at the intersection of expressing, impressing, reflecting, and mirroring, showing how identity is reproduced or transformed through lived experience.

The power of the three‑card trick lies in combining these forms of evidence rather than treating them separately. Analysing only the normative corpus risks confusing idealised statements with actual practice. Relying solely on architecture risks attributing static identity to institutions that are evolving internally. Listening only to narratives risks privileging individual interpretations without recognising structural or symbolic constraints. Triangulation allows identity to be seen not as a fixed point but as a set of movements. It highlights coherence when the three cards reinforce one another, and it exposes misalignment when one card diverges significantly from the others. Importantly, the method is not designed to declare whether an institution’s identity is true or authentic. Instead, it reveals how identity is declared, embodied, and experienced; how it evolves; and how it becomes contested or stretched under external pressures. When the three cards move in harmony, identity appears legible. When they move apart, the institution may face identity friction – an early signal that adjustment or reflection is needed.

In an era of increasing regulation, marketisation, and pressure to differentiate, universities often feel compelled to communicate distinctive identities while simultaneously conforming to external norms  and pressures. The three‑card trick provides a practical, conceptually grounded method for observing identity in this tension. By keeping all three cards in sight, the method helps institutions recognise what they are truly communicating, intentionally or otherwise, and how they might align their identity more coherently as they evolve.

Dr Michelangela Verardi is a senior technologist and grants manager at the University of Milan, where she oversees the legal and organisational frameworks for artificial intelligence research projects in health science. A qualified lawyer, she brings extensive expertise in university governance and institutional legal affairs, following a long tenure as Legal Office Director at Bocconi University. Dr Verardi holds a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) in Higher Education Management from the University of Bath and serves as an adjunct professor at Accademia del Lusso. Her research interests include university identity, branding and IP protection, the internationalisation of academic systems, and the judicialisation of university policies.


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Dismissing your vice-chancellor

by GR Evans

“Over a few days in September, five universities announced their vice-chancellors were leaving” reported the Guardian in November 2018. The universities included Liverpool John Moores, Southampton, Bradford and Anglia Ruskin. Elsewhere new vice-chancellors were ‘starting’ at the Universities of London, Reading, East London, Sunderland and Belfast. The turnover, suggested the Guardian, was ’unprecedented’. Certainly there had been damaging press coverage on the size of some vice-chancellors’ salaries, but there did seem to be a problem in both getting and keeping the staff at that level. But some vice-chancellors whose conduct has been criticised have recently ‘agreed’ to step down rather than facing a formal procedure for dismissal.

Times Higher Education has recently covered the dismissal of Swansea’s vice-chancellor, which seems to have taken place without reliance on any special provision for the ‘removal’ of the university’s vice-chancellor. This raises the question whether such provision is appropriate, or indeed justified. From a practical point of view alone there will be a difficulty in dismissing  such a chief executive because he or she will normally be listed in the institution’s procedures as the ultimate decision-maker in the dismissal of its employees. But is the head of the institution a special case?

The Model Statute created by the University Commissioners under the Education Reform Act 1988 (s.203) was designed to provide a special protection against dismissal for academic staff when academic tenure was abolished. It applied to all universities then existing and it had a special section providing for ‘removal’ of the heads of institutions. This was clearly needed, for in the case of the ‘removal’ of academic staff only the vice-chancellor could decide whether to initiate the new disciplinary procedure.

Oxford retains the provision, requiring eight members of the Council to make a complaint to the Chancellor and if he considers there may be good cause, the Council must appoint an internal tribunal. The tribunal will comprise a person with judicial or substantial practitioner experience as a solicitor or barrister and not employed by the University, with two members chosen by Council, one of whom must be a member of the academic staff.  The Chancellor would make the decision to dismiss the vice-chancellor, based on the findings of the tribunal.  Cambridge (whose vice-chancellor had been one of the post-1988 Commissioners) retained the wording of that provision until 2010, allowing ‘any three members of the Council’ to complain to the Chancellor ‘seeking the removal of the Vice-Chancellor from the office of Vice-Chancellor for good cause’. Any ensuing charges would be considered by an internal University tribunal in a similar way.

The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge have their own versions of the Model Statute under which the Head of House may similarly be ‘removed’. New College, Oxford  could  set about removing its Warden if nine members of its governing body made a complaint to the Sub-Warden.  The whole governing body would then decide whether there was a prima facie case, with a tribunal to follow if they considered there was.  Girton College, Cambridge may remove its Mistress if three members of its governing body make a complaint to the Vice-Mistress,  with a tribunal to follow and dismissal, if recommended, made by the Vice-Mistress. In all these college examples there are minor variations on the details of the procedure.

A high-profile and unique recent instance of the attempt to ‘remove’ a Head of House in Oxford has been the case against the Dean of Christ Church. The Dean is both the Dean of Oxford Cathedral and the equivalent of a vice-chancellor in his autonomous college. The difficulty of keeping the two roles in balance prompted a Christ Church Oxford Act in 1867. As Head of the College, the Dean’s potential dismissal came under the College’s provisions under Education Reform Act 1988. Christ Church allows ‘any seven members of the Governing Body’ to initiate a call for removal of the Dean from office. The internal tribunal which has just so expensively found no good cause at all against the Dean is a legacy of that provision.

Swansea was free to change its rules and abandon the post-1988 provision because since 2006 universities have been able to modify their Model Statute arrangements without having to seek Privy Council approval, and many have eagerly done so. Procedures for dismissal of academic staff  have frequently been moved to a lower level in the domestic legislation and all staff may be subjected to a single set of employment procedures. A post-1992 university such as Buckinghamshire New University has no statutes but an Instrument of Government approved by the Privy Council under the Education Reform Act 1988 s.124A(3). Any dismissals are carried out under its general HR policies.

Bath still has the Model Statute provision in its statutes, with at least three members of Council making a complaint to the Chair of Council, a Tribunal of three, and the final decision to dismiss made by the Chair, but there was no need in the circumstances for that procedure to be followed when Glynis Breakwell decided to retire. But ‘going quietly’ with a ‘settlement’ can be very expensive. Both Bath and Bath Spa Universities faced strong criticism for the size of the ‘golden goodbyes’ paid to their departing vice-chancellors; Christina Slade ‘stepped down’ as vice-chancellor of Bath Spa in 2017.

A review of the legacy of the clumsy Model Statute provision for removing a vice-chancellor seems overdue, and with it fresh consideration of whether the head of an institution is a special case when it comes to dismissal.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge, and CEO of the Independent Dispute Resolution Advisory Service for HE.