academic freedom, HE policy, pedagogy, quality, Uncategorized, Universities, university autonomy

Pecking away at UK universities

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Three disparate pieces of writing about the future of UK higher education have been playing on my mind this week. As Diana Beech and Andre Spice have written, HE is facing a perfect storm: boxed in by regulation, facing a shrinking demographic for enrolment, and constrained by a finance model of capped tuition fees in an era of rising costs. It’s a grim situation which is resulting in huge deficits for three quarters of UK universities, department closures and massive numbers of redundancies.

Adding to the gloom is an apparent crisis of relevance for higher education. In the USA there is already an identifiable trend whereby young men are eschewing college altogether. Here’s an early piece recording the issue, and there have been many since that indicate the decline in enrolment is primarily among men.

According to a recent HEPI Policy Note authored by Edward Peck, Ben McCarthy and Jenny Shaw, the problem is that universities are making themselves irrelevant because they are continuing to teach a knowledge-focused curriculum. Peck et al issue a warning that this scenario cannot continue. Their argument rests on the assumption that AI is going to obviate the need for mastery of a body of knowledge, and instead, universities should concentrate less on engagement with knowledge and more on the acquisition of professional, vocational and personal development.

This proposal seems like part anxiety, part desire to be disruptive and claim for the authors the gift of clairvoyance. Many of us will remember the IPPR’s ‘An Avalanche is Coming’ from 2013 which predicted traditional university courses would soon be superseded by a demand for online MOOCs. While most universities offer blended learning now, nobody hears much about MOOCs anymore.

So, to assume that AI will very soon sweep away the need for students to acquire subject knowledge seems like a similar naïve leap of technological solutionism. This is just one of the unchallenged assumptions which also include declaring current students as Generation Alpha – a presumed homogenous cohort of ‘digital natives’ who, despite their technical familiarity, will ultimately be required to develop a healthy understanding of the ethical limits of AI.

More improbably, Peck et al maintain that ‘a less knowledge-focused campus could facilitate the face-to-face engagement that has been the distinctive feature of higher education for over a thousand years’. This is truly an ambition of Muskian overreach. No specifics are discussed in this short paper, nor is there any plan of implementation. In my experience, guiding students towards developing and articulating generic skills is a tough sell. Where is the strategy for motivating them, especially if skills development becomes the raison d’etre of the campus university? I don’t see any plan to, as NMITE does, invite students to tackle challenges posed by employers or address real-world problems in an interdisciplinary way. I don’t see a vision for anything life-enhancing about this curriculum, such as international education, equipping students with languages or computing skills. In any case, it is hard to envision the banality of a university where the only ratified areas of study are ‘complex analysis’ and ‘critical thinking’. Thinking about what ? In 2025 we already have a taste of what happens when we unleash a cadre of overrated, narrowly-educated adolescents whose only thought is of their own exceptionalism.

It is not only students who must alter their expectations; staff too must adapt: “Skills required by staff will change,” they state. I wonder who they are addressing because I think most academics would consider this proposal a scam which fails to develop deep understanding and informed analysis. Are they really going to fire all the physicists, linguists, historians and materials scientists, and fill their posts with change managers and life coaches? Lots of luck recruiting qualified and quality staff to UK universities in that context.

In another HEPI blog, Paul Ashwin has offered an different answer to the calls to make HE relevant and makes the case for maintaining serious engagement with specific subject content. He points out that generic skills and subject mastery are not alternatives. In fact, for the last thirty years, quality assurance models have insisted that the former are arrived at by achieving the latter. It was always apparent to me that what students need help with is making those skills explicit and in how to apply them in numerous diverse areas.

I have met many students whose declared incentive to study for a degree was to ‘get a good job’, and that is perfectly rational and understandable. However, they are also inspired by an enduring interest in their chosen subject, and having that animating passion seems to be the key to student satisfaction. If the HEPI Student Experience survey is any indication, the majority of students are happy with their university and only 7% wished they had taken another course. (HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey 2025). When I taught in the US, I was surprised, towards graduation, to hear students say, ‘I just want to get out of here’. I was used to UK students leaving university with reluctance, voicing a desire to return to do a master’s degree.  

Like Ashwin, I cannot see the point in years of higher-level study centred only on ‘unconnected stores of specific knowledge’. What we actually need are educated people from all disciplines, perspectives and experiences to address the key questions of the 21st century.  Your micro-credentials in ‘leadership’, decision-making and ‘commercial awareness’ are not going to impinge on the threats from climate change or global health hazards.

Peck et al’s vision of the future of universities hardly seems like a compelling avowal of the unique value of higher education, let alone the public good. Why would any student commit to spending three or four years at a campus university if all you are practicing is workplace readiness, team building, and change management. To pronounce knowledge and culture as irrelevant defies the purpose that have kept universities relevant and productive for a millennium. It eliminates the academic autonomy which guarantees the integrity and value of the research and teaching in universities. The shibboleths which have steered our pedagogy, namely distinctive, research-led courses and student choice are casually sacrificed to the skills agenda. Also into the wood chipper is any identifiable notion of quality assurance, supplanted by a pledge of ‘more or less stringent parameters’.

The Peck et al plan for campus universities would obviously be cheap to deliver, if anyone wants it. It is a familiar business model if you have ever read about the more discreditable for-profit ‘universities’ in the USA and beyond. We may not arrive at Trump University charlatanism, but the current financial crisis for universities in the UK is driving even Cardiff University to surrender quality to short-term rent-seeking behaviour.

My fear is that Peck et al are raising an influential voice for content-less uniformity in higher education and its subordination to the supposed needs of employers. We should take this paper seriously, not because the proposal has merit or would be popular with academics and students, but because the lead author, Edward Peck is about to become Chair of the Office for Students – the sector regulator. He might shortly have the authority to oversee its introduction.

HE policy, metrics, REF

Open Access for books – an open or closed case?

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As most UK academics now know, there is a proposal to require long-form research outputs like monographs and book chapters in the arts and humanities to be made open access within 24 months of publication. This has arisen as a consultation in advance of REF2029, and the decision will inform eligibility criteria for submission of outputs and entitlement for QR support. There has been a lively back and forth on Twitter, and more detailed arguments for and against open access for ‘long-form outputs’ have also appeared on the HEPI blog recently.

The case for OA was presented by Stephen Curry, Dorothy Bishop and Martin Paul Eve and focuses on making research accessible to a wider audience and providing accountability for public money. The cost is estimated to be £96 million over the period of the REF cycle and they suggest this should be covered by REF QR funding.

Objections came in a reply from Patrick Grant, Tanita Casci and Stephen Conway who claim the huge costs of OA are not commensurate with value and that it drives us to a compliance-centered view of research rather than an approach with excellence at its centre. They argue we should be encouraging the best outputs, not selecting on the basis of unhelpful criteria.

Another commentator, Sam Moore, endorses less bureaucratic outlets like Open Library of Humanities and a number of new OA university presses, while favouring a voluntary approach whereby the author judges for themselves the appropriacy of OA for their work, rather than being driven by ‘a culture of compliance’.  


The main problem, as I see it, is that Open Access is open for the reader, but ruinously costly for the author. For some years we have had article processing charges, and we now have book processing charges (BPC). BPCs start at around £10,000 pounds at Routledge and Palgrave at £11,600 while Cambridge University Press is too shy to publish its costs. The last time I published a book, the process was free – disregarding my own and my co-author’s labour of course. Nobody ever expected to get rich on royalties except for a few fortunate academic superstars, but it does seem offensive to expect us to furnish these considerable fees just to maintain the current punishing career expectations.

In my view, it should be possible for academics to publish their work and not be out of pocket, just as I was able to during my career. 30 years ago, the REF provided essential new money which supercharged arts and humanities research in the UK, especially in the new universities which historically had not been well funded for research. After all, nobody expects to have to fund work which is part of their job description (assuming you are fortunate enough to have a contract which specifies research in 2024). Even as a very junior academic, I didn’t have to go and grovel to a head of department, research manager or associate dean to plead for money to disseminate my research. This ideal has already been undermined, as only a minority of scholars now experience the fortunate research context that I did. Most people starting careers, or who are contingent, teaching-only or unaffiliated scholars will not be beneficiaries of REF QR money and some will not have research specified in their contracts. Surely, the function and assumed value-for-money of QR funding is to support the development of research, rather than to finance some inflated business model for publishing the end product.

That leaves the option of applying for a research grant within which you can budget for prospective publication fees. But first you need to win the grant and most have a success rate of about 25%. You can improve your chances by making a case that your work fits the priorities currently adopted by the research funding body, adding yet another tier of selectivity. If that route fails, then you are stuck in a UoA-code lottery as you bid to be one of the department’s privileged beneficiaries for your OA monograph. It all sounds very restrictive and indeed, bias in the selection of outputs submitted for assessment is a concern raised by Grant, Casci and Conway. But in any case, given the usual levels of top-slicing of REF funds and the state of university finances, the suggestion that universities would apply their QR money to this end is fanciful – who would make the decision between a biography of George Eliot over Frontiers in Queer Theory over Siege Warfare in the Crusades? It’s an invitation to impose judgements which reflect prejudice and corporate reputational concerns over academic quality. The purpose of the REF is to audit a snapshot of research throughout the UK, and it cannot meet that challenge if some scholars can’t even raise the pay-to-play funds.

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Martin Eve who has done so much pioneering work to promote OA. He questions how the arts and humanities can justify the public spend if nobody can read their work. This is a valid point. Books from academic publishers often retail at £100-£200. But we should, perhaps, be careful what we wish for, as an undiscerning audience, mediated by a hostile press, can often be extremely judgemental about work in the arts and humanities. Who remembers the manufactured outrage over Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 ‘Jane Austin and the Masturbating Girl’, or Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ which launched unleashed the first culture wars in the 1990s.

I agree with Martin Eve that as an independent scholar I reap considerable benefit from being able to freely access very recent research without requiring affiliation to a library with expensive subscriptions. But as a scholar on a fixed income, I’m excluded from publishing in UK outlets. That’s OK, I’m not in an academic post trying to build a profile or submit to the REF. I’m happy to be out of that. But still, is that all there is to research in the humanities in 2024? Is that really what we want it to be all about as a community of scholars? Yes, there is Open Library of Humanities and that remains peer reviewed and interdisciplinary. Unlike PlosOne for the sciences, it does not levy article processing charges as it is supported with subscriptions. But, in time, this may diminish the role of niche journals which offer many beginning scholars an academic community and mentorship from like-minded researchers.

There are certainly gains from OA. It might be the best chance to dilute the excessive credence placed on metrics and journal impact factors if there is more equitable access to publications, and the wider academic community is able to judge their significance, rather than devolve that task to a triad of reviewers.

There have been complaints for a while that later iterations of the REF have progressively overseen the devaluing of monographs and outputs other than journal articles in high impact journals. This has not served the arts and humanities well. There have been undesirable consequences to having slavishly followed the science model of research and publication; it has been rather like trying to make the Chinese language fit the grammatical patterns of German. Any proposal which circumscribes the agency and academic judgement of individuals, and impedes the thriving culture of ideas, should be monitored very carefully in terms of its affects.

Aside from mere compliance culture, I worry that we are yielding power to the government to dictate, via the research funding councils, the research agenda under the guise of value for money and economic necessity. It would inevitably diminish curiosity-driven research and hand yet another cudgel to managers who would probably come to regard books and chapters with even less esteem than they do presently.

academic freedom, Freedom of speech, HE policy, university autonomy

Government by trolly and stochastic nationalism

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This is the first blog post in quite a while. It has been a busy few months during which my spouse and I have finalised an international move, complete with immigration complexities, bureaucracy and expense. I have still been active in HE commentary, though. In May, I thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Regina, Saskatchewan where I spoke at the conference ‘What are Universities for’ on the topic of ‘From neoliberalism to authoritarianism: universities, metrics, regulation and surrender to governmental control’. I also spoke at a panel on critical university studies at the Critical Management Studies conference at Nottingham Trent University in June. I have been inspired back into writing by the kind words of Petra Boynton in a recent LinkedIn posting who mentioned me among a list of esteemed authors she said had transformed her thinking and writing. I was delighted to appear in their company, and Petra’s accolade reminded me why I write, and it came at a time when I needed encouragement.

A few days of poor weather saw me absorbed by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry last week (November 2023). The transcripts of this will be fascinating material for the next generation of corpus linguists and discourse analysts. I imagine among prominent keywords will be ‘liar’ and a number of terms of abuse I will not list. We were introduced to another concept by the former Prime Minister’s advisor, Dominic Cummings. He called Boris Johnson ‘the trolley’ due to his habit of veering suddenly in the opposite direction away from decisions. The state of chaos revealed by the Inquiry suggests the trolley metaphor extends well beyond Number 10 Downing Street.

We see disarray and policy turmoil throughout government. Recently, we saw the minister for Science, Innovation and Technology, Michelle Donelan, make her contribution to the war on woke by declaring her antipathy to codes and charters for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) even in the face of the government’s own legislation in this area; even in the face of her own directives.

On 28th October 2023, Michelle Donelan sent a letter to the CEO of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the independent government body which directs research and innovation funding. She expressed her ‘disgust and outrage’ about two named individuals who had been appointed to the research funder’s EDI committee. The letter suggested that these two professors, who offer their time voluntarily to the UKRI committee, had expressed extremist views, in sympathy with Hamas, in tweets on the subject of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The letter was addressed to the CEO of UKRI, Dame Ottoline Leyser but Donelan made it public on X. Donelan demanded an immediate inquiry into failures of impartiality, breaches of Nolan Principles and excessive attention to EDI. The message could be interpreted as a demand the individuals should be sacked – whether from the committee or their university posts, I’m not sure. There was certainly a call for the committee, and even EDI work to be closed and discontinued. What became apparent when the implicated tweets were shared, was that the opinions expressed, and the language used, echoed that of several other humanitarian organisations including the UN, the International Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres. The incident ignited academic Twitter (or X) as posters expressed their own disgust and outrage both at the infringement of freedom of speech and at the response of Dame Ottoline who announced she was ‘deeply concerned about the issues you raise in your letter and I am taking swift and robust action’. She moved to ‘suspend operations of the Research England Equality Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group with immediate effect’ and launched an investigation. In reaction to this, there was a reassuring demonstration that the Nolan Principles are alive and well among academics, as anyone with integrity resigned their (mostly voluntary) posts on UKRI’s committees and advisory groups, effectively making suspensions of activity redundant.

The Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, (HEPI), Nick Hillman, chose to frame Donelan’s intervention as just a minister exercising their freedom of speech. That seems a naïve view, and I’d better explain why. Firstly, the minister is issuing a clear directive. The meaning of any communication derives from aspects of the context. Obviously, the author – in this case the minister – assumes a more powerful role with respect to the recipient (the UKRI CEO) and the broader constituency of UKRI members. She is speaking with the full authority of her status as government minister, though we may debate whether she has committed overreach in her attempt to infringe the independence of UKRI. It is entirely different from a context where, I, for example, might have expressed my disgust. That would be a view; Donelan’s is a directive.

The BBC’s Newsnight on 1st November featured an interview with Professor Tanja Bueltmann, University of Strathclyde, who had resigned from the UKRI Talent Peer Review College. The other interviewee was Iain Mansfield who had been a Special Advisor for three education ministers until 2022. He represented the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange (Transparency rating E). This, it transpires, was the source of Donelan’s information.

The resignations of UKRI appointees might have seemed impulsive, except, as the Americans say, it wasn’t academics’ first rodeo with this minister. In June 2022, Michelle Donelan provoked conflict with the sector when she criticised Advance HE of imposing a woke agenda in universities after publication of their Race Equality Charter. And as in this November’s debacle, she also singled out the Athena Swan charter for being too bureaucratically onerous. The language was chosen for its carefully concealed coercion; universities should ‘reflect carefully’ and ‘I would ask you to consider’ whether they want to participate in such charters.

The reply from Advance HE was much more independent in tone than the one mustered by UKRI: ‘Activism plays no part in our work. We have no particular ideological stance or agenda that we are seeking to promote’. Advance HE affirmed that the intent of the charter was to act against racial harassment and encourage universities to incorporate race equality within course content. It was a dignified response, but still failed to call out the irrationality of government contradictions. Because in February 2019, universities were charged by the government with tackling racial disparity in degree outcomes: ‘Universities will now be held to account on how they will improve outcomes for underrepresented students, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, through powers of the Office for Students, who will scrutinise institutions’ Access and Participation plans’, insisting that the race gap in degree outcomes be eliminated. In fact, they had explicitly required Advance HE to review the Race Equality Charter to see how the sector charter can best support better outcomes for both ethnic minority staff and students.

How should universities respond when the sector is obliged to comply with equalities legislation, and then find themselves damned for its efforts? Has Michelle Donelan caught the trolley disease? Or have we caught her flailing and flip-flopping in an attempt to capture the right-wing nationalist vote ?

And then we find this Conservative government, which is currently proposing laws to fine universities for blocking speakers with unpopular views, is not very keen on defending the rights of academics who are critical of government policies. This leaves them open to very obvious charges of hypocrisy.

The targets of silencing and blocking have not been the usual suspects from humanities and social sciences, either. In October 2022, Dr Kate Devlin, Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London had her speech to a government department event on STEM cancelled after she had criticised their policies. There was even an email confirming her talk had been blocked because advisors had read her social media posts.

In May 2023 The Guardian reported that a chemical weapons expert, Dan Kaszeta, had been ‘disinvited from giving a keynote speech at a UK-run expert conference after civil servants discovered social media posts he wrote criticising Conservative ministers and government migration policy’ in an article claiming Jacob Rees-Mogg had launched a vetting scheme in 2022.

These shameful incidents did not occur in isolation; this was part of a plan. In September 2023 it was revealed through a Freedom of Information request that the government was keeping files on academics it deemed critical of their policies. The Guardian reported: “Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury, co-authors of a bestselling book on early childhood, were told by the organisers of a government-sponsored event for childminders and nursery workers, which they were due to speak at in March, that the DfE planned to cancel the conference just days before it opened because they were deemed to be “unsuitable” headline speakers. The results (of the FOI), which she received at the end of the summer, revealed that the department kept a file on her. It included critical tweets she had posted about Ofsted, England’s schools inspectorate, and noted that she had “liked” posts promoting guidance on teaching young children that was written by educationists rather than the government”.

This is appalling surveillance, and to echo the government’s constant refrain, has a chilling effect. It is designed to. It sends the message that advancement is best secured by anticipating and mirroring government concerns and avoiding topics like anti-racism, trans issues and social justice generally. And given the lack of response by Universities UK, the vice chancellors’ organization, you can imagine pressure to conform coming from that perpetually cowed constituency too. They will be trembling at the passage in this week’s King’s Speech to Parliament in which he was obliged to ventriloquise that the government would bring in policies to “reduce the number of young people studying poor-quality university degrees and increase the number undertaking high-quality apprenticeships”. Even Jo Johnson has accused the government of bashing universities for political gain.

The UK government has even been willing to put pressure on the HE regulator, which bears the Orwellian name of the Office for Students. When their much-vaunted student panel failed to agree with what the executive had decreed were student priorities, the members were silenced. While the Chair and CEO had been appointed to make universities safe for right-wing academics and politicians to speak at universities without being disturbed by protest, the student panellists, felt that the cost of living and value for money were more important themes. It might be sufficient explanation if we learn that the Chair of OfS is Lord Wharton, a friend and appointee of former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Eighteen months ago, Wharton was discovered sharing a platform with racists and anti-democratic Trumpers and Orbanistas at the world Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest 2022. Presumably he went there to find out how best to shut down any of the other leading European arts and social science universities as Orban has done with Central European University.

The irony is that a government which has railed against safe spaces and legislated to allow a diversity of opinions on campus even if they cause offense to some, has sought to outlaw one particular stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It has been grating to watch the Covid 19 Inquiry pull back the covers on a failing government that has continued to fail while attempting to mask attention with rabid appeals to culture wars. Kenan Malik of The Guardian has written of the current turn to cruel, performative politics. We see in this government the worst excesses of American neoconservatism and European ‘illiberal democracy’.

These seemingly unconnected policies and dog whistles are taking us inexorably in the direction of authoritarianism in which criticism of government policies is framed as contrary to ‘British values’. I’ll call this stochastic nationalism because despite the chaos, the trajectory is scarily predictable. Universities are a prize to be controlled and threatened. It’s a strategy informed by the playbooks of Trump, Bannon, Orban, Modi, Erdogan and some other unpleasant political actors. It is global and it’s here. Universities have conceded too much independence over the decades. Academics are too easily bought, and their leaders are too easily intimidated. It may already be too late to mount a resistance.

academic freedom, HE policy, metrics, university autonomy

No More Big Lie

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As we end 2022, I find myself mentally scrolling through some of the news stories over the last year and finding a recurrent theme of lying. This has has become so common, so reflexive that we seem to have normalised it in the public sphere, particularly politics.

Anne Applebaum in her 2020 book The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, argues that the route to authoritarianism is piloted by The Big Lie. This is a divisive myth which party members and adherents must espouse, even if they only partially believe it, in order to belong. It is frequently and loudly proclaimed precisely because it lacks a factual basis.

The UK’s Brexit campaign wasn’t the first Big Lie, and Applebaum gives several other examples, but Brexit was the first time I remember seeing such calculated deceit in domestic politics unfolding against contemporaneous fact-checking. Lies were told about immigration, extra money for the NHS, legal and economic autonomy, and trade deals, and seemingly could not be dislodged with evidence. These lies were repeated by politicians and they saturated social media channels so that people assumed they must be true. Indeed, Donald Trump saw this strategy as a template for his own 2016 presidential bid. People, it seemed, were willing to sacrifice truth and logic for identity created through signalling a set of values. Politics now occupied the realm of the talismanic and symbolic, and we became further desensitized to lying and misinformation during the Boris Johnson administration.

It remains uncertain whether Donald Trump will face any consequences for his actions leading to the attempted insurrection on January 6th 2021. The Congressional Committee charged with investigating the events of that day had no doubt that the former president was responsible and their amassing of the facts has been impressive. But Trump is a master at standing on the edge of legality and testing the constitutional limits on his conduct in office. If he is allowed to argue, as Nixon did in his 1977 interviews with David Frost, that whatever a president does is by definition legal, we will sanction a legacy that is terminal for any prospects of decency in politics.

We are already seeing the results of this realignment in behavioral expectations. We have travelled very far from the ‘good chap’ theory of government which may have imposed restraints in an era when shame was a powerful social force, but not anymore. This week, a case has caused real consternation in the US in the form of George Santos, the elected Congressman for New York’s 3rd District, who will take his seat on January 3rd 2023.

It appears that nothing Mr Santos told his supporters in the November election was true. The New York Times reports:

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

It gets worse. He has lied about his family background, claiming his Jewish grandparents fled the Holocaust. His heritage is Brazilian and he was raised Roman Catholic. He claimed on Twitter this year that his mother worked in finance and died in the Twin Towers on 9/11, only to undermine himself a few months later by revealing it was only the fifth anniversary of her death. His lies were so numerous they defied consistency.

What is interesting is the response given by Mr Santos to these allegations which would have been career-ending, even as recently as five years ago in the USA. So degraded has the Republican Party become that Santos feels able to shuck off the stigma of his fabrications with the claim that everyone embellishes their CV. There are two points to this. His example lends permission to others to falsify their academic and work history records, for any reason whatsoever. It also fortifies the kind of cynics who cheerily demean the credibility of politicians and democratic process by saying that all politicians lie, so what’s the big deal with Santos? That seems to be the view of the Republican Party leadership who so far have not condemned Santos. He is, of course, a supporter of most of Donald Trump’s MAGA positions and the party fears the wrath of this faction if they were to prevent Santos from entering Congress.

The trouble is, when we see this level of impunity in the political sphere, we are primed to accept it elsewhere. There are indications that academics are getting used to being traduced within their own organisations. The refusal by USS trustees to acknowledge a surplus in the pension scheme is one example. In research, Dorothy Bishop points to the lack of consequences for scientists who falsify their data in journal papers. At the University of Leicester in 2021, there has been complete stonewalling against the charge that management deliberately infringed academic freedom by targeting scholars in critical management studies for redundancy, even when they made no attempt to disguise the fact. The betrayal was felt even more acutely when it was revealed that the REF environment narrative in business and management included a pledge to continue investment in this area of strength.

Let down? Gaslit? I’m not claiming there is anything as momentous as a big lie dominating the UK HE sector, but there are some warning signs we need to address. University management teams have been vested with way too much authority, as the decision-making powers of senates and academic boards have been intentionally weakened. Competition has proved a poor motivational lever for academic work. Pressure to publish, win grants and prioritise proxy measures of quality such as citations and journal impact factors has caused a distortion of academic priorities and led to an increase in research misconduct. Of course, the head of the snake is pressure to climb world rankings and somehow enact the sense of hierarchy and competition which animates managers, at the expense of the cooperation desired by academics.

At this point it is cheering to see any rebalancing of the fulcrum towards sanity and integrity. James Wisdon, Lizzie Gadd and Stephen Curry have been revisiting The Metric Tide review on responsible use of metrics in research evaluation. Together with the INORMS research evaluation group, there is now a push to moderate the influence of global rankings on university behaviors and a conversation is beginning on how to persuade universities not to measure their performance by single indictors nor by a composite overall score. See the #MoreThanOurRank hashtag on Twitter and Mastodon. This is a fantastic initiative from actual practitioners who don’t position themselves as ‘management’.

Just as there is a legitimation crisis in politics, there has been a recent collapse in the credibility of the CEO class. Despite their probable approval of ‘bossism’, I imagine VCs would not want to emulate the public humiliation of the CEOs of Twitter, Theranos, FTX or the Trump Organisation. It’s time to deal with the fact that universities are not organisations where every system can be optimised, where every measure is above average and every employee is ‘hardcore’. There are communities to serve, not just worlds to dominate. A little humility and an injection of reality might be just what we need. Happy 2023.

HE policy, pedagogy, students

The Impossibility of Being a Student

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This autumn I have watched a number of adverse developments and policy catastrophes wash though the higher education sector and it has taken me until Christmas to blog about it. I haven’t stopped caring about HE, but rather I have felt crushed by the increasing influence of bullies, bigots and billionaires over our lives, and felt dejected by domestic and international politics.

But two recent stories have really stood out to me as evidence that various governments during the 21st century have ensured it is now nearly impossible to be a student in terms that are recognisable to anyone of my generation.

A Twitter thread by Dr Peter Olusoga started with a howl of despondency ‘I don’t want to hear a single word of complaint from you EVER, about ANYTHING’, as he tweeted a picture of an empty lecture theatre. A thoughtful thread continued to try and unpick the reasons why, post-pandemic, or, post lecture capture, students have stopped attending. This trend was reported by others on Twitter, so clearly Dr Olusoga is not alone in his frustration. Readers may appreciate this unusually balanced view from the Daily Mail. Lecturers are often castigated when this happens, on the grounds they should be more entertaining – more ‘relevant’ – and students will arrive.

Of course, lecturers are not entertainers by trade although most do manage to be interesting to students who are prepared to engage. But students are not always studious, in a world where digital distractions and the necessity of paid work claim their time.

Universities, though, appear to have become less committed to providing some of the material necessities for students to be on campus at all. In early December, we heard that a student mother had been suspended by the University of Derby because she wished to bring her young baby to class with her, so that she could finish her degree in Psychology. Although her tutor had agreed that Leah Foster could bring her son in on a temporary basis, they were both over-ruled by a decision citing health and safety.

Understandably, Leah Foster felt that the university was acting in a way which was discriminatory, and which prevented her from being a student. Reading the university’s reassurance on its website, she might be forgiven for assuming that support systems were in place for students in her position. And the University of Derby, like other universities has to publish an Access and Participation statement as a condition of registration with the Office for Students. Additionally, they have a policy of Widening Participation from disadvantaged groups, and they will be carefully overseeing their continuation and progression statistics, as these are critical to their Teaching Excellence Framework rating. So, in view of supporting student parents, there is a lot at stake for Derby, and that is before we start to weigh the public relations and reputational calamity this case has brought to their door.

One obvious solution would be for the university to provide a subsidized (for student parents) nursery. These used to be widespread on university campuses and were also accessible to staff. In many cases they made the difference between someone being able to participate in higher education, or not. They were always over-subscribed, but this just confirmed their necessity. The fact that they are rare today is a scandal, especially when 300 (non-university) nurseries have closed in the last 12 months. I note that Staffordshire University is a noble exception with its award-winning Woodland Nursery.

The next higher education own goal is on the issue of student housing policy. This was interrogated recently by Jim Dickinson of Wonkhe. It appears that some popular universities, especially, but not confined to the Russell Group, have been recruiting more students that they can provide accommodation for. Sometimes, even the city in which the university is located has run out of accommodation in the private rental sector, and we all remember these headlines in the early autumn.

It is not entirely the fault of universities that affordable accommodation within reach of the place of study has come under pressure. This helpful HEPI blog by Stephen Blakey of UNIPOL explains how a combination of the pandemic, universities’ reluctance to take on the risk of owning accommodation and the general flight to privatisation have all conjoined to cause the current chaos for students.

We cannot overlook, though, the contribution of the government’s aim to seed Darwinian competition between universities. It was an inevitable outcome of the policy encouraging students who achieved top A-Level results to ‘trade up’ to higher-ranked universities that there would be overload in the more selective end of the sector. Meanwhile, the press is content to blame grade inflation, and nobody seems to have much sympathy for the course closures and lecturer redundancies which threaten the survival of less-favoured universities. The government shrugs and says students should really check out the availability of accommodation before they apply, which, of course is in the previous December/January. It’s all a mess.  

It’s not a mess I was ever confronted with as a student. Of course, my experience was well before the era of mass higher education when only a tiny minority of 18 year olds proceeded to higher education. But we were well supported, if not in the domains of mental health, counselling or disability accommodations. My tuition fees were paid by the local authority. I had a full student grant which was more than adequate to fund accommodation. Our student flats or halls were owned and operated by the university and highly subsidised, as it was recognised that students needed a decent standard of accommodation. They were sparse and bore rudimentary facilities, but they housed students from all backgrounds. There was not, as there is now, student accommodation differentiated by price and luxury. The cost of my room amounted to 27% of my £1100 grant in my first year. I had plenty left over for food, books and travel. Indeed, we were entitled to a refund of ‘excess travel expenses’ which was generously interpreted by my local authority as three return rail fares and a daily return bus fare to campus. This could be claimed at the end of the academic year, so it amounted to a tidy lump sum arriving in late July. In addition to this largesse, my father’s former employer had a benefit scheme whereby they paid most of the assessed parental contribution directly to the student. As my father was a retiree, they paid me £300 each year of my undergraduate degree. During the summer vacation I was able to claim the dole and also housing benefit if I was paying rent, though most landlords settled for a cheap ‘retainer’ fee. Together this funding ensured I never needed to do paid work in either term time or vacation. There really wasn’t any excuse not to be an assiduous student, though, of course, a few too many squandered the nation’s investment in their education.

Since the 1980s there has been enormous expansion of universities and progress towards a target of 50% participation in HE. This has come with the plan that students should pay much more of the full cost of tuition, while graduate beneficiaries such as myself were not asked to make much contribution to the next generation’s education through higher taxes. All universities have been asked to admit more students and to diversify the student body in terms of race, social disadvantage and routes of access. Government has enforced this by arms-length regulation from the Office for Students who require various conditions and Access and Participation Plans (APP) from HEIs.

In terms of the aims of those APPs, however, universities have been required to deflect the intended emphasis from sustaining the students they recruit to ‘diversifying pathways into and through higher education’ with a particular steer to developing apprenticeships. In addition, HEIs are being encouraged to pay more attention to pre-16 attainment. No wonder they have taken their eye off supporting those disadvantaged and marginalised students they do admit by making it possible for them to – you know- participate.  But then those of us who have worked in higher education will recognise the paradox of the university policy. Anyone who gains the trust of academics by being committed to actual change, facilitation and implementation of research-based practice to tackle real problems in support of the student experience, will quickly be triaged out of post and replaced with somebody more amenable to faddish ideological showboating.

This brings me to another higher education displacement activity – the mirage of workplace-based learning for all. It is obviously necessary for students of healthcare, engineering, social work and education to gain this kind of experience. But many students of English, history and philosophy might resent the surrender of several weeks of the precious three years they had hoped to devote to academic enquiry, intellectual enrichment and personal growth. Many of the students I taught had a more varied work history than I did and were well capable of reflecting on the relevance of their studies in linguistics to the workplace. The certainly didn’t need ten weeks of a placement in a bookshop to enhance their employability. It is noticeable that the same VCs who are now telling asking students to report lecturers who speak to students about the reasons for the current UCU industrial action, are entirely happy to sacrifice actual subject learning to a period of contrived, grafted-on ‘work experience’.

What this communicates to students is that subject learning is subordinate to vocational experience. Coming to class is unimportant, even if you can afford the bus fare from your over-priced accommodation. After the ‘pivot’ to online learning during the pandemic, it is hard to convince students that attendance is still a necessity when they can find course materials and lecture capture on the VLE learning room. Any of the excitement of taking risks or learning to exercise any actual academic judgement is obviated by the use of marking criteria which spell out for students exactly what is expected. No wonder students become alienated on their ‘student journey’ as it is now known. It must seem impersonal and synthetic.

It is going to take some real commitment and imagination to get them back. Mass higher education should not mean an unfulfilling experience or unnecessary barriers to study. Jim Dickinson points to timetabling solutions where students have classes on two or three days a week, offering the benefits of an immersive experience and time for paid work – if only there was more of that on campus. I also wonder why universities involve so few students in staff research projects; I’ve seen this work well at Cornell University and Nottingham Trent and it is a better spur to engagement than work experience. But we need to go further and ensure that some of those benefits we had before the financial crash are replaced: childcare, option choice, workable staff-student ratios. My fear is that managers are too busy placating politicians and other ‘stakeholders’ and they have lost sight of the real problems that have caused universities to unravel in the 2020s.

conditions of labour, Freedom of speech, HE funding, HE policy, Universities, university autonomy

Book Review of Steven Jones: Universities Under Fire

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This review first appeared on the HEPI blog on 31st August 2022. An alternative review of the book, by Nick Hillman appeared on the HEPI blog on 25th August here.

The 18th book in the Palgrave series on Critical University Studies tells us there is a lot to critique in universities in the 21st century. The problems detailed in Steven Jones’ book are familiar to HEPI readers: higher education funding, marketisation, academic precarity, management by metrics, and students positioned as consumer. Jones discusses all of these, together with a chapter on culture wars and freedom of speech controversies. His view of academia is discouraging: a sector where precarious staff, menaced by exhortations to be ‘resilient’ and ‘agile’ suffer imposter syndrome, and where ‘quit lit’ is a ratified genre of academic writing.

Neoliberalism

Jones focuses his critique on the pervasive spread of market ideology and neoliberal values given extra impetus since 2012 by the new tuition fee regime in England and the removal of student number controls. This perspective is often dismissed by commentators who claim to be perplexed by the meaning of the term ‘neoliberal’. Jones, on the other hand, demonstrates its explanatory value as he convincingly clarifies the connection between ideology, policy and language, and changing practice in regulation, pedagogy and research. Universities have seen the widespread imposition of markets, competition and accountability (which Jones does not entirely dismiss) and this has led to the acceptance of discourses of student as consumer, personal (financial) responsibility and value for money. This has successfully indemnified the taxpayer against their intergenerational responsibility to educate the young, instead transferring the bulk of the cost to the identified student beneficiary.

As a result, the acquisition of a university degree has been increasingly framed in commodified terms. This has been evident when we consider the attacks by The Times in the summer of 2022 on international student recruitment by the Russell Group. The UK public are led to suspect that universities have become mercenary institutions which have allowed their children to be displaced by foreigners with larger fee tabs. Paradoxically, however, attracting a healthy overseas student contingent can elevate a university’s ranking. This cements the status of their degrees as an elite product, attractive to ambitious students and their parents. The sad fact is that universities have styled themselves as ‘we are international’ while neglecting to ensure an international experience for most UK-domiciled students and even discontinuing degree courses in modern languages. No wonder, as Jones reveals, some universities spend millions on marketing the symbolic rather than the academic offerings. New students may be greeted on the clearing hotline by professional footballers while others are introduced to the city by a staffer in a tiger costume.

Critique of Marketisation

While university managers have been panicked into an embrace of market values, the Government’s application of principle is more inconsistent. The market is one that has been manipulated by interventions like allowing students with high A-Level grades to ‘trade up’ university offers. There has been a similarly fluctuating commitment to ‘students at the heart of the system’ such as when the National Student Survey was dismissed as a key Teaching Excellence Framework metric when scores failed to condemn the government’s less favoured universities. There is no need for student opinion when a quantifiable metric of graduate salaries is available to serve as a dubious proxy for teaching quality. As long as the measures are congruent with market ideology, they are preferred to, say, the student voice which asks for decolonisation of the curriculum.  It is more convenient to disparage such calls as ‘political’ if their concerns do not align with those of university managers.

Vice-chancellors have not been rewarded for their genuflection to the market, though. They are forever obliged to exalt employability and yet derided for teaching subjects coded by the media as non-serious, such as gaming, which are nevertheless in high demand in a growing sector of the economy.

Critique of university management

Jones argues firmly and persistently that university senior managers, have neglected their duty to defend the sector from the damaging effects of political interference and a consistent ‘deficit narrative’ in the press which has eroded public trust in universities. He punctures the conceit of managers who style themselves as chief executives or, more often now, as presidents with chiefs of staff, who with swaggering pretension, ‘lead change’ and ‘shape for excellence’, oblivious to the alienation around them. Meanwhile, individual academics have often been left to be monstered by the right-wing press for fear of offending a Government wedded to myths of ‘lamentable teaching’, ‘mickey mouse courses’ and specious culture wars, revealing that ‘[W]hile the establishment has grown anti-university, universities have assuredly not grown anti-establishment’ (p.226).

Call to action

The book is a call to action and Jones lays out precisely where intervention and restructuring are necessary if the sector is to recover its sense of purpose and public trust. Competition has served the sector poorly, constraining the opportunity to articulate shared values and promoting conformity. Universities should be tasked, as New Zealand’s are, with being the critics and conscience of society, and for Jones, ‘The first step is for universities to resist being co-opted into a system it is their primary role to critique’ (p.248).

Everybody invested in higher education – managers, policymakers, students and staff – needs to seize the narrative for education as a public good. That narrative is encoded in linguistic choices: higher education is in receipt of investment not subsidy; it is for pleasure, creativity and inquisitiveness. The problem, in an era of metric infallibility, is that none of these is as measurable as value for money, graduate salaries or even ‘satisfaction’.

Jones’ appeal for integrity in university management should be an uncontroversial one. Managers could start by heeding current research in Business and Education departments which is sceptical of outmoded managerial practices such as management by metrics which lead to compliance rather than innovation. Accountability is necessary, but other metrics are possible, as we know from the work on responsible metrics which informs the current project to review the REF – Future Research Assessment Programme.

Jones makes a case for what we thought we already had – autonomous universities with democratic participatory governance, held accountable by independent regulators.

This is a well-written and engaging book. Jones’ ability to write an introductory paragraph is a model that could serve all academic writers. There was a quote on almost every page I wanted to commit to memory. I hope it inspires more people to believe in the benefit of higher education and counter the destructive narratives that undermine it.

HE policy, metrics, redundancy, students

From the linguistic turn, to the turn of linguistics – for closure

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After the linguistic turn of previous decades, it seems as if English universities have unilaterally decided the discipline should be abandoned. And it is English universities that are acting to close courses because of the peculiarly destructuive nature of their version of the marketised funding model. Vice chancellors seem inclined to follow each other’s lead in withdrawing courses in the arts and humanities. Last year saw closures in history and archaeology. The previous year it was modern languages. Fifteen years ago it was chemistry. This year it’s the turn of English and linguistics. In all cases, there has been very little account taken of the quality of courses or the nature of outcomes for graduates. Even less thought has been given to the complex inter-dependencies of disciplines within and across universities. Arguments – if any are presented – tend to be made on the basis of falling applications, even when the subjects under review have been identified as strategic priorities by government, as in the case of chemistry and languages. Staff, naturally, feel traduced and gaslit when they have exceeded expectations in TEF and REF success, but management teams cut courses and implement redundancies anyway.

There have been several of these scenarios in recent weeks and reports of poor treatment of both staff and students at the universities of Wolverhampton, Huddersfield, Roehampton and Sheffield Hallam. I have written a number of letters to vice chancellors in defence of the implicated courses. These letters have been similar in theme, but tailored in each case to reflect the particular circumstances of the university. To date, I have received just one reply, from the Communications team at Roehampton referring to ‘careful consideration’ and a ‘challenging environment’ and assurances that ‘no decisions have been taken at this stage and we are committed to engaging in meaningful consultation with our academic colleagues’.

The obvious irony for me is that, in engaging with vice chancellors, I have chosen to rely, in part, on arguments from metrics. One reason is to point out the hypocrisy and arbitrariness involved in some of these decisions. There sometimes seems to be a kind of herd mentality whereby, if one university decides to withdraw a course, in short order, a number of ‘competitor institutions will follow suit. The implications for students are that some courses, often in the arts and humanities, cease to be available in certain geographical areas or in certain types of institution. Modern languages courses are now rare at post-92 universities. There is a well-founded fear that arts and humanities courses will soon be the provenance of just the Russell Group.

Below is my email to Professor Sir Chris Husbands, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University.

Dear Vice-Chancellor

I am writing to express concern at the proposed closure of degree courses in English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University.

The linguistics team at Sheffield Hallam have earned a significant reputation for their work in all areas of applied linguistics, and their research underpins the high-quality teaching enjoyed by students. In my role as subject leader of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, I attended research seminars with members of the English language team, most notably Dr Jodie Clark who served as our external examiner for a number of years. I currently follow Jodie’s podcast ‘Structured Visions’ which is a model of academic outreach and how to make research accessible.

As a former chair of the TEF and a board member of HESA, you will be aware that measures of teaching quality have now been subsumed under the metric of LEO graduate outcomes.  Scrutiny of these offers a means of making intra- and inter-institutional comparisons between courses. This tableau from Wonkhe has been devised so that the government’s Start to Success graduate outcomes (based on percentage of students continuing to a degree and progressing to highly skilled employment) can be mapped across courses and universities. Sheffield Hallam English Language scores 9.5 out of 10; English Literature scores 8.28. These scores compare well to the local Russell Group University of Sheffield where English language and Linguistics scores 8.55 and English Literature scores 8.8. You will also be aware that the Sheffield Hallam English courses lie at the top end of course STS scores across the university, with course scores ranging from 5.5 – 9.5. They are, then, strong courses whose graduates progress to highly skilled occupations.

Turning to the recent 2021 REF results, it is apparent that the English UoA submission has achieved the second highest GPA in the university at 3.19, with 42% of its research in the 4* category and 35% at 3*. Again, this compares well with the University of Sheffield English Language and Literature with 4* 53% and 3* 37%.

If a student applicant is concerned about teaching quality, outcomes and careers after graduation, there would be no reason to prefer to study English at the University of Sheffield over Sheffield Hallam, other than concern over perceived prestige. I would argue that the way to make gains on that front would be to invest in those courses which lead to enhanced opportunities, underpinned by excellent research-led teaching. Cancelling the university’s strongest programmes would seem to undermine progress towards meeting the government’s agenda on delivering high-quality courses which contribute to levelling up opportunities in the region.

There may be a temporary fall in applications, but a degree in English Language makes for a very marketable graduate. A distinctive feature of the English Language degree at Sheffield Hallam is the placement year option. High quality placements have been shown in a study by Nottingham Trent University to reduce the graduate outcomes gap between economically-fortunate and more deprived students.  

The more extensive the range of modules, the wider the choice of postgraduate opportunities. English language or linguistics is essential for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and many students seek employment abroad after graduation. Others progress to teacher training where an understanding of language structure and function is vital for teaching English in schools. Methods of linguistic analysis such as corpus linguistics are widely applicable in research areas from parliamentary research to AI. The study of language, identity, digital communication and pragmatics all offer skills which can be applied to teaching, journalism, marketing or the development of search engine optimisation.

I accept that the marketisation of universities has presented us with some contradictions, and these must be difficult for any leader to manage effectively. The reactive strategy suggests prioritising response to applicant choice in courses, but this requires constant revision of the course portfolio in order to accommodate shifting popularity. The pro-active strategy is to identify the university’s strengths in teaching, research and outcomes, and support their development. I imagine a university employs a marketing team in order to persuade students to enrol in such proven high-quality courses. If marketing fails to persuade, what is marketing for?

The fact that English at Sheffield Hallam has attained such high scores in the new STS measures of teaching and in the REF, and that these have been achieved in the context of the pandemic and large-scale disruption of teaching, is remarkable and should be the occasion for celebration. To close these courses and place careers at risk when staff have met all that could be asked of them would be an object lesson in how to demoralise an entire university.

Having an awareness of language structure and usage is crucial for so many areas of work. It is also one of those humanities disciplines most critical for sustaining democracy. I urge you to reconsider proposed course closures in English.

Yours sincerely,

Liz Morrish (Ph.D.)

assessment, conditions of labour, HE funding, HE policy, REF

Metric Tide Revisited

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The independent report The Metric Tide (TMT) was released in 2015 and its recommendations outlined a way of using research metrics responsibly in the design of the REF. It led many of us to hope it would curb some of the more damaging effects of metrics in research assessment.

To a large extent, REF panels are now aware that the focus must be on peer review, supplemented by responsible metrics. Although the Stern Review agreed with the recommendations of TMT, there have been some failures of implementation, acknowledged by the report’s author, James Wilsdon. On reflection, he feels that TMT was overly managerial in its approach, and there needs to be a focus on changing the culture towards healthier research processes.

There was definitely a moment of optimism after the 2014 REF that universities may be induced into treating research, the process of research and researchers with more respect and support. Together with the publication of TMT, the movement for responsible metrics has been buoyed by some declarations of principle such as the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics and the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Metrics (DORA) . Despite this, we have seen some egregious and irresponsible abuses of metrics, even among the many UK universities which have become signatories. Some credit the REF with having driven some more undesirable results outcomes including an increased homogenisation in research (see work by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra) and the never-ending fixation with rankings.

UKRI has now decided it is time to review how the purposes and design of the REF could be improved. This discussion and consultation is known as the Future Research Assessment Programme (FRAP)  which will “look afresh at the role of metrics in any future research excellence framework and consider whether design changes now under consideration as part of the FRAP suggest similar or different conclusions to those reached in 2015”. The review is being led by Stephen Curry, James Wilsdon and Lizzie Gadd, so in my estimation, the project is in good hands.

There are a number of consultations for FRAP taking place, and at a Zoom round table on July 12th, Silke Machold, Dean of Research of the University of Wolverhampton, wondered how to change behaviours which distort research priorities, but which nevertheless construct the criteria for success. The platforms which provide the research monitoring extract huge profits while funding for research is impoverished. Machold questioned what value is created by metrics and the associated requirements to monitor, report and manage.

We also heard from Rachel Gooberman-Hill, Chair of the UK Committee on Research Integrity, set up this spring with the intent to champion rigour, transparency and care and respect for researchers. We all raise our hats to that, but the next speaker, Patricia Murray of the University of Liverpool, illustrated how far we are from those ideals. Disgracefully, metrics such as grant capture and field-weighted citations have been used to select academics for redundancy at her university . Another low point for integrity was the shameless targeting of scholars in critical management studies at Leicester – a discipline which no longer exists there. And there have been multiple reports of academics being served notice of redundancy after successful REF results in their units of assessment. As Catherine Davies of the University of Leeds advised, breaches of DORA by signatories need to be addressed before cynicism takes root. Unless we have managers who embody research integrity in their own practice, then metrics will continue to be weaponized against researchers and academic freedom further undermined.

I agree that the REF has driven research culture, so if it is to continue (and it will), we must identify how we want that culture to change. So here is a suggestion. The one area which seems most open to modification is research environment. It is the area most focussed on people rather than figures, so any transformation could start with an assessment of the experience of academics themselves – postgraduate, post-doctoral and senior researchers. There are many tools like Vitae-CEDARS but again, these are expensive and complex corporate assessments. What is more appropriate is a simpler ‘satisfaction’ questionnaire including questions on perceptions of academic freedom, respect and support for research. This might deliver the kind of picture required, along with some metrics such as staff continuity and turnover, indicators of environment for mental health and, as well as PhD ‘throughput’, a question about the jobs that doctoral graduates go on to.

Another point. The various elements of the REF do not all need to be assessed concurrently. The environment measure surely is amenable to being uncoupled from the one-time census of research outputs and impact. Universities are apparently committed to rolling REF assessment and frequent mock exercises, and have put in place all the infrastructure to manage them. In that case, asking them to send updates on the research environment shouldn’t be burdensome. Continuing REF funding should be contingent on maintaining a healthy research environment that demonstrates standards of integrity and care for research and researchers. It would stop unscrupulous management teams from taking academics’ work for the REF census and then making them redundant the next day. We might find that their commitment to research as teamwork becomes more than mere window-dressing. It would redress the imbalance of power created when the Stern Review allowed institutions to submit outputs created at the institution after a researcher had left or retired. As well as injecting some much-needed integrity, it would give a more realistic picture of UK higher education as a research environment.

Anyone wanting to add their own ideas for the conduct of the next REF can email the team at [email protected]

academic freedom, course closures, HE policy, redundancy, university autonomy

Rocked by toxic shock jocks 

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The celebrations and commiserations of the REF results have ebbed; now it’s time to weigh up the repercussions. An entertaining pastime is to re-evaluate some of the early forecasts. One prediction, ironic in hindsight, was from David Price, the outgoing vice-provost (research) at UCL, who said that the REF 2021 post Stern Review reforms had ensured that the game-playing that was such a feature of REF 2014 was ‘not noticeable’.

It’s clear now that it all depends on who is playing the game and who sets the rules.

Price’s viewpoint is revealing of his position in relation to power structures in academia. Presumably, he was referring to the absence, in 2021, of the pre-census transfer market of academics whose ‘outputs’ and ‘impact’ make them desirable assets for other institutions wishing to beef up their own unit of assessment submissions. Stern’s recommendation that HEIs could submit all work produced by researchers while they were in employ there has meant a switch in the balance of power. The person who creates the outputs no longer holds them in their vault. Instead, they are banked by the institution along with the funds that flow to any 3* and 4* research. From the point of view of academics, game playing has been very much in evidence, only, this time, they are the playthings.

The REF funding model and the audit-disciplined university has meant academics have been told their job security depends on achieving the highest targets for research quality and impact. Additionally, those willing to focus their research on government priorities are more likely to enjoy access to funded research opportunities. The response of academics in keeping their research afloat through the pandemic when teaching has intensified and student need swelled, has been heroic. They were unprepared and undeserving of the retribution which has arrived – prompt, pervasive, and punitive. Across the sector, academics are being served with notice of redundancy: De Montfort University, Roehampton, Wolverhampton, and of course, early adopters like Leicester and Liverpool. Many of these job losses are in departments which have scored well and exceeded expectations. Now that the REF results are announced, the institution is free to lay off academics and claim the funding for retired or fired employees even as their REF narrative depicts a vigorous and lively research environment. Ben Whitham, on Twitter, wrote: ‘The spectacle of uni VCs that waited until the teaching term was over and the ref results in to try to force through unnecessary frontline redundancies (while they keep drawing their own inflated salaries) is just gross… DMU, Wolverhampton, now Roehampton… It’s a frenzy’. The MP for Putney, Southfields and Roehampton, Fleur Anderson has revealed that she has spoken to the VC and voiced her concerns about ‘fire and rehire’ tactics that have been alleged.

What do we call this other than a cynical exercise in rentier redundancy? How can universities possibly claim to be decent employers when staff are treated so appallingly? Let’s recognise as well that trade unions are often bypassed in many of these ‘consultations’ or ‘non-restructures’.

From the point of view of a high proportion of academics now, the REF has yielded nothing but contingent departments contingent courses and increasingly contingent staff. These conditions cannot nurture knowledge creation, dissemination and transfer. Academics need to take risks with their work, and a degree of job security had always been normalised in universities until the attacks on tenure and on academic freedom of the last few decades.

But now we have transparent attacks from government on academic culture and endeavour delivered with financial levers and the reputational risks of audit ignominy. Alongside this sits an aversion to the arts and humanities which vice chancellors seem happy to prosecute, even though this means turning away fee-bearing students from courses which recruit well and cross subsidise the more expensive-to-teach courses in STEM and in some cases, place institutions at risk of bankruptcy.

The problem with a government willing to see universities go to the wall is that we currently have a huge demand for higher education. As Jim Dickinson of Wonkhe points out: “Somewhere up the “top” of the tables, there’s students rammed in on massive modules, where the personal tutor system is more of an ambition than a reality. And at the other end, the redundancy programmes pick up pace.”

For a government which now avows a commitment to the student experience and student support (i.e. learning analytics), the contradictions accumulate. In desperation, some university managers reach for an uncapped source of subsidy to solve their cash flow problems – international students. Even in an era of heightened regulation and surveillance of international education, there can be cases of exploitative practices. Plashingvole on Twitter wrote, “I find myself wondering why senior managers thought it was ethical or sensible to do a deal with agents in a very poor country to recruit 700 students from one particular place largely to a single course with very few checks on qualifications.” And even that strategy has not stanched the financial haemorrhage.

It would be hard to advise an 18-year-old university applicant which universities and which courses might last the course of a 3 year degree program. Jim Dickinson on Twitter (May 18th 2022): ‘It’s miserable for students and academics. You can make a case (not one I simplistically agree with) that demand should drive HE supply – but not at this pace. Because it takes time to expand or contract in a way that doesn’t damage the student experience’. Inevitably, the impact on students of this failure of policy will be to limit their choices and crush ambition. Not only that, but the closure of a course leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over its graduates. Was their course worthwhile? Will their degree be valued by an employer? Will there be any staff left to write them a reference?

I suppose the over-arching theme of many of my blogs is why do staff keep turning up ? Why do talented students still strive to do good doctoral research? More and more I find an uncomfortable rebuttal in the number of tweets from academics leaving their university posts. For many of them, they can no longer face the daily battle with expectations versus a worsening reality. The Times Higher reports: “A new article blames academia’s rising mental health toll on universities’ refusal to allow staff to apply principles of academic inquiry to their own institutions. “Values that an academic might seek…to uphold in one’s work – such as a commitment to reason, objectivity, public responsibility and the pursuit of knowledge – are routinely compromised, thwarted, trivialised or dismissed,” says the paper in the journal Social Alternatives. “The very tools of critique and analysis that academics use to understand the world around them are simply not able to be applied in any meaningful way to their own employment circumstances.” The mental injuries sustained when dealing with this conflict and alienation has led to an epidemic of mental illness among university staff.

Jim Dickinson has identified the flaw in marketisation concerning the student experience. In terms of the staff experience, marketisation, commercialization, the audit and rankings agendas and the removal of academic autonomy work against the need for long-term planning for serious work to take place. It is pointless if all we can do is swim upstream against the vicissitudes of government impulse. As one head of department wrote on Twitter: “YES. I’m a Head of School now and this question is central to everything I do, both for myself and for my colleagues – what can I ask them to put energy into when we all know that 2 years on everything will be knocked down again?”

It doesn’t have to be like this. I had dinner last week with two recently-retired professors from US research-intensive R1 universities. They are both just retiring in their late 70s or 80s. Both of them had significant reputations in Hispanic literature and both had served as heads of the MLA and both had been on committees awarding Pulitzer Prizes and MacArthur Grants. Here I defer to all the caveats about the American academic superstar system, but nevertheless, I was struck by how they have reached the end of their careers with a great deal of earned self-worth intact,  whereas, right now, I know about half a dozen UK professors who are leaving academia. None of them feel as if they have any respect from their university management. They all seem to be quitting in a state of despondency. By contrast, one of my dinner companions was talking about the care the university was taking of their archive of papers. The other had just been honoured with a festschrift produced by former graduate students. I couldn’t even begin to try and explain the circumstances which drove me out of UK higher education in my 50s; the two world views are not mutually comprehensible. How do you convey the brutality of a system which reckons the value of an academic, however ‘productive’ and influential, in only the most instrumental terms? How do you explain the necessity of justifying every last minute of your time at work? How do you explain the anxiety of whether your work will ‘fit the REF narrative’ or ‘have impact’. To someone whose career has been driven by their own autonomous academic judgment and priorities, it just wouldn’t have made sense.

assessment, conditions of labour, pensions, quality, strikes, USS

Time for a new USS valuation

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I have been reading a couple of books about authoritarian threats to democracy: Anne Applebaum’s The Twilight of Democracy, and Mary Trump’s The Reckoning (thank you to John R for sending me the latter). The common thread in these books is the centrality of The Big Lie in political cultures at particular risk from authoritarianism. When a conspiracy theory based on falsehoods is strategically adopted by a government or political party seeking power, espousing it becomes a test of fealty. Applebaum traces one such Big Lie in Poland, regarding the loss over Smolensk of the aircraft carrying the president in 2010. In contradiction of all evidence arising from the independent investigation, the Smolensk conspiracy has seen a great many Poles believing that it was a deliberate act – the result of a plot to assassinate the president and it has now cemented itself as a defining belief of the ruling Law and Justice party. Applebaum notes that it has polarized opinion and poisoned the political climate in Poland. Its tokenistic status is clear when she reports how many of her former friends in government repeat the Big Lie while privately acknowledging they do not believe it.

More recently, the same tactic was used by former US President Donald Trump in his failed insurrection. Only 21% of Republican voters believe the 2020 election of Joe Biden was legitimate. It is one of the most disturbing tactics to use in a population awash in information of dubious provenance. When even basic, observable facts are open to dispute, it is profoundly destabilizing to a democracy. Mary Trump argues this is not the first Big Lie in American history and it remains a country that cannot come to terms with its history of slavery, racism and inhumanity. Even today, the teaching of documented evidence of atrocities is being criminalized by banning ‘critical race theory’. Rather like our own history in the UK of teaching under Section 28, the idea is for teachers to self-police and back away from discussion of race in America’s classrooms which discomfort the white majority.

Perhaps in UK academia we have our own version of The Big Lie. It is depressing to think that members of UCU are having to take strike action again in a campaign that has endured since 2018 and in which the intransigence of the employers’ representatives, USS executive board and many of the scheme’s trustees has continued to draw strikers to the picket lines. Today, a group of women professors has written to Universities UK pointing out the disproportionately damaging impact of a cut to their pensions of 35-45% on women in the scheme. The letter repeats the request made by UCU that there should be another valuation of the scheme and that an equality impact assessment should be carried out. The last (disputed) valuation of the scheme was conducted in March 2020 when markets fell as the pandemic led us into new territory of uncertainty.

Most of us will have followed the discussions on Twitter in which academic pensions experts present their evidence disputing the deficit that USS has claimed. I refer you to the many detailed and informative threads by Mike Otsuka @MikeOtsuka and Sam Marsh @Sam_Marsh101.  The lone voice on the Board of Trustees who alleged a miscalculation of the deficit was Jane Hutton, a professor of statistics and an employee non-executive director. She was rapidly silenced and her dismissal from the board expedited. Also, Josephine Cumbo, the pensions expert of the Financial Times has been persistently sceptical of USS executive/ employers’ allegations of fund deficit and urges a revaluation.

Possibly feeling the weight of evidence is against them, vice chancellors and pro vice chancellors at pre-92 universities have reached out to quell opposition at ‘town hall’-style meetings or more ‘intimate’ departmental visits. They offered reassurance that pension losses would only be around 10% of current benefits. When members tried the projection tool for themselves, the losses were dire and unaffordable. It turns out, you’d need to be earning a senior manager’s salary for the pension losses to be at the smaller end. One VC was reported to have shut down debate by refusing to ‘engage in a back and forth about the ‘facts’ – as if facts don’t matter in a university. As if facts like a new valuation of the USS scheme could not end this particular dispute. But instead, entirely counter-productively, VCs are now spending millions on shoring up a deficit few of them believe exists, preferring to use this opportunity to exhaust the resolve of union members. Academic Twitter reports that privately, many senior managers express sympathy with the position of scheme members who face poverty in old age, and yet, they appear afraid to break ranks with the USS board establishment position. It has all the hallmarks of a Big Lie deployed to crush reason and democracy.

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We seem to live in a culture of impunity for lawbreaking and lying in the service of power grabbing. We have been treated to a masterclass this week in the shape of the P&O ferry operator who summarily sacked 800 staff to replace them with cheaper workers from overseas. Despite admitting this was illegal when hauled before a parliamentary committee, the CEO appeared to feel safe from any legal consequences. He may be on less solid ground with the port workers in Rotterdam, or indeed the health and safety inspectors in Belfast and Dover. And the betrayal of trained staff does not seem to have endeared P&O to the travelling public either.

There may be a lesson there for vice chancellors too. You wonder how their persistence will repay them when academics vote with their feet and leg it to universities offering the government-backed, final-salary TPS pension scheme. They will find it difficult to remain attractive as employers when one half of the sector benefits from an OK pension scheme, while the other offers returns worth a couple of bus fares into town for 40 years of work. La trahison des clercs indeed.

I am cheered that as part of the UCU Four Fights action, hundreds of external examiners have publicly resigned on Twitter. External examiners perform many tasks central to the process of awarding degrees: the certification of degree results; the endorsement of assessment reliability, fairness, consistency, and compliance with standards. This work is carried out, usually, for a fee that barely reaches minimum wage when we reckon up time spent. And so, academics have chosen to withdraw their labour from a process that most of them do from a sense of service to the sector. It is often enjoyable and rewarding, but it is voluntary in that it is not directed by one’s primary employer. Most university quality and standards regulations will insist that a qualified and ratified external examiner signs the decisions of exam boards that award degrees. Without them, the standards and academic integrity of those degrees cannot be verified. In response to the mass resignations, some university managers are adopting policies to permit some external ‘representation’ at boards of examiners. So a mathematician from Durham can pronounce on the quality of history degrees at Birmingham? Is this really a legitimate solution?

Maybe the kind of contingent adaptations made to teaching and learning during the pandemic have lent justification to other expedient variances with the orthodoxy, but tampering with the one bit of the quality architecture that requires subject expertise and academic judgement will weaken the reputation of UK degrees internationally. UCU members could go further and, in the same way as safety officials are refusing to let P&O ferries sail, they can refuse to endorse the decisions made at exam boards and insist, on the record, that degrees awarded without external moderation are not safe. The clercs can fight back, especially on their own terrain.

Critical university studies, discourse and managerialism

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