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.

Advertisement

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.

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.

Higher education and pandemic uncertainty

Anyone managing, working in, studying at or applying to a university is facing uncertainty during a pandemic spring that may extend into a pandemic autumn.

Wonkhe has published four informative pieces on the scale of the economic challenge for universities: by David Kernohan here  and  here , and Jim Dickinson here.  In another, Jo Grady, General Secretary of UCU, writes:

A conservative estimate on the impact of Covid-19 on our universities by London Economics identified a £2.5bn funding black hole, which would result in a £6bn shock for the economy and a loss of around 60,000 jobs – half directly in universities and the rest in the communities they serve. It is an alarming prospect.

What was unexpected was a sudden curveball from the government on student number controls. The Office for Students had already issued an injunction not to implement any admissions policies which might cause instability in the sector. This was interpreted as a warning to those universities which had been named and shamed for offering ‘conditional-unconditional’ offers in the hopes of grasping some certitude by luring applicants from the clutches of more prestigious, but selective universities. But then the government saw fit to destabilize the admissions process all on its own. The award of 5,000 places on the basis of selective metrics was a calculated decision to further rig a market which has stubbornly refused to bend to incentives over the years to deliver market supremacy to the Russell Group. David Kernohan explains:

The ability to bid for a total of 5,000 places in architecture, sciences, maths, social work, engineering (and engineering geology), and veterinary science is linked not to TEF itself – but to the data underlying two TEF metrics as absolute values. Additional places are only available if your continuation rate is over 90 per cent, and your graduate highly skilled employment or further study rate is above 75 per cent.

So we have eligibility criteria that actively encourage the growth of providers that recruit students overwhelmingly from well-to-do backgrounds. And this is a deliberate choice.

For 2020/ 2021, most universities are offering the prospect of some face to face teaching, while presenting online lectures as something they have been ‘aspiring’ to for a long time. In fact, they had seemed just as happy with Panopto lecture capture and its dual promises of surveillance and strike breaking opportunities. But never let a pandemic forestall the opportunity for some PR casuistry from Universities UK and some individual universities.

It was fantastic to see our blended approach to online and face-to-face learning being held up as an example to follow yesterday by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Education Select Committee Chair Robert Halfon MP.

…boasted Nottingham Trent.

However, it may have been premature to announce death of traditional campus-based learning. The president of Indiana University, Michael McRobbie, quoted in the Times Higher said “One thing we have learned definitively is that students do not want to be locked in their parents’ basement for four years doing their degree online.”  But we wait to see if the yoyo-ing ‘market’ and online delivery will carry much appeal for students who are reportedly considering deferring entry until September 2021. Many also support delaying the academic year.

If students are feeling anxious, academics are feeling the pressure of panicked demands for increased research activity from managers who at the same time are threatening redundancies.  Even as academics have struggled with home-based working, some university research mangers have demanded ‘business as usual’. This has provoked an instant reality check from contributors to academic Twitter, and this from Daphne S. Ling in a Nature article entitled ‘This pandemic is not an extended sabbatical’.

Many of us are also dealing with precarious housing, food and financial insecurity, unexpected care of children and relatives, exacerbation of chronic physical illness and mental-health struggles, family members working on the frontlines and separation from families and friends. Our struggles, anxiety, fear and grief are real. We don’t all have access to the same resources or support systems, and not everyone’s struggles look the same. Disparaging messages about productivity are especially toxic to people struggling with their mental health who have been cut off from their support networks.

The relentless insistence on productivity has been on display at the University of Strathclyde where there has been no relaxation of pressure to produce world-leading REF outputs from the University of Strathclyde. Below is a screenshot of the email recently sent to academic staff. Despite the attempt to camouflage the purpose of this message as ‘support’, the message from management is transparent and threatening. Don’t you dare let your ‘outputs’ fall or your citations diminish, even though you may have little control over either.

On a more promising, if contradictory, note, it is refreshing to see a new commitment to mental health in universities. This will be a priority says Julia Buckingham, President of Universities UK who asks UK vice chancellors to commit to mentally healthy universities, heralding the Step Change program, which, in partnership with the Student Minds charity, promises a new whole-university approach which puts equal emphasis on staff and student mental health.

We encourage our members to adopt a whole university approach to mental health, ensuring that mental health and wellbeing are a core part of all university activities. Strong and visible leadership is essential to unlock the changes we all want to see”…“We need to see senior leaders speaking out and promoting open and supportive conversations about mental health, involving students and staff in a collective commitment to improve outcomes for all.

Readers of this blog may be familiar with my account of trying to have one of those conversations with students about staff mental health. I imagine there will remain some similar limits to the scope of those conversations.

In my subsequent investigations (here and here) of the mental health climate for staff in universities, I have made quite a few recommendations on how this might be ameliorated in terms of structural changes and realistic expectations of staff. One recommendation which now seems doomed is any commitment to sustainable careers for new PhDs, post-doctoral researchers and newly appointed lecturers. In the US and England – market-dominated higher education systems – the price is being paid by early career and precarious academics who now face hiring freezes which will blunt their ability to get a career launched. Their prospects may never recover. If they were graduating in most EU countries, their research could continue.

The most significant issue that has been brought into focus by the pandemic is that a higher education system controlled by the market is not as robust as market fundamentalists like to insist. While there are no reported redundancies in Germany, and Dutch academics have been awarded a pay rise, we in England are obliged to gamble the future of universities on tuition fee income and a constant flow of students from outside the EU. We are about to witness the consequence of a depletion of both sources of income. The claim has frequently been made that higher education in the UK has been spared the consequences of austerity. That claim will not be repeated as we see the failure of the strategy of marketisation to counter the vulnerabilities revealed by an unforeseen crisis. Today The Times pronounces, “The likely bankruptcy of some institutions would be neither surprising nor particularly regretful.”   There seems to be a real chance that England will see its universities decimated, while those of other major economies will strengthen. Let’s hope those whose educational choices are so casually dismissed by The Times will fight for the university places that will expand their opportunities and they have qualified for.

 

 

 

 

When does Prevent prevent freedom of speech?

A version of this article first appeared on *HE: Policy and markets in higher education, published by Research Fortnight on 19th September 2017 http://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1370192

Earlier this year I was expecting to deliver a talk to a UCU meeting called to oppose the University of Warwick management’s proposal to reform Statute 24. This refers to amendments to the University’s procedures for Disciplinary, Grievance, Redundancy and Removal for Incapacity on Medical Grounds for Academic Staff. I had been asked seven days previously to address the meeting, but because Warwick has a requirement to give three weeks’ notice for approval of a visiting speaker, the organisers felt the meeting was unable to proceed.

Warwick’s ‘three week rule’ is one of the procedures adopted by the university under the government’s Prevent agenda.  I was invited to an emergency meeting and the union organisers needed to find a speaker fast. Understandably, they had other things on their minds and forgot to apply for speaker approval. Warwick administrators quickly responded to say that they had received no application for speaker approval, and indeed would not have refused any application on my behalf. There is, apparently, a procedure which covers the eventuality which occurred:

The principal organiser must ensure sufficient time for the HoD or nominee to give consideration to any concerns, and for the University to review the request should the HoD or nominee deem this necessary. If so, and where possible, the University should be notified of the speaker request in question at least three weeks prior to the event, to enable a full risk assessment to be conducted and any mitigating arrangements to be put in place. If it is not possible to provide three weeks’ notice, the department should inform the University as soon as practicable.

Perhaps staff were not well informed about this.

Like most academics, I do a fair amount of speaking at conferences and events, and this was my first encounter with Prevent or any need to get prior approval before appearing on campus. A three week notice period for all speakers seemed to me rather excessive. However inadvertent, the resulting cancellation acted as an impediment to the free flow of discussion, and has hindered organisation of a trade union activity.

Is there scope within Prevent to do things differently? I decided to do a bit of research. I started with the HM Government Prevent Duty Guidance for Higher Education.

When deciding whether or not to host a particular speaker, RHEBs should consider carefully whether the views being expressed, or likely to be expressed, constitute extremist views that risk drawing people into terrorism or are shared by terrorist groups.

RHEB – Relevant Higher Education Bodies. The government would always rather use an exclusionary acronym than call them universities, but this was a new one on me. Mind you, this was written in 2015, before we had to start calling them ‘providers’. The document contained a lot of information about defining terrorism, assessing risk and forming action plans, but no specific guidance on implementation. That advice is provided in a 44 page document from Universities UK on external speakers in higher education institutions.

There is a flow chart for speaker approval, and guidance on best practice for communicating the policy and timeline. Nowhere is a review period of three weeks suggested.

Some of the advice contained in this document, however, is almost guaranteed to impinge on academic freedom. For instance page 20:

Who is chairing the meeting? Are they sufficiently qualified to provide balance and challenge during the event? What is their stance on the topic under discussion and is this likely to impact the smooth running of the event?

Will hosting the speaker have reputational risks for the institution? Is the event likely to attract media attention and if so how can the university manage this effectively?

In my case, since I had been asked to speak in opposition to a proposal by the university’s management, this might have been unsympathetically construed as posing a reputational risk for the university. So the answers to the above questions, and the assessment of risk, may reflect the assessor’s stance and position in the institutional hierarchy.

An interesting issue arises on page 32 in that academic freedom does not necessarily apply to visiting speakers. We learn this is because academic freedom pertains only to teaching within a university:

The legal basis for academic freedom focuses on the teaching activities of staff and the freedom of institutions and their staff to determine admission criteria and the content of courses. Beyond the freedom of speech provisions, the legal framework does not extend academic freedom to the activities of visiting speakers.

And so to the local implementation of the policy at Warwick. The Warwick Prevent Action plan (07/11/2016) says:

Regulation 29 has been completely rearticulated to better foreground the University’s commitment to Freedom of Speech. The Regulation is complemented by a suite of supporting procedures for the approval of external speakers. This includes a light-touch approach for academic visitors and for external speakers associated with commercial conferences.

Regulation 29 says very little about freedom of speech; it has rather more to say about risk assessment and obligations to adhere to guidelines on university branding.

Another document outlines procedures for the approval of external speakers for Students’ Union, Student-Led, and Institutional-Level Events.

Organisers of events involving external speakers encompassed by these obligations, must complete and submit the External Speaker Request Form at least three weeks prior to the event taking place. The event must not be confirmed with the guest speaker until approval has been received from the University or the Students’ Union.

A requirement to give three weeks’ notice does not seem like ‘light touch’, but perhaps local culture permits the rule’s uneven application. I attended a conference at Warwick this year at which a speaker was thanked for stepping in at the last minute. Nevertheless, if you are a union official, you might be deterred by the suspicion that you could be under greater scrutiny.  Clearly my union hosts were cautious about getting their fingers burned, and that was enough to deny a union meeting a knowledgeable speaker.

My experience, and a swift survey of some available university policies, tells me that the Prevent agenda applies with differing degrees of scrupulosity across the sector. Despite Warwick’s wish to appear ‘light touch’, their procedure is lengthy and entails a risk assessment which must apparently be conducted by management. There are other institutions whose policies merely ask that organisers undertake their own risk assessment, and then ‘escalate’ to management if there is a reason for concern.

The University of Bristol policy states:

The Event Organiser (the person responsible for the event) must undertake a self-assessment (using the questions in section 2) to determine whether further scrutiny and support from the University are required. If the Event Organiser reasonably decides that there are no issues, the event can go ahead. It is anticipated that the vast majority of events organised will fall into this category.

Commendably, Nottingham Trent University does not distinguish between internal and external speakers and also allows organisers to make their own assessment of risk:

Formal approval from the University must be obtained, in advance, for any event to be held on the University’s premises (whether or not an external speaker is involved) where it is expected, or reasonably foreseeable, that the event will raise controversial issues which may risk infringement of or non-compliance with the University’s Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech.

These are preferable models to follow as they signify a high degree of trust in the judgement of members of the university. This is appropriate for learned, intelligent, responsible scholars and I can’t imagine how a vigorous research culture can thrive without this. Given that universities are currently under the cosh again on the issue of academic freedom, perhaps they can be encouraged to give some thought to reforming procedures which unnecessarily curb the freedom of all speakers to spontaneously address issues as they arise.

A day later and this thoughtful piece appeared from Smita Jamdar on the tensions between the government’s insistance on Prevent, and new regulatory powers on freedom of speech on university campuses.

 

 

Firsts Among Equals? Why have the number of first class degrees increased so dramatically?

“Figures on degree scores from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, analysed by the Press Association, show that 40 higher education institutions saw the proportion of firsts rise by more than 10 percentage points between 2010-11 and 2015-16” (Simon Baker, Times Higher, July 20^th 2017). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sharp-increase-first-class-degrees-triggers-standards-debate

Once again the annual HESA figures on degree classifications have set in motion an outpouring of consternation from broadsheets and tabloid newspapers alike. Photos two weeks ago of conventionally attractive, white, and mostly female students tossing their mortarboards are now displaced by sneers and insinuations that their achievements have been compromised by a wanton lowering of standards. Simon Baker’s piece shows some startling figures: The University of Surrey’s proportion of first class graduates has doubled between 2011 and 2017 from 19.3% to 41.2%, while firsts at the University of East Anglia have tripled from 12.5% to 34%. The article offers some explanations for the large increase: better teaching, higher entry standards to universities, students working harder, the effect of students paying higher fees; league tables which reward high percentages of ‘good degrees’. This year there is an additional incentive to send students out with a first or upper second class degree – many employers demand them, and the TEF rewards institutions with solid track records of graduate employment. But for the newspapers, I suppose it is what they call ‘low hanging fruit’ – something they understand so little about, it is easy to distort the facts and take a whack at universities, ever a target for an eye-bulging populist. You almost expect to see Lord Adonis weighing in.

I think I can offer some insight into why the achievement of students has risen in the past 6 or 7 years. For over twenty years I was actively involved in quality exercises at subject, department and institutional level. I also gained considerable experience as an external examiner. Progress in academic standards and quality has been in process throughout my career, and it seemed to me we had achieved peak criterion-referenced scrupulosity. No longer is the award of a first class degree treated as some kind of mysterious alchemy, recognised only by possessors of an equal or superior first class mind. The culture of metrics and key performance indicators has made itself known to students in the form of learning outcomes and assessment criteria. This means that students are not in the dark about ‘what the lecturer wants’, or ‘what do I need to do to get a first’. The approach to advanced learning that elicits such questions is, to my mind, inherently flawed, but nevertheless, that’s where we are in UK universities. The system has constructed a student who is a consumer with anxieties which must be allayed by the provision of roadmaps to success.

We have also been led in this direction by very sound pedagogy. We now know that the best way to learn is by having a go, and then getting advice from someone whose knowledge and experience can help you improve. To that end, students are given many forms of feedback during their course, among them formative and summative feedback. An assessment may be broken down into, for example, a proposal which is marked and returned with comments (formative), and then an essay or project which a student can write up in the light of this feedback (summative). Lecturers are also encouraged to make available ‘exemplars’ which show how a previous student has attempted the exercise (anonymised, and with permission, of course). These will be accompanied with a commentary which clarifies exactly how the student has met the marking criteria, and why the grade was achieved.

The marking criteria themselves are extremely explicit, and the marker will indicate, for each of the criteria, exactly which level has been achieved. The comments will give guidance on how the student could improve to the next level. This is how quality feedback should work – the student knows exactly where the areas of strength and weakness are, and can work to address them. No surprise then, if more students learn to follow these recommendations in order to achieve the higher grades.

And for the marker too, there are surprises. Sometimes the mark you originally had in your head after reading an essay will change once you start to systematically align your marks with the criteria.

Additionally, for many years external examiners have been encouraging internal markers to extend the range of marks given. It is easy to see how many more students ended up with a 2.2 or a 2.1 when the vast majority of their marks over three years were between 50-69%. If they were awarded a first class mark, this would probably be between 70-74% so it was unlikely to tilt the average over the first class threshold. More recently, the top end of the scale has been opened up because – well, not all first class papers are equally good. So now a student may receive 96% for an exceptional piece which is regarded by markers as almost of publishable standard. This would be very rare. But there can be marks in the 80% range for excellent work, as well as a solid 70+% for the very good pieces. A few of these stellar grades, and you will get more clear, numerical firsts emerging.

Even in pre-HESA, NSS and TEF days, it was never the case that all first were awarded on the basis of reaching the numerical threshold of 70%. This was largely to take into account the rather parsimonious award of marks over 70% for essays and exams, and the artificial compression of those first class marks into the 70-75% range. Very few candidates would end their studies with an aggregated mark of over 70%, so exam boards would consider a candidate for ‘promotion’ to a higher grade if their score fell within 1-2% of the first class borderline. Also, scores were weighted to reflect ‘exit velocity’, so the student who improved over the course of their degree and achieved mostly first class marks in their final year, would graduate with the higher classification. There were other locally-agreed regulations, but as far as I am aware, most universities acted to make sure students were awarded a degree classification which reflected their ability and scholarly improvement. This worked well.

The problem, if it is a problem, is that we now have two forces of uplift operating at the same time: the broadening of the first class marking range, and the regulations for ‘promotion’ to the higher degree classification. If both are applied, it is not surprising that 20-25% of candidates qualify for a first. This would explain the very large increase from 2010/11 to 2016/17.

I am not making any recommendations here, merely trying to add some clarity and reason to what has become a rather volatile issue. I have avoided the term ’grade inflation’ because this oversimplifies the confluence of processes and rationales which have led to the current situation. Universities must prioritise good practice and fairness in teaching, learning and assessment. But they must also guard against the more perverse incentives presented by consumerism, student satisfaction, league tables and the TEF.

 

 

Defend Academic Freedom at Warwick

This is the script of what I hoped to deliver today (10^th May) to a UCU meeting called to oppose the University of Warwick management’s proposal to reform Statute 24, and specifically the University’s procedures for Disciplinary, Grievance, Redundancy and Removal for Incapacity on Medical Grounds for Academic Staff. I was asked on Tuesday May 2^nd to address the meeting. Sadly, due to Warwick’s policy under the government’s Prevent agenda, there is a requirement to give three weeks’ notice for approval of a visiting speaker. The  organisers were evidently aware of this regulation and realised they had not left enough time to apply:

“The principal organiser must ensure sufficient time for the HoD or nominee to give consideration to any concerns, and for the University to review the request should the HoD or nominee deem this necessary. If so, and where possible, the University should be notified of the speaker request in question at least three weeks prior to the event, to enable a full risk assessment to be conducted and any mitigating arrangements to be put in place. If it is not possible to provide three weeks’ notice, the department should inform the University as soon as practicable.”

So I was not able to address an emergency meeting on important union business.  But at least I can blog.

If the amended Statute 24 and ordinances pass, Warwick UCU feel that academic freedom at the university would be weakened. I agree with them, and my belief is underpinned by personal experience.

If you care about the attempted roll-back of academic freedom in UK universities, please sign this petition for Warwick UCU.

I was a student back in 1981 when Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph launched the first governmental assault on public universities. The outcome was the rescinding of tenure for academics. I remember at the time there was a competition in the university staff bulletin. These were often jokey things, like write a reference for the person you’d most like to get rid of from your department. But this one was genuinely thought-provoking: ‘write a speech defending tenure to a steelworker from Consett’. That was a ‘check your privilege’ moment. If it was a hard sell in 1981, it is seems more defensible now. We know what abolition of tenure looks like 36 years on. We have seen the steady erosion of academic freedom and job security. We have seen the undermining of shared governance in universities, and how swiftly the space emptied of democracy has been exploited by authoritarian management structures.

Universities used to be based on collegiality and shared governance. The Union has a role in negotiation, but the starting point in universities should be staff participation in decisions on how the university is run. If our role is to defend democratic values in the public sphere, we should be able to model that within our own walls. It is clear that we have rather neglectfully buried our heads, while shared values, traditions and assumptions have been overridden in the corporate university. Our colleagues in the US are appalled at our lack of tenure and academic freedom. They are busy protesting rescinding of tenure in Wisconsin, and threats in Iowa. Meanwhile, in Hungary, thousands took to the streets when the government threatened to close an entire university.

Now that we can see the danger, why aren’t we in the UK protesting more widely?

We can’t wind the clock back, but for heaven’s sake, at least we deserve protection from summary dismissal and attacks on academic freedom. Let’s start there. Take a look at what is being proposed at Leeds University – dismissal for ‘some other substantial reason’:

“The university wants to add a new reason for dismissal ‘some other substantial reason’ to our Statutes, which would make it easier to dismiss people for any reason. For example, a conflict of interest or personality clash, third party pressure, raising insufficient funding, not publishing enough, not having a PhD, or criticising management.” Leeds UCU

As CARA – Council for At-Risk Academics  – says, ‘you only need to kill one academic to silence a hundreds’ so our academic freedom is worth protecting.

So, we need to educate UCU members and academic staff members about their clear rights to academic freedom. Here is section 27 of the UNESCO Constitution:

27. The maintaining of the above international standards should be upheld in the interest of higher education internationally and within the country. To do so, the principle of academic freedom should be scrupulously observed. Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies.

[http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13144&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html]

And the UCU Statement on Academic Freedom:

• Freedom in teaching and discussion

• Freedom in carrying out research without commercial or political interference

• Freedom to disseminate and publish one’s research findings

• Freedom from institutional censorship, including the right to express one’s opinion publicly about the institution or the education system in which one works

• Freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies, including trade unions

[https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/5128/Academic-freedom–a-guide-for-early-careers-staff/pdf/Academic_freedom_leaflet.pdf ]

All of these are reflected in the 1988 Education Reform Act and this is the basis for current statutes and articles of government in UK universities. However, they are not always well supported by the nation’s vice chancellors. I’d suggest Sir Keith Burnett at Sheffield is a lone beacon among them for academic freedom, saying: “Great teaching is not inconsistent with academic freedom, it depends upon it.”

Certainly Warwick’s proposed amendment to Statute 24 says nothing about freedom to criticise the institution or system in which one works. In fact, the paragraph d) of the amendment to the statement on academic freedom reads: “To avoid unlawful discrimination and promote equality of opportunity, dignity at work and good relations with the University.” Are employees obliged to be on good terms with ‘the university’ at all times, even if its management does things they don’t agree with? Some of us know from experience that that any form of controversy or critique can be regarded by management as causing reputational damage. That might lead to a charge of gross misconduct, and as far as I can see, the most likely outcome for that is instant dismissal. But universities are not above the law, and they should not try to amend their statutes to circumvent it.

If you think we have no need to fear for our freedoms, just remember that several colleagues have reported on Twitter that they have been forbidden from speaking beyond their area of designated expertise, or even from speaking about their research during the election campaign.

Warwick is also seeking to amend its disciplinary code. The right to legal representation will no longer be part of the procedure. From the FAQ:

“The use of legal representation in any internal proceedings creates an overly adversarial environment, not least for the individual member of staff involved. Often the use of legal representatives results in an overly legalistic approach to the issues to be determined and this does not necessarily assist any party, nor is it in line with general good employment practice or the ACAS Code of Practice”.

Really? Do they think you just sailed up the river? Let’s imagine what might have happened to a rather well known professor at Warwick if he had not had legal representation.

Would absence of a lawyer make the disciplinary process less confrontational ? Add clarity ?  In short, no, of course not. But there are two points to raise here.

If the experience of colleagues at a couple of other universities in the Midlands are any guide, there will be many more disciplinaries for what most reasonable people would regard as minor infractions. These take up enormous time and energy and are stressful, not to mention the expense of these, and the drain on the university’s main source of income – student fees.

Second point – Regardless of whether the wording in the statute on academic freedom remains unchanged, disciplinaries will be used to curtail academic freedom, as they were in my case. I wrote a blog piece about the causes of the epidemic of work-related stress in academia – and chose to talk to students about this. The piece was re-published on the Times Higher website where it trended for 4 days. That eventually attracted the attention of management and I found myself facing a 12-week disciplinary process. Previously, I had served 30 years without so much as a late library book. There was no doubt in my mind about the intention to silence me as a critical voice. Incidentally, I had not mentioned the university that employed me, because the piece wasn’t about them. It was about a system that has become an ‘anxiety machine’ as Richard Hall calls it.

I notice that Warwick’s proposed disciplinary policy allows appeal on the grounds of academic freedom. But from the management perspective, it is never about academic freedom. There are always other justifications for alleging gross misconduct. As long as the charges are in place, the actual behaviours pinned on them tend to be rather fungible. But management are pretending that this is a strengthening of academic freedom. It is anything but.

I resigned because for me the capacity to do the job rests entirely on academic freedom. Without that, there seemed no point in turning up. So take note of the mushrooming of these procedures being taken against staff for fairly minor infractions and expect summary dismissals or written warnings that inhibit further risk-taking with independent thought. Be warned. This is the direction of travel in universities.

Another bullying tactic is the use of Capacity Procedures in accordance with performance management and quite unrealistic targets, for example, for grant capture.  In several universities, professors have faced redundancy, performance management, or even in one case, being told that the criteria have shifted and they can be judged to no longer ‘map over’ to the new role descriptor. This is inhumane. In several universities, I have seen the result of this to be incapacitating stress, professional and personal breakdown. It is the academic equivalent of being dragged off the plane. In the words of the late Stefan Grimm, ‘they treat professors like shit’.

Democratic structures must be built from the ground up. They will not materialize through authoritarian diktat. It is now clear that highly qualified and able people work much better in a high-trust environment. It is really important to remember that management are not the university. The university is made up of an entire community. Nobody ever came to a university because of the Human Resources department or its disciplinary policy. And as Rob Cuthbert has written

“It behoves managers to remember that as managers they make no direct contribution to the real work of the university – teaching and research. They are an overhead and, like all overheads, they need to justify their existence.” [What’s wrong with management in higher education? April 28, 2017 by SRHE News Blog

Managers are overheads. Let’s all remember that.

Steps to resistance – what works. A case study of RTB from Newcastle University.

The details of The Newcastle University Raising the Bar initiative were well-reported in the Times Higher in 2015 . There was an attempt to formalize outcomes-based performance management, whereby academics would be judged by metrics on financialized targets for grant capture, REF ‘outputs’ at grade 3 or 4; PhD student throughput etc. I have blogged about this here.

After academic staff protested, organised and negotiated further, the proposal was withdrawn last summer. I like to think of it as a successful culture hack towards more democracy and civility within the university. I have been collaborating with a collective from Newcastle known as the Analogue University. We have written a chapter (unpublished but forthcoming) on the context of management by metrics, and the Analogue University collective has reported on their extensive research project which documented the resistance to Raising the Bar (RTB). The following were the main strategies that were used successfully in countering the management’s narrative. The summary and quotations are used with kind permission of the Analogue University collective.

Organise and mobilise support

Use whatever democratic structures are available to you within the university. A massive turnout at school, department and union meetings is important in voicing concerns and planning strategies for opposition. Try and get student support and press coverage. Both will make an impact. Get an online petition together, and ask prominent professors to write a letter to management. Within three days over 3,500 people worldwide had signed the petition against RTB at Newcastle.

Deconstruct management-speak

Start with the pronouns “we” (Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming; Machin and Per, 2016). Often in these documents there is a deceptive ambiguity about ‘we’. It is a quirk of the English language that ‘we’ can be both inclusive and exclusive. These documents which claim to be ‘modernising’ and bringing procedures up to date with recent legislation usually exploit that. So ‘we’ retains both its managerial prerogative and its pretence at inclusivity. However, the Warwick communications from Provost Christine Ennew are unusual in their use of the exclusive ‘we’, demonstrating that the innovation is led and imposed by management:

We began consultation with the Trade Unions in December 2016.

We have published the revised statutes, ordinances and policies in draft so that you can see the proposed changes.

We have discussed the proposals with the University Council, Heads of Department and our Trade Unions.

We are proposing.

We would like to hear views from all of our staff community.

And if there is any doubt about the managerial exclusivity:

If you are a member of a Trade Union, you will have the opportunity to contribute to this process through your Unions.

Publicize the story – especially social media

There is now a lot of evidence that shows when you get an intransigent management, using social media can bring about results. “Since the RTB was primarily driven by a desire to raise Newcastle University’s reputation as a premier research institution, the activists felt that the management would be more receptive to their demands if they saw the university in the news for the wrong reasons. The news and social media platforms such as Times Higher Education (THE) and Facebook were used to publicize the growing dissatisfaction and opposition to RTB”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]. Notice this would violate the new statute which requires “good relations with the University”.

“The research project succeeded in getting public intellectuals who have written on the threat of neoliberalism to the humanities, such as Martha Nussbaum, Marilyn Strathern, Stefan Colini, and Rowan Williams to join its advisory board. Their very presence drew attention to the dispute and helped ensure it was more widely publicised. As one key goal of RTB was raising the reputation of the university internationally, such attention risked undermining RTB by negatively damaging the reputation”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017 forthcoming]. Again, would this invite disciplinary action under the proposed amendments?

Industrial action

“In the summer of 2016, after all the attempts at getting the university management to withdraw it failed, the UCU moved towards industrial action in the form of Action Short of a Strike (ASOS), principally a marking boycott. This precipitated a swift climbdown on the part of management and a successful resolution of the dispute in favour of the Union and its members”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]

Articulate an alternative vision and vocabulary of excellence in academia

The activists felt that they ‘fought hard but without bitterness’. It was important for them to not personalise the campaign as being against the VC and senior management. An alternative to RTB was drafted under the title ‘Improving Research Together’ (IRT).This recognised the need to be seen to perform well in key audit exercises, and asked management to withdraw RiPE and engage in the proposed IRT alternative as, “an inclusive, collegial, evidence-based, bottom-up process to devise a non-coercive framework in which to foster a higher-performing research community”(Academic Frameworks for Research Improvement, Newcastle University / University and College Union, June 6, 2016). [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]

TEF Times: 2nd Reading of the HE Bill

In July 2016 we are contemplating a new period of instability for universities in the UK, and with the passing of the 2^nd reading of HE Bill, things could quickly get a lot worse. The EU Referendum result has already created uncertainty regarding the future of much of our research funding. It seems there is much uncertainty at the top of UKHE: Universities UK (‘the definitive voice of UK universities’) has asked for the government to press the pause button on HE reform , Meanwhile, the vice-chancellors of Nottingham Trent and Exeter Universities argue for forging ahead with reform and the implementation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

Maddalaine Ansell, CEO of the University Alliance, appears to agree with the latter in her prediction that the HE Bill will take the sector to calmer waters.  Ansell’s premise is that there will be a benefit from having all legislation relating to HE encompassed in one piece of legislation: The Higher Education and Research Act 2017. Except it won’t, of course. A moment’s reflection allows us to list student loans, students with disabilities, and academic freedom – all of which have separate legislation. Additionally, Ansell appears to overlook the added complications of teaching and research which will now be overseen by different government departments since Theresa May’s July ministerial reshuffle. It is a complicated picture, and I cannot see any advantage to deepening it.

Let us remind ourselves just how disruptive these changes proposed by the White Paper entitled Success as a Knowledge Economy (SKE) will be. They include an invitation to new private ‘challenger institutions’ who may be granted degree-awarding powers more quickly than previous regulation allowed. There are changes proposed to governance, academic freedom and protections against arbitrary dismissal which appear to infringe the historic autonomy that universities enjoyed from government. A critique of the proposed changes can be found in an Alternative White Paper (AWP), authored by a group of concerned academics can be found here.

The most unnecessary and wasteful plan in the White Paper is for a Teaching Excellence Framework. This has been proposed to correct supposedly ‘lamentable’ teaching (AWP p28). The paragraphs which outline how this will work display some baffling logical linkages. Here are some of the assertions made in the paragraphs which outline the justification for the TEF:

• higher education leads to better employment outcomes, but these outcomes are not consistent;
• there is considerable variation in employment outcomes and employability amongst subjects and across institutions;
• students often enter HE with little information to guide their choices;
• students often say they would have chosen a different course;
• the importance of students having access to a wide array of work experience opportunities;
• a recent IFS study also found huge variance in graduate earnings depending on choice of subject and institution, as well as background;
• higher average earnings mean that graduates make an important contribution to society through their tax revenues;
• employers and HE providers working together on curriculum design, and graduates having the ‘soft skills’ they need to thrive in the work environment. (SKE p42).

Apparently, the answer to all of these is the TEF which they claim will raise teaching standards. From 2018/19, an award of excellent or outstanding will permit an HEI to increase its fees in line with inflation. Others, even those meeting expectations, will suffer various degrees of attrition and their students condemned to a ‘choice’ of an educational resource eroded by inflation.

The government remains confident that good teaching can be measured on an institutional basis, but the first point to emphasize is that these measures are, as the White Paper admits, proxies, not measures of good teaching which transpires in classrooms and other learning contexts.

“Such things can be measured: students assess their satisfaction with their courses, retention rates are a good proxy for student engagement, contact hours can be measured, employers choose to sponsor some courses, or work with some institutions, because of the industry-relevance of their offerings, and employment rates can be measured. Some of these metrics are of course proxies – but they directly measure some of the most important outcomes that students and taxpayers expect excellent teaching to deliver. And we recognise that metrics alone cannot tell the whole story; they must be benchmarked and contextualised, and considered alongside the additional narrative that can establish a provider’s case for excellence”. (SKE p46)

Secondly, nowhere in the White Paper is there any evidence of so-called lamentable teaching. In fact the published NSS figures show the opposite. Taken nationally, the average figure is extremely high at 86% (England 2015 NSS results) with a rather small range of scores. So why, asks Dorothy Bishop, is there any need for a TEF?

It is hard to avoid the implication that there is likely to be a shift in the direction of prioritising graduate earnings, and indeed, it is one of the proposed measures as the TEF moves towards “a more granular and informative assessment of graduate outcomes” (SKE p48). Possibly the best expose of this misguided proxy measure was the study published in April by the IFS. It demolishes graduate salary as a metric, with its finding that “Graduates from richer family backgrounds earn significantly more after graduation than their poorer counterparts, even after completing the same degrees from the same universities.”  Although this study is acknowledged in SKE, the logic is not absorbed. If we can assume that excellent teaching will not be restricted to more socially advantaged students, what relevance is there to measuring graduate earnings? We can detect an implicit threat in the White Paper that the government may seek to pressure universities to close courses which do not deliver the right ‘outcomes’, i.e. graduates who are able to earn enough to pay back the cost of their student loans. That, then, is the real purpose of this metric. Purely ideological – your graduates don’t pay back – your course is closed.

“In creating the OfS, the regulation of higher education will be restructured, shifting from an outdated, top-down model of a funding agency to a market regulator clearly focused on the student interest. We will give the OfS an explicit duty to promote choice and competition, which will increase quality and efficiency in the sector, and will expect the OfS to work closely with the Student Loans Company and Government to ensure the decisions it takes have regard to affordability and deliver value for money for the taxpayer”. (SKE p63)

In 2017/18 the TEF will be run on a voluntary basis. A ‘provider’ can opt in, presumably if it wishes to establish a good reputation for teaching. A mock league table of benchmark-adjusted metrics published by the Times Higher showed that the Russell Group universities were eclipsed by a Midlands triangle of Loughborough, Aston and De Montfort universities. But this could also be part of the script. The government is creating the conditions whereby the Russell Group flounce out of the TEF and follow the incentives towards privatisation. It is only a matter of time before the elite universities follow their counterparts in Australia and start charging variable fees which will have nothing to do with teaching quality and everything to do with accrued reputation – something which the White Paper claims it wishes to dismantle. Rather than providing concrete information on which students can base their choices, this uninformative snapshot will leave students confused between choosing between the dodgy dossiers of established reputation and the imposter proxies of the TEF.

The TEF will do nothing to increase good teaching, curtail bad teaching or provide students with any more guidance than they already have. And if the REF is anything to go by, it will involve escalating costs and a scale of wastage which makes older, experienced academics weep with regret at what could be achieved if only the money were spent wisely. The cost-benefit analysis is provided by Dorothy Bishop here.

Universities have gone along with the REF because (up to now at least) there were reputational, even if few financial, gains to be won. The TEF allows for little financial gain, and also looks to be repeating some of the reputational mistakes of the early QAA subject reviews which denounced some subjects as failing. The TEF, even when it launches its disciplinary-level ‘granularity’ will not be a ‘game changer’.

Even though universities now have the tools to immediately individualise TEF scores of student satisfaction, nobody is going to be poached by an HEI for their superior teaching scores. Similarly, I would imagine that few academics will be to be tempted to move to a stronger teaching department. And bear in mind, academics have limited agency to affect outcomes such as retention, student satisfaction and employment. Students may be very satisfied with individual teachers, while perceiving elements of the course to be disappointing, funding to be inadequate, accommodation too expensive or the claims of family or paid employment to be stronger.

For universities it is another hurdle to be surmounted. A promised tuition rise in line with inflation will be quickly consumed in the arms race to enhance the institutional image. But the government’s nudge unit will clock up another win as soon as it achieves the desired outcomes; privatisation of an elite tier of universities free to charge whatever they wish, and perhaps, the closure of a few universities which have widened participation, but failed to compensate for the calculated upward distribution of wealth which has been part of the neoliberal project. Whether the HE Bill is creative disruption or reckless joyriding remains to be seen.

Brexit – is this Schrödinger’s neoliberalism?

The day after what the BBC has been calling a seismic event is bound to feel rather numbing. The prospect of leaving the EU is disorienting and scary precisely because no manifesto, no roadmap has ever been presented by the quitters. Everybody is wondering what it will mean for them, and there is no guidance. We’re used to getting that much within minutes after the Chancellor’s budget statements. But today, we’re all feeling bewildered about jobs, mortgages, pensions, the NHS, tax, bendy bananas, and all the rest.

Twitter was filled with people saying how their timeline had not prepared them for this. Like me, many were connected to other left-leaning, progressive internationalists, and so had felt entitled to discount what they regarded as the kneejerk xenophobia of the uninformed. I howled in sympathy with my learned friend @Plashingvole who is profoundly immersed in the tolerant embrace of British cultural history. He cites the legacy of Paine, Wollstonecraft, Rowan Williams, Chartists, Suffragists….and the Ramblers’ Association. What, eh? Somebody forgot to tell my sister’s bloke about that. But when your whole being is infused with that radical legacy, it is hard to wonder how it could be so convincingly rejected by the majority of the nation.

However, I ended this memorable day with a renewed respect for democracy and the important lessons it teaches us.  The workers of the north east and Wales have been told for the last 40 years that their skills are out of date, their industries uncompetitive and their productivity lacking. They were the first canaries down the disused mine of neoliberalism.  How long can working people absorb austerity, unemployment, being told they need to change and be flexible….and still never be better off? The EU has meant that my class has accrued a degree of job security through transnational mobility, but that has not been extended to the steel worker in Redcar. We can point to many waystations on the road to Labour allowing its working class constituency to be displaced by a liberal elite. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson were ‘relaxed’ about wealth accumulation (i.e. upward distribution of capital). Gordon Brown chose to paint Gillian Duffy in Rochdale as an irrational bigot. In the last election, Labour, led by Ed Milliband, shimmied rather uncomfortably around the issue of immigration, and horrified the liberal middle class voter in the process.

And so the referendum result came as a surprise to a party which saw itself as having a working class base, but broad appeal. The surprise was that the vote was divided along lines of class, privilege and education. As many commentators have pointed out, a referendum doesn’t allow for nuance and negotiation. It draws a binary divide and you are compelled to vote for one side or the other. It also captures one instant in a decision-making process and makes it a defining moment. Well, now the victims of the neoliberal constructed recession have told national and global elites to get stuffed, and they’ll take their chances with a different way – any way. We have Schrödinger’s neoliberalism – it has been both rejected but guaranteed at the same time.

Some among the national elite in government and the media rail against the rejection of ‘experts’, even though they have had a hand in undermining their claims to authority. But university leaders need not feel blameless in this. I marvel at the hypocrisy of vice-chancellors who seek to marginalise critical voices in their own universities, and then wonder why the debate has not been carried by the weight of public intellectuals.  Public intellectuals should play a role in informing opinion, but very often they come from those departments now on the danger list in many universities because they don’t bring in huge amounts of money in research grants. So when your VC emails out their post-referendum statement, ask them – where is your affirmation of academic freedom? Where is your continuing and unfettered support for history, cultural studies, literature, social sciences, politics, philosophy, international relations, modern languages?  These are the incubators of critique and framers of arguments in these crucial debates.  But when you try and subdue a university into a controversy-free, ‘managed’ zone, if you silence the radical voice, then don’t ask why the intellectuals suddenly find themselves ostracized.

Despite what has happened, I remain optimistic because these events tend to trigger moments of ‘grand narrative’.  On the one hand we can see Donald Trump, who embodies that resistance to traditional elites, surfing in on the Brexit wave. On a more hopeful front, we can envisage that this narrative of defiance and empowerment might be directed, not just against symbolic national elites, but also at authority in other locations. Perhaps this is a time for those of us who work in universities to challenge the corporate managerialists who have seized hold of universities and subverted their purpose. At the moment, if you are in arts and humanities in a university, you probably feel a bit like voters in Scotland – as if you are held in thrall by a self-interested and bungling regime which acts against your interests and values.

So it’s a big vote of thanks to academics at the University of Aberdeen and Newcastle University who are already making progress with their campaigns to take back the university for its academic citizenry. How long do you feel like being treated to the Neoliberal University bait and switch? 40 years? Time to start acting against those structures of power which have worked against fundamental academic values of education, trust, community and academic freedom. Below are the core principles from the draft manifesto of the ‘Reclaiming Our University’ group at Aberdeen:

• To create an environment for free, open-minded and unprejudiced debate, which stands out as a beacon of wisdom, tolerance and humanity.
• To defend our freedom to undertake research and teaching in the pursuit of truth, against the constraints, both internal and external to the institution, which threaten to curtail it.
• To restore the trust that underpins both professionalism and collegiality, by removing those systems of line and performance management, and of surveillance, which lead to its erosion.
• To bring together research and teaching as complementary aspects of an education that carries a responsibility of care.
• To restore the governance of the university, and control over its affairs, to the community of staff, students and alumni to which it rightfully belongs.

Join the conversation, and organise against attacks on academic freedom and the collegiality of the university. Comments on this blog will be copied to the Aberdeen group’s site.