Last week’s postcard of a vice chancellor’s robes gave us a chance to look at leadership job titles in higher education. This week a cracker of a postcard lets us do the same for academic organisational structures.
In the olden days it was easy – universities had academic departments. And sometimes they were grouped into faculties. Now it can be more complex: you’ve still got departments and faculties, but there are also schools and colleges, and centres and units, and sometimes institutes too. What’s going on?
Department S
Let’s start with the basics. A department tends to be an organisational unit of a university – with its own head, space and governance structure – which comprises all of and only the academic staff in the discipline for which it is named. There’s an epistemic component to it: it is meant to be all and only the people in a discipline because they and only they can have a truly informed opinion on the content of that discipline. That is, what should be taught in courses in that discipline, what counts as a degree, what research should be given priority, who should be appointed to join that disciplinary community as a colleague, and so on.
Departments are not only comprised of disciplines with simple names, like physics, chemistry or history. My undergraduate degree was in a department of philosophy, logic and scientific method, for example. The key thing is that it was all of the people who were in that community – academics, postgrads, undergraduates, hangers on – and that was a disciplinary community that the college had chosen to have. It didn’t have a physics department – that’s fine – but if it had, it would only have had physicists in it, and it would have had all of the physicists in it.
School for scandal
Next up, in a notional hierarchy, is a school. Schools contain subjects which aren’t the same but which do have a similarity on some sort of measure. So it might be a school of social sciences. Or a school of allied health. Or a school of business and law. Sometimes schools are a genuine attempt to encourage interdisciplinarity, with subject specialists allowed to mingle freely within the school, and have all sorts of conversations. And sometimes schools have actual departments in them, and they’re really just a way of consolidating all of your heads of departments into one easy-to-manage dean.
Losing your faculties
A still higher niche in the pantheon is the faculty. Faculties are (usually) groupings of cognate subjects which are bigger than schools. So you might (in a very big university) have a faculty which has in it schools, which in turn have departments. Or you might have a faculty which has departments in it. Or maybe a faculty which doesn’t have any organisational units within it, and is the core level of academic organisation. And of course, it can mean very different things too. The faculty can refer simply to the academic staff of an institution. In France, for a while, the faculty was a national, supra-university organisational unit, as we saw in this postcard of the Sorbonne.
Electoral college
And then, of course, there’s the college. This has many meanings. In Oxford and Cambridge, colleges are core to the whole operation, providing residence, tutorial support, and employing academic staff (who also, normally, have a university post too). In London the university is made up of colleges, but in this case they are all fully-fledged and autonomous institutions in their own right. (And to confuse matters further, the University of London’s colleges used to be called schools before the 1994 statute changes.) In Durham colleges do some of this but staff are university staff. (I think!). And in York, Lancaster and Kent too colleges provide a focus for residence, social life and support. And then you have colleges as a bigger version of a faculty, for instance at Cardiff and Birmingham. Often colleges like this are based around the REF groups, and were designed to enable fine-tuning of submissions; unsurprisingly it tends to be the research-intensive universities which go in for this kind of thing.
Division of labour
You might also come across a division. This can again mean different things. At Oxford, a division is like a college at Cardiff and Birmingham, or a faculty elsewhere: it’s a high level grouping of subjects. Division is also used within medical schools with a meaning like department: my guess is that this is to avoid confusion with hospital departments which often exist in the same buildings (hospitals!) as academic medical units. Which is good: if you’re trying to get well, the last thing you need is to inadvertently find yourself in an academic meeting rather than a hospital consulting room.
More research needed
And now we get onto three terms which are often associated with research: institute, centre and unit.
Institutes tend to be largest in scale of these three, and sometimes are free-standing. Think, for example, of the Institute of Cancer Research, which is a college of the University of London. Or the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, which used to be the free-standing Institute of Psychiatry. But, confusingly, institute also has currency within education as a discipline. For example, there are institutes of education at Reading and Worcester universities, where they seem to be the title given to an academic school; and at University of Liverpool, where the institute of education offers only postgraduate taught and research degrees.
Research centres tend to be research teams funded by a specific grant for a specific purpose, or be time limited for some reason, but be larger than simply funding a researched to do some research. And this gives them momentum which means that they become established units in their own right, but always having to secure future funding via grants. An example might be STICERD at the LSE, which has been in existence since 1978, which is nearly 50 years. Not bad for a research project.
And then research units tend to be like centres but a bit smaller, or with a shorter lifetime, or a more specific purpose. A research unit might just have one principal investigator (PI) – the academic in whose name the research funding is granted – whereas a centre or institute would have several.
And then finally research groups – see for example Imperial’s list of research groups – which, generally, are collections of researchers in the same field pursuing the same sort of questions at the same institution. They might be recorded on a university’s finance system as a cost centre, but they less often have a formal place in institutional governance. It’s a handy label to help understand the knowledge creation and exploration in a university. And sometimes it’s all about the big researcher – Professor Bloggs’ lab, for example.
So, there’s a run through. One thing I guarantee is that you will be able to find a counter-example to everything that I have written here. None of the words here – department, school, faculty, college, institute, division, centre, unit, group – has a legally protected meaning. The University of Cambridge, for example, has six schools. And within some schools are faculties and centres, whist other schools have within them departments, centres, units and institutes.
Universities are like Humpty Dumpty in their naming conventions:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
This is from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, by the way. It is worth remembering that Carroll was an Oxford academic. Did the university’s bewildering terminology influence Humpty Dumpty, or vice versa?
Dreamscape
Here’s a jigsaw of the card. It was posted on 23 July 1967 to an address in London. I think it describes a dream, but you decide:
I had let some smoky basement rooms to the Rolling Stones for £15. People were dancing in them. I wondered whether all that hashish would be good for them. The Stones arrived in a Land Rover. They put on Beatles jackets and took no notice of my remonstrations. You were very thin because one of them was leaving you. They laughed and played cards all night, standing up. You never opened your mouth. You did not seem to notice me. I woke with a splitting headache – all those fumes I suppose. M
And here’s an image of the text of the card. You may be able to make more sense of the line “you were very thin because one of them was leaving you”, some of the words which gave me trouble.