left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Just before Easter Politico broke a story about English higher education that has subsequently been a focus of attention, analysis, commentary – and contention. The mis-classification of higher education students in respect of programmes delivered at weekends, largely but not exclusively taught in franchised-to providers, leading to both tuition fee and maintenance funding being illegitimately claimed.

The scale of the story and reaction is entirely unsurprising given the numbers concerned: up to 22,000 affected; a potential total value in maintenance loans, for 2025-26 alone, of £190M.

why are we here?

As unsurprising has been the blame game that this has started, operating on multiple levels.  Was it, as some have written, indicative of the lack of integrity of universities desperate to boost their bottom line?  Was this the fault (as claimed by Universities UK) of inadequate regulatory guidance?  Is this the government’s fault; a failure of regulation?  And even if not culpable on these grounds, how can the government now reclaim maintenance loans from students who signed up for weekend delivery programmes in good faith and are the types of students perhaps least likely to be in a position to be able to make the now required repayments?

As noted, there has been much written about this already.  And while, yes, I have added to this outpouring it’s not my real focus in this post. Rather, it’s a starting point.

The questions of the integrity of the universities involved (who even where this issue occurred in franchised-to providers, are responsible as those providers’ awarding bodies), links to Universities UK’s argument that the guidance on the funding of weekend delivery programmes was unclear.  If the regulations were broken, this argument runs, universities were not acting with intent to breach these regulations.  These universities aren’t to blame; it’s the fault of ‘the system’ (though the impact on the students affected and tax payers is acknowledged).  This isn’t a crime as the wording of ‘the law’ was unclear; though it may be a sin, as it breached the intention of ‘the law’.

Whether it was a sin but not a crime, is something that has been debated.  There are good arguments that the regulations were clear, but also evidence that it isn’t this straightforward.  It’s a debate that continues to rage, and is now entirely predictably further bolstering the coffers of those legal firms with higher education practices as the universities involved contemplate a legal challenge to the government’s actions.

What’s more interesting, though, is what the episode reveals about the organisational culture and values of universities.

i walk the line

It’s tempting to interpret some of what has happened as a willingness on the part of universities to operate as close to the regulatory line as possible.  That in a more heavily regulated sector under increasing financial pressure, universities can (to put it no more strongly than this) press up against this edge; and the closer one gets to the line, the greater the likelihood that at some point one will inadvertently step over it.  A higher risk behaviour, that goes against the classic portrayal of higher education as a low-risk sector.

This is, of course, just one potential interpretation (based on the slightly distant observation, with no direct knowledge or experience) of one situation.  However, it’s perhaps not the only recent development that is legal, but goes against the deeper currents of sector behaviour.

An obvious example of this has been recent reports of universities seeking to change the contract terms of their staff.  There has been a focus recently on Sheffield Hallam’s proposal to move teaching staff into a subsidiary company with poorer terms and conditions, while research-active staff remain employees of the university (£).  However, this reflects a growing behaviour in parts of sector, as it reportedly mirrors existing practice at Coventry, Portsmouth and Worcester universities (£).

Of course this reflects both the current financial pressures across the sector, and the particular challenges faced by post-1992 universities given their legal obligation to offer academic staff membership of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.  But it does so in a way that entirely cuts across the idea of a university as an academic community.  How can a university be an academic community, when it doesn’t even employ many of the most critical members of that community?  How is that consistent with the values of a university?  Of course it’s not illegal (anything but; significant sums will have been spent on legal advice to ensure this), but (perhaps to stretch a point) it feels like a sin against a cardinal value of the nature of a university as a community.

Which brings me back to values, linked as always (well, across institution-level documents in UK universities) to culture.

the values proposition

I have an ambiguous relationship with the idea of universities as value-driven organisations.  On the one hand this feels that it should be an unqualified good, a distinctive quality of universities linked to their role in furthering the public good.  At the same time, though, it’s equally true that every organisation is values-driven.

Values drive behaviours. All organisations involve the behaviours of individuals, the interaction of these; and additionally, collective behaviours.  The distinction isn’t between those organisations that are values-driven and those that are not.  It is between what the values are that are driving behaviour; and in this context, the critical thing is not espoused values but revealed values.  As the saying goes, watch what they do don’t listen to what they say.

Which I think is a useful way of thinking about some of the situations I’ve described above.  Look at what the organisation is doing, as that reveals the values that actually drive behaviours.  And the overlap in the Venn diagram between those revealed values, and the espoused values in institutional strategies, can and does vary significantly between universities.  We’re not in the territory of ‘I hear the language of culture and values and reach for my gun’; but when culture and values are mentioned it pays to listen very carefully, and put on one’s glasses to read the small print of any associated document(s).

it’s all Greek to me

There is, though, another perspective that perhaps needs more attention than it gets.  Geoff Moore’s Virtue at Work (Oxford, 217) seeks to apply the virtue ethics approach of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (London, 2013; first published 1981) to individuals, managers and organisations.  Part of Moore’s analysis compares and contrasts organisational culture and values, with organisational character and virtues.  This isn’t mere semantics.

Moore describes culture as ‘somewhat utilitarian … get the culture ‘right’ and the organisation will be successful’; linked to values ‘as external standards to which we might aspire’.  He argues that character and virtues are ‘deeper … to do with what an organisation really aspires to be at its very core … guiding the organisation towards achieving its good purpose’ [p.131].

And the essentially different nature of virtues to values is highlighted by Moore’s list of organisational virtues: courage; temperance (self-control); justice; practical wisdom; zeal (‘making the most of any challenge and getting the job done’); integrity (citing MacIntyre’s definition: ‘to refuse to be, or to have educated oneself so that one is no longer able to be, one kind of person in one social context, while quite another in other contexts); and constancy (i.e. ‘to pursue its contribution to the common good over time’) [pp.124-27].

surviving

Why or how does any of that matter?

My sense is that Moore’s list of virtues is both deeper and more relevant to the nature of universities and their activities than many of the lists of values we see in university strategies.

That attention to these virtues (living as well as espousing them) would lead to fewer instances where universities choose to tread the edge of the regulatory and legal line, leading to the types of decisions, actions and mistakes covered in the earlier part of this post.

And that if that were to be the case while, in the current challenging circumstances the UK higher education sector faces, it may be over-ambitious to expect the sector to achieve the Aristotelean goal of thriving, it could at least make it more likely that it will survive in a recognisable shape and condition.