No More Big Lie

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 3^rd District, who will take his seat on January 3^rd 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.

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The Impossibility of Being a Student

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 21^st 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.

Book Review of Steven Jones: Universities Under Fire

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 18^th book in the Palgrave series on Critical University Studies tells us there is a lot to critique in universities in the 21^st 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.

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

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.)

Metric Tide Revisited

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 12^th, 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 responsiblemetrics@gmail.com

Rocked by toxic shock jocks

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.”

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 🧵

— Jim Dickinson (@jim_dickinson) May 18, 2022

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 18^th 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.

Academic Irregularities AT 100

This 100^th post for Academic Irregularities has been a difficult piece to write, and I’m not sure whether it is a celebratory piece or a summary of the blog I have been writing over the last six years. I think back to what urged me to start it. Primarily, it was a rage at what Derek Sayer has called the ‘insult’ of the REF, and feeling obliged to take refuge in Thomas Docherty’s clandestine university. It was increasing alarm that workers in universities were being forced to abandon their values, their curiosity-led research and instead allow their careers and academic worth to be defined by criteria that might have emerged from a management consultancy.

In terms of inspiration, I owe much to some early pathfinders: Thomas Docherty, Derek Sayer, Dorothy Bishop, Eva Bendix-Petersen, Bronwen Davies, Kate Bowles, Richard Hall, Helen Sauntson and too many others to mention. Despite ‘leaving’ academia, my academic network has continued to flourish, and I feel more fully connected than ever before. I’d like to offer thanks to Ernesto Priego and Fanis Missirlis who have cheered just about everything I have written. You have a special place in my affections.

The blog has broadly covered policy, organisational and funding changes in higher education in the UK since 2015, from a critical perspective. Issues have ranged over managerialism, research and teaching evaluation, metrics, performance management, casualisation and precarity in academic careers, academic freedom, academic capitalism, stress and mental health, culture wars, the Covid pandemic and the future of universities.

But the underlying theme has been the marketisation of higher education and a system struggling with government interference and insecure funding whose priorities have been distorted by league tables and rankings. As a result, universities have been drawn into a web of unintended consequences of competition. Whereas 15 years ago, universities were striving for uniqueness in their research and teaching, now they are afraid to do anything their ‘competitors’ are not doing. Indeed, the Business School at the University of Leicester has explicitly informed staff that they wish to rebalance their research towards the mainstream.

The reach of metrics into our professional lives has been felt by all who labour in academia. Researchers are now judged by grant capture, the rank of journals they publish in, citations, H-index, and of course, the perceived status of their employer institution. Some universities have started to require a record of grant capture as proof of active researcher status. Although the University of Liverpool is signatory to the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment, colleagues in Life Sciences have seen this measure imposed as the selection criterion for redundancy – a clear violation of the principle of DORA.

Excessive metric surveillance continues to drain the self-esteem of academics in their teaching role where they are subject to student evaluations which can sometimes deliver unfiltered racist and sexist comments. The value of their teaching is further called into question by government and media if their graduates do not attain salary levels which trigger repayment of student loans, currently set at £27, 295. These two arbitrary measures currently form part of the institutional TEF grading. Meanwhile, we are moving closer to a situation whereby the value of a university course will be assessed on students’ ability to secure highly-skilled professional employment on graduation. 

There is an agenda here and the government has been largely successful in propounding a myth that only science courses are of value.  Summer 2020 saw the government launch a pandemic Restructuring Regime which incentivises universities to re-focus on scientific research and ‘a much greater reorientation towards the needs of the local and regional economy’. This may soon be reinforced with a tuition fee cut (with no replacement funding) for arts and humanities.

This steer has led to a chain reaction of universities cancelling recruitment to a raft of arts and humanities courses, especially modern languages, English (applications are down, but still the 4^th most popular UCAS choice), history and archaeology. In this scheme, some universities seem keen to rebrand themselves as Australian-style universities of technology. Aston University and London South Bank University launched their new branding with a webinar on the themes of a Truly Modern Technical Education and stating that the role of universities is to promote UK economic progress and competitiveness. Aston and LSBU have chosen what they hope is a survival strategy that will increase enrolment, funding and perhaps government preferment. They intend that their reputations will not be based on rankings and research council funding; instead, they will now define themselves by validation from business and employers and by success in impact and translational work. And in binning modern languages courses, they show all the signs of being willing to follow government direction, even to the extent of employing the think tank allegedly associated with friends of Dominic Cummings.

Marketisation has taken universities into some strange places and encounters with contradictions. Let’s return for a moment to the metric of graduate salaries or LEO – Long term Educational Outcomes. We don’t need the Telegraph to tell us that graduates of law, business and computing are likely to earn above-average salaries. However, it is also apparent that graduates from these same subjects at different universities have very different outcomes. As David Kernohan points out, when making these globalising statements, no account is taken of prior attainment, subject of study, socio-economic background, sex, and region of residence, and LEO scores disperse in keeping with these characteristics.

David Kernohan has made another data set accessible which contains a few surprises, especially for the STEM-or-bust brigade. Using HESA and Unistats (now Discover Uni) data of progression and graduate salary to give a grade out of 10, each university course can be ranked.    LLB law course scores range from 9.6 to 3.8. Business studies has an even wider range from 10 to 0.45. General computer studies courses earn scores from 10 to 2.25. A lot of variability, then. Meanwhile most standard history courses have scores which cluster around 7-8 as do courses in English and Modern languages. It is a myth, then, that science courses are the sole gateway to prosperity and professional success, but it is a powerful and pervasive one.

The pattern is repeated for individual institutions. If you imagine your future is secure if you graduate from a Russell Group university, you may be disappointed. Undergraduate courses at Newcastle University have scores from 9.5 to 4.0 with the lowest scoring courses being engineering and physics. At York St John University, scores show a strong plateau above 7 with the lowest score at 6 – a similar profile to its Russell Group neighbour, the University of York.

Nevertheless, the message from government conveyed by education minister Gavin Williamson is that some students graduate with ‘nothing but a mountain of debt’. A number of university managers have chosen to genuflect before the veiled threats of funding cuts and have engaged in anticipatory redundancies in subjects they imagine will expose them to disapproval. At each, the presenting justification is that these courses do not lead to good outcomes. As the assault on the arts and humanities gathers pace, it seems to lend permission for closures at more and more institutions. It doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence, such as the data set above, is laid before them. The power of myth continues to supersede reality.

At the University of Leicester, the reason for latest round of redundancies may reveal ideological bias and a distrust of critical thinkers. In the Business School, academics have been targeted because of their apparent affiliation with critical management studies. Sometimes this has been determined on the basis of journals in which work has been published. At other universities, critical race studies and gender studies are at risk. One wonders if the threat to history courses has been generated by government disapproval of any critical engagement with history which might challenge the preferred narrative of a benign and virtuous British Empire. If this is the beginning of the Orbanisation of the UK academy, hostility towards these subjects can be traced at universities as diverse as Cambridge and Chester.

What we are seeing is actually a war on accountability. Just as well-regarded scholars are being exiled from universities through targeted redundancies, there is also a more furtive undermining of regulations and procedures. In universities where managers have chosen to poison industrial relations by refusing to back down on redundancies, there has been industrial action including strikes and marking boycotts. At the universities of Liverpool and Leicester a large number of external examiners have resigned meaning that marks and degree classifications cannot be confirmed. This has not deterred managers at Liverpool from assuring students that marks missing because of the boycott will be manufactured by algorithm and that degrees will be awarded. Liverpool students have reacted by posting the university’s assessment regulations on Twitter and asking the administration to abide by them. The failure of the management’s strategy is painfully evident in the howls of protest from students today (5^th July 2020) as the university has released, and then taken down, their marks.

There is also a parallel attack on quality and standards in universities. Despite the international reputation of UK degrees, the new holy grail for higher education capitalists is the unbundling of modules so that students can pick and mix their way to a ‘stackable’ degree from a variety of institutions. Having spent my career being required to account for the coherence of content and learning outcomes, the progression between levels and modules, ‘signposts to success’, assessment and feedback criteria etc., I wonder how the quality and reliability of these degrees can be established.

We are indeed entering a Trumpian vision of deregulation in which all norms are discarded, and evidence is dismissed. Paul Krugman charges that in some institutions, actual expertise is a disqualification for administrative office and, instead, ‘preference is given to the incompetent’. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; the fish rots from the head – choose your analogy, but government sets the tone for leadership elsewhere, even in universities.

A pertinent example was reported on Twitter yesterday by @plashingvole who was being subjected to a staff development workshop on neuro-linguistic programming. He has blogged about this previously in 2017. NLP is nothing but pseudoscience dressed up as empowerment and it  has been massively debunked, but all to no avail at Vole’s seat of learning.

When I asked HR why they were training managers to use NLP during organisational change they said ‘the academic research may say it doesn’t work but we think it does’. Interesting way to approach working at an actual university. [@plashingvole 4/7/2020]

Just where do you go in the face of this?  It is disturbing to find so much naivety and gullibility among university managers – and so little shame – and you can see exactly why they would be unsettled by sound scholarship in critical management studies, or evidence of declining mental health among academics, or problems of bias with module evaluation questionnaires. Perhaps we need to accept that accountability is for little people; it only works top down, and when convenient.

Richard Hall writes of the ‘hopeless university’. I share his pessimism and the fear that there is now a crisis of legitimation in universities. What kind of knowledge is defensible? Knowledge which will sell. But there are signs that such cynicism is beginning to wear on academics who try to adhere to a different set of values. There is a credibility gap for universities from both within and without.

One of the things to emerge from the pandemic is the demise of the fiction that universities can be market-led and customer-focussed. The hypocrisy and gaslighting they have faced has incubated a generation of students who understand the ways in which universities have sought to exploit them and the money that rides in with them. They understand how the workings of institutional sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia structure their experience of being a student at university. The HE marketeers like to see universities portrayed as transactional service providers, but universities cannot be run like consultancies. They are not designed for short-term commissions. Their purpose is to develop and facilitate the growth of knowledge, wherever that leads. Universities will remake themselves because that is what they have done for a thousand years. Their survival will be achieved through the diligence and imaginations of those who study and work in them. The future of scholarship and learning will require a new commitment towards trust, democracy, accountability, humanity and academic freedom, but there are scant signs of that just yet.

Course closures are not ‘inevitable’

Times Higher Education published a story today:

Course closures are ‘inevitable’ consequence of Westminster policy. Aston and London South Bank are latest institutions to shutter humanities and social sciences degrees

in which I was quoted as agreeing with a statement from another contributor:

‘Andy Westwood, professor of government practice at the University of Manchester, said successive governments had encouraged universities to specialise in what they’re best at, as well as in certain types of subjects. “As market reforms have intentionally put pressure on universities to think and act this way, it’s inevitable that some provision will disappear in some institutions,” he said’.

Then I am quoted.

‘Liz Morrish, a visiting fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at York St John University, agreed, highlighting that universities like LSBU served a number of students from less privileged backgrounds. “Languages and the humanities generally cannot be allowed to become the preserve of the Russell Group,” she said’. Critical scholarship could not flourish, Dr Morrish continued, if academics “don’t know from one year to the next whether their high-quality programmes will satisfy whatever shifting metrics university management are setting this year”.’

I was a little concerned about what it appeared I had agreed to. Was it the proposition that closures in languages and arts and humanities are inevitable ? That is certainly not my position. There is no inevitability to the removal of courses and the stripping out of staff expertise. Are these closures the result of government policy – probably, but it is important for all in universities to resist this misguided suite of policies which spring from marketisation. Many view these closures as opportunistic actions justified as post-pandemic restructure by university managers. We can identify the cause of the course closures, but please, let’s not erase the expressions of disapproval.

So just for the record, when I was asked for an opinion by Anna McKie, the author of the article, this was my reply by email.

It has always seemed to me highly ironic that prime ministers and ministers of education of all parties go to great lengths to emphasize the importance in schools of teaching history and modern languages. By contrast, these same politicians fall silent as university departments of history and languages are closed down with consequent loss of expertise and opportunity. Where do they think teachers of history and languages will come from? 

Aston is just another in a steadily increasing list of closures. in fact with the closure of modern languages at Nottingham Trent, the Midlands – one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the country – risks offering nothing but a monoglot education to a large proportion of its students. 

These institutions serve a number of less privileged students and do well on measures of access and widening participation. It is important to note that, at Aston, the management recognise they are going back on a commitment to its Languages for All program which is part of the Access and WP agreement. Languages and the humanities generally cannot be allowed to become the preserve of the Russell Group. Aston has a Business School and also a degree program in International Relations. Do students of business not need languages? And do students of IR not need both languages and history ? 

It is extraordinary that History has been threatened with closure at Aston. The subject was only started in the 2018-19 academic year and identified as an area of strategic growth. It has not yet produced a graduating cohort. How can the outcomes of the subject be assessed ? Furthermore, several well-known scholars were lured to Aston from secure posts elsewhere and now, 24 posts (21 permanent) are targeted for redundancy. As far as I am aware, the research strength and grant income of the department are satisfactory. And I understand several department members were successful in gaining promotion recently just before the redundancy plans were announced. This is poor management at the very least. 

In my piece on the August restructuring regime, I noted that the relief package was being offered to universities which were providing courses focused on the needs of the local economy, and which were committed to academic freedom. I offered this observation:

 ‘How soon before the UK emulates other authoritarian governments, such as Hungary or Brazil, in deciding to outlaw gender studies or other perceived left-wing critical areas? The government seems to want to re-shape universities in terms of curriculum, delivery, recruitment and management. This is, to use an over-worked term in 2020, unprecedented’.

Academic freedom, and areas of critical scholarship are not best defended when scholars don’t know from one year to the next whether their high-quality programs will satisfy whatever shifting metrics university management are setting this year. What is taking place at University of Leicester Business School is the most transparent attack of academic freedom. We are now, very rapidly seeing the destruction of those areas of critical scholarship which make universities cornerstones of liberal democracy, to quote Rowan Williams.

I hope there is material there you can use. As always, I am very happy to discuss further. 

Nobody is redundant

Along with everybody else concerned about higher education, I have been immersed in debates about the future of universities after Covid. I recommend the Post-Pandemic University’s blog and series of online conferences . We discuss how face-to-face and online learning will coexist. How different are the underlying pedagogies for each modality? Scholars describe the huge increase in workload that multi-mode and multi-platform teaching has generated and worry this will further exhaust their mental health and energy.

Amidst this crisis, university managers are contemplating a financial shortfall arising from missing accommodation revenues, costs of increased biosecurity measures and, in some cases, fear of declining student headcount. Among the cost-cutting measures currently being imposed are the non-renewal of short-term contracts, curtailing of research leave, and most controversial in the context of a pandemic recession, compulsory redundancies.

So here are some thoughts on the post-pandemic landscape of universities and their campuses which occurred to me after I received unexpected but welcome messages from a couple of former students in the last few weeks.

James who graduated in the early 2000s got in touch to ask “Are you watching It’s A Sin? It made me realise that the first time I learnt about ‘gay history’ was at university. In your class and in another module called ‘representing aids’ – I can’t remember the tutors name? Anyhow it was the first step into a world where suddenly everything started to make sense – I’d never been so connected to learning. It’s a sin reminded me of sitting in your office and telling you I was gay after your class – and feeling safe. Will never forget that moment. Thanks 🙂 x’.

Mike who also graduated in the early 2000s messaged to say ‘I now look back on my time at NTU with fondness. You stand out as a hugely positive influence on me thanks to your open and engaging teaching style and your natural pastoral approach to conversations on numerous topics which certainly helped to broaden my view of the world and influenced my liberal political stance. So thank you again for the part you played in opening the mind of a somewhat fucked-up young man from a Yorkshire mining town!’.

While these affirmations might confirm all the suspicions Sam Gyimah and other Tory ministers hold about apparently left-wing lecturers, there is a more important message. It is about shared, interactive learning. Learning in a community. Learning and memory. Learning in place. Learning in a place. And most importantly, learning is personal in a very different way from the concept of ‘personalisation’ which is sold by the ed-tech industry and endorsed by vice chancellors and deans across the HE sector.

I have had a few emails from students over the years, reminiscing about course content which has been transformed from the abstraction of a university seminar to becoming personal and immanent. No former student has ever thanked me for raising their income or increasing their return on investment. And yet, this seems to be high among the concerns of the department of education. The OECD has produced a report which attempts to monetise what they see as each year of missed learning for children and university students and the presumed concomitant loss in knowledge and skills.

There are two related streams of long-run economic costs that are central to this discussion. First, affected students whose schooling has been interrupted by the pandemic face long-term losses in income. Second, national economies that go forward with a less skilled labour force face lower economic growth which subtracts from the overall welfare of society.

[Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann 2020. The economic impacts of learning losses. OECD Education Working Papers No. 225]

On Twitter, Ben Williamson, a critic of ed-tech, has been resisting the analysis that less learning = less human capital = weaker productivity, and points out that ‘economization of education is nothing new. Education has been positioned as integral to economic development for years. States compare and compete over education. So “learning loss” is just a new anxiety of a much longer trend to instrumentalize education.’ And he goes on to warn how ed-tech companies are waiting in the wings to provide the ‘digital transformation’ solutions to enable students to catch up.

In February 2021 Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan wrote a report for Education International in which they recognise that a large amount of venture capital is flowing into ed-tech in response to a much more prominent role for data-driven decision making in higher education. Together with the perennial promise of ‘personalised’ educational content, their report predicts a future of ‘unbundled’ courses, and an accelerated process of marginalisation or ‘pausing’ of activities which do not satisfy the monetised criteria for their continuation. It is important to remember that much of this personalisation depends on the collection and use of large amounts of student data which students are obliged to surrender just as a consequence of logging on to the university VLE.

There are other similarly undemocratic and data-driven ways in which universities are being refashioned. In announcing redundancies and course closures, a number of universities (Portsmouth, Liverpool, Brighton, Leeds, Leicester and others) are stripping their own assets. In the case of Portsmouth, the group @Save English Literature at Portsmouth #UCU alleges that decision making has lacked openness. At the University of Sussex, a newly-validated BA course in Languages and Intercultural Studies has been cancelled without consultation.

Some of these decisions appear to constitute major restructuring of the university and curricular provision without going through the regular channels for making such changes. This risks compromising the autonomy of academics to teach and research according to their own judgement. The most egregious violation of this principle is the University of Leicester which recently announced redundancies in English and in Business, with UCU blaming a history of poor financial management.

In English at Leicester, redundancy notices have been served on scholars in medieval literature. If you are thinking that Leicester might have been motivated to nurture its medievalists after the discovery of the remains of Richard III in 2012, well that was probably archived as the last REF’s impact case study. On with the new, as the justification for the cuts, according to management, is to allow greater support for gender and sexuality themes within English literature. Management have seized a tactical opportunity to align this action with their aspiration to ‘shape for excellence’ and towards decolonising the curriculum. If this pronouncement was not so naïve and disingenuous it might find support. But you don’t decolonise the curriculum just by excising every literary period prior to colonisation. As Martin Parker points out in a recent podcast, in the school of business, where a vigorous and renowned critical curriculum already exists, the university management are acting to erase precisely those perspectives. So, critical management studies and political economy are being axed in favour of data analytics, entrepreneurship and leadership along with the erasure of jobs and expertise. These two parallel catastrophes expose the insincerity of a management team trying to camouflage their own opportunistic vandalism as progressive development.

Bad faith and insufferable, gaslighting hypocrisy do long-term damage to ambition, loyalty and trust within an institution. Staff and students are bound to feel poorly served when ratified governance procedures and normal consultation are circumvented to the point whereby the university is left in a weak position academically. Staff suspect politicians and university managers of mounting an ideologically-driven assault on the arts, humanities and social sciences, and it is refreshing to see one university leader calling for resistance to the government onslaught.

As well as echoing government hostility to non-stem subjects, some executive teams seem to be taking their orders from data crunching firms like DataHE or The Knowledge Partnership whose websites suggest they have greater regard for short-term marketing data than for the function or composition of universities. Data HE assert ‘We are expert in data sensitivities…We are data specialists in higher education recruitment and our aim is to accelerate the use of data for good strategy and high performance in universities.’  Despite DataHE’s goal to “increase trust in the use of data”, their blog appears to end in May 2019.

If there is one insight which does have currency within academia, it is that scholars in universities are bound by complex chains of mutual dependence on each other’s knowledge and expertise. Whether you call it collegiality or networks or interdisciplinarity – universities function as intellectual ecosystems. So, international relations is underpinned by history and geography which make use of concepts developed in sociology which has close links with anthropology and social theory whose concepts are developed in cultural studies which informs the study of literature and media. And expertise in all of these disparate but interconnected fields will be represented and strengthened by colleagues in departments of linguistics and modern languages. In science as well, these polymer chains entwine the disciplines and allow new connections to emerge.

It goes without saying that universities are knowledge institutions. Their ability to develop successfully depends on the expertise of the staff who work within them. There are no short cuts to academic careers that require long periods of training in highly specialised areas. This requires academic, personal and financial dedication and all without any guarantee of what the government wishes us to view as ‘return on investment’. In other words, many take the long-term risks, but few are rewarded with the academic post that enables good work and academic freedom.  

It is appalling that these strong but also fragile connections may be carelessly severed by those who are ready to cede institutional autonomy to data consultants or government caprice, or who are willing to see staff numbers fall to in order to finance a new atrium or promote the ultimate status symbol – the overseas campus.

Unless we make decisions on academic grounds and not the data of marketisation, branding, reputation, universities risk irrelevance and collapse into alienation. Research will not be led by curiosity but instead by the kind of ill-informed hunches the prime minister’s advisors tend to have. Higher education will become increasingly standardized, homogenized and dehumanized even as the preposterous contradiction of algorithmically-driven ‘personalization’ is sold to students and university managers alike. It is really important that all staff take part in conversations about the future of universities and the way they may work in the future. Structures of democratic governance and collective decision making have never been more important – or weaker.

‘low quality’ higher education…again

OfS will tackle pockets of low quality higher education provision

This blog post appeared on the Wonkhe site in mid-November 2020. Written by Nick Holland, Competition and Registration Manager at the Office for Students, it had been anticipated by a statement by Universities UK the previous day. In this article, UUK clearly aligned themselves with the presuppositions that there is a serious problem with quality in UKHE and that the sector needs to introduce some proper regulating. This plays into widely-held beliefs amplified by some media outlets hostile to universities, and a government which seeks to undermine them along with other pillars of a democratic society like the legal apparatus, a free press and even parliament itself.

It is dispiriting for those of us who have had quite a lot of faith in the UK’s HE regulatory mechanisms from the Quality Assurance Agency to the internal procedures of validation and periodic review that operate within all universities. Less able to command confidence has been the government’s own regime of the Teaching Excellence Framework, operated by the Office for Students.

Nevertheless, Nick Holland, the author of the piece, appears innocent of these established structures. We apparently exist in some post-lapsarian quality vacuum which needs to be pumped with new regulations, about which OfS has launched a consultation. And so OfS promises to act on new proposals, even if it requires a temporary adjournment of its other preoccupations: freedom of speech  and grade inflation – another piece by Nick Holland.

So below, with some commentary, are excerpts from Holland’s blog. What his choice of discourse does is to install a set of presuppositions about the endemic poor quality of higher education. Furthermore, in this depiction, no evidence can be relied upon apart from a limited set of proxy measures which lend metric infallibility to the conferral of quality. This intervention from the Office for Students seems to reverse several years of avowed ‘light-touch’ regulation in which oversight enabled universities to operate their own bureaucracy of quality assurance and enhancement. But now, the principal metric to be trusted to certify the worthiness of higher education is that of graduate salaries. This is the fulcrum which has elevated the concept of higher education as private good while depressing the notion of higher education as public good. 

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Excerpts from Holland in grey and interpretation in green

While we had planned to consult on our approach to quality and standards in any case, we will of course draw on our experience of regulating through the pandemic in our future regulation of quality and standards.

This was conducted through veiled threats demeaning the quality of online provision with no thought about how we might intervene to support universities. That’s just not what we do.

The OfS has always been able to hold universities and other higher education providers to account for the quality of their courses and the standard of qualifications they award. But these proposals would sharpen our regulatory requirements, raise expectations for quality and student outcomes, and allow us to take action where there are poor quality courses at providers in particular subject areas.

We already have the regulatory framework well embedded in practice and working well. But since the bar for moral panics has gone way north in 2020, we thought we’d create a bit of spontaneous drama.

Quality and standards

Also included are secure standards – so students can be assured that their degree will stand the test of time – and successful outcomes. Subject to consideration of responses to the consultation, we would be looking to use these definitions as part of our regulation – underpinning the baselines we set which all providers must meet in order to be, and remain, registered with us.

Of course, the enduring worth of your degree would be best ensured if we were committed to ensuring that your HEI continues to function. Instead, we are committed to ‘the market’ and providing registration to new, ‘challenger’ institutions which are awarded degree awarding powers almost immediately. It’s hard to imagine a better way to undermine the hard-won accreditation of your university. And what do we mean by ‘outcomes’? Well, that changes all the time. Sometimes it means ‘good degrees’ but then we clamp down when universities give too many of them. We’re a bit clearer what it means this month later on.

Crucially, we are also saying that all higher education providers must provide quality for all groups of students. That means two things. First, if we are worried that certain groups of students are being adversely affected, we can swiftly intervene. Second, we are saying – unequivocally – that is not acceptable for providers to use the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds they have as an excuse for poor outcomes. Doing so creates a skewed playing field, where poor performance for disadvantaged students is effectively allowed. That is untenable, and unfair to those students who have often overcome the odds to enter higher education. Obstacles to attainment for these groups need to be removed and not hidden behind.

See what I did there? First I install a presupposition that not all HEIs provide a quality education for all students. That charges universities with the responsibility to fully compensate for the social, educational, cultural and systemic inequalities that particular groups of students encounter. For example, the long periods of missed education that disabled students or care-experienced students have faced. And don’t make excuses for the alienation that many BEM or gay students have experienced all through school – that’s up to universities to fix. It’s helpful to scapegoat universities as it makes us popular with government when we undermine public trust in them.

The plans also allow us to intervene at a subject level if we have concerns. This intervention really matters. Most universities and other higher education providers offer high quality higher education across the board.

I had to say this. But important to rattle that sabre every time I throw them a compliment.

But at some providers, we have been concerned about pockets of low-quality provision. Being able to intervene at subject level will make a real difference. As well as assessing data on student outcomes we will also continue to welcome notifications from students alerting us to issues and concerns about the quality of their course.

Obviously, you’d be better making your views known through the various structures available at your HEI, from course committees, to student unions or even the NSS. But here at OfS, while we don’t endorse ‘cancel culture,’ we do approve of snitch culture, and we have always envied the direct reporting line offered by ‘rate your professor’.

Toughening up

Choosing a section title that’s maximally offensive especially during a pandemic.

Ensuring students have every opportunity to achieve successful outcomes on their courses remains an important OfS priority. That is why we are focusing on the number of students who progress to the end of their course and go on to managerial and professional employment or higher-level study. We are proposing to update – and toughen – our requirements for the minimum performance we would expect from any university or other higher education provider.

I told you we’d be clearer what ‘outcomes’ means. In 2020, we’ve pretty much settled on it meaning getting a well-paid job. Because we want students to pay back their loans. Yes, we’ve reduced the whole university experience to pretty much that.

Deciding on the numerical values for these minimum baselines will take time and be subject to further consultation, but we will have higher expectations for providers for all of their students.

I think we can guess what that baseline will be…because we want students to pay back their loans.

These are important proposals, which will help to properly protect students. Please do take the time to have your say in the consultation, which runs from today until January 12.

Don’t waste your time. We’ve already decided.

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That subject level data again…..

It’s fascinating to trace the meandering semantics and pursuit of ‘low quality degrees’ over the years. It has meant many things, from accusations of ‘lamentable’ teaching to complaints that too often degrees do not lead to high-paying jobs. While the government boldly alleges poor quality of provision and outcomes in the public HE sector, by contrast, they are happy to support a favoured ‘challenger institution’ by conferring (via QAA) degree awarding powers on the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology before it has even had a graduating cohort.

Such indulgence is not bestowed on other institutions and an assemblage of metrics must be found to identify courses that the government rather wishes would disappear. Chief among them, we suspect, might be media studies, gender studies, creative arts and the more critical humanities and social science subjects generally.

David Kernohan of WONKHE (30^th November) writes that OfS were due to publish data and a report entitled Start to Success representing the latest attempt to devise a diagnostic quality tool. To save them the trouble, Kernohan has produced a draft version mapping data points representing all HE courses in the UK against projections of non-continuation of students on courses and data from Graduate Outcomes on “highly skilled” graduate employment. Kernohan himself suspects that this metric may be low quality.

What we find is that many of the courses the government denounces, or that universities have been busy eradicating, perform well against these metrics. In the lower quadrant of the quality mapping are quite a lot of law, business, civil engineering and computer science courses, while in the higher quadrant are many courses in Arabic, Classics, English and Geography. Also, some courses at higher status universities manifest surprisingly low scores, while some less-favoured courses like media studies at lower-ranked universities turn up scores above 9/10. Like Kernohan, I am not attempting to confer credibility on these metrics; instead we need to recognise that in searching for ‘low-quality courses’ to liquidate in the name of regulatory scrupulosity, the casualties may not be the government’s preferred candidates. If the government wants to purge those courses which develop critical questioning and an awareness of social justice, then coercion and apparent metric infallibility will not deliver that result. They will have to emulate the more authoritarian approach adopted by Victor Orban in Hungary. They will need to name the courses they disapprove of and ban them. I wonder how close we are to that eventuality? The culture warriors are laying the groundwork and a receptive post-truth society might see it through.