left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Over the last few weeks I’ve enjoyed reading recent posts from Gill Evans and Roger Brown, commentators on UK higher education whose work in the past always made me think

And thinking not particularly laterally, I was brough back to some of David Watson’s work.  Which in turn led to his 2009 book The Question of Morale: Managing Happiness and Unhappiness in University Life.  Not entirely sure why.

echoes of past discontents

Perhaps because it was written at the time of a previous period of significant challenge for the UK higher education sector, being published at the time of a 2008 financial crisis that was having significant consequences for higher education.  Without wanting to labour the point, UUK’s chart on English higher education funding per student suggests at least some parallels between then and now:

It was in this context (as well as many others) that Watson considered what had led the modern university to become ‘a deeply unhappy place with a pervasive culture of disappointment, pessimism and “moral panic”’.

I was possibly hoping to find some solace, given the environment and threats UK universities now face.  However, for some reason (probably my tendency to have ‘hidden shallows’), I found myself drawn to Watson’s Laws of the Academic Jungle (included in the book, having first been published in the Times Higher Education piece to which I’ve just linked), rather than other, more nuanced elements of his book

looking for the fixed points

I’ve always had a fondness for these Laws, as each of them makes me either chortle or shiver in recognition. And some do both – for example:

The first thing a committee member says is the exact opposite of what s/he means (“I’d like to agree with everything the vice-chancellor has just said, but…”; or “with respect”…; or even “briefly”).

Re-reading the Laws I was struck, and a little reassured, by their continuing currency.  There was, though, one that gave me particular pause:

You should never go to a school or department for anything that is in its title (which university consults its architecture department on the estate, or – heaven forbid – its business school on the budget?)

I remember hearing statements of this type relatively frequently in the 2000s.  For instance I’ve heard this particular Law being attributed to other higher education notables, such as a high-profile university registrar.  And I can recall a head of a self-described leading academic department (by which he meant they had just had a good RAE), making exactly the same point when the idea of drawing on the research expertise of one of their colleagues was suggested.

I’m not sure, though, whether this Law still holds.

times change

From a range of comments, across a few universities in the last few years, I’ve started to hear a lot of talk about the need, and the efforts taken, to draw on the domain expertise of academic colleagues when taking forward institutional developments: plans, policies, projects etc.  And I’ve seen many instances where this is being done.

If we’ve moved away from this particular Watson Law, I’m not entirely sure why we have.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the increased emphasis on research impact.  As it has become more embedded in processes such as REF, we’ve become more attentive to the idea of research impact.  So perhaps we’ve started to think (consciously and/or unconsciously) as institutions that if we want to see the impact of our research expertise in the way the world works, then we can and should expect to apply this expertise to the way that universities work.

Possibly there have been other regulatory prompts as well.  For example the emphasis OfS is placing on evaluation and theory of change in respect of Access and Participation Plans, and implicitly but still evidently in other areas such as TEF. As this happens, we’re increasingly seeing universities draw more extensively on the research expertise in these areas of their academic staff.

but …

Of course, there are always potential pitfalls.

One is the perennial issue of reward and recognition. In some universities this kind of contribution to internal policy development and implementation would, in terms of promotion, tend to fall under the heading citizenship, rather than education or research.  And we know that despite the significant efforts over the years, in many institutions there’s still a tendency for the latter two (and in some universities the final one in particular) to be what carries the most weight in promotions.  How do we draw on the domain expertise of our academic staff, without potentially hindering their prospects of advancement?

And there’s also a danger that the more we do this, the more it risks squeezing out the contributions from professional services colleagues; that this academic domain expertise is seen to be superior to the expertise of professional services staff.  Of course this doesn’t have to be the case, and in many cases won’t be.  But it can happen, and sometimes does.

Neither of which, of course, are unmanageable or inevitable.

to be uncharacteristically optimistic

So ultimately, though in an unexpected way, I did find solace in Watson’s book.

UK higher education faces huge challenges:  a broken financial model; a breaking employment model, with the growing scale and impact of casualisation (including the often overlooked dimensions of this in providers delivering franchises, and Online Programme Manager Partnerships in many universities); the selection of the sector as a front in the culture wars.

Despite these challenges and discontents, and the impacts they have, we can still see ways in which the sector has changed and is changing for the better.  And one of these is that in many instances the way in which we think about how we operate and run ourselves as organisations is much deeper and more considered than it was.  We’re making much better use of a range of expertise, including that of our academic experts, in considering such issues than we were.

While that may be a thin silver lining amongst some very dark clouds, that’s still a positive and a reason for at least a small measure of happiness.