The Freedoms of the New

UK universities exist in an ecology characterized by a number of stresses.   Resources are thinner on the ground than they once were.  Whilst students can claim funds in the form of loans, this changes their perceptions, which in turn affects recruitment and retention behaviours within universities.  Research Council funding is reduced, and that which is left has been reorganized such that new methods of extraction need to be acquired.  Universities themselves are increasingly seen as resources also, and are endlessly compared in league tables in order to discern where the richest pickings are.  And the fruits of scholarly activity are sporadically and stringently audited for their quality and (now) socioeconomic impact by protean panels.

 

As one would predict universities are in competition with one another to extract the most utility within this ecology.  Each university has its own plans but it is also the case that cooperative strategies have emerged; notably the Russell Group formed in 1994 in order to maintain the best research and teaching within the changing landscape.  A key element of this cooperative venture has been to brand 24 universities as leading.  Leading can mean guiding others, helping them to develop, a potentially beneficent act.  But, of course, it can also simply mean superior.  From our discussions with many colleagues they are all clear that the intention is firmly to brand this list as superior, and this is affirmed by the reliance on league tables and audit outcomes.  The Russell Group will lead students to opportunities, as was our own experience when graduate students, but there is little indication that they are acting to improve the circumstances of other universities.  We suspect this social norm has emerged not least because of the unfortunate use of that term – leading - for it establishes an expectation in the same breath as dashing it.  Why would we expect to be led?  What does this say about us?

 

The putative elitism that the Russell Group embodies often colours interpretations of the division between old and new universities, because old universities are seen as the stock from which they draw members, old universities are part way to that elite club by dint of their age and traditions.  We have encountered the view that life in the old university sector must be better – their access to resources greater, enabling more time to be spent on research, and their students must be more engaged and, perhaps, a little more like us in their weird intellectual fetishes.  This view needs thinking about, and more than a little excoriation.

 

It is clearly the case that the Russell Group does well on all the measures by which universities are judged.  The probability of a top UK-based scholar in any field being employed by a Russell Group university is high, but not 1.0.  If we broaden this to old university membership then the figure gets closer to perfection.  This situation can be interpreted in at least two ways.  On the one hand, the Russell Group earns its right to superiority because by all measures it is.  This will attract excellent scholars.  On the other, some see the Russell Group as setting the measurement agenda to favour themselves.  Where is the accounting for the costs of true widening participation, some might ask?  The Russell Group and the older universities do not have to deal with the same issues as the new, it is assumed.  Those issues are obstacles to enhanced performance on the league tables and new university scholars have their scholarship diluted.

 

Given that league tables are inherently limited, and therefore biased, we imagine these negative complaints can be defended statistically.  But all they amount to is a statement that there are differences: differences can present problems, but also opportunities.

 

We both work in psychology departments in new universities in London.  In this part of the world we have many close neighbours including a number of Russell Group departments.  Indeed, if we go into town for a beer we stand a high chance of seeing such colleagues and walking past their ivory laboratories.  They are hard to miss.  Not that we want to miss them, because we benefit hugely from being in a crowded niche, as we get an opportunity to hear new ideas and debate them with the leading thinkers in our field.  And here we use leading in both senses – they are doing well but they also turn up in London to teach us.  We are lucky to live here: we know it.

 

But when we come to think about life in one of those top-ranked departments we have another view.  These are places where staff are set publication and grant capture targets that are often unrealistic given the diminished resources and increasing numbers of scientists clamouring for them.  Yet those targets, when unmet, negatively impact on career progression and limit creative growth, for that is what academic hierarchies are designed to reflect and enable.

 

In order to increase the odds in the competitive market, these departments become markedly specialized, favouring only very specific subdisciplinary areas of the entire field and thereby making a decision about their net contribution to the overall development of knowledge.  This is a heinous bureaucratization of science, one that is philosophically a little hard to justify if one maintains the view that leading might mean guiding enquiry and knowledge.  Certainly, a lot of excellent, specialized work is done in these institutions but it is paradigm bound.  In the terms of our discipline, these departments are rarely places of behavioural science but instead places of specific methods and questions.  Other perspectives need not apply.

 

Old universities, not yet in the Russell Group but keen to compete, can act as if they have no choice other than to mimic this strategy.  To some extent it works and they get to join, but at the expense of their diversity we fear.  It is certainly the case that we have seen young colleagues leave our sector to take up a role, slightly more junior that their previous one, in an old, ambitious university.  Their experiences are not always happy ones.  The policies they encounter are rigid, and a handful of staff are favoured at the expense of others, as they are more likely to meet the necessary criterion to push the department and university up the tables.  In many ways, these institutions can be much tougher than those in the Russell Group.

 

Meanwhile, in the new university sector we are beset by ambitions and competition also, but the research agenda is looser: on average the strategy is to do some.  We are both involved in research management – we are concerned with REF returns, impact agendas, grants capture and increasing our departmental knowledge exchange activities etc.; all terms used across the university ecosystem.  But our experience is that we shape our policies to the interests of our colleagues.  We want to know what they want to know and then we figure out how to facilitate that in the current situation.  It has never occurred to us to create a department that is a certain flavour in order to increase our standing on a particular table.  This makes us fundamentally uncompetitive under the Russell Group rules and it gives us a freedom that is most closely associated with the concept of a university.  We are permitted to think our thoughts and follow our ideas.

 

Ideas lead to hypotheses, lead to experiments and there are costs here.  Some of the things we dream we cannot afford to follow up – but we doubt that this limitation is peculiar to our sector alone; it is just differently scaled.  We do apply for grants, and occasionally they are won and well spent.  However, a trick that we are missing is that of thrift.  Where our Russell Group neighbours might develop work around high-end technology, admittedly extending a narrow field usefully, we must learn to experiment within the limits of our extant facilities.  One of us is often heard talking with great admiration about Niko Tinbergen and his innovative ways of testing ideas in ethology, indeed he really won his Nobel Prize for this rather than for a lasting theoretical contribution.  His painted eggs and model gull heads got to the heart of some fascinating behaviours.  We believe that the current climate and our specific ecological niche will encourage this order of creativity.  There is certainly nothing hindering this other than an obsessive tendency to assess the greenness of our neighbours’ lawns.

 

So, when we hear a colleague bemoaning her lot in the new university sector and expressing a heartfelt desire to join a leading institution we will ask “why throw away your freedom and your opportunity to innovate?” 

 

Authors: Tom Dickins & Derek Moore

 

Originally published on http://tomsnonacademicwork.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-freedoms-of-new.html?m=1