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.

 

 

 

 

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Keeping a lid on the pressure: universities and mental health

It has been almost a year since HEPI published the first Pressure Vessels report on the epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff. Last week saw the publication of an update co-authored by Nicky Priaulx of Cardiff University and me: Pressure Vessels II.

The update was written partially to address criticisms of the first report levelled by some vice chancellors: the data was too old, lessons have been learned, mental health is our priority etc. But the updated report tells its own story. With the last two years of data analysed, there has been a continued rise in the numbers of referrals to occupational health (19%) and counselling services (16%). Scroll down to the press release for more headlines.

The response to Pressure Vessels II from Universities UK gave me a sense of déjà vu and so I compared it with last year’s quote in the Times Higher – it was word for word the same:

In a statement Universities UK said “the health, wellbeing and safety of all staff and all students is a priority for universities.

The response from UCEA was baffling to say the least:

Raj Jethwa, CEO of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, said the report could have viewed year-on-year increases in mental health referrals “as a positive improvement to staff well-being in the HE sector.”

In what world is an increase in mental health referrals a positive reflection on the sector’s response to the mental health crisis? When we remember that it is the employers’ responsibility to PREVENT stress, you wonder why they have not moved to follow some of the recommendations I made last year. Their response prompted me to tweet:

And here’s UCEA, channelling Captain Schettino of the Costa Concordia, vaingloriously sailing his liner towards the rocks, abandoning crew members as it sinks.

There are a number of unanswered questions looming as universities face the future post-Covid 19. How will staff be protected from excessive workloads arising from redundancies, resignations that will not be replaced, and an unwillingness to continue to employ hourly-paid staff or graduate teaching assistants? Universities are even now cancelling sabbaticals and cutting academics’ time for research – but will the same expectations to produce world-leading REF 3* and 4* research outputs still apply? And what about student satisfaction as courses move online – will academics still be held accountable for that? These are all serious stressors in the life of academics at the moment before we have even taken account of sickness, grief and changes to financial circumstances being confronted by many in universities.

Most people who read this blog are aware of why the staff experience in universities and the mental health crisis are important to me, but let me give some context.

Just a few days previously, I published this piece on the CDBU website (and also on this blog). Here’s the connection to the Pressure Vessels reports. The CDBU blog piece ‘Don’t frighten the students’ was my account of the events that led to my resignation from my academic post in 2016. It places my concern with universities and mental health as the motivating force behind the work that has kept me busy with speaking and writing for the four years since I left. I felt I owed it to the injured colleagues I had met at various UK and international universities, and those whose blogs and tweets I had read, to keep raising the issue. I think the evidence speaks for itself – it is, after all, based on the universities’ own figures for mental health referrals.

When managers questioned my right to publish on this issue, their immediate concern was to silence a voice they considered impertinent. Rather like Matt Hancock, they didn’t like my tone.

It might have played out very differently. An enlightened manager could have suggested, as Nick Hillman, director of HEPI, did, that I pursue a rigorous and fact-based study of the issue. University managers, though, are less interested in hearing challenging views on issues they consider inconvenient. My experience reminded me of a story told by fellow blogger, Plashingvole, about the time he was interviewed for a management job. He was asked what he would do with dissenters. ‘Encourage them’ was his reply. He didn’t get the job. But questioning, challenge and refusal are all essential if universities are to nurture the critical thinking that drives real progress. It has amused me to speculate that these two reports for HEPI might have formed the basis for quite a creditable REF impact case study. No skin off my nose, because, as I am fond of saying, I have been able to get so much more real work done when I’m not having to justify it to management or the machinery of academic audit.

When Pressure Vessels came out in May 2019, I still did want to take one last swipe at the forces of institutional repression. I sent ‘personalised’ copies of the report to two of the managers who presided over my process for gross misconduct. The inscription read:

For X – witnessing your creative approach to the disciplinary process at Z University inspired me to campaign for compassion and kindness in university management. Your actions have led me to publish with a well-regarded organization which has amplified my voice. I will always be grateful.

Subtle. And true. Without them, these reports probably wouldn’t have been written.

This press release first appeared on the HEPI website on 30^th April, 2020. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/04/30/pressure-vessels-ii-an-update-on-mental-health-among-higher-education-staff-in-the-uk/

Pressure Vessels II: An update on mental health among higher education staff in the UK (HEPI Policy Note 23) by Dr Liz Morrish, a Visiting Fellow at York St John University, and Professor Nicky Priaulx, a Professor of Law at Cardiff University, reveals figures obtained via Freedom of Information requests on demand for counselling and occupational health services.

• From 2016 to 2018, there was an increase of 16% in counselling at the 14 universities for which comparable time series data were obtained.
• Over the same period of time, there was a rise of 19% in occupational health referrals at the 16 universities for which comparable time series data were obtained.
• From 2009/10 to the end of 2017/18, at those five universities reporting complete data, there was a rise of 172% in staff access to counselling.
• At all 17 universities covered in the report, there has been a rise in staff access to counselling of 155% in recent years.
• At the 10 universities with data for 2009 to 2018, occupational health referrals rose by 170%.
• For counselling and occupational health, the figures reflect gender differentiation, with women more highly represented.
• There is also a pattern corresponding to contract type: for occupational health data, the largest proportion of individuals being referred is non-academic staff.
• While greater use of support services may sometimes reflect improved access, the analysis may also support previous claims about the declining mental health of university staff.

The report builds on HEPI’s earlier ground-breaking work on this issue, published in May 2019 as Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff.

Dr Liz Morrish, the co-author of the report, said:

‘The first Pressure Vessels report was well received by staff who work in higher education. However, some managers and executives appeared unwilling to accept the findings of year-on-year increases in mental health problems. We hope this updated report will confirm our case beyond argument. The current sample of institutions has identified increases in referrals to occupational health and counselling as high as 500% since 2010.

‘We have also looked at the effect of this climate of workplace stress on staff retention. As we look forward to a future after the COVID19 pandemic, higher education staff and managers would be unwise to disregard the additional pressures this will bring. Like the virus, workplace stress is here to stay and must be addressed.’

Nick Hillman, the Director of HEPI, said:

‘After the current Covid-19 crisis is over, universities are going to have to pick up the pieces. There will be new challenges in recruiting and keeping students, in managing finances and in delivering research. It is vital that the wellbeing of staff is always considered as these changes occur.

‘The future success of UK universities mustn’t come at the cost of individuals’ lives. We need to build a virtuous circle by delivering supportive environments that strengthen institutions because they work well for all staff and students, rather than a vicious circle where institutions may succeed in the short term but people’s wellbeing is harmed.’