In praise of universities

This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as a problem – that “left-liberals” are “over-represented” in British academia. The methodology used to establish the political views of academics was risible, being based on a self-selecting survey (what survey methodologists call a ‘voodoo poll’) and this and other flaws were pointed out by John Morgan in the Times Higher Education.

Even if the data were more robust, it is a bizarre notion that academics’ political views should be ‘representative’ of the general population and that, if they are not, they are, to use the report’s word “skewed”. Academics are not appointed for their political views, or to represent anyone under some kind of proportional representation system – and it would be disastrous if they were appointed in this way, rather than on the basis of their academic expertise. But the choice of the term ‘over-representation’ is deliberate, as signalled in the closing line of the full report – it tries to take the language of diversity (in relation to gender, class and ethnicity) in order to imply, although there is absolutely no evidence of this, that those on the political right are victims of discrimination so that whilst being qualified for academic posts they are excluded from them.

The word ‘victims’ is significant in understanding what is going on here, which is a species of the populist politics sweeping Western societies. That populism has at its heart a victim narrative in which the ‘liberal elite’ (sometimes the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’) has a fiendish power to do down the common sense of ‘the people’. It is a nonsensical reading of where power lies, since the intellectual apparatchiks of recent decades are more obviously the ASI and similar neo-liberal bodies than anyone else, but after the events of the last year no one can doubt its traction. Another part of the populist wave is its anti-intellectualism, with ‘experts’ being denounced and even compared to Nazis. So the ASI report channels that strand of populism, too.

The populist implications of the ASI report were quite apparent in the way it got picked up in the media. Especially grotesque was a spiteful piece by Tom Utley in, inevitably, the Daily Mail. It started with a long whine about having been put down by his ‘left-wing’ tutor at Cambridge (like so many of the populist Right – Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg - Utley is a product of ‘elite’ universities) some forty years ago.  The ‘put down’ was, in fact, a correction of his misunderstanding about the subject under discussion – as it happens John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ concept, discussed on p. 146 of my book - although Utley clearly doesn’t realise this and it apparently still rankles.

The rest of the article is a series of tendentious assertions (e.g. cherry picked examples of Oxbridge college heads) and smears (e.g. the ‘endless holidays’ of ‘dons’) exhibiting such a degree of intellectual dishonesty and disregard for evidence that one can at least agree that he was not very well-taught when at university. These are then explicitly linked to populist politics by pointing out that most academics opposed Brexit. That is hardly surprising: most people with a degree and even more with a higher degree did.

The irony is that British universities are extraordinarily successful in any terms they might be judged. They perform far better proportionate to either the size of the UK or the funding they receive than those of any other country in the world in terms of placement in world rankings, where the UK has 34 of the top 200 universities, and quality of research. They are intimately linked with medical and industrial innovation and the communication of culture. Moreover, they earn billions of pounds for the UK in student fee income (though this is under threat from government immigration policies). To jeopardise this in pursuit of ‘politically representative’ staffing would be, to coin a populist phrase, political correctness gone mad. Would we want, say, biologists, to be selected on the grounds of political representativeness rather than scientific ability? Is that the Lysenkoist dream of Tom Utley and the ASI? I fear that it might be.

But universities should be defended on wider grounds than this. To the extent that it is the case that they are bulwarks against populism then that is a good thing in itself. The hallmark of populism is what we are learning to call post-truth. The hallmark of universities is still that of a liberal Enlightenment commitment to truth, evidence and reason (that is so even when academics interrogate and critique the liberal Enlightenment). So it is small wonder that they are under attack from populists, and that is all the more reason to hold on tight to what they embody and represent.

A story about leadership

The other day I came across the text of a short story which I submitted to a 2004 competition run by what was then the Times Higher Education Supplement on the theme of leadership in higher education. My submission didn’t win, but reading it again it made me chuckle, and despite some obvious anachronisms that I haven’t changed it still seems to me to say something about leadership in higher education, even twelve years on. So I thought it would be nice to let it see the light of day. Apologies for the small font size which for some reason I can't change ....

 

The Vision Thing

Something strange happened yesterday. Not that that is unusual, so perhaps it can’t be strange. And after all, as I’ve only been in the job for two weeks it’s to be expected that everything will be strange, so strangeness is normal. Stop. I have to remember that I am not an academic any more and these kinds of semantic musings are no longer my concern. Anyway, yesterday’s strange thing was an article in the local newspaper about me: ‘New Broom for Greshingham University’.

It’s not that I am unused to seeing my name in the newspapers, and more prestigious titles than the Greshingham Echo I may say. A few years ago, when I chaired the government watchdog on vegetable pesticides I was often in the national press. (‘Boffin’s Hot Potato’ was my favourite headline). No, what was strange was to see myself described as a ‘new broom’. For if there is one thing that I have learned since I started as Vice-Chancellor it is that I spend all my time fulfilling the commitments and carrying out the policies of my predecessor.

It’s fortunate that I inherited his PA, Judy, otherwise I really wouldn’t have a clue what to do. On the other hand, I have to confess that I am rather scared of Judy. This morning was a case in point. I arrived later than I had intended, having drunk more then I should at a dull dinner last night. Judy didn’t actually tell me off for my tardiness, but I had the sense that she would have liked to, and that once I have been longer in post she will have no hesitations about doing so. She pointed out that in ten minutes time I was due to chair a meeting of the university advisory board (a collection of self-important local business people, as it turned out) and then ran through the rest of my engagements before dropping the bombshell. Tomorrow I was to have the first of a series of open meetings with the staff at which I would discuss my vision and mission for the University.

“It’s been in the diary for months,” she countered, seeing my dismay. “Sir David always held these open meetings at the start of the year. He went on a leadership development course that said it was a good way to motivate the staff and ensure their buy-in to the strategic level objectives of the University.”

Sir David was my predecessor. See what I mean about the new broom fantasy?

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, cravenly rather than defiantly, for I have already learned that I am completely dependent upon Judy.

“Why don’t you use last year’s vision and mission?” she offered, and left me morosely sipping a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

It’s fair to say that I paid less attention than I ought to the advisory board meeting. What I wanted was advice on preparing my vision and mission, but that wasn’t on the agenda. Despite my readiness to be guided by Judy, something in me revolted at the idea of simply re-hashing the existing ones. Perhaps it was the new broom phrase. It was time to stamp my mark on Greshingham and tomorrow’s meeting would be an ideal place to start.

I told Judy my intention at lunchtime. I had the suspicion that she was doubtful, but this may just be my paranoia. In any case, I stood firm. I might not have been on a leadership course, but I’m certainly a leader – a natural leader, perhaps, so I don’t need to go on a course – and, equally naturally, I do have a strong vision of what the University should achieve. All that was needed was time to put pen to paper.

As luck would have it I had a couple of hours free that afternoon. According to the diary, I was due to meet the Head of Chemistry which Judy told me had been a regular fixture every term for the last four years because it was in a ‘turnaround’ situation. That meant, apparently, that it had scored poorly in the last RAE, been found wanting in its teaching quality and was so laggardly in meeting its access targets that my predecessor had singled it out for his special oversight. However, in an oversight of a different kind, it had gone unnoticed that, having failed to turnaround, the School had in fact been closed down and so the termly meeting was now redundant.

“As are the members of the School of Chemistry,” I quipped.

“They’ve been re-deployed, Vice-Chancellor,” she said stonily.

I don’t think I will try making jokes with Judy any more.

***

When I came to write down my vision I found, distressingly, that I don’t have one. I mean, I want us to do well, obviously. But this seems altogether too anaemic to warrant being called a vision. How about something more grandiose? To be a world-class university? That has a better ring, certainly. It’s difficult to take seriously, though. I haven’t met all my colleagues yet, but those I have seem to fall considerably short of world-class. Indeed, if we exclude the robotics team, it seems unlikely that the world would be perceptibly worse if Greshingham didn’t exist at all. Perhaps that is unfair to the Media Lab people, at least in their own estimation, although I freely concede that I am hazy about what goes on there. Attaching electrodes to journalists’ heads?

I realised that it was now half an hour since I had started, or rather failed to start. In desperation I turned to the pages of the THES to see how other universities position themselves. It seemed to depend on what kind of place they are. The newer universities stressed teaching (‘Luton – education that works’) whereas the older institutions put the accent on research (‘Southampton – at the cutting edge of innovation’). I certainly don’t want us to be thought of as an ex-poly, but then again we mustn’t come across as too ivory tower either. The best bet might be to emphasise teaching and research.

But were these things visions, anyhow? Would anyone imagine in their absence that the aim was education that didn’t work and research which didn’t bother with new discoveries? I thought of last week’s visit to the Philosophy Department and realised that some people might. Even so, I was sure that ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Berkshire’ couldn’t be considered a vision so much as a statement of fact. Surely a vision had to be aspirational: ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Wales’?

Perhaps I should start with the mission instead. But what was the difference between a vision and mission? I had to admit to myself that I had no idea. I could ask Judy, I supposed, but I wasn’t quite ready for that humiliation. Would the dictionary help? For each word there were various meanings, mostly irrelevant. Mission – ‘body sent by religious community to propagate its faith’, for example. On the other hand, was it so irrelevant? Perhaps this kind of outreach activity was exactly what was needed to deal with the access problem which was discussed at last week’s council meeting? Then again, was the university a religious community? Did it have a faith? And might it all smack of colonialism anyway (a bad thing)? As for vision – ‘thing or person seen a dream or trance’ didn’t really work. After all, I’d been sitting in a dream or trance for over an hour and hadn’t come up with anything.

On balance, the best definitions seemed to be ‘statesmanlike sagacity of planning’ for vision (I particularly liked the sound of that) and ‘task to be performed’ for mission. I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Still, it seemed like a thin line. If my vision was to be a world-class university, and despite my reservations this still appealed to me, then surely the mission was also to be a world-class university. The only difference so far as I could see (my vision, according to the first definition in the dictionary!) was that I had the vision and this then became other people’s mission. That seemed like a good idea, but would other people agree?

Irritatingly, just as I was making progress, the telephone rang. Judy told me that my daughter Simone was on the line and needed to talk to me urgently. Simone is a student, in her second year at one of the London colleges. I was worried that something was wrong but it soon emerged that all she wanted was to be picked up from the station that evening. Sometimes I think my family don’t realise how important I have become. I was about to tell her off for disturbing me at work with this triviality when it occurred to me that Simone is studying business management. Admittedly it was vaguely embarrassing to have to ask my own daughter about how to formulate the vision and mission of my university, but there’s no point in being too proud. And wasn’t this the sort of thing she would have learned about?

“Yeah, Dad,” she drawled contemptuously. “We did that in the first year.”

“So what should I say?” I asked, all pretence of superiority gone.

“Depends if you’re a lion, a wolf or a jackal,” she said. “Which are you?”

“Well, I’m not sure” I found myself giggling nervously. “What do you think?”

“Do you lead from the front, hunt on your own or stick with the pack?”

“I suppose a bit of all three,” I suggested.

“Hmm, a hybrid,” she said, disapprovingly. “Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference because whatever you are you have to look into your inner self and ask what you really want and then translate it into a story that can inspire people,” she said, before announcing that her train was entering a tunnel.

After the phone went dead, I tried to take her advice. I looked into my inner self. What was my real vision for the future? The only thing I could think of was getting a knighthood, like my predecessor. My mission? I suppose it boiled down to not making any truly awful mistakes in public. And they fitted together pretty well, because so long as I don’t completely screw up then I should finish with a knighthood. What was the other bit? Translate that into an inspirational story. It seemed good enough to me, but I couldn’t honestly think anyone else would be inspired by it. In fact, if I said this at tomorrow’s meeting then it might well count as making a truly awful mistake in public.

There was a knock on my door and Judy bustled in, reminding me that my next meeting was about to begin. There wasn’t any point in pretending any longer, but still I tried to save face.

“Judy,” I began, “I’ve decided that what we need is a period of continuity and stability. It’s called - um – the golden labrador approach to leadership. So I thought I’d stick for the time being with last year’s vision and mission. What were they again?”

“Greshingham aims to provide education that works and research at the cutting edge of innovation in the heart of the Midlands,” she intoned.

I’d been thinking along the right lines, obviously. Still I wasn’t willing to forget the new broom tag.

“Good,” I replied. “We’ll go with that, but add at the end ‘with world-class aspirations in selected areas’.”

I thought I had had the last word, but a moment later Judy returned and handed me a letter inviting me to attend a workshop entitled ‘Transforming Leaders in Higher Education’.

Was my life was about to change?

Antisocial media

I’m taking a break from blogging about the election (about which there is not much of interest to say at the moment anyway) to reflect on something which, whilst not new, seems to be a growing phenomenon. It’s prompted by an experience whilst waiting at a large train station in London the other day. Nearby, there was an information stand at which sat a young woman in a smart uniform. Every few minutes, a passenger would approach her with some query or other and each time she would, after a moment, look up from her mobile phone, answer the question, and then immediately go back to the phone. I watched for a while and it seemed to me that she could hardly bear to look away from her phone for even a few seconds.

I’ve also noticed – again, it’s not an original observation, but recently it seems to be one I make more frequently – how the students I teach seem to find it all but impossible to go through a class, or for that matter a few minutes, without looking at their phones. One thing that seems particularly strange about this is that students invariably complain about the lack of class contact time, especially since the introduction of tuition fees in English universities, and yet in that time that they do have they absent themselves. There’s been quite a bit of research which suggests that phone-addiction is becoming increasingly common, including studies of students.

By phone addiction, of course, we really mean addiction to the internet and social media. It’s quite an alien world to me, and I’ve posted elsewhere about my views of twitter. I’ve never had a Facebook account – let alone Pinterest or Instagram - and although I do use my phone for email and texting I regard it primarily as just a phone. I don’t much like using it as the connection and comfort never seem as good as a landline and, horror of horrors, I leave it turned off for days at a time.

That’s not, or not just, middle-aged Luddism. I do wonder what the effects of this apparent addiction are. Some are all too obvious as when people walk through busy streets, oblivious to everyone around them, glued to the phone. Indeed there are increasing numbers of accidents as a result, as in this report about Tokyo, but I guess the same would be true in any large city. It’s also obvious when you watch commuters using phones and tablets to play games. Recently, a British politician was criticised for playing the game Candy Crush during a parliamentary committee. Less obvious effects include the report this week that levels of myopia amongst children are rocketing because of the amount of time spent indoors at computers and mobile devices, and in China steps are being taken to prevent this. Or, to take another example, phone use whilst driving is an increasing cause of traffic accidents.

There seems something infantile about all this; the inability to pay more than momentary attention, the compulsive need to play. More than that, it seems as if the social media addiction in particular comes at a great cost to social interaction. In connecting us it also disconnects us from ‘real’ relationships, as many commentators have noted. It is also – connecting with the example I began with – being reported that workplace productivity is being damaged by the obsessive need to connect, with one recent survey identifying it as the main cause of timewasting at work.

I realise that this sounds puritanical, and perhaps it is – perhaps, though, there are some virtues in puritanism? And of course there are downsides to all forms of human interaction, whether virtual or real. But it does seem to me problematic that increasingly we are unable to live in the present and the here-and-now. I’ll close with another recent observation, of a couple sitting at a restaurant table each engaging not with each other but with their phones. Or perhaps not, for it came into my head that for all I knew they were actually connecting with each other via their phones in preference to talking. It seemed not just possible but ineffably sad.

Follow the money

I don’t often write about universities on this blog, because to do so seems too inward-looking. But current developments underway in UK universities should be of real public concern. I’m referring in particular to a massive shift towards requiring academics to generate substantial amounts of grant income to fund their research. To understand why that matters, it’s necessary to understand a little bit about how research funding works in the UK (more precisely I should say England in terms of what follows, although there is considerable similarity in the rest of the UK). There are two main routes. One is the government funding distributed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) on the basis of the quality of research undertaken (hence it is called QR funding), with this quality being assessed by the Research Excellence Framework(REF), the latest results of which are due next week. The other route is research grant income (RGI) which may come from a variety of industrial, charitable and government sources, with the UK’s research councils (RCUK) being the most important as regards the latter.

With respect to QR funding, this is driven mainly by assessments of the quality of publications (but also by the wider impact of these and some other factors). Academics undertake QR funded research as part of their contractual duties and are not tied to any particular projects. RGI funding, by contrast, is based on bids to support particular projects. QR funding therefore offers considerable freedom of research focus, but it is not a ‘free for all’ since the REF assessment is stringent and, indeed, a source of much complaint from academics.

In recent months, many British universities have been imposing massive pressure on academics to increase RGI and in some cases have set very harsh targets on individuals to secure such funding, under threat of redundancy. Three cases in particular have attracted some publicity: those of King’s College London, Warwick University and Imperial. The latter example has a particularly tragic twist with the suicide of a Professor of Toxicology, apparently linked to the demands for RGI generation placed upon him, recalling other cases of suicide in organizations discussed in a previous post.

These issues relate to many others discussed on this blog and in my book, especially the general impact of the New Public Management and the ways that this has given licence to capricious managerial privilege and, for that matter, bullying. How this relates to universities are brilliantly explored by in a 2012 article by Yiannis Gabriel and, with respect to business schools, in a 2013 article by Martin Parker. But I want to focus on some more narrow issues here.

One is just about the financial rationale of what is happening. Suppose we want to be very ‘hard-headed’ and say something like “well, of course, research must pay its way: it’s high time these academics learnt to live in the real world”. Apart from any other problems with such a view, it neglects the fact of QR funding. Academics who publish work judged to be excellent by the REF generate income for their universities via HEFCE. Why, then, insist that only RGI money matters?

The other is even more important. Funding research via RGI requires that the funder be persuaded in advance of the research that it is worthwhile. That presents several very important issues, both practical and political. On the former - it’s very well-known that the value of research is often only apparent many years after it has been conducted. The computer applications of pure maths are obvious examples. On the latter – research that seems controversial or unfashionable will be a poor prospect for deliberative funding decisions. The two are linked, since it is almost inevitable that grant and project based funding decisions will be small-c conservative: they are based upon existing knowledge and understanding.

This has a particular significance when it comes to the funding of critically-oriented research about organizations and management. For all that academics may complain about REF, it has allowed such research to flourish to the extent – and it is a considerable extent – that it has generated publications deemed to be of high quality and hence generating QR funding. An approach based on RGI offers a much less propitious environment for at least two reasons. One is that the very fractured and fractious state of the field makes it hard to get consensus from referees on grant applications. Another is that, to the extent that RGI requires identifiable end users, critical research, whose ‘users’ are typically civil society at large, is likely to struggle.

Of course we are not in that situation yet, and that is one of the strangest aspects of this story. For it is not that QR funding has dried up. True, there have been for quite some time persistent calls that all government university research funding should be channelled through RCUK. But that is not yet the case. It is tempting, then, to read the preoccupation of university managers with individual RGI records as a matter of managerial control for its own sake, rather than financial exigency. If so, academics who have for so long complained about REF may find themselves in the ironic position of defending it in the face of the emerging landscape RGI targets.

That in turn should be a real worry beyond academia. I suppose it is just about possible to imagine at least applied scientific and medical research being funded by industry and research councils, and some humanities and social science research being funded by charities and research councils. But even in these cases much of value will be lost. It’s very difficult, though, to imagine that much in the way of critical organizational research will get funded, which means that one of the core areas of human existence will mainly get researched uncritically. If in doubt, look at the RCUK web page entitled ‘Research and Business: A Productive Partnership’ telling us that “the Research Councils are a source of ideas, knowledge, expertise, skills and research infrastructure for your business”. No mention of the public good there, you may notice, for all that the funds come from each and every UK taxpayer.