The value of universities

I spoke recently at the Guardian’s Future of Higher Education Summit about the importance of universities, and it’s now gone up on their website. You can watch the talk here, or read the text below.

“As a panel we were asked to speak about what the sector can do to pull together and communicate the value of higher education to politicians and the public. I just want to make three points.

First, I think we need to begin by calling the problem by its name; the problem that besets British universities at the moment. We often get caught up in all the issues whether that’s open access or REF or student fees – we get lost in the detail or we get crisis fatigue. But I think these are all symptoms of a problem that I call the enclosure of the epistemic commons.

Second, I think we can put our own house in order. That involves a number of things. It involves thinking about ourselves as engaged in a shared project across our various diverse institutions; it involves abolishing the mission groups; and it also involves democratising internally – there is often a real disconnect between the official image of a university projected by managers and that which academics such as myself feel that we are engaged in, which is very messy and involves students crying in your office sometimes.

But then third, and perhaps most importantly, I think we need to tell new kinds of stories about who we are and what we do. At the CDBU* we have various ideas about how we can do this, but I think we need to articulate the value of our institutions. I think universities are really remarkable kinds of institutions. They are one of the few places where older people and younger people come together in a partnership; where alive people and dead people talk to each other across the distances of time; where people who are inside the institution collaborate with people who are outside the institution; where people who are here collaborate with people who are far away. They are places dedicated to the messy, on-going, and uncertain business that is life, and this is deeply, deeply human. Unfortunately these are qualities that are not tailored to the marketised, priced world where value is commodified and preferably tradable, but it’s exactly for these reasons that they are very, very precious institutions and it’s the reason that I think we need to defend them.”

*Council for the Defence of British Universities 

Internationalisation and the problem of recognition

Internationalisation is something higher education institutions have been engaging in since the 1970s. Initially it took the form of development schemes, but as Hans de Wit has recently pointed out, in the 1980s “the direction shifted from aid to trade”, with universities in the UK and Australia in particular beginning to charge full-cost fees to foreign students. Since the 1990s internationalisation has undergone yet another revolution, with universities increasingly offering education offshore.

The merits of this process have been much debated, but last week I was at the Humboldt Centre for British Studies in Berlin to attend a workshop on the changing role of the university, and among the papers presented was one by Johanna Waters (Birmingham) and Maggi Leung (Utrecht) that cast new light on the issue. In a qualitative study, they interviewed both the providers of British degrees in Hong Kong and also the students who undertake them. Their findings suggest that British universities would be wise to pay more attention to the geographically specific and long-term consequences of their educational offerings…. read the rest of this post at guardian.co.uk

Binding the generations

I spent yesterday afternoon in the Sheldonian Theatre where academics from the University of Oxford expressed their lack of confidence in the coalition’s higher education policies.

I had known about the meeting for some time, but I first sensed that something out of the ordinary was happening when my students started lobbying me to attend. Not only did they give me leaflets, they sent me Facebook messages. Then the Oxford University Student Union President circulated an email of support and college student councils passed resolutions endorsing the motion. And as we sat inside yesterday, listening to the vice chancellor outline the OHS regulations and warn speakers of the antilocutor device, chants could be heard echoing outside. The students, it seemed, were making common cause with their teachers.

In support of the motion were speeches that defended higher education as a public good and highlighted the incoherence and inconsistency of government policy. There were talks that endorsed universities as places of diverse and divided opinion in which individuals learn to think for themselves, and talks that upheld universities’ non-utilitarian agenda.

But as I sat listening to these robust articulations in a room full of people who seemed to be charged with a renewed sense of their mission, I realised there was something else the speakers were talking about as well… read the rest of this post at guardian.co.uk