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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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Do we really empower sabbatical officers to be the voice of students?

by Rebecca Turner, Jennie Winter & Nadine Schaefer

Student voice is firmly embedded within the architecture of universities, with multiple mechanisms existing through which we (as educators) can ‘hear’, and students can ‘leverage’ their voice.  The notion of student voice is widely debated (and critiqued – see Mendes & Hammett, 2023), and whilst relevant to this blog post, it is not what we seek to focus on here. Rather we focus on one of the primary figureheads of student voice within universities – the sabbatical officer – and consider how they are empowered to represent the ‘voice’ of their peers to their university.

Sabbatical officers are elected by the student body to represent their interests to the wider university community. They are leaders and trustees of their student union – semi autonomous organisations that operate alongside universities to advocate for the student body (Brooks, Byford & Sela 2016).  As elected student representatives, sabbatical officers sit on high-level university committees where student voice is ‘required,’ making the rapid transition from a student in a lecture hall, to a voice for all. Though this is an anticipated move, it is potentially challenging. Becoming a sabbatical officer is the accumulation of a hard-fought election campaign, which commonly builds on several years of working with their students’ union alongside their undergraduate studies (Turner & Winter, 2023).

In collaboration with the NUS, and with the support of a small grant from the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), we undertook a national survey to develop contemporary insights into the work of elected sabbatical officers. Sabbatical officers were clearly keen to share their experiences as we achieved responses from 59% of student unions affiliated to the NUS. We also undertook interviews with a sample of sabbatical officers (n=4) and permanent student union staff (n=6) who supported them during their time in office. Here we reflect on headlines emerging from this study, to place a brief spotlight on the work of sabbatical officers. 

What a busy year (or two!)

Sabbatical officers were often negotiating multiple, potentially competing, demands – as this survey respondent reflected when invited to comment on the main challenges they faced:

‘Getting up to speed with the fast-moving world of [being] a sabbatical officer and the many roles I had (sabb, trustee, leader, admin and campaigner)’.

Sabbatical officers had a long list of responsibilities, including jobs inherited from their predecessor, union and university commitments, as well as the commitments they made through their own manifestos.  Attending university committees to give the student voice took considerable time, with many questioning the value of the time spent in meetings:

‘It’s very much the case that you are in a room for two hours where you will be speaking for, I don’t know, two minutes. So sometimes it seems very boring to get involved with those random conversations which have very little to do directly with student experience.’ SO1

It was a common theme that sabbatical officers were silent during these meetings, waiting for the brief interlude when they were invited to speak. Leading us to question both where their agency as student representatives lay in these committees, and how they could effect change in this space, when their engagement was limited. A concern shared across survey respondents, for example:

‘I’m in a huge number of meetings which significantly reduces the amount of time I have to work on manifesto objectives.’

With a jobs list (and a diary) that echoed that of many Vice Chancellors (though with considerably less experience in HE), sabbatical officers reported engaging in trade-offs for who they worked with, whose voice was heard and opinions sought, to balance the demands of their role.  As this sabbatical officer reflected, this could leave the wider student body questioning their actions:

‘[Students] want to see the battle happening.  What they don’t want to see, is me sit for three hours and hash out the middle ground with some members of staff who probably aren’t going to change their mind.’ SO2

Finding their voice

Though given a seat at high level tables, respondents did not always feel at ease speaking up, the sentiments of this respondent were repeated many times in our data:

‘I think the hardest part is, we are sitting on committees with individuals who have worked here for years.  We’re never going to have that same knowledge, so that makes it quite a challenge um to be able to understand the ins and outs of the university and the institution, and the politics.’ SO3

We did question whether the expectation to engage in these spaces may further reinforce the inequalities in student leadership highlighted by Brooks et al (2015).  However, sabbatical officers were not working alone. Permanent officers played an important role, helping them, for example, to decode paperwork and plan their contributions. Leadership allies, who may, for example, provide early access to meeting paperwork to aide preparation, or coach sabbatical officers in advance of meetings, assisted sabbatical officers to find their voice:

‘I think the university has been really accommodating giving me the heads up on things that I could then have a bit more time to read up on things and to improve my knowledge.’ SO4

Developing effective support networks was essential; through these networks they gained the knowledge needed to contribute confidently in ‘university’ spaces. However, this took considerable time and resulted in many reprioritising their work. They focused on activities deemed essential (which were many!) with other areas of the work being streamlined to ensure promised commitments could be fulfilled (Turner & Winter, 2023). 

The time taken for sabbatical officers to get up to speed was discussed at length by those serving a second term, which as this respondent noted, was ‘when the real work got done.’   They had learnt the ropes, and as another Sabbatical Officer (SO) reflected:

‘There’s a lot of stuff [to learn] when you come into this role.  I think sabbatical officers do well if they are re-elected because they’ve had to learn a lot.’ SO2

‘Knowing the route to achieve my goals’

Our data captured the committed and driven nature of this (overlooked and overworked) constituent of the HE community. Though working in challenging circumstances, they embraced opportunities to influence policy and practice. Successes were based on the support they received and the strategies they developed to undertake their work. The value of an effective handover from their predecessor cannot be overlooked and permanent student union staff provided much needed continuity and support. Sabbatical officers drew on their student representatives to provide the eyes on the ground and engaged with senior leaders to develop their understanding of how universities work and through these individuals they grew in confidence to speak in front of diverse audiences.  As individuals, many respondents performed their roles with tenacity, approaching their work both pragmatically and innovatively. Yet the time limited nature of this role added pressure and delineated what could be achieved:

‘Knowing the route to achieve my goals was difficult because it requires knowing what exactly you want before you’ve even started the job [so that you can] achieve what you want in year.’

This prompted us to question the sustainability of the sabbatical officer role; realistically who can manage, at this early stage in their career, the breadth of demands placed on them for more than a short period of time?

Promoting the voice of sabbatical officers?

As pedagogic researchers, we have a final, curious observation to make regarding the dearth of systematic research into this field of HE. Student unions have a long history; reference is still made to the activism and uprise of the 1960s (Klemenčič 2014). As a community we lament how student voice activities have become the realm of quality assurance, and question whether students have become politically apathetic (Raaper, 2020). The re-positioning of student unions has increased accountability and encouraged partnership working with their affiliated university (Brooks et al, 2016; Squire 2020). This leads us to question how relevant it is to continue to look backwards and talk of how students’ unions used to operate in the past. As the sector becomes increasingly diverse and how students engage with HE becomes more fragmented, we need to play closer attention to students’ unions to ensure they are supported to function effectively and represent the interest of students. 

Dr Rebecca Turner is an Associate Professor in Educational Development at the University of Plymouth, UK.  Alongside her interest in student voice and representation, Rebecca’s research addresses themes relating to inclusivity, student success and widening participation. 

Professor Jennie Winter is Dean of Teaching and Learning and Professor of Academic Development at Plymouth Marjon University, a National Teaching Fellow, and a Principal Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. She holds numerous external roles, contributes to international pedagogic research, and her work has been utilised by the European Commission and presented globally.

Dr Nadine Schaefer is an Educational Developer at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests include student voice, student engagement and wider quality assurance issues in HE. Nadine is a Senior Advance HE Fellow (SFHEA).

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What’s in a name? That which we call a university…

by Rob Cuthbert

In England the use of the title ‘university’ is regulated by law, a duty which now lies with the regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). When a new institution is created, or when an existing institution wishes to change its name, the OfS must consult on the proposed new name and may or may not approve it after consideration of responses to the consultation. The responsible agency for naming was once simply the Privy Council, a responsibility transferred to the OfS with the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. For existing older universities where legislative change is needed, the Privy Council must also still approve, but will only do so with a letter of support from the OfS. The arrangements were helpfully summarised in a blog by David Kernohan and Michael Salmon of Wonkhe on 8 April 2024, before most of the recent changes had been decided.

That which we call a university would probably not smell quite as sweet if it could not use the university title, and with its new power the OfS has made a series of decisions which risk putting it in bad odour. In July 2024 it allowed AECC University College to call itself the Health Sciences University. Although AECC University College was a perfectly respectable provider of health-related courses, this name change surely flew in the face of the many larger and prestigious universities which had an apparently greater claim to expertise in both teaching and research in health sciences. The criteria for name changes are set out by the OfS: “The OfS will assess whether the provider meets the criteria for university college or university title and will, in particular: …  Determine whether the provider’s chosen title may be, or may have the potential to be, confusing.” It is hard to see how that criterion was satisfied in the case of the Health Sciences University.

Even worse was to come. In 2024 Bolton University applied to use the title University of Greater Manchester, despite the large and looming presence of both Manchester University and Manchester Metropolitan University. And the OfS said yes. If you google the names Bolton or Greater Manchester University you may even find the University of Bolton Manchester, which is neither the University of Bolton nor the University of Manchester, but is “Partnered with the University of Bolton and situated within the centre of Manchester” – indeed, very near the Oxford Road heartland location of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan universities.

This is rather more confusing and misleading than University Academy 92, founded by a group of famous football team-mates at Manchester United, formed in August 2017 and based near Old Trafford. Wikipedia says that “the approval by the Department of Education (DoE) to allow UA92 the use of ‘University Academy 92’ was questioned with critics claiming the decision to approve the use of the name makes it ‘too easy’ for new providers to use ‘university’ in a new institution’s name”. This criticism continues to have some merit, but a high-profile football-related initiative, now broadened, is perhaps less likely to cause any confusion in the minds of its potential students. It may be significant that it was created at the same time as the HERA legislation was enacted, with government perhaps relaxing its grip in the last exercise of university title approval powers before the Privy Council handed over to the OfS. UA92 was and continues to be a deliverer of degrees validated by Lancaster University. In 2024 the OfS the University of Central Lancashire applied to be renamed the University of Lancashire, despite the obvious potential confusion with Lancaster University. And the OfS said yes.

It was not ever thus. The Privy Council would consult and take serious account of responses to consultation, especially from existing universities, as it did after the Further and Higher Education 1992 when 30 or so polytechnics were granted university title. A massive renaming exercise was carefully managed under the Privy Council’s watchful eye. As someone centrally involved in one such exercise, at Bristol Polytechnic, I know that the Privy Council would not allow liberties to be taken. The renaming exercise naturally stretched over many months; the Polytechnic conducted its own consultations both among its staff and students, but also much more widely in schools and other agencies across the South West region. Throughout that period, in a longstanding joke, the Polytechnic Director playfully mocked the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University by suggesting that the polytechnic might seek to become the ‘Greater Bristol University’. It was a joke because all parties knew that the Privy Council, quite properly, would never countenance such a confusing and misleading proposal.

How would that name change play out now? In the words (almost) of Cole Porter: “In olden days a glimpse of mocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.”

Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, and a partner in the Practical Academics consultancy. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor and professor of higher education management at the University of the West of England.


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Want a job at Cambridge?

by GR Evans

Cambridge has arcane and complex rules and policies for jobs in the university and its colleges; despite their idiosyncracy some of them may have lessons for other institutions. GR Evans is an expert guide to the rules, the policies, national employment law and the many debates through which the Cambridge rules and policies have evolved. If you ever wondered how Cambridge works, read this.

Academic jobs with an element of security are increasingly hard to get. Fixed-term contracts have long been the norm for research-only contracts, which are usually dependent on short-term funding from a external grant. For some decades the norm for ‘academic’ posts had settled at ‘teaching and research’, with appointments to last until retirement age. However, the Equality Act of 2010, making it discriminatory to enforce retirement by age, has helped to discourage contracts promising ‘permanence’. Teaching-only posts have become more common. The Office for Students now grants degree-awarding powers to new providers of higher education but so far these have almost all been confined to powers to award ‘taught degrees’.

These trends have encouraged the use of fixed-term and casual employment of academics by many HE providers. The University and College Union has launched an Anti-Casualisation Pledge. The University of Cambridge is not one of the worst offenders in this respect, though, like other higher education providers it may make use of the device of linking the continuation of an appointment to the continuation of external, usually grant, funding. In a  case in May 2008 it was held that the University of Aberdeen had been in breach of the Fixed Term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002 where that had been relied on, but there seems to have been no subsequent litigation helping to establish a precedent.

Under the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) institutions may set their own ‘criteria for the selection, appointment or dismissal of academic staff, or how they are applied’ (s. 2(5)(d) and s.2 (8) (b) ii.). The clause appears again later (s. 36 (1) (b)) in HERA in connection with the duty of the Office for Students to ‘protect academic freedom’ in ‘performing its access and participation functions’. 

Yet the legislation does not define ‘academic staff’ and the applicant for an academic job in Cambridge must negotiate a complex system. Titles, status, hierarchy and contracts all have their history and the University’s constitution plays a decisive part. Its governing body is made up of now more than 7,000 members of its Regent House, which must make any legislative change to its employment practice and procedure by approving a published proposal in the form of a Grace, under Statute A,III,1-2. There is some mismatch between the requirements which may be written into employment contracts and those of the Statutes and Ordinances, particularly with reference to obligations to teach. It remains the case that a new University Officer enters into Office simply by signing a book kept by the Registrary for the purpose:

Unless it is otherwise provided by Statute or Ordinance, every officer shall be admitted to their office as soon as may be after the commencement of tenure by subscribing, in a book kept at the Registry, a declaration that the officer will well and faithfully discharge all the duties of the office, and by entering in the book the date of entering upon the office. (Special Ordinance C (ii) 4)

A major reorganisation of Senior Academic Promotions and the creation of Career Pathways have left their mark. Cambridge  still offers ‘Teaching and Research’ posts but more recently it has added ‘Teaching and Scholarship’ posts with the emphasis on teaching and their own Pathway. It is seeking to create a Research Career Pathway too. The University conducts itself very transparently and both the University’s Statutes and Ordinances and its organ of historical record, the University Reporter, are online and easy to search by anyone eager to get an academic job in at Cambridge and needing to understand its advertised vacancies.

The University formerly had University Lecturers and Senior Lecturers, Readers and Professors. These titles have changed with the University’s adoption of a ‘grading’ system (Higher Education Role Analysis and Statute C, XIII). Lectureships  and Senior Lectureships have become Assistant and Associate Professorships (Grades 9 and 10), former Readerships are  Professorships (Grade 11) (by Special Ordinance, C, vii under Statute C,IX,3, Part C ) and the full Professorships are Professorships (Grade 12) (Special Ordinance, C, vii under Statute C,IX,3).  

These academic posts are ‘University Offices’ as well as employments. Such Offices may be academic-related but those successful in being appointed to a University Teaching Office (UTOs), the most desirable of its academic posts, are entitled to a sabbatical Term after each six Terms. Statute C, I, 4 requires UTOs:

 to devote themselves to the advancement of knowledge in their subject, to give instruction therein to students, to undertake from time to time such examining of students as may be required by the Board, Syndicate, or other body which is chiefly concerned with their duties, and to promote the interests of the University as a place of education, religion, learning, and research.

They must also examine for degrees and such ‘other qualifications of the University as the University may from time to time determine’. Special Ordinance C (ix) 5 requires them to give at least thirty lectures a year, or other teaching agreed as equivalent.

UTOs must belong to a Faculty or Department but they may choose to be members of more than one. This normally does not apply to those appointed to a ‘curatorial’ Office which include a teaching requirement, for example in one of the University’s museums. A recent exception allowed such an appointee in the Fitzwilliam Museum to enjoy sabbatical leave (Reporter, 31 July, 2024).

Cambridge was slow to provide its UTOs with written contracts, with many of its UTOs appointed without one and some indignation expressed about the content when they were first introduced at the beginning of this century, especially when they proved to contain intellectual property restrictions (Reporter, 31 March 2004).

University Officers are protected constitutionally by Cambridge’s Statute C which expressly guards their academic freedom and requires ‘justice and fairness’ in their treatment. A Schedule to Statute C preserves specifically for ‘academic’ staff many of the protections in the Model Statute which was framed by the Commissioners appointed as the Education Reform Act 1988 required.

The disadvantage is that academic Officers remain subject to Cambridge’s Employer-Justified Retirement Age, although as a result of the 2011 Repeal of Retirement Age Amendment to the Equality Act of 2010 other employees of the University no longer have a ‘retirement age’. Special Ordinance C (ii) 12 requires University Officers to ‘vacate their offices not later than the end of the academic year in which they attain the age of sixty-seven years’.

A Report on this requirement was published on 15 May 2024, recommending that academic-related officers should no longer be subject to the EJRA and the age of retirement should be raised to 69. The recommendations of the Report were put to a vote by ballot of the Regent House in July, with an amendment adding ‘abolition’ of the EJRA to the options. Abolition of the EJRA was rejected but the other changes were approved bringing the forced retirement age to 69 for those to whom it still applied (Reporter, 24 July, 2024). This has had the effect of shrinking still further the category of University employees subject to forced retirement.

College posts

A post in a Cambridge College may also look attractive. The University and the individual Colleges are all employers in their own right. Although in Oxford an academic is commonly employed conjointly by the University and a College, in Cambridge a University post and a College post are quite separate and some UTOs choose not to accept a College Fellowship. The choice is theirs.

Cambridge, like Oxford, has chosen not to expand its undergraduate intake because its Colleges do not have room to accommodate more, though in principle a College may choose to add to its own academic staff. The Colleges set their own rules for the employment of College Lecturers under their individual Statutes. The main task of a College Lecturer is to give supervisions to undergraduates, in the form of personal small-group teaching, though a College employee may have an ‘affiliation’ to a Department or Faculty and give occasional lectures.  There has recently been some controversy over the role of Supervisors, who may include graduate students as well as College and University lecturers, mostly concerning the rate of hourly pay available.

Colleges tend to be eager to add a University Teaching Officer to their Fellowship: a  UTO’s salary is covered by the University and the College will need to add only a small supplement. So desirable are UTOs that a UTO Scheme is published ‘to enable all Colleges to operate effectively in the educational field by ensuring a reasonable distribution of University Teaching Officers amongst them’. This explains that ‘A UTO Fellow should be regarded as a permanent educational resource for a College and not simply as a provider of undergraduate supervisions’.

Senior Academic Promotions 

The  use of the unqualified title of ‘Professor’ remains protected, and named Professorships are rarely advertised. These are ‘established’, continuing to exist when vacated, and filled by a Board of Electors appointed for the purpose. Other full Professorships are ‘personal’, granted by promotion from an existing academic University post, so to obtain one it is necessary first to gain a less senior post. Personal Professorships are created for a ‘single tenure’ and disappear when the holder resigns or retires (now superseded under Statute C,XV). The creation of such a Professorship requires the approval of  a Grace (Statute A, III,3ff).  It is possible for a ballot to be called before the approval of such a Grace, but highly unlikely.

However, during the 1990s unestablished academic posts of University Lecturer  and Senior Lecturer had begun to be created, with some unestablished posts described as ‘at the level of Professor or Reader’, though a General Board circular of 19 June 1998 limited these to five year appointments.[1] In 1996 the General Board published a Notice on ‘Titles of unestablished appointments at the level of Reader’ (Reporter, 5655, 1995-6 p512), with a further Notice in 1999 on the ‘Procedure for appointments to unestablished posts at the level of Professor or Reader’ (Reporter, 5773, 1998-9 p587).

By now controversy was afoot on the operation of the Senior Academic Promotions Procedure.  Statute D, XIV [now Special Ordinance C(vii)] stated that:

 ‘No Professorship shall be established in the University except by Grace of the Regent House after publication of a Report of the General Board’.

For those successful in gaining a personal Professorship by Promotion a Grace is published and duly approved in the normal way.

From the late 1990s there was controversy in Cambridge about ‘Senior Academic Promotions’ (Reporter, 17 November, 1999). UTOs often expressed disappointment and indignation when they failed to gain Professorships by promotion. In 1995 a General Board Notice was published establishing a procedure for making appointments to  unestablished posts ‘at Professorial level’ (Reporter, 5609, 1994-5 p381). This was felt to be needed to cover certain special cases arising where the candidate had a claim to recognition as a Research Professor through a potentially qualifying relationship with such a body as the Royal Society, Leverhulme Trust or the Medical Research Council. In each such instance the candidate was to be assessed  for a Cambridge Professorship by a committee appointed for the purpose.  

A representation was made to the Vice-Chancellor under Statute K, 5 [now Statute A,IX,1], that the General Board’s practice of making appointments to unestablished Research Professorships was in contravention of the University’s Statutes. A legal opinion was sought, which confirmed that the practice was ultra vires (Reporter, 21 March, 2001). The General Board then published the Reports with Graces necessary to create the established posts for these appointees, but on a fixed-term basis. It remains the case that a:

 competent authority may authorize the establishment of an office for a fixed term provided that there is objective justification for such authorization and shall decide what constitutes objective justification. (Statutes and Ordinances. p.673)

There were reforms, but also continuing concerns about ‘career-structures’, as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor reported in a Discussion in November 2018, suggesting that the proposed Academic Career Pathway scheme might ‘make a decisive difference in tackling some of the main areas of concern’ and ‘also serve as a platform from which to review academic titles more generally’ (Reporter, 5 June 2018). A Report proposing the introduction of Career Pathways was published in May 2019 (Reporter 15 May 2019), duly Discussed and approved, setting out the changes of title. This was Discussed on 9  June. There was acknowledgement of:

growing dissatisfaction with the existing titles and concerns about comparability with the titles adopted by the University’s peer group nationally and globally which could hinder recruitment and/or retention of academic staff and handicap our academics in competing for research funding. (Reporter, 17 June 2019)

Oxford underwent a similar review of the requirements for its own promotions to Professorships.

Career Pathways

Cambridge is now adding other ‘Pathways’ to its longstanding ‘teaching and research’ requirement for the holder of a University Teaching Office.  A Research Career Pathway is still at a planning stage but there is already a Teaching and Scholarship Pathway. On the Teaching and Research Pathway an Officer may aspire to progress from an Assistant Professorship (Grade 9), to an Associate Professorship (Grade  9 or 10), a Professorship (Grade 11) and a (personal) Professorship (Grade 12). Clinical Academic posts have their own criteria and rewards including  Clinical Professorships.

Cambridge has held back from introducing ‘Teaching-only’ offices, preferring the introduction of a Teaching and Scholarship Pathway, with the intention to ‘establish a dedicated career path for the development of staff in teaching‑focused roles’ (Reporter, 24 March, 2021). Nevertheless its introduction prompted concerns about the meaning of ‘scholarship’ in distinction from ‘Research’.  Was it to mean having read the latest books and articles rather than having written them (Reporter, 28 April 2021)? The resulting route on this Pathway involves promotions to Offices with ‘Teaching’ in their titles: Assistant and Associate Teaching Professor (Grades 9 and 10), Teaching Professor (Grade 11 and 12) and Senior Teaching Associate (Grade 8).  

Getting a job at Cambridge has its complexities, then, which may usefully be kept in mind by the would-be applicant.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.

[1] I am grateful to William Astle for this reference.


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Teaching and research? Yes, but universities have another important job

by Paul Temple

The easy way to tell authoritarian (or worse) states from ones that are, broadly speaking, liberal democracies is that in the latter you will find a range of public institutions that are significantly independent of the central state: this is what creates a plural society. It is, when you consider it, pretty surprising that we can have institutions largely funded, one way or another, by taxation, yet not controlled by the state. Take the example of Britain’s national cultural institutions: these are mainly state-funded yet guard their independence fiercely. However, we have seen in recent years how government has tried to drag them – the BBC, several major museums – into ludicrous “culture wars” and seeking to appoint to their governing bodies individuals thought to be sympathetic to certain government agendas. It is a sign that we live in a functioning liberal democracy that government does not routinely get its own way in these struggles: under an authoritarian regime, it would not even be a matter for discussion. Liberal-minded people know, almost instinctively, that independent institutions matter.

Perhaps the most important non-state public institution, everywhere, is the judiciary. The outcomes of legal cases where the state is involved in Russia or China, say, are invariably foregone conclusions. A judge’s task in these situations requires presentational skills rather than forensic ones: to frame the predetermined outcome so that it seems as if legal norms were applied, thus allowing the government to claim that the decision was made by an independent judiciary. That show trials continue in Putin’s Russia and elsewhere (why not just throw dissidents into jail, or indeed execute them?) is an implicit recognition that the moral standing of liberal institutions is too high to be simply ignored.

But those of us fortunate enough to live in liberal societies – being, as the poet Douglas Dunn puts it, “on the pleasant side of history” – cannot be complacent: the institutional structures that we all-too-readily take for granted and which underpin pluralism and support our freedoms are, we have seen recently, desperately fragile. The “enemies of the people” assault on the judiciary by the tabloid press in November 2016 over, bizarrely, a legal determination that parliament needed to vote to trigger the process of leaving the EU, showed how a populist frenzy might be worked up. That the attack was not countered immediately and vigorously by the government, because it suited the government’s political purposes at the time, was deeply shameful and worrying.

In most authoritarian states, universities and colleges do not seem to carry the same weight as the judiciary: they are apparently mostly left to get on with their work in peace, providing, naturally, that they don’t cause trouble for the regime. Academics in the former Soviet bloc countries became expert in knowing how far they could push matters (normally, not very far) and still keep their jobs and privileges. The state was a constant – if to outsiders, hidden – presence in university affairs, and university rectors usually saw their jobs in terms of keeping their academics quiet and the secret police out. The Soviet academic observation that the most dangerous university subject was history – because while we could be certain that the future would be a socialist nirvana, the past was full of traps for the unwary – neatly delineated the scope of university work under authoritarian rule. A recent detailed account of governance in Chinese universities today (Liu, 2023) explains that each university has a Communist Party committee which is “the highest authority within the university”, a point not made, in my experience, when western visitors meet the university president. He or she is accountable to a political structure that outsiders do not usually see (and if they do, its role is glossed-over), and which determines how decisions made in Beijing will be applied within the university.

In Britain, by contrast, the state/university divide was once maintained with almost religious fervour. In the days of the University Grants Committee (UGC) – peak liberalism for higher education – I once found myself chatting over coffee in a conference break to an Education Department civil servant. When he learned that I worked in a university, he almost dropped his coffee cup in shock when he realised that he’d sinned against the arms-length principle that meant that the UGC was supposed to be the only means of contact between universities and government departments. Universities, like local authorities, were seen then as autonomous parts of the public realm, each with their own goals and methods, rather than as agencies delivering central government policies. “The department [for Education and Science] dispensed cheques to the University Grants Committee for the universities and to the local authorities for schools and polytechnics with guidelines sometimes attached but virtually nil powers of enforcement…In the 1980s [under the Thatcher government] all that changed” (Hennessey, 1989: 428).

That change meant that the sharp state/university divide has now largely vanished: the role of the OFS is of course utterly different to that of the UGC. The proposal put forward by the then government in the recent general election campaign (have we heard the last of it?), that there would be central direction on which degree courses universities would be allowed to offer – or, in the measured tones of the Department for Education press release, “Crackdown on rip-off university degrees” – would mean that universities should be considered for all practical purposes as central government agencies, just as in China.

Why does this matter? One not-insignificant reason is about effectiveness: largely autonomous institutions – self-governing universities, locally-elected councils, free trade unions, the Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners – responding variously to the needs of the groups they are aiming to serve will almost certainly lead to better outcomes than would be produced by a remote, centrally-directed operation. But the larger reason is that pluralism underpins the freedoms we value in liberal societies, creating the distributed decision-making which you and I might have a chance of influencing. When those decisions are not ones that central government finds to its taste, it is even more important that independent thinking might prevail. The regular attacks on universities by Ministers in the last government, as regularly chronicled in SRHE News, surely had the purpose of undermining autonomous institutions with a commitment to disinterested knowledge production, and so weakening a core element of a liberal society. If this isn’t a fight worth having, I don’t know what is.

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

References

Hennessy, P (1989) Whitehall London: Secker and Warburg

Liu, X (2023) The Development and Governance of Private Universities in China Singapore: Springer Nature

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The Secret Lecturer: What Really Goes on at University

Canbury Press 2024, 208pp. ISBN 9781914487217 (paperback), 9781914487224 (ebook)

Review by Rob Cuthbert

If you do research in higher education, this book might make you angry – but probably not for the reasons the author hopes. The blurb says: ”For more than a decade, the deteriorating state of the higher education sector in the UK has been known to insiders, but not to the public. Now … an academic who must remain anonymous … presents a no-holds-barred account of life on campus.”

I had high hopes. The Secret Barrister was a runaway success, earning the respect of professionals and public alike. The Secret Doctor trod much the same path. Surely The Secret Lecturer could not fail to do for higher education what its predecessors had done for law and medicine?

Yes it could. So why was it such a disappointment? Not because it is full of jaw-dropping anecdotes and stories which could be hard to believe. I believed all of them, and too many HE staff will have had many similar experiences. The disappointment is at an opportunity wasted, with the book’s opening sentence enough to deflate all expectations:

“For many people the question, ‘Are British universities f***ed?’ is as rhetorical as ‘Does the Supreme Pontiff devoutly believe in the monotheistic faith he leads?’ or ‘Do members of the Ursidae family of carnivorous mammals defecate in arboreal regions?’”

Many would be tempted to stop there. This “no-holds-barred account” comes from someone too bitter to let his professed love of higher education show, and not as clever as he thinks he is (the text suggests it is a ‘he’).

Where other secret professionals enrich their anecdotes with insights on how their profession could be better and develop a convincing narrative, The Secret Lecturer just indulges in stereotypes. Students are either lazy drug-taking plagiarists who make fantastic excuses for their lack of effort, or disadvantaged and benighted souls who have been cruelly betrayed by their schools, lecturers, departments, university or the system. Academic and professional colleagues are mostly treacherous, cowardly, prejudiced, ambitious, lazy backstabbers, apart from the few who share the world view of the author, and a dedicated administrator or two. Managers are all intellectually dull time-wasting control freaks who get in the way of proper academic work, often with “meaningless HE rituals”. Academics in business, marketing and law collude in lowering academic standards – “it’s all poster presentations and multiple-answer quizzes” – which in other disciplines are jeopardised mostly by fear and management pressure – “If you exhibit talent round here, you’re likely to be hated rather than appreciated.” And when The Secret Lecturer steps outside the campus he finds only a dystopian ghost town where all the shops have gone out of business and the bureaucrats’ blood runs even colder than in the university.

Clunky similes and metaphors keep popping up: the inflation rate is “as high as Johnny Depp atop a heap of hard drugs” before “another gormless rectangle of a senior manager” intervenes. They become even more mysteriously obscure – on just one page not only: “feeling more forlorn and nauseous than if I’d been forced at gunpoint to watch the complete television work of Ross Kemp”, but also “It’s hotter than the air that issues from Adrian Chiles’ mouth.”. The author presents events as if they are from just one academic year, which is a perfectly legitimate device, but his day-by-day account through two semesters is the only structure for the text. The longer-running threads such as a job application to a foreign university and giving a paper at an overseas conference are less convincing, suggesting lack of due diligence by the author as much as bad faith by others. And surely hardly anyone who still does it believes that external examining is “a nice little earner”.

The brief Epilogue purports to suggest a way forward, involving abolishing fees, culling the massed ranks of management, decarbonising, demilitarising, decolonialising and restoring institutional democracy. But these remain mere slogans in the absence of any coherent narrative, and the horror stories remain as symptoms in the absence of any coherent diagnosis of the underlying problems. “My idealistic aim is that someone, somewhere might read this book and be cheesed off enough to clear up the mess.” Higher education may be a mess, but ranting while waiting for someone else to clear it up is not a solution.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter @RobCuthbert.