The New University (eBook)

Introduction

If you’ve picked up this book the chances are you already have an interest in universities, education, or the social impact of such institutions. You might be one of the 2.5 million students in the United Kingdom1 who are taking undergraduate, postgraduate, or doctoral study, from The University of Aberdeen in Scotland to the University of York in England, studying a whole range of subjects from Accounting to Zoology. You might be one of the thousands of non-academic staff who are maintaining estates, running outreach activities, administering programmes, sorting finances, building partnerships, or managing projects. Equally, you could be one of the 200,000 plus2 full-time equivalent academic staff who are researching, teaching, and administrating (often all at once).

I write this book as one of those non-academic staff members. Every day in my job as a senior policy advisor at the University of Liverpool, I spend my time thinking about how my university can respond to policy challenges, embrace new opportunities, and do well by its students, staff, city, and wider region. Fundamentally, I believe universities are a force for good in the world and I do not believe this view is unusual. Liverpool is, for me, not just a place but it is the place that shaped my whole adulthood. Entry to the University of Liverpool gave me access to the place where I met my best friends, the city where I got my first job, and the qualifications which have made an enormous difference to my life. Such a difference that I now work at the university where I studied, and in some small way I hope get to give back to an institution to which I owe an awful lot.

Even from this description you will hopefully get a sense that universities are more than places that teach and carry out research. At their most basic, they give people skills codified into a degree certificate which they exchange for salary, opportunities, and experience. There is also a load of research behind the scenes which is carried out into indescribably vast areas of work. All with the intention of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Sometimes a university education has distinctly practical applications, sometimes it is purely to stretch our understanding of the world, and sometimes it falls somewhere in between, where the world may one day be able to use the more theoretical research.

My story is only one of millions, my institution is only one among hundreds, and, together, this life-changing impact with social consequence can do incredible good. It is this term ‘community’ which sits at the heart of everything I am interested in. To reduce the perception of universities to just teaching and research alone is to reduce the immense value they bring to their respective communities. I am also particularly interested in how much of that shapes the universities we have in the UK today. This is at the root of The New University and, by the end, we’ll have a clearer idea of community’s true place in the higher education system.

Even if you have not been to university yourself, it’s likely that someone you know has – a relative, friend or colleague, perhaps. 97% of mothers, for example, regardless of whether they went to university themselves, want university education for their children.3 The majority of chief executives of the UK’s top 100 businesses attended university,4 and every Prime Minister of this century attended university. By global standards, the UK significantly outperforms in higher education participation relative to its size,5 and it is home to 18 of the world’s top 100 universities6 (if rankings are your thing). Their annual collective income is more than £40 billion per year,7 and some estimates suggest they are stimulating £95 billion of further economic activity.8 Whether you are aware of it or not, universities reach into every part of our economic, public, and social lives. They are the machines shaping our leaders, the engines driving the employment conditions of hundreds of thousands of people, and the anchors transforming the places they are based.

The New University is born from an urgent need for universities to claim a greater stake in our shared future as forces for social good – locally, nationally, and internationally. COVID-19 has brought this urgency into even sharper view as the sector charts a new purpose in the face of economic precarity, the threat of widening social inequalities, and in some quarters, questions of its very value. In spite of these challenges there is a positive future for universities to grasp and to shape. One where they are widely valued as forces for good; as vehicles for transforming lives through education; as magnets for jobs and opportunity; and, as always, open to change and in turn seen as legitimate in changing society. Rather than solely defending the value of universities here (after all, there are mission groups, hundreds of university public affairs staff, and a handful of excellent think-tanks, websites, and companies, who dedicate all of their professional energies to making sure universities get a fair hearing), I am interested in addressing a different question.

How can our universities do better in doing good by their students, communities, country, and society, in the post-COVID era?

In unpacking this question, it’s necessary to know that not everyone sees the work of universities as a social benefit. Open up any national newspaper today and you’ll find a story about universities and ‘cancel culture’. A cursory Google search brings up moral panics about lecturers being warned for having opinions, universities being threatened with defunding if they do not protect freedom of speech, and a slurry of articles about students and students’ unions disinviting (or often choosing not to invite) controversial speakers. This was most forcefully put forward by David Davis MP in introducing his motion for a Freedom of Speech (Universities) Bill9:

‘Today, there is a corrosive trend in our universities that aims to prevent anybody from airing ideas that groups disagree with or would be offended by. Let us be clear: it is not about protecting delicate sensibilities from offence; it is about censorship. We can protect our own sensibilities by not going to the speech. After all, nobody is compelled to listen. But when people explicitly or indirectly no-platform Amber Rudd, Germaine Greer, Peter Tatchell, Peter Hitchens and others, they are not protecting themselves; they are denying others the right to hear those people and even, perhaps, challenge what they say.’

The word ‘indirectly’ is doing a lot of heaving lifting here. Amber Rudd had an invitation withdrawn by a student society, not a university; Germaine Greer actually spoke at Cardiff University; a member of private organisation the National Union of Students chose not to speak with Peter Tatchell; and Peter Hitchens would not agree to the University of Liverpool’s Policy and Code of Practice Regarding Freedom of Speech, so spoke to the same audience ten minutes from the University premises. There was an event postponed by University of Portsmouth students’ union that Hitchens chose not to reschedule. This is hardly the ‘corrosive trend’ Davis speaks about.

These examples are plainly a stretch, but they speak to a wider sense that universities are somehow different and separate from the society in which they operate, as secretly political institutions with an education wing attached. Almost entirely anti-Brexit, internationalist, and filled with those experts we supposedly no longer need, universities might be seen to have lost the cultural wars, finding themselves unmoored between their homes as liberal institutions and a government and media who have declared a ‘war on woke’.10 Even so, how can it be the case that it is clearly felt to be profitable political ground to criticise the places where such a huge portion of the population are educated, or employed? A sector which in the most basic terms employs more people than agriculture, forestry and fishing combined,11 yet enjoys little of their political and public support.

Dismissing these criticisms of universities may make us feel better, knowing that we’re right, or that it is at least governmental meddling yet again. However, universities will not reach the communities they were built to serve without reflection on how this scepticism came to be and how the sector might combat it. A clear analysis means facing up to where the sector has failed to bring the public with it and acknowledging perceptions may only change where it tackles some truly enormous challenges. Supporting the creation of good jobs. Being more effective vehicles for opportunity. And enhancing the prospects of the locations they are based.

To be robust in talking about universities should not mean dismissing the concerns about them. There is trap that public sector advocates fall into time and time again, telling people they are wrong through data, spreadsheets, and dispassionate economic analyses. This will not change their mind on deeply held beliefs. The New University aims to forge a new way for universities to show their value, not just tell people about it.

This might not be enough for some readers, and some might still be sceptical of a university’s value. You may remember a time when you could leave secondary school, work in a stable job for your whole career, buy a home, enjoy holidays abroad, and do so from the strength of work experience and technical...