Paul T. Corrigan teaches at The University of Tampa. He is currently writing a book on teaching literature. He has published on teaching and learning in TheAtlantic.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, College Teaching, Pedagogy, Reader, The Teaching Professor, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and other venues. He has a PhD from the University of South Florida and a MA from North Carolina State University. More at paultcorrigan.com. Follow on Twitter at @teachingcollege.
Tag: reading
-
Weekend Reading: Rethinking the Role of Place in UK Higher Education Policy
- This HEPI guest blog was kindly authored by John Goddard OBE, Emeritus Professor of Regional Development Studies at Newcastle University.
In a HEPI note prompted by a Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) conference, Nick Hillman asked: Should the seminal Robbins report inform the forthcoming post-16 strategy? He referenced the point made by Professor Robson of SKOPE about the need ‘to encourage place-based approaches … and replace competition with coordination.’ As Nick points out, the challenge of place and coordination are not new, but as I will argue, these are not being confronted by policymakers right now.
The Robbins’ report led to new universities being established. But these were in county towns and as we observe in our volume on The University and the City, overlook the growing urban crisis of that period. The Education Reform Act of 1988 severed the link between polytechnics and local government. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which allowed polytechnics to apply for university status, had the Government’s desired impact of reducing the unit cost of higher education and moving the UK instantly up the OECD rankings in terms of participation in higher education. But it also signalled a further disconnection with cities. The creation of new universities in the 1970s to meet a 50% participation rate was also unplanned in geographical terms. So, unlike many countries, the UK has not had a plan for the geography of higher let alone further education.
Indeed, UK higher education policy and practice has ignored the lessons of history as well as being geographically blind. It has not been sensitive to the different local contexts where universities operate and the evolution of these institutions and places through time.
It is important to remember that locally endowed proto-universities like Newcastle, Sheffield and Birmingham supported late 19th-century urban industrialisation and the health of the workforce. They also played a role in building local soft infrastructure, including facilitating discourse around the role of science and the arts in business and society. This was also a time in which new municipal government structures were being formed. In short, universities helped build the local state and create what the British Academy now calls social and cultural infrastructure, in which universities play a key role
These founding principles became embedded in the DNA of some institutions. For example, in 1943, the Earl Grey Memorial lecturer in King’s College Newcastle noted,
Ideal Universities… should be an organic part of regional existence in its public aspects, and a pervading influence in its private life. …Universities to be thus integrated in the community, must be sensitive to what is going on in the realm of business and industry, of practical local affairs, of social adaptation and development, as well as in the realm of speculative thought and abstract research.
In the later 20th century, most so-called redbrick universities turned their back on place as the central state took on direct funding of higher education and research and did not prioritise the local role of universities. But this was challenged by the Royal Commission on the Future of Higher Education in 1997, chaired by Lord Dearing. He noted that: ‘As part of the compact we envisage between HE and society, each institution should be clear about its mission in relation to local communities and regions.’ For him, this ‘compact’ was wide-ranging, had a strong local dimension and was one where the university’s contribution to ‘the economy’ could not be separated from the wider society in which it was embedded.
Many of Dearing’s ideas were subsequently incorporated into the work of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) that were established in 1989 to promote economic development and regeneration, improve business competitiveness, and reduce regional disparities. This included investment, (matched by European regional funds ) into university-related research and cultural facilities. These capital and recurrent investments contributed to ‘place making’ and university links with business and the arts. For example, the former Newcastle brewery site was purchased by Newcastle University, Newcastle City Council and RDA, which they named ‘Science Central’. The partnership was incorporated as Newcastle Science City Ltd., a company limited by guarantee with its own CEO and independent board. The organisation’s portfolio included:
Support for business, facilitating the creation of new enterprises drawing on the scientific capabilities of the region’s universities and work with local schools and communities, particularly focussed on promoting science education in deprived areas.
The initiatives recognised the role that universities could play in their places by building ‘quadruple helix partnerships’ between universities, business, local and central government and the community and voluntary sectors.
But from 2008, with the onset of public austerity, a focus on national competitiveness and a rolling back of the boundaries of the state, we saw the abolition of the RDAs in 2012, the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships with more limited powers and resources and a cutting back on non-statutory local government activities, notably for economic development. My 2009 NESTA provocation Reinventing the Civic University was a reminder that universities had to go back to their roots and challenge broader geo-political trends, including globalisation and the creation of university research excellence hierarchies that mirrored city hierarchies.
Marketisation was subsequently embedded into law in the 2017 Higher Education Act. This abolished the Higher Education Funding Council for England and its network of regional consultants working with formal university associations. The act unleashed competition regulated via the Office for Students (OfS) and supported by an enhanced discipline-based research excellence funding scheme. Both were place blind. Some of us raised the possibility of the financial collapse of universities in less prosperous places where they were so-called ‘anchor institutions’
It was a recognition of this place blindness that contributed to the case for the establishment of the Civic University Commission, chaired by the late Lord Kerslake. The Commission argued that the public – nationally and locally – needed to understand better the specific benefits that universities can bring in response to the question: ‘We have a university here, but what is it doing for us? Institutions that were ultimately publicly funded needed to be locally accountable given our place-based system of governance – parliamentary constituencies and local authorities.
For the Commission, accountability meant something different from a top-down compliance regime. Rather, sensitive and voluntary commitments made between a diverse set of actors to one another, whose collective powers and resources could impact local economic and social deficiencies
The Commission therefore proposed that universities wishing to play a civic role should prepare Civic University Agreements, co-created and signed by other key partners and embracing local accountability. Strategic analysis to shape agreements should lead to a financial plan that brings together locally the many top-down and geographically blind funding streams that universities receive from across Whitehall – for quality research, for health and wellbeing, for business support, for higher-level skills and for culture.
Some of these national funds now need to be ring-fenced to help universities work with partners to meet local needs and opportunities, including building capacity for collaborative working within an area. As the Secretary of State for Education has suggested in her letter to VCs, this might include a slice of core formulaic Quality Research (QR) funding. Such processes would be preferable to the ad-hoc interventions that have hitherto failed to establish long-term trust between universities and the community. At the same time, a place dimension could be included in the regulation of the domestic student marketplace. This could all form part of a compact or contract between universities and the state which enshrined a responsibility to serve the local public good.
Going forward, I would argue that the coincidence of multiple crises across the world has far-reaching implications that universities cannot ignore. Indeed, if they do not step up to the plate and assert their civic role as anchor institutions in their places, their very existence may be at stake. The issues are well set out in this Learning Planet Institute Manifesto for the Planetary Mission of the University.
Reading this Manifesto should help policy makers and institutional leaders in the UK recognise that the current financial crisis facing universities is an outward and visible sign of deeper threats, not least those arising from popularism and being fanned by Donald Trump. And popularism has its roots in the experience of people in left behind places.
Therefore, Government support for the role of universities in their communities is not only beneficial to them but also to society at large. To respect institutional autonomy, this requires the right incentives (sticks and carrots). For example, universities throughout England could be required to support the Government’s plans for devolution as part of the compact I suggest. Questions to be answered by the Departments for Education; for Housing, Communities and Local Government and for Science, Innovation and Technology working TOGETHER could include:
- What structures need to be put in place inside and outside of universities to facilitate joint working between universities and Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs)?
- How should universities be included in upcoming Devolution Deals?
- How might these differ between MCAs at different stages of development and different levels of prosperity?
- How should universities link their work with business, with the community and the priorities of MCAs for inclusive growth and with the Industrial Strategy White paper?
- How should Combined Authorities work with different universities and colleges in their area to meet skills gaps?
- How can areas without MCAs work with universities to deliver equivalent outcomes?
In summary, universities must recognise that they are part of the problem identified by populism, but can contribute to solutions through purposive local actions supported by the government.
-
Weekend Reading: From AI prohibition to integration – or why universities must pick up the pace
- This HEPI guest blog was kindly authored by Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who chairs the Dyson Institute and is a Trustee at HEPI, and Bess Brennan, Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus, which is running a series of collaborative events with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.
Are universities super tankers, drifting slowly through the ocean while students are speedboats, zipping around them? That was one of the most arresting images from the recent Kings x Cadmus Teaching and Learning Forum and captured a central theme running through the Forum: the mismatch between the pace of technological and social change facing universities and the slow speed of institutional adaptation when it comes to AI.
Yet the forum also highlighted a fundamental change in how higher education institutions are approaching AI in assessment – moving from a reactive, punitive stance to one of proactive partnership, a shift from AI prohibition to integration. As speaker after speaker acknowledged, the sector’s initial approach of trying to detect and prevent AI use has been shown to be both futile and counterproductive. As one speaker noted, ‘we cannot stop students using AI. We cannot detect it. So we have to redefine assessment.’
From left to right: Mary Curnock Cook, Professor Andrew Turner, Professor Parama Chaudhury, Professor Timothy Thompson. Source: Cadmus
This reality has forced some institutions to completely reconceptualise their relationship with AI technology in order to work with the tide rather than against it. Where AI was viewed as a threat to academic integrity, educators are beginning to see it as an inevitable part of the learning landscape that calls for thoughtful integration, not least so that students are equipped for change and the AI-driven workplace. For example, Coventry University has responded by moving its assessment entirely to a coursework-based approach, except where there are Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB) requirements, and explicitly allows the use of AI, in most cases, to assist.
Imperial College’s approach exemplifies this new thinking with its principle of using AI “to think with you and not for you.” This approach recognises AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for human cognition, fundamentally changing how universities structure learning experiences. The shift requires moving from output-focused assessment to process-based evaluation, where students must demonstrate their thinking journey alongside their final products.
Like many universities, Imperial is also concerned about equity of access to AI. As a baseline it offers enterprise access to a foundational LLM with firewalled data, Copilot, which ringfences the data within the institution. But it also has a multi-LLM portal pilot, which includes ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and DeepSeek, acting as an AI sandpit to help instil a culture of thinking of the LLMs as different tools to be experimented with – users can switch between them and ask them the same question to see the variation in results. Meanwhile, LSE has partnered with Anthropic to offer all students free access to Anthropic’s Claude for Education, which helps students by guiding their reasoning process, rather than simply providing answers.
Practical implementation challenges
This transition to integration requires practical frameworks that many institutions are still developing. A speaker voiced the sector’s uncertainty as: ‘We do not know the next development – we didn’t see this one coming.’ This unpredictability leads to what was termed ‘seeking safety in policy’ – a tendency to over-regulate when the real need is for adaptive frameworks.
The challenge of moving beyond traffic light systems (red/amber/green classifications for AI use) emerged repeatedly. These systems, while intuitive, often leave educators and students in the ambiguous amber zone without clear guidance: ‘everyone falls in the middle. You cannot do the red stuff but how do you enforce that? What do we really mean by the green stuff?’ Instead, some institutions are moving towards assessment-specific guidance that explicitly states when and how AI can be used for each task.
Cultural and systemic transformation
This technological shift demands profound cultural change within institutions. As one participant observed, ‘Culture change is being driven by students. Academics may not want to change but they no longer have a choice if they’re getting assessments written by AI – or they don’t know if the assessments are written by AI’. The pace of student adoption is outstripping institutional adaptation, creating tension between established academic practices and emerging student behaviours – those speedboats and super tankers again.
However, while the magnitude of the challenge calls for institutional-scale change and moving beyond individual innovations to systemic transformation, super tankers don’t turn quickly.
Strategic approaches to change at scale
Several institutions shared their successful strategies for managing large-scale change. The key appears to be starting with early adopters and building momentum through demonstrated success. As Cadmus founder Herk Kailis noted, change champions are: ‘the best people who are keeping the sector evolving and growing – and we need to get behind them as there aren’t that many of them.’ Imperial’s approach of appointing ‘AI futurists’ in each faculty demonstrates how institutions can systematically seed innovation while maintaining a connection to disciplinary expertise.
Another speaker observed that successful change requires ‘recognising the challenges and concerns of academic colleagues, bringing them together, supporting colleagues in making the changes they want.’ At Maynooth University, incentives for staff, such as fellowships and promotion pathway changes, rather than mandates, draws on the notion that ‘you can’t herd cats but you can move their food’.
Cross-institutional collaboration
The forum emphasised that institutional change cannot happen in isolation. The complexity of stakeholder groups – from faculty leads to central teams to students and student-facing services – requires sophisticated engagement strategies. As one participant noted about successful technology implementation: ‘Pilots don’t work if they are isolated with one stakeholder group. You need buy-in from all the groups.’
The call for sector-wide collaboration extends beyond individual institutions to include professional bodies, regulatory frameworks and quality assurance processes – QA must also keep up with the pace of change. PSRBs, in particular, were singled out as a blocker to change.
International networking is also important. For example, UCL is working with Digital Intelligence International Development Education Alliance (DI-IDEA) from Peking University, which is experimenting with AI in education in innovative and accelerated ways.
Building sustainable change
Perhaps most importantly, the forum recognised that sustainable institutional change requires long-term commitment and resource allocation, and this imperative could arguably not have come at a more difficult time for many HE institutions. The observation that ‘There’s never been a greater need and appetite from staff to engage with this at a time when resourcing in the sector is a real problem’ highlights the tension between ambition and capacity that many institutions face.
However, the success stories shared – such as Birmingham City University’s Cadmus implementation saving 735.2 hours of academic staff time while improving student outcomes – demonstrate that institutional change, while challenging, can deliver measurable benefits for both educators and learners when implemented thoughtfully and systematically.
Three recommended actions from the forum
1. Address systemic inequalities, not just assessment design
Research from the University of Manchester shared at the conference showed that 95% of differential attainment stems from factors beyond assessment itself – cultural awareness, digital poverty, caring responsibilities and lack of representation.
Action: Take a holistic approach to student success that addresses the whole student experience, implements universal design principles, and recognises that some students are ‘rolling loaded dice’ in the academic game of privilege. Don’t assume assessment reform alone will solve equity issues.
2. Reduce high-stakes assessment
Traditional exam-heavy models risk perpetuating inequalities and don’t reflect workplace realities. Multiple lower-stakes assessments can support deeper learning and may be more equitable.
Action: Systematically reduce reliance on high-stakes exams in favour of diverse and more authentic assessment methods. This helps to address both AI challenges and equity concerns while better preparing students for their futures.
3. Co-create with students as partners
Students are driving the pace of change – they are already using AI. They need to be partners in designing solutions, not just recipients of policies.
Action: Involve students in co-designing assessments, rubrics and AI policies. Create bi-directional dialogue about learning experiences and empower students to share learning strategies. Build trust through transparency and genuine partnership.
-
PRINCIPAL VOICE: Inviting families into our classrooms slashed absenteeism and raised reading levels
Two years ago, I bought each of the teachers at Hamilton Elementary in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood a blue chair. I told them to put it in the back of their classrooms, and that if a parent or caregiver wanted to visit to see how their children are learning — no matter what the reason — that this would be a dedicated space for them.
I may have earned some exaggerated eye-rolls from educators that day. After all, I can appreciate the disruption to learning that classroom visitors can sometimes cause, especially among excitable elementary schoolers.
But school is our home, and it is our responsibility to invite families into our home and welcome them. And this was a necessary olive branch, my way of saying to families: “From here on out, things are going to be different.”
And they were. They also can be different at other schools, because the benefits of family engagement go well beyond student achievement.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
Research has long shown that when parents and caregivers are involved and engaged with their children’s education — whether that’s by attending parent-teacher conferences or participating in school events — student achievement, motivation and social-emotional well-being increase.
Parent involvement with reading activities has a positive impact on reading achievement, language comprehension, expressive language skills and level of attention in the classroom, according to the National Literacy Trust.
Research also shows that educators enjoy increased job satisfaction and are more likely to keep teaching at the school, families enjoy stronger relationships with their children and feel less isolated, and even school districts themselves become better places to live and raise children.
None of this was the case when we returned to normalcy following Covid. Just 13 percent of students were reading on grade level, and 37 percent were chronically absent. I knew right away that before we even attempted to tackle academics, we needed to engage families and make them feel deeply connected and committed to the community I envisioned building here.
Today, 45 percent of students are reading at grade-level, and chronic absenteeism, at 12 percent on the most recent official numbers, is down to 10 percent in our own tracking, with a goal of pushing it down to 8 percent in 2025-26.
But it wasn’t easy given the distrust that had boiled over during the pandemic, with families skeptical of our ability to effectively support their children and school staff feeling defensive and exhausted.
It was clear to me that families weren’t excited to send their kids to school, didn’t feel informed about what was happening on our campus and, moreover, didn’t feel comfortable — let alone capable — of communicating their needs to us.
Complicating matters further was the need to share information across many languages other than English, which can make relationship-building and communicating expectations difficult.
Roughly half of our students are English learners, and while the majority of their families are Spanish-speakers, there are growing populations of students whose first languages are Haitian-Creole, Pashto and Vietnamese.
Related: What the research says about the best way to engage parents
The first thing I did was establish open communication with parents using ClassDojo, a mobile app that gives families an easy, intuitive central access point to our teachers and staff, automatically translates all messages into parents’ native languages and allows us to share stories about what is happening in school.
It became an easy way to build trust and collaboration between families and staff.
Creating that type of visibility was key to breaking down walls between us. And in those early days, we didn’t post about literacy, math or anything related to academics. Instead, we focused solely on attendance and getting families to come inside the school as much as possible.
We focused on relationship-building activities and joyful learning. We hosted after-school art classes and monthly family Fridays, when families could come to school to engage in a fun activity.
We organized a Halloween costume drive with candy and fun games for kids; we hosted a Read Across America event where we passed out Play-Doh; and we organized other low-stakes events at school, rooted in building a partnership between home and school.
Again, our goal wasn’t learning during these meet-ups. It was all in service of building trust and creating meaningful relationships with students and their families.
Once we had the foundation in place, we added a focus on academics — though we rooted that learning in family engagement, too. For example, our schoolwide focus last year was phonics, so we sent activities home for families to complete with their children that were tied specifically to concepts the students needed reinforced, based on their individual assessments, like long vowel patterns and sight words.
These activities were taught by the students and their teachers to family members during conferences.
Beyond helping students, the exercise challenged a false narrative so many families had assumed — that they either didn’t know enough about what was happening in school to help, weren’t confident enough to help or didn’t have enough time.
Today, the atmosphere at Hamilton feels radically different than when I first walked through the doors. When we first started hosting Family Fridays, about 10 family members and their children showed up.
Now, we have roughly 200 caregivers at every meet-up. Families run most of the community-based initiatives at the school — from a boutique where families can shop among donated clothes twice a month, to a food distribution center, to a book club, English classes and a monthly meet-up where families can socialize.
When district leaders visit, they’re always impressed by the participation. I tell them, if you care about family engagement, it has to be so deeply embedded into the system that people don’t have a choice but to do it.
That’s why I’m constantly thinking about how to center family engagement in staff meetings, in attendance meetings, in literacy and math plans, in behavioral and counseling plans and in meetings about school procedures and budgets.
It’s a strategy that not only involves families but also supports academic achievement and student well-being. For me, family engagement is the ultimate strategy for academics.
Sometimes in the K-12 world we keep outreach and academics separate, but in reality, engagement is the key that unlocks our ability to hit academic goals and create a joyful school community.
Dr. Brittany Daley is the principal of Hamilton Elementary School in San Diego, California.
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about family engagement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
-
Weekend reading: The Launch of the APPG on Students: Commission on Students in Higher Education
This blog was kindly authored by Alex Stanley, NUS Vice President of Higher Education, Saranya Thambirajah, NUS Vice President Equality & Liberation and Alex Sobel Member of Parliament for Leeds Central and Headingly.
Today, we’re proud to launch the Commission on Students in Higher Education, a project between the APPG on Students, supported by NUS UK and a group of expert Commissioners, and based on evidence, event attendance and input from over 50 students’ unions and sector organisations.
The Commission speaks to the themes of the Department for Education’s HE Review and Post-16 Strategy and places the voices of students right at the heart of key questions on inspiring high-quality teaching and learning, access and widening participation.
In the current financial climate for universities and for the Treasury, we would have loved to be able to produce a Commission which speaks to interventions in quality, that highlights the groundbreaking pedagogical practice that students’ unions and educational organisations were excited to share with us, and the amazing widening participation work that we have seen across the country.
However, across all of our work we had to return to the question of funding, for students and for the sector. Right now, we risk a situation where the state of funding for students and for universities creates a double crisis, where neither the student themselves have the money to thrive while studying, nor the university has the money to adequately support them.
We know that students are working longer and longer hours outside of their degrees, in jobs not directly relevant to their future careers. The HEPI and AdvanceHE Student Academic Experience Survey for 2025 shows that this is eating into their independent study time, with the average weekly study time dropping by two hours over the last year.
Our evidence shows a further impact of working hours: what is suffering is not necessarily academic outcomes, but students’ overall experience in higher education. Students’ unions reported to us that the uptake of student activities, clubs, societies, and extracurricular activities is decreasing, and when asked, students stated that they were spending the time they would have liked to spend on activities undertaking paid work instead.
This should raise significant concerns for anyone involved in higher education and student life. When a student enters university, they of course gain experience and qualifications from their academic study, but the skills and experiences gained from their additional activities are just as valuable for many students. In providing these activities, students’ unions are engines of social capital.
Those students who work the longest hours and come from middle and lower income families are seeing the sharpest end of the cost-of-living crisis are also those who stand to benefit from extracurricular activity. There are some widening participation initiatives actively working to rectify this, by providing mentoring and support to participate in additional activities. Evaluation of these programs, further explored in the Commission report, found that those who were enrolled in the programs were also more likely to take up leadership positions in their Students’ Unions, clubs and societies. This shows the need for financial support which supports not only academic, but social participation.
As part of the Commission, we received proposals on how a fairer settlement for student maintenance could be reached within the current financial envelope. The Commission considered proposals on funding maintenance through a system of stepped repayments to redress regressive distributional effects in the current student loan repayment system, to instituting a graduate levy on employers who benefit from recruiting graduates, both of which have been covered in the HEPi report How should undergraduate degrees be funded?
The cross-party consensus is clear: right now, it’s imperative that the government establish a new system of student maintenance that rises with the cost of living and ensures grant funding is available for the poorest students. We also believe that the government should have ambition toward meeting a Student Minimum Income, also fully explored here.
In the Post-16 Review, the Department for Education has the opportunity to publish with a suite of bold, brave reforms to make like better for students. We will not be able to have the conversation about teaching, access and high-quality student experience without a foundational conversation about funding and student maintenance: we urge the Department to include a new settlement for student maintenance in the scope of the Post-16 Strategy.
You can read the full report from the Commission here.
-
Reading “Nexus” as Opportunity for Different Type of AI Conversation
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Published in September 2024
The last book I recommended for digital learning teams to read to fuel conversations about AI and higher education was Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick. It is short, taking only four hours and 39 minutes to read in audiobook format. (Is there any other way to read books?)
Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is an altogether different beast. Reading this book entails absorbing some significant opportunity costs at a portly 17 hours and 28 minutes of listening time.
Counterintuitively, at this moment in higher education, Nexus’s 17 hours and 28 minutes of required attention are more feature than bug. All of us working in digital learning and higher education would do well to trade time reading about the latest assault on our values and institutions and instead spend that time listening to Harari tell his AI story.
Despite the value of Nexus as a distraction from news, screens and any conversations about almost anything nowadays, real value can be derived from the book in our campus discussions about AI. Granted, a bit of handwaving may be necessary to connect Harari’s story with how we are going to infuse AI into our curriculum, course production and university administrative processes. As with most exercises in lateral thinking, the benefits come from the process, not the ends, and any attempt to connect the ideas in Nexus to campus AI policies and practices is sure to yield some interesting results.
What Harari sets out to do in Nexus is fit the emergence and future impact of AI within the broader historical story of the evolution of information networks. As with all prior information technology revolutions, AI (or at least generative AI) will decrease information creation and transmission costs.
In higher education, we already see the impact of AI-generated content, as AI-created assessments and AI-generated synthesis of course videos and readings appear across a wide range of online courses. Very quickly, we will start to see a transition from subject matter expert instructional videos to SME avatar media, generated from nothing more than a headshot and a script.
Harari’s worry about our AI future is that generative AI can create new information. Information does not equal knowledge, as platforms for dissemination can just as quickly (or more easily) spread disinformation as facts. What happens when generative AI generates and spreads so much disinformation that practical knowledge gets overwhelmed?
Unlike Mollick’s book Co-Intelligence, which is practical and positive, Nexus is abstract and a bit scary. It will be challenging to read Nexus with the goal of making connections with how we might handle the rise of generative AI on our campuses and within our industry without arriving at some level of pessimistic concern. After all, we are in the business of knowledge creation and dissemination, and generative AI promises to change (perhaps radically) how we go about both of these activities.
A second area of higher education AI concern that reading Nexus will do little to alleviate revolves around who creates the tools. The history of universities being dependent on the platforms of for-profit companies to accomplish our core mission-related teaching activities is not an encouraging precedent. The thought of higher education as a passenger in a corporate vehicle of AI tools and capabilities should invoke first worry and then action.
While Nexus’s lack of actionable steps for universities in the age of AI might frustrate many in our community looking for that road map, it may be that taking a 30,000-foot view is what is needed to best assess the landscape. What Nexus lacks in practical advice around AI for higher education, it excels in providing the overarching framework (information networks) and historical context in which to have different (and perhaps more ambitious) campus conversations on AI.
What are you reading?
-
WEEKEND READING: Should the seminal Robbins report inform the forthcoming post-16 strategy?
HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, spent Friday at a conference organised by SKOPE (the Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance), part of the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. It was overseen by James Robson, Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, and featured the Minister for Skills, Baroness (Jacqui) Smith, among many others.
In his opening address, Professor Robson articulated the growing consensus that, when it comes to post-school education, the time has come:
- to replace competition with coordination;
- to allow place-based approaches to flourish; and
- to unlock new opportunities for the benefit of students and employers.
In her remarks, Jacqui Smith agreed, arguing for an end to ‘town / gown’ splits. The Minister emphasised she thinks higher education must reach out to other parts of the education sector: while she recognises the majority of future skills needs will be at a higher level, she wants to bring down the ‘artificial’ barriers between FE and HE in a ‘coordinated’ and ‘facilitated’ way.
Some people in the audience interpreted this as meaning universities’ only hope of more money is to do the Government’s bidding and, either way, the higher education sector clearly needs to get ready for a more directive approach from a more active state. The basic idea seems to be to have everyone work together to raise productivity, level up the regions outside London and deliver more social mobility.
It may sound lovely but these issues are as old as houses and, whenever I think of them, I think of those paragraphs from the Robbins committee – which was designed ‘to review the pattern of full-time higher education’ – that wrestle with freedom versus direction. The Robbins report struggled with the right level of co-ordination and, while much of what it said reflected Lionel Robbins’s liberal views, it also envisaged a role for oversight and direction:
Will it be possible to secure the advantages of co-ordination while preserving the advantages of liberty? The question is of critical importance. Freedom of institutions as well as individual freedom is an essential constituent of a free society and the tradition of academic freedom in this country has deep roots in the whole history of our people. We are convinced also that such freedom is a necessary condition of the highest efficiency and the proper progress of academic institutions, and that encroachments upon their liberty, in the supposed interests of greater efficiency, would in fact diminish their efficiency and stultify their development. …
We believe that a system that aims at the maximum of independence compatible with the necessary degree of public control is good in itself, as reflecting the ultimate values of a free society. We believe that a multiplicity of centres of initiative safeguards spontaneity and variety, and therefore provides the surest guarantee of intellectual progress and moral responsibility. We do not regard such freedom as a privilege but rather as a necessary condition for the proper discharge of the higher academic functions as we conceive them. …
The difficulties are greatest when it is a question whether institutions of higher education should have the ultimate right to determine their own size. … if funds are available, refusal to co-operate in national policies or to meet national emergencies is an unsympathetic attitude, and it would be easy to think of reasons why it should be overruled. … If, when all the reasons for change have been explained, the institution still prefers not to co-operate it is better that it should be allowed to follow its own path. This being so, it must not complain if various benefits going to co-operating institutions do not come its way. … [My emphasis]
it is unlikely that separate consideration by independent institutions of their own affairs in their own circumstances will always result in a pattern that is comprehensive and appropriate in relation to the needs of society and the demands of the national economy. There is no guarantee of the emergence of any coherent policy. And this being so, it is not reasonable to expect that the Government, which is the source of finance, should be content with an absence of co-ordination or should be without influence thereon. …
It all goes to show, yet again, that there is no such thing as a new education policy question.
There are a number of tests we should perhaps apply to the let’s-coordinate-everything-to-elevate-skills approach that is likely to form the core of the forthcoming post-16 strategy / white paper that is due ‘soon’ – very soon if some of those attending the conference are to be believed and not at all soon if others there are to be believed.
First, if we can’t even build a high-speed speed trainline on budget and on time, why are we so confident we can easily build an integrated skills and education system (and without a material increase in spending)? It is surely right to at least ask whether public authorities really do know so much about the future economy’s needs that individuals should cede control over who should study what and where. Clearly, Skills England could be important here, but it is an untested beast. (I note in passing that the Smiths, Jacqui and Phil [Chair of Skills England], are getting back together to do a webinar this week.)
Secondly, the broken model that tends to be held up in contrast to the coming smooth one is a market in which there is lots of wasteful competition, excessive homogeneity and a lack of focus on the country’s needs. But the idea that the only alternative to a coordinated system is a pure and chaotic market is bunkum. We’ve not had a pure market in higher education and I’ve never met anyone who wants one. Neither the political centre nor the Far-byn (or is it Cor-age?) axis want one. Perhaps we are letting ourselves be blinded by the idea that there are only two options: a pure red-in-tooth-and-claw market, which is a caricature of what we have, and a cuddly coordinated system, which will be harder to deliver than we pretend.
Thirdly, where is the space for education for education’s sake? As one member of the audience pointed out at the SKOPE conference, current discussions are so focused on ‘skills’ and the economy that education is sometimes becoming lost. Yet FE and HE collaboration is difficult at a practical and day-to-day level. Kath Mitchell, the Vice-Chancellor of Derby University, pointed out the challenges of running an FE college and a university together – for example pointing out that Buxton and Leek College is (absurdly) barred from receiving FE capital funding because it counts as part of the University of Derby.
Fourthly, we should question the assumption underlying current critiques that our universities are much too homogeneous. They do have some things in common, though one might just as well point out that all education institutions that share a legally-protected title controlled by strict criteria, such as ‘university’, are always going to have some things in common. But I’ve visited pretty much every UK university, and many of them multiple times, and I would urge anyone who thinks they’re all the same to do something similar. Just compare the two universities I know best (as I’m on their boards), Manchester and Buckingham: the former is a research-intensive institution with a turnover of £1.4 billion, 12,000 staff and 47,000 students while the other is a teaching-intensive place (‘the home of two-year degrees’) with a turnover of £50 million, 500 staff and 3,500 students as well as the only private medical school in the UK. Or compare the LSE and UCA (the University of the Creative Arts). Or Falmouth University and Newcastle University. These things are not the same.
Finally / fifthly, as Andy Westwood pointed out in his remarks at the SKOPE conference, devolution is ‘non-existent’ in large parts of the country. So what does ‘a coordinated place-based approach’ really mean there? It’s one thing if you’re in Greater Manchester; it’s quite another if you’re in a rural area far from the nearest town or city, college or university. Moreover, while it is true that the old Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) had a regional aspect to its work which we could well copy today, it was a big funder as well as a regulator and it had a substantial regional presence.
-
Texas Students Make Gains in Reading but Struggle with Math, STAAR Scores Show – The 74
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
Texas’ students saw some wins in reading but continued to struggle to bounce back from pandemic-related learning losses in math, state testing results released Tuesday showed.
Elementary students who took the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exam this year made the biggest gains in reading across grade levels. Third graders saw a three percentage point increase in reading, a milestone because early literacy is a strong indicator of future academic success. Progress among middle students in the subject, meanwhile, slowed.
“These results are encouraging and reflect the impact of the strategic supports we’ve implemented in recent years,” said Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath. “We are seeing meaningful signs of academic recovery and progress.”
This year’s third grade test takers have benefited from state investments in early literacy in recent years. Teachers in their classrooms have completed state-led training in early literacy instruction, known as reading academies. The state also expanded pre-K access and enrollment in 2019.
Morath did acknowledge students needed more help to make similar gains in math. Five years after pandemic-related school closures, students are still struggling to catch up in that subject, the results showed. About 43% of students met grade-level standards for math, a 2 percentage point increase from the previous year, but still shy of the 50% reached in 2019.
Low performance in math can effectively shut students out of high-paying, in-demand STEM careers. Economic leaders have been sounding the alarm about the implications that weak math skills can have on the state’s future workforce pipeline.
The STAAR exam tests all Texas public school students in third through eighth grade in math and reading. A science test is also administered for fifth and eighth graders, as well as a social studies test for eighth graders. Science performance improved among fifth and eighth grades by 3 and 4 percentage points respectively, but students in those grades are still below where they were before the pandemic.
Students in special education also made small gains. English learners, meanwhile, saw drops in all subjects but one — a 4% decrease in reading, a 2% decrease in math, and a 2% decrease in social studies.
The test scores give families a snapshot of how Texas students are learning. School accountability ratings — which the Texas Education Agency gives out to each district and campus on an A through F scale as a score for their performance — are also largely based on how students do on the standardized tests.
The test often casts a shadow over classrooms at the end of the year, with teachers across the state saying they lose weeks of valuable instructional time preparing children to take the test. Some parents also don’t like the test because of its high-stakes nature. They have said their kids don’t want to go school because of the enormous pressure the hours-long, end-of-year test puts on them.
A bill that would have scrapped the STAAR test died in the last days of the 2025 legislative session. Both Republican and Democratic legislators expressed a desire to overhaul STAAR, but in the end, the House and Senate could not align on what they wanted out of an alternative test.
Legislators this session did approve a sweeping school finance package that included academic intervention for students who are struggling before they first take their STAAR test in third grade. The package also requires teachers get training in math instruction, mirroring existing literacy training mandates.
Parents can look up their students’ test results here.
Graphics by Edison Wu
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
-
Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy
by Fadia Dakka
The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022). These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.
In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.
Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.
In such a climate, pressures to develop core academic skills such as academic writing abound, as a quick glance at the vast literature available to both novice and accomplished researchers to help them improve the quality and quantity of writing reveals (eg Sword, 2017, 2023; Murray, 2025; Wyse, 2017; Moran, 2019; Young & Ferguson, 2021; Thomson, 2023; Sternad & Power, 2023).
Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).
Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1] [FD2]
In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.
The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.
Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’ with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.
Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.
The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).
The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld. Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.
This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).
The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.
The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.
The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.
Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.
Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.
Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).
However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.
The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.
Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.
-
Weekend Reading: Out of Eeyore’s Gloomy Place (rather boggy and sad)
- This is an edited version of a speech giving by Vivienne Stern, Chief Executive of Universities UK, to the HEPI Annual Conference on Thursday 12 June.
Thank you, Nick, for the invitation to speak today.
In a somewhat pathetic attempt to prove the utility of my degree in English Literature, I once learned that the way to prove the validity of your argument was to back it with reference to a work of literature, preferably by someone who was good and dead.
And so, I want to start with the opening lines of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Here is Edward bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that perhaps there is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
How like being a Vice Chancellor.
Most mornings, I imagine you leaping out of bed, full of the joys of spring and filled with a sense of possibility. Between that point and, let’s say, breakfast, you probably find yourself getting hit on the back of the head by 20 or 30 things that will, unequivocally, need dealing with. It is not dull. But this constant stream of new bumps can make it difficult to take a step back and think. Where is this all heading?
We are challenged on both sides of the political spectrum, and there is a curious degree of political consensus around some of the major issues. Anxiety about whether the massification of higher education has gone too far; whether too many students are studying for degrees that have limited value; whether this represents a good use of public money in the form of the loan write-off, and that some of these students would be better off doing something else. There is a concern from both right and left about the degree to which the sector has become increasingly characterised by competition which seems to serve no one well.
Research, currently being undertaken on behalf of Universities UK by Stonehaven and Public First, has illuminated public concerns about the financial motives at play in the sector – a sense that somehow students and graduates are getting screwed by the system – bound up with widespread dissatisfaction about the state of the economy, public services and a growing anxiety that the future for us and our children is one of inevitable decline.
This is underpinned, both in the current government and on the right of the political spectrum by that old conviction that there are ‘good universities’ – generally confused with the Russell Group – and ‘other universities’ which are generally suspect. On the upside, from the Chancellor on down, there is a genuine belief in the power of universities to power the economy and individual opportunity. Government wants more of the good stuff. But in both government and the official opposition, questions are being asked about public funding could be directed in a more targeted way to support, to encourage and incentivise those things which public and politicians would like to see more of – and weed out the stuff they are less convinced by.
I have told you nothing that you don’t already know.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
When I started in this job, nearly three years ago, I thought I knew what to expect. A few months in I found myself saying to my husband ‘What on earth was I thinking? I used to have this lovely job, swanning around the world listening to Ministers in other governments tell me how wonderful our university system was. It was like wandering into the bottom right-hand corner of the Hundred Acre Wood – Eeyore’s Gloomy Place (rather boggy and sad).
How do we get out of it?
One path leads us deeper into the bog.
Political distrust and pressure on public finances, coupled with a belief that somehow other parts of the education system have more to offer, leads to the continuing erosion of funding -in all four nations of the UK.
You have less money to teach and support students; while scrutiny, scepticism and expectations continue to grow. This forces you into increasingly competitive measures – increased risk appetite in areas like international recruitment, transnational education (TNE) and franchising, fiercely competitive recruitment behaviour which hobbles one university at the expense of another. In research, the paramount need to remain internationally competitive and to retain rank position drives more and more universities deeper and deeper into financial difficulty. The only way out is to press the pedal on international recruitment, to the extent that the Home Office will let you.
This feeds public and political distrust and a sense that something is irretrievably broken here. Even tighter immigration controls follow. More regulation of outcomes and franchising. All sorts of people start to think your problems are of your own making, and that they have simple solutions: whether that’s cutting or capping student numbers, or deciding what to fund or not fund, to determining which universities do research and which do not.
This is the path we’re on.
At UUK, we have spent the last two years trying to map the other path – what gets us out of this bog, and back to the bit of the forest with more of the bees and butterflies?
That was the point of the Blueprint, which we published nine months ago.
There are many people who think that the answer is just explaining ourselves better. I partly agree with them. Of course, we should do more to increase public and political understand of the fantastic work that universities do in all sorts of areas. I see this stuff every single day, in universities of all types, and in all parts of the country. At UUK, we’ve been doing much more of this front-footed stuff through a series of interlocking campaigns to reinforce three key messages: a degree is an overwhelmingly good investment for most graduates; universities power local, regional and national economies; and that universities are a vital national asset.
We need to do more of this, and more effectively. We’re working closely with communications teams in universities to help us.
But I don’t think doing more of this is going to solve the problem or change the path we’re on.
And I don’t think that we can counter negative perceptions of the sector by explaining why they are wrong.
That was the point of the Blueprint. We took a good hard look at what was working well, and what could be better. We enlisted critical friends to provide challenge, and to try to keep us focussed not what on we needed from the Government, but on what the country needed from us.
And we are following through: there are far too many recommendations in the Blueprint – but we are delivering on the most significant ones already, and we can see evidence of the influence of the agenda we set in the Westminster government Higher Education Reform agenda.
The Transformation and Efficiency work is one part of this. A couple of weeks ago we published the first outputs of that work, describing seven opportunities which would help the university system move towards a New Eara of Collaboration. We will shortly publish the next output; a guide to what we are calling ‘Radical Collaboration’ produced by KPMG and Mills and Reeve. JISC sharing with the sector outline business cases for three major areas of sector-level cooperation: procurement; shared business services; and collaboration to sustain vulnerable subjects.
Step by step, we’re trying to pick our way towards the other path through the woods. A route which starts with an attempt to be objective and, where necessary, self-critical; not defensive when faced with criticism, but confident enough to listen to it and respond thoughtfully and proactively. To build pride in what our universities currently represent in the national self-image, and to present them as a reason for optimism about our country’s future. I’d like us to be able to capture some of the excitement you all encounter in labs and seminar rooms – students and staff who are busy discovering something new, and can’t wait to tell other people about it.
At heart, what I think we are working towards is a proposition that the university system should not resist the growing clamour for change, it should own it. We should lean into change. We should remind people change is part of our story: that every so often, the university system goes through a major evolution: think of the 1850s and the establishment of a generation of technical institutes for the education of working men, to the radical decision to start admitting women, to the 60s White Heat of Technology universities; to the removal of the binary divide and the age of massification.
Our universities are constantly changing, and change is good.
Like the rings in a tree, these moments of transformation happen periodically as the sector grows. But they happen around a recognisable core. If a scholar from the 1400s pottered through a wormhole in time, they would recognise what is happening in our universities – the pursuit of knowledge and its transmission within a scholarly community – but the way that successive eras of change have left their marks would tell the history of the sector.
Seismic social changes, which have changed who is in our universities: what they study, how they study and how closely we work with wider society, industry and public services.
So, here’s the thing. I believe we are going through one of those periods of change which leaves a mark. That we’re entering a new era and we’re the lucky folks who get to try to work out what the change will be.
What will enable this great university system to go from strength to strength?
But we’re not alone in thinking that this is a moment where change is needed. There is a window, which is open for now, but is not going to stay open too long.
In July, the Westminster government will publish its Higher Education Reform strategy, embedded in a post-16 White Paper. At some point, either alongside that or slightly later in the year, the Department for Science and Technology (DSIT) will set out their vision for the research system and the university place within it.
The current line of thought tends towards differentiation of mission; specialisation and a more directive approach to the distribution of scare public funds to support national priorities.
An extreme version of this might result in universities being put into boxes; constrained in their mission; to government picking winners and losers – from amongst institutions, or types of institution, or from amongst subjects.
The traditional metaphor here requires jam. Since we are in the Hundred Acre Wood, I will substitute jam for honey.
It will be from thinly spread honey to honey concentrated in a smaller number of places, or used for a smaller number of things. The strategic priorities grant, made up of about 30 tiny honey pots, will see quite a bit of smashing up. A smaller number of bigger pots will take its place. Government will use these to incentivise and support the things it wants to see. Since we don’t anticipate there being, overall, much more honey, it implies that some will end up on bread and water.
I am going to get myself out of a sticky mess by dropping the metaphor.
I am instinctively a bit jumpy about Ministers deciding what universities should and should not do, simply because I have worked with quite a lot of them.
Can we come up with a compelling vision, behind which we can enlist the support of both universities themselves, and the government alongside it?
The Blueprint and the Efficiency and Transformation Taskforce are trying to point the way. They set out:
- A conviction that we should not turn back on the road to massification: that although there are many who doubt it, we should keep going, until your background is not the most likely determinant of whether or not you go to university.
- A belief that further expansion should not necessarily be more of the same: we can work to present choices, illustrating the many different ways universities already offer higher education. From degree apprenticeships, fully online, blended, and accelerated provision, to courses developed for specific employers in partnership with them. Presenting the three-year degree as one option amongst many for those who want a higher education – but a positive choice with distinct and valuable features, which explain its enduring appeal.
- But we could lead the debate about what the LLE could become – how it could allow students and employers to club together to support professional development throughout a career, in a structured and accredited fashion.
- And while there are those who say that there is no such thing as the university system; we might assert that we should act to make sure that we don’t see a slow falling apart of something that should be a system, by an over-emphasis on competition within a market. This county needs universities which are capable of filling a range of needs – from world leading specialist institutions, like the Courtauld Institute which I will visit later today, or the Royal College of Music; to the post graduate institutions which don’t appear in the rankings because NEWS FLASH the rankings don’t capture post graduate institutions; to the small community based universities which are often church foundations, and which focus on a public service mission. We need these things just as we need the enormous powerhouses that are our great dual-intensive and research-intensive institutions. If it can be argued that we don’t have a system, we should look to change that.
- We should acknowledge again and again that this country is in a bit of an economic funk and that, as it has done many times before, the university system will put its shoulder to the wheel to help turn that around. That we’re open to being more forensic in our analysis of what is effective, to spreading the best practice more widely, to being held to account. What I really mean is that we should stop just producing studies on our economic impact, which the Treasury ignores, and work with government to develop a shared understanding of the economic value created by the university system, which we could actually use – as we have HEBCI and REF – to influence behaviour and improve what we do.
- Above all, we have an emerging conviction that universities can and should collaborate more – both to be more efficient and to be more effective in their collective mission. We should be willing to think radically about this. The next phase of the Transformation and Efficiency work will be focussed on how we might support this direction of travel in very practical ways.
And the role for Government? Perhaps more Christopher Robin than AA Milne. More ‘in the forest with us, finding our way together’, than ‘sitting in an office in Whitehall and deciding who does what’.
But we do want Government in there – most importantly we want Government to recognise that there is a public interest in the way this system works. That public funding can play a role in smoothing the rough edges of the market and correcting for its failures, and that have a responsibility alongside the sector itself for the stewardship of the system.
Going back to Winnie the Pooh has been a pleasure. I am going to end where I began, as the book itself does, with the image of Winnie, going upstairs this time, ankle first, gripped by the little fist of Christopher Robin. Let’s stop bumping a while, so we can think.