Tag: University

  • Higher education postcard: the university court

    Higher education postcard: the university court

    We’re in Aberystwyth again this week, but not for an in-depth look at the university – we’ve done that before.

    Instead, we’re going to look into an aspect of old university governance, with an Aberystwyth artefact. This is a draft report to the University Court of Governors.

     

    The older, chartered universities in the UK (which means, broadly, those founded between 1800 and 1992) tended to have three bodies involved in governance:

    • A senate, which was the academic decision-making body of the university, comprising all or some of the university’s academic staff
    • A council, which was the governing body of the university, but which couldn’t take a decision on an academic matter without first consulting the senate
    • A court, made up of stakeholders (ie graduates, local bigwigs, learned society representatives), which had very few if any powers, but to which council must account for itself and its activities.

    Typically speaking, a court would meet once a year. Its powers might include appointing the chancellor of the university, but that is a ceremonial role, so is a very limited practical power (although one over which universities occasionally trip up). And at the annual meeting, there would be reports from the vice chancellor, and questions, and then that would be it for another year.

    Now, this report is from a college of the University of Wales, which was a federal university. This means I’m not clear whether the report was to the court of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth, or to the court of the federal University of Wales. But either way, it gives a fascinating snapshot of what accountability looked like in 1920. (And if you know about the governance of the University of Wales in 1920, please do say in the comments below!)

    The report would have been the first under the principalship of John Humphreys Davies, pictured here.

    Davies was an alumnus of Aberystwyth; he succeeded Thomas Francis Roberts, who had been principal from 1891 to 1919, and had died in August of that year whilst still principal. He had since 1905 been registrar of University College Aberystwyth, making him another rare example of progression from senior professional service roles to institutional leadership.

    The report starts with a brief statistical summary. It shows the impact of the first world war on numbers: there were 298 students in 1917–18; 410 in 1918–19, and 971 in 1919–20. About 30 per cent of the students were women; over 70 per cent came from south Wales; over 15 per cent from north Wales; over 10 per cent from England. And the remainder – nineteen students in total – came from Egypt, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, France, India, Java, Jamaica and an unexpectedly large contingent – ten students – from Serbia.

    There’s then a report on degree examinations, recording each student who had taken degree examinations, for bachelor of arts, master of arts, and certificates of education. I haven’t counted the names, but they stretch for fifteen pages of the report, so it looks like all of the students at the college. Jones is the most frequent name, with 60 in the faculty of arts, three in law, 31 in science, and two for the certificate in education. And we also get a report on alumni who had gained degrees from the University of London, or gained scholarships at Oxford.

    And then the fun starts. Written reports from every department, starting with Greek, ending with the Officer Training Corps Contingent. Here are a few extracts:

    Mr Jenkins, Greek: ‘Special: only two students took the course. Of these, Mr Neil Evans more than maintained his promise of the preceding session and attained a high standard in the examinations. As he intends to take Latin Honours in 1921, it may not be possible for him next session to devote to Greek as much time as he would wish, but if he can defer Greek honours till 1922, there is every prospect of his attaining a high class. The other candidate, Miss Young Evans, also did quite well, and showed improvement on the work of 1919.’

    We have become much more squeamish about naming individuals in formal papers, even when praising them, or damning them with faint praise. Poor Miss Young Evans.

    Professor Atkins, English: ‘The work this session has on the whole been satisfactory, though difficulties have not been wanting, owing to the large increase in the number of students and the varying ability of the ex-service students to settle down to serious study…’

    Demobilisation was clearly not without its downsides.

    We also get a fascinating insight into examination success rates. Here’s the data for undergraduate exams in English:

    By my reckoning, this is a pass rate about 72 per cent for intermediate, 58 per cent for ordinary and 64 per cent for special levels. What would we make of these rates today?

    We learn that the library received gifts including 600 volumes from the library of the late Principal Thomas Francis Roberts; the review of the Aberdeen Angus Cattle Society; the proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin; and the report of the Association of Headmistresses in London. And, excitingly, that Miss Cummings of the Bodleian Library in Oxford has been appointed cataloguer to classify and catalogue the library’s holdings “in accordance with the rules of the Library of Congress.”

    We have the first report from Professor Zimmern, the founding chair of international politics at Aberystwyth, a subject in which the college was to gain much renown.

    And let’s end this set of extracts with this, about the Normal College’s music students. (You’ll remember that the Normal College, in Bangor, focused on teacher training.)

    Apathy, irregularity and a lack of preparation. A sad and sorry state of affairs. I wonder if it was ever thus?

    Overall I’m struck by the level of detail and the minutiae in the report. There’s a flavour of what life must have been like at Aberystwyth, and an openness to accountability which is interesting. Maybe it’s a genuine transparency, maybe it’s a desire to hide big issues behind the day-to-day. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it.

    I’ve got two jigsaws for you today. First the postcard at the top; and then a double page spread from the report, just for the sheer fun of it.

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  • Liberty University must face former trans worker’s discrimination claim, judge rules

    Liberty University must face former trans worker’s discrimination claim, judge rules

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    A worker who was fired by Liberty University for disclosing her transgender status and announcing her intention to transition may proceed with her employment discrimination case against the institution, a Virginia district court judge ruled Feb. 21 (Zinski v. Liberty University). 

    The case involved a worker who was hired in February 2023 as an IT apprentice at the university’s IT help desk. She received positive performance reviews until July of that year, when she emailed Liberty’s HR department, explaining that she was a transgender woman, had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy and would be legally changing her name, according to court documents. An HR representative promised to follow up with her.

    Shortly thereafter, after hearing nothing, the worker reached out again and was scheduled for a meeting later the same day. She was presented with a letter terminating her employment and explaining that her decision to transition violated Liberty’s religious beliefs and its Doctrinal Statement. 

    In response to the worker’s lawsuit, Liberty University argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (among other laws) allow religious employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, contending that the worker’s firing was religion-based rather than sex-based in discriminatory nature. 

    While Judge Norman Moon appreciated that the case presents a “novel question of law in the Fourth Circuit,” he ultimately found current case law didn’t fully or clearly support the university’s argument. 

    “If discharge based upon transgender status is sex discrimination under Title VII generally, it follows that the same should be true for religious employers, who, it has been shown, were not granted an exception from the prohibition against sex discrimination,” Judge Moon said in his order denying the university’s motion to dismiss the case. “They have been entitled to discriminate on the basis of religion but on no other grounds.”

    Judge Moon pointed out that “no source of law … answers the question before us,” but “we find that a decision to the contrary would portend far-reaching and detrimental consequences for our system of civil law and the separation between church and state.”

    “This case — and the law it implicates — points to the delicate balance between two competing and laudable objectives: eradicating discrimination in employment, on the one hand, and affording religious institutions the freedom to cultivate a workforce that conforms to its doctrinal principles, on the other,” Moon wrote. “We find that our holding today — that religious institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, even if motivated by religion — most appropriately maintains this balance.”

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  • University of Hawai‘i dean sues law professor who criticized diversity event

    University of Hawai‘i dean sues law professor who criticized diversity event

    When the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa planned a Black History Month event in February 2023 that lacked any black facilitators, law professor Kenneth Lawson publicly challenged a dean about it at a faculty meeting. Nearly two years later, and shortly after clashing with administrators over their decision to doctor one of his class presentations,  Lawson suddenly must defend himself against a defamation lawsuit over his remarks — one filed by that same dean. 

    On Feb. 20, Lawson’s legal team filed an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss the dean’s lawsuit, in which she alleged that Lawson’s heated arguments with her concerning the Black History Month event, as well as Lawson’s call to boycott the event, were defamatory. Lawson’s legal team argues that the defamation suit is “an attempt to chill and silence Professor Lawson’s constitutionally protected speech.” And the fact that it came fast on the heels of a curriculum dispute raises further questions of retaliation.

    2023: Lawson files First Amendment lawsuit against university following imbroglio over Black History Month event 

    The threats to Lawson’s expressive freedoms date to a faculty meeting back in February 2023, where he voiced vehement objections to a scheduled Black History Month event that was to feature a panel with no black facilitators. (Lawson is black.) 

    At the meeting, UH Dean Camille Nelson clashed with Lawson over the issue. Lawson claimed Nelson (who is also black) didn’t have sufficient experience in or understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. Nelson retorted that her experience as a black woman gave her perspective to understand racism, but that she did not want to litigate that issue during the meeting. In a follow-up email, Lawson accused Nelson of being “highly dismissive” of his objections, and a few days later, he called for a boycott of the panel via a university listserv. 

    Law professor challenges university after campus ‘shooting’ hypothetical changed in lesson plan

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    The University of Hawai’i violated academic freedom and set a dangerous precedent with unilateral revisions to a law professor’s presentation on a legal concept.


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    UH banned Lawson from campus and launched an investigation to determine whether he had created a “hostile work environment” for his colleagues. The university also issued no-contact orders barring Lawson from contacting certain administrators and restricting his use of university listservs. 

    Lawson, in turn, sued UH for violating his First Amendment rights to speak on a matter of public concern: racism and inclusion at the university. 

    The university eventually sanctioned Lawson for the February 2023 incident, requiring him to complete mandatory training and serve a one-month suspension without pay. Lawson returned to teaching in August of 2024, after completing the university’s sanctions under protest as his legal case proceeded.

    2025: Lawson becomes locked in conflict over academic freedom violations

    Last month, we told readers about Lawson’s clash with the university over an in-class PowerPoint presentation. Last September, Lawson used a hypothetical involving himself and two deans — one of whom shoots at the other, misses, and hits Lawson accidentally — to teach his law students the legal concept of transferred intent. The accompanying slide included website portraits of himself and the two deans to illustrate the example. 

    When an anonymous student filed a complaint about the example, the university’s response to the complaint presented a master class in how to violate academic freedom. The university ordered Lawson to change the hypothetical because it could be “disturbing and harmful,” despite the fact that he had not violated any policy. When Lawson rightfully demurred, the university unilaterally changed Lawson’s slides, removing images of the two deans—but leaving Lawson as the victim of the shooting. (Why students would be less disturbed by a hypothetical that still depicted their professor as a shooting victim was not explained.)

    Slide with an image of law professor Ken Lawson alongside generic man/woman icons

    FIRE sent two letters to the university urging it to restore the hypothetical to its original state. We argued that unilaterally changing a faculty member’s teaching materials raised serious concerns about the university’s fealty to the basic tenets of academic freedom. Those tenets protect the right of faculty members to determine how best to teach their subjects. This freedom is even more important when those topics are complicated, difficult, or potentially upsetting to students. Going over Lawson’s head to change the hypothetical without his consent also raises serious concerns for future academic freedom issues. Would UH consistently bypass faculty rights to change instruction until the teaching satisfied administrators?

    UH dean files defamation lawsuit

    Shortly after Lawson filed his censorship grievance, and nearly two years after the case’s original filing, Nelson hit Lawson with a lawsuit of her own: She alleged that Lawson’s behavior at the meeting nearly two years earlier, and his subsequent email to the university listserv, had defamed her. 

    She suffered significant emotional distress and reputational harm, she says, because of Lawson’s alleged accusations of her of being a silent “Intellectual Negro.” 

    Yet defamation claims require proof that the targeted person made false statements of fact, not just heated statements of opinion. There is no way to read Lawson’s remarks as anything but opinion. Furthermore, the First Amendment offers a “wide latitude” for faculty members to express themselves “on political issues in vigorous, argumentative, unmeasured, and even distinctly unpleasant terms.” 

    Baseless SLAPP suits threaten the speech rights of all Americans

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    SLAPP lawsuits — strategic lawsuits against public participation — are often used to silence expression by bringing legal claims about others’ speech. Lawson’s legal team filed his anti-SLAPP motion seeking the dean’s suit’s dismissal on Feb. 20. 

    We hope this motion will give UH the sharp reminder it needs that faculty members have a right to speak on matters of public concern. Faculty members also have the right to determine how to approach their courses. And faculty members shouldn’t have to fear retaliation — in the university setting or in the court of law — for exercising their First Amendment rights.

    We’ll continue to keep readers apprised of Lawson’s battle against his university.

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  • What’s in a name? That which we call a university…

    What’s in a name? That which we call a university…

    by Rob Cuthbert

    In England the use of the title ‘university’ is regulated by law, a duty which now lies with the regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). When a new institution is created, or when an existing institution wishes to change its name, the OfS must consult on the proposed new name and may or may not approve it after consideration of responses to the consultation. The responsible agency for naming was once simply the Privy Council, a responsibility transferred to the OfS with the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. For existing older universities where legislative change is needed, the Privy Council must also still approve, but will only do so with a letter of support from the OfS. The arrangements were helpfully summarised in a blog by David Kernohan and Michael Salmon of Wonkhe on 8 April 2024, before most of the recent changes had been decided.

    That which we call a university would probably not smell quite as sweet if it could not use the university title, and with its new power the OfS has made a series of decisions which risk putting it in bad odour. In July 2024 it allowed AECC University College to call itself the Health Sciences University. Although AECC University College was a perfectly respectable provider of health-related courses, this name change surely flew in the face of the many larger and prestigious universities which had an apparently greater claim to expertise in both teaching and research in health sciences. The criteria for name changes are set out by the OfS: “The OfS will assess whether the provider meets the criteria for university college or university title and will, in particular: …  Determine whether the provider’s chosen title may be, or may have the potential to be, confusing.” It is hard to see how that criterion was satisfied in the case of the Health Sciences University.

    Even worse was to come. In 2024 Bolton University applied to use the title University of Greater Manchester, despite the large and looming presence of both Manchester University and Manchester Metropolitan University. And the OfS said yes. If you google the names Bolton or Greater Manchester University you may even find the University of Bolton Manchester, which is neither the University of Bolton nor the University of Manchester, but is “Partnered with the University of Bolton and situated within the centre of Manchester” – indeed, very near the Oxford Road heartland location of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan universities.

    This is rather more confusing and misleading than University Academy 92, founded by a group of famous football team-mates at Manchester United, formed in August 2017 and based near Old Trafford. Wikipedia says that “the approval by the Department of Education (DoE) to allow UA92 the use of ‘University Academy 92’ was questioned with critics claiming the decision to approve the use of the name makes it ‘too easy’ for new providers to use ‘university’ in a new institution’s name”. This criticism continues to have some merit, but a high-profile football-related initiative, now broadened, is perhaps less likely to cause any confusion in the minds of its potential students. It may be significant that it was created at the same time as the HERA legislation was enacted, with government perhaps relaxing its grip in the last exercise of university title approval powers before the Privy Council handed over to the OfS. UA92 was and continues to be a deliverer of degrees validated by Lancaster University. In 2024 the OfS the University of Central Lancashire applied to be renamed the University of Lancashire, despite the obvious potential confusion with Lancaster University. And the OfS said yes.

    It was not ever thus. The Privy Council would consult and take serious account of responses to consultation, especially from existing universities, as it did after the Further and Higher Education 1992 when 30 or so polytechnics were granted university title. A massive renaming exercise was carefully managed under the Privy Council’s watchful eye. As someone centrally involved in one such exercise, at Bristol Polytechnic, I know that the Privy Council would not allow liberties to be taken. The renaming exercise naturally stretched over many months; the Polytechnic conducted its own consultations both among its staff and students, but also much more widely in schools and other agencies across the South West region. Throughout that period, in a longstanding joke, the Polytechnic Director playfully mocked the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University by suggesting that the polytechnic might seek to become the ‘Greater Bristol University’. It was a joke because all parties knew that the Privy Council, quite properly, would never countenance such a confusing and misleading proposal.

    How would that name change play out now? In the words (almost) of Cole Porter: “In olden days a glimpse of mocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.”

    Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, and a partner in the Practical Academics consultancy. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor and professor of higher education management at the University of the West of England.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • Achieving a 100% Completion Rate for Student Assessment at the University of Charleston

    Achieving a 100% Completion Rate for Student Assessment at the University of Charleston

    Seated in beautiful Charleston, West Virginia, the University of Charleston (UC) boasts “a unique opportunity for those who want an exceptional education in a smaller, private setting.” UC provides a unique student experience focused on retention and student success even before students arrive on campus.

    Students are offered an opportunity to complete the College Student Inventory (CSI) online through a pre-orientation module. This initiative is reinforced through the student’s Success and Motivation first-year course. University instructors serve as mentors, utilizing the CSI results to capitalize on insights related to each individual student’s strengths and opportunities for success through individual review meetings and strategic support and skill building structured within this course.

    After achieving a 7% increase in retention, Director of Student Success and First-Year Programs Debbie Bannister says administering the CSI each year is non-negotiable. Additionally, the campus has refocused on retention, emphasizing, “Everyone has to realize that they are part of retention, and they’re part of keeping every single student on our campus.”

    UC has reinstated a Retention Committee that utilizes summary information from the CSI to understand the needs of its students. Of particular concern, UC notes that the transfer portal has created additional challenges with upperclassmen, so including a representative from the athletic department on the retention committee has been crucial.

    Through this focus on retention and strong implementation strategy, UC achieves a 100% completion rate for the CSI for their first-year student cohort. Building off the scaffolding support from early support meetings related to the CSI insights, first-year instructors are able to refer back to reinforce articulated support strategies and goals throughout the first-year experience. The structure and progression through this course reiterates college preparation skills and resources building motivation and a growth mindset to persist through college.

    Increase student success through early intervention

    Join institutions such as the University of Charleston by using the College Student Inventory with your incoming students. More than 1,400 institutions have used the CSI, and it’s been taken by more than 2.6 million students nationwide. Learn more about how you can use it to intervene earlier with students and increase student yield.

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  • Registrars assembling – the history of the Association of Heads of University Administration

    Registrars assembling – the history of the Association of Heads of University Administration

    Many will not have seen this rather wonderful short history of AHUA, the Association of Heads of University Administration, published in 2024 and written by John Hogan, who retired as registrar at Newcastle University in 2022.

    Having been involved in AHUA for 18 years to the end of 2024, including 11 years on the executive and a couple of years as Honorary Secretary, I thought I had seen quite a lot in terms of the association’s development. However, as this report shows, I really did not know the half of it and my contributions were genuinely minor alongside the achievements of those who went before.

    In development

    The origins of what is now AHUA date back, in formal records at least, to a “Registrars’ Conference” in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. It was attended by ten people representing seven different universities (with apologies from two more) and chaired by the registrar of Durham University, William Angus (later secretary at the University of Aberdeen from 1952 to 1967 and referred to by his previous colleagues as “Aberdeen Angus,” apparently).

    Extract from the minutes of the 1939 Registrars’ Conference

    While some of the issues discussed were very much of the time, such as air raid precautions, others have contemporary resonance such as ensuring inclusion of students on the electoral register. Admittedly this was a slightly different situation given that there were university constituencies at that time and there were real concerns about institutions’ ability adequately to count potential electors. Other issues though seem very familiar including student health, international students, admissions qualifications and student fees.

    As the organisation developed as the Conference of Registrars and Secretaries (CRS), after the war it became UK-wide and spent considerable time in the 1960s discussing and dealing with an expanded HE sector such that it had 23 UK universities in membership by then.

    As noted in John Hogan’s report – and as is evident from the photographs from conferences in the 60s through to the early 90s – it was a hugely white male-dominated organisation for many years, reflective of university administrations at that time.

    Fortunately, much has changed in composition since then. Structures in universities were rather different in those days too although for the whole membership, regardless of title, a core duty was acting as a confidential source of advice and support for the vice chancellor. Further elements identified in the 1960s which continue to be a part of many AHUA members’ roles include leading a significant portfolio of university services and advising the university’s statutory bodies and other senior officers. Relative to today numbers were tiny – only around 400 administrative staff in 1953 rising to a still modest figure of around 1,900 by 1973, although both of these numbers exclude what were deemed “clerical” posts.

    It is also interesting to note that, under the auspices of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), a number of registrars were heavily involved in the establishment of the Universities Central Council on Admissions (UCCA) in 1961. This body, reformed as the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service – UCAS – in 1993, was for many years notable as an example of a genuinely efficient and effective shared service in supporting university admissions (although its governance structure and mission has changed somewhat since then).

    Topical matters

    In determining conference topics members were consulted via paper questionnaires on the issues of the day (although, entertainingly, this process generated a big bureaucracy which had to be scaled back). In 1964, responses were sought on the following:

    What information was held in student records, the ratio of secretarial to academic staff, the operation of telephone systems, the appointment of supervisors for higher degrees, amongst many other matters.

    Moreover, the records uncovered by the author show some problems are perennial:

    The fraudulent publication of degree certificates was a concern at the 1948 Conference. Student behaviour, and car parking both featured in 1962. Pressure to change the academic year from October–September to January–December was first acknowledged in 1965. Nearly all universities had considered the possibility and rejected it.

    Excitingly, IT became a white-hot topic in the 1960s and there were discussions over the national coordination of student records – this led to a working party involving the UGC and the Royal Statistical Society. As I recently noted here, the issue has not gone away…

    As Hogan notes, the records of proceedings appear generally cordial, although:

    The occasional acerbic comment was captured in the minutes. Ernest Bettenson, (Registrar of the University of Durham 1952 then of University of Newcastle upon Tyne 1963–1976) expressed the view that the 1972 “…White Paper was like Mrs Thatcher (its author as Education Minister) – well set out and attractive, but somehow unlovable.

    Beyond these formal matters, conferences also included cultural and social events including a formal dinner which, I am astonished to learn, was black tie until 2006 (thankfully that stopped before I joined in the following year). Other features which have, mercifully, not survived include the spouses’ programme, golf sessions and alcohol sponsorship (no fewer than three distilleries were sponsors for the 1995 conference in Aberdeen).

    Grappling with the issues

    CRS operations became a bit more business-like towards the end of the 1970s with the establishment of a standing steering committee and the appointment of a business secretary. Following the significant cuts in funding from 1981–82 the focus of discussions was very much on the consequent organisational challenges and, as Hogan notes:

    More horizon-scanning can be identified in CRS’s discussions during the 1980s than previously. William Waldegrave, then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department of Education and Science, predicted mergers across the so-called binary line, between universities and polytechnics, within the following ten years, when he spoke to the Conference in 1983.

    Plenty of contemporary echoes there. The Jarratt Report (1985) on management efficiency divided opinion in the CRS, with some supportive and others more sceptical or indeed scathing. Apparently, Jim Walsh, registrar at the University of Leeds, was particularly vocal:

    …warning members that he would oppose any attempt to turn the Conference into a kind of “Jarratt Enforcement” agency and distributing a criticism of the proposals under the title “A Load of Old Cobblers?”

    It is reassuring that CRS members struggled with its name back in the late 1980s in the same way as successors have ever since. It was accepted that “the name ‘conference’ was unhelpful, and ‘association’ was more attractive except for the resulting acronym – ARS.”

    However, before that issue could be resolved the CRS had to grapple with the more serious issue of the impact of the ending of the binary line. While almost every established university in 1992 had a registrar or secretary, the structures in the newer universities was much more varied meaning that it took some time to come to a full settlement on who would be eligible to join an expanded organisation.

    And then, of course, a new name was required. ARS was off the table so the “Association of University Heads of Administration” or the “Association of Heads of University Administration” were the preferred options. CVCP was consulted and it seems some vice chancellors were unhappy with the title on the basis that they saw themselves as the head of the administration. Anyway, a decision was made and the name and abbreviation everyone struggles to pronounce to this day was agreed upon.

    You’ve come a long way

    Hogan goes on to note the broader engagement of AHUA and its member with regulators and other sector agencies from the late 1990s onwards as well as the importance of its regional groupings and the key role played by full-time professional staff support from 2001 (Catherine Webb served as Executive Secretary from 2006 to 2024, providing vital continuity and vast expertise). Policy concerns at executive meetings and conferences throughout the last two decades have included governance, statute changes, pensions, the need for better regulation and a reduction in the regulatory burden.

    Other significant developments in the recent period have included development programmes, for new and aspiring registrars, growing the association’s communications and influencing activities, developing the national Ambitious Futures graduate training programme (which sadly ended as a consequence of the pandemic) and a reciprocal mentoring programme between staff of colour and AHUA launched. All were driven forward by a (much missed) former chair, Jonathan Nicholls, who also sought to establish AHUA as the “go-to” professional organisation in the sector.

    AHUA, as Hogan’s history shows, has come a long way but remains a key UK-wide sector organisation with a slightly more diverse membership than in the past, but there is still some way to go there. It’s an organisation of which I hugely valued being a part and it is great to read this short but comprehensive report on AHUA’s origins and development.

    AHUA Spring Conference 2024 at the University of Leeds

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  • Higher education postcard: Al-Azhar University

    Higher education postcard: Al-Azhar University

    Greetings from Cairo!

    In 970 work started on the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, which had been founded on the orders of al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah, the fourth Fatimid Caliph. Work on the buildings was completed two years later. In 988 Ya’qub ibn Killis, the first vizier of the Fatimids, designated the mosque as a centre of learning, and the following year 35 scholars were hired. This marked the beginnings of the mosque as a place of learning. The curriculum included law and jurisprudence, grammar, astronomy, philosophy and logic; ibn Killis himself taught; and both men and women could study there.

    It was also, it seems, a place of learning with an agenda. The Fatimids, argue Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara in their 2016 work “The Origins of Higher Learning”, funded Al-Azhar in order to create a framework to underpin Shia Islam.

    In 1171, the Ayyubid caliph Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, who you might know better as Saladin, overthrew the last of the Fatimids, after many years of strife. One of the actions he took was to assert Sunni Islam, rather than Shia; and with this the fortunes of Al-Azhar took a downward turn. There was, it seems, the destruction of books on a vast scale. Some say 120,000 books from the library, some say 2,000,000. Now, by the 1050s the library was said to hold 200,000 books, which is a lot, but it does feel like the upper estimate for destruction one hundred years later has some poetic license about it. In any event, a lot of books were destroyed. Al-Azhar lost its breadth, becoming a centre for the study of Sunni Islam.

    And so it remained, for several centuries. It gained in prestige, becoming one of the four main centres for Sunni jurisprudence in the Islamic world. It regrew its library, which now holds over seven million items; it expended its premises. It continued to accept students for study; and continued too award qualifications. On which rests its claim to be the longest continually operating degree awarding body in Egypt.

    In 1961 – nearly 1000 years after its foundation – Al-Azhar was re-founded as a modern university. Its curriculum was secularised, to cover business, science, engineering, and medicine. And it has a broader remit, as a body responsible for schools across Egypt, with over 4,000 affiliated institutions, with 2,000,000 learners at those schools and institutes.

    Since 2011 the University’s Council of Senior Scholars – senior Islamic scholars, that is – has been re-established and plays a role in national affairs. This includes electing Egypt’s Grand Mufti, which role had previously been appointed by the country’s president. Roughly speaking, a mufti is an Islamic scholar who can issue a fatwa; the Grand Mufti in a country is head of that country’s muftis.

    One of the reasons I like finding out about universities in other countries is the exposure to different ideas of what a university is or does. Al-Azhar has antiquity, it teaches to a high level, it’s a university. And it has a broader remit too.

    And here, as is now becoming customary, is a jigsaw of the postcard. Hope you enjoy it!

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  • Spring 2025 Inclusive Growth and Racial Equity Thought Leadership Lecture Series (Howard University)

    Spring 2025 Inclusive Growth and Racial Equity Thought Leadership Lecture Series (Howard University)

    Scheduled for Feb 20, 2025. The Spring 2024 Inclusive Growth and Racial Equity Thought Leadership Lecture Series will feature a fireside chat with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, Director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research, and National Book Award-winning Author.

     


     

     

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  • The Timpson university – HEPI

    The Timpson university – HEPI

    • By Richard Brabner, Executive chair of the UPP Foundation and Director of ESG at UPP.
    • Richard is a guest on today’s My Imaginary University podcast with Paul Greatrix, in which he cites James Timpson as one of the inspirations behind his imaginary university. To coincide with the podcast, Richard has penned a review of James Timpson’s book, The Happy Index: Lessons in Upside-Down Management.

    You’re not supposed to have heroes at 40, or at least not admit to as much in the august pages of the HEPI blog. But here’s my confession. I have two and they are both called James.

    The first – James (Jimmy) Anderson, England’s greatest living sportsperson – isn’t relevant for the blog (although surely he deserves recognition from our great universities in the North West?). Instead this blog is about the other James – James Timpson – until recently CEO of Timpson Group and now Lord Timpson, Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending.

    James Timpson is best known for the recruitment of former prisoners, with ex-offenders comprising around 10% of his company’s workforce at any one time. As his journey of employing ex-offenders developed, it led him to become a national figure – championing not just jobs for ex-offenders but prison reform. In 2016, he became the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, founded the Employment Advisory Board network across the prison estate and, after the general election, became one of the Government’s most eye-catching appointments as the Minister of State responsible for all of this.

    It is his approach as a CEO, though, which offers an interesting perspective for higher education leaders. Not only is the business known for its recruitment policies but for many other progressive measures. He wouldn’t describe it as such, but James Timpson is a business leader known for putting social purpose into action.

    He would steer clear from using the term social value, or the increasingly common ‘purpose-led business’, because he finds corporate jargon maddening. This is one of the many lessons he shares in his book, which offers advice to leaders and would-be leaders on how to create a thriving organisation ‘that puts people first.’ The book – published before he became a Minister – is structured in eight chapters (or, as he calls them, lessons) with various interesting observations included in each. For this blog, however, I have pulled out three key themes which permeate through the book and are highly relevant to our sector.

    1. Happy colleagues = happy students

    University-employee relations are often fraught with tensions and have been riddled with industrial action in recent years – so could a key-cutting business offer a better way forward?  

    We’ve seen the transformative power of treating colleagues with kindness and respect, which then extends to how teams interact with customers. It’s a virtuous circle that can make our shops, and indeed all places of customer service, better for everyone involved.

    The quote above might come across a stating the bleeding obvious or even a little saccharine without the rest of the chapter it is written in, but it is important to put cynicism aside here, because throughout the book – and I would argue its number one focus – is to foster the right colleague experience.

    The idea of focussing on the colleague experience in an era of redundancies and ‘cost transformation’ may be too culturally difficult or simply inauthentic for our sector. But I would argue that the present circumstances make it even more important. At the heart of Timpson’s approach is a very human and empathetic one which respects colleagues’ individual circumstances rather than one which relies on policies and processes.

    Timpson has a Director of Happiness (again, please hold off on your cynicism) whose job revolves around providing support to colleagues confronting crises or challenges in their professional or personal lives. This person helps organise funerals, helps colleagues find somewhere to live and can even unlock financial support when necessary. Whether it is physical fitness, financial wellbeing or mental health, Timpson also offers a comprehensive package of welfare support for employees. Shouldn’t we do this too?

    Strong workplace benefits add to the positive colleague experience. This is not unusual for universities; academics and professional services tend to have great annual leave entitlements and exceptional pensions (compared to the private sector), but again, what comes through from reading The Happy Index is the human and empathetic element to their approach. They offer extra days off for milestones – a grandchild’s birthday or a school concert. They provide chauffeur-driven cars for an employee’s wedding, and they own 19 holiday homes dotted across the UK for Timpson’s colleagues to use for free.

    Much of this approach isn’t new or revolutionary, there are clear similarities with the 19th century quaker businesses, or Percival Perry’s policy of ‘high wages, reduced hours, and extensive corporate welfare’[1] for running Ford’s first factories in the UK. Yet, in an era of private equity financialisation, it is all too rare in the modern age. When Governments talk about universities learning from the private sector it is the likes of Timpson they should be referring to.

    2. Focus and simplicity

    Timpson’s human approach to the colleague experience is aided by simplicity – a value which cuts across the eight lessons in the book. When he writes about data, he says that leaders can become overly reliant on it and lose sight of what really matters. There are only four pieces of data James Timpson really cares about. Daily sales figures, customer service scores, cash flow – and what he describes as The Happy Index. This is a survey they regularly run and track with all colleagues, which asks one simple question: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you with the support you get from your team?’.

    If Timpson is right in his view that ‘the way colleagues feel reflects the way our customers will feel’, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if this correlates to higher education? Perhaps universities could post this question each Friday via an app (not dissimilar to innovations like Teacher Tapp) to track colleague satisfaction and then correlate it with student experience data.

    Another relevant piece of advice is to avoid ‘entrepreneuritis’. Timpson says this is an area he struggles with as it is common for entrepreneurs to think they can venture into any business and make it thrive. Yet the pitfalls are as large as the opportunities. This reminded me of much of the evidence for the UPP Foundation Civic University Commission, where we found a huge amount of positive activity, but rarely was it strategic and connected to the needs of the city or region.

    The civic arena won’t be the only part of the university where our sector has to grapple with entrepreneuritis, but fortunately, Timpson offers some common-sense advice for how to test whether diversification is worth the investment, time and effort, based on three questions:

    Will it benefit the company, will the company fit into our culture, and is it going to be more work than it’s worth?

    All of these can be adapted for higher education.

    3. Giving back to get more

    The third theme brings us back to what Timpson is best known for. A ‘Timpson University’ would really lean into progressive recruitment for both academics and professional services colleagues, as well as adopt some of the most creative and impactful social value programmes in the private and public sectors. This shouldn’t be regarded as an act of charity. This is very much enlightened self-interest – James Timpson says that ‘returning citizens are often the most dedicated, honest and hardworking colleagues we can find’. A recruitment policy for colleagues which looks at supporting the most disadvantaged – ex-offenders, people who have suffered homelessness or who are care-experienced; alongside local recruitment (as some universities already do), which targets the poorest neighbourhoods in the region, could be transformational. The additional opportunity for a university, unlike a shoe repair shop, is the symbiotic relationship this approach could have with its widening participation strategy.

    Many universities have programmes to support disadvantaged people into employment, but I’m not sure any are as sophisticated or impressive as Timpson’s. There are clearly challenges, but the book is at its best when it details the journey the business has been through and some of the ways to successfully manage ex-offenders – unsurprisingly, the human approach and a culture which embraces kindness and the support and guidance of colleagues is critical.

    James Timpson’s book is a fascinating insight into running a successful business the right way. It really does show the art of the possible in terms of doing good while making a profit. But there are three weaknesses in a largely excellent read. Pulled together from a collection of Sunday Times articles, at times it can suffer from a lack of coherence. It is quite amusing, for example, to read about the importance of returning to the office on page 160 while finding out about the long-term potential of remote work on page 166. There’s also a little too much positive spin throughout the book. In the section about entrepreneuritis and diversifying income streams all of his examples ended up being successful. It would have been an even better read if he offered examples of real failure. I would have also liked to read more about his views on how the nature of business ownership impacts social value, something which should be explored in greater depth.  

    These are minor criticisms, however. The book offers excellent advice for leaders in any sector – even our universities – on the way to run a successful organisation in the 21st Century.

    [1] Kit Kowol: Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War

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  • Social mobility is about to die – and university won’t help

    Social mobility is about to die – and university won’t help

    In 1994, the year that HESA was born and we started to count those with degrees from former polytechnics in the stats, about 225,000 full-time home-domiciled students graduated with a first degree in the UK.

    Today the Russell Group enrols about 350k. Funny that those who say too many people go to university tend to stay tight lipped about that part of the sector’s “dilution”.

    Ten years later, then funding council boss Howard Newby said:

    [T]he English—and I do mean the English—do have a genius for turning diversity into hierarchy and I am not sure what we can do about that, to be quite honest. It is very regrettable that we cannot celebrate diversity rather than constantly turning it into hierarchy.

    The switch of circa 125,000 students from poly to university in the early 90s was one of the signature moments of the status/sorting panic that has accompanied the expansion of higher education over time.

    The story runs something like this. Access to university has never been evenly distributed across the social-economics. And having a degree seems to bestow upon graduates socio-economic advantages.

    So over the long-run, rather than doing the hard yards of making entry distribution fairer – which, whatever method is used, necessarily involves saying “no” to some who think they have a right to go – the easier thing has always been to say “yes” and expand instead.

    Hence when in 2018 OfS had a choice between Option 1:

    …it obviously couldn’t persuade ministers to front out Option 1. So everyone let Option 2 happen instead – only without the money to support it. And now look at the mess we’re in.

    Option 2 – whether applied to the whole sector or just the elite part – creates a problem for those who enjoy the relative rarity of the signalling. The signal is less powerful, partly because there are few who look back on their time at university and think “maybe if it was truly meritocratic I wouldn’t have made it in”.

    It also ought to be expensive to expand – so over time both universities and their students are instead expected to become more and more efficient, or fund participation through future salary contributions to pay for the expansion.

    And if overall participation levels off, Option 2 applied just to the elite part of the sector yanks students away from everywhere else – with huge geographical and social consequences along the way.

    There is a human capital upside of mass participation. The better educated the population, the more inventive and healthy and happy and productive it will be in general. But without other actions, that doesn’t address the relative inequalities of getting in or getting on.

    Onwards and upwards

    The phrase “social mobility” doesn’t actually appear in the 2024 Labour Manifesto – but it’s lurking around in the opportunity mission as follows:

    We are a country where who your parents are – and how much money they have – too often counts for more than your effort and enterprise… so breaking the pernicious link between background and success will be a defining mission for Labour.

    Good luck with that. Part of the question for me that surrounds that is the scale of that challenge insofar as it concerns higher education – and what is coming soon in the stats that will make that easier or harder.

    For the past few decades, different iterations of the “efficiencies” needed to massify – which focussed largely on the transfer of the costs of participation from state to graduate – have had three core features designed to reconcile the expansion and efficiency thing with the goals of social mobility before, during and after HE:

    • Initiatives (a mix of sticks and carrots, inputs and outcomes and getting in v getting on) aimed at broadening the characteristics of those getting in into higher education
    • No upfront participation costs via loans to students for maintenance and tuition – so being in it felt “equal”
    • Loan interest and income-contingent repayment arrangements designed to redistribute some of the relative economic success to the less successful

    Taken together, the idea has been that accessing the signalling benefits will be easier via expansion and fairness fixes; that the experience itself resembles the “school uniform” principle of everyone having a fairly similar experience; and then that those who reap the economic rewards shoulder the biggest burden (and in that a burden a bit bigger than it actually cost) in paying for it all.

    You tackle inequality partly through opportunity, and partly through outcomes – the rich pay more both than others and more than the actual cost. So central was redistribution to the design of the fee and loan system in the last decade that the government announced and formally consulted on a plan for early repayment mechanisms to stop people on high incomes being able to “unfairly buy themselves out of this progressive system”.

    But a decade on, the government is in a real bind. The initiatives aimed at broadening the characteristics of those enrolling into higher education look much less impactful than just expanding – especially in “high tariff” providers.

    The cost of living – especially for housing – is wrecking the “school uniform” principle unless we were to loan students even more money – which has its… costs.

    And having reduced interest on student loans to inflation – paid for by a longer loan term – it’s hard to think of a more politically toxic move than slapping it back on, however redistributive it will look on an excel sheet.

    A bigger mountain to climb

    That all exacerbates the social mobility challenge. Students cluster into the Russell Group because that group of providers now has the same “meaning” for the press and parents that “university” had prior to 1992.

    Whether in the Russell Group or not, the differential student experiences of haves and have-nots (both inside and outside of the curriculum) will show up both in their actual skills and what they can “sell” to employers. And the most successful graduates from the most attractive-sounding universities will pay less for university across their lifetime, while everyone else will pay more.

    In a way though, even thinking about social mobility or the redistributive graduate contribution scheme in terms of relative lifetime salary is the biggest problem of all. Because given what’s coming, it really should be the least of our worries.

    Since Tony Blair increased tuition fees to £3,000, above-inflation house price growth has delivered an unearned, unequal and untaxed £3 trillion capital gains windfall in Britain. 86 per cent above inflation house price growth over the past 20 years has delivered capital gains on home owners’ main residences worth £3 trillion – now a fifth of all wealth in Britain.

    The value of household wealth stood at around three times the value of national income throughout the 1960s and 1970s – but since the 1980s, the rate at which households have accumulated wealth has accelerated, outpacing the growth in national income, so that the stock of household wealth was estimated to be 7.6 times GDP at the end of 2020.

    Wealth matters. For those who have accumulated it, it provides a better ability to absorb shocks to income, easier access to lower-cost credit, and facilitates investment in significant assets such as housing. But it’s not equally held.

    Wealth is about twice as unequal as the income distribution, and because growth in wealth is outpacing growth in household income it is harder for those currently without it to accumulate it, and enjoy the same benefits outlined above – because as the value of assets rise relative to income, it becomes harder for someone to “save” their way up the wealth distribution.

    The least wealthy third of households have gained less than £1,000 per adult on average, compared to an average gain of £174,000 for the wealthiest ten per cent. Gains have been largest in London, where on average people have gained £76,000 since 2000, and smallest in the North East of England, with an average gain of just £21,000.

    As Robert Colville points out in The Times:

    We have come to realise that what is really dividing our society, as that £5.5 trillion starts to cascade down the generations, is not the boomers’ greed but their love.

    There’s an age aspect to the inequality – those aged 60+ have seen the biggest windfalls at around £80,000 on average – compared to an average of less than £20,000 for those under 40 years of age. But that age aspect also points to something hugely important that’s coming next – because eventually, those older people will die – and who they transfer their wealth to, and what it’s invested in, will matter. Because not only does wealth inequality dwarf wage inequality, it also predicts and drives it.

    Student transfers

    Here thanks to the Resolution Foundation we can see how intergenerational transfers (both gifts and inheritances) will become increasingly important during the century, as older households disperse their wealth at death via inheritances. It estimates that those transfers are set to double over the next 20 years as the large baby-boomer cohort move into late retirement – and it is likely that more wealth will be dispersed by these households while they are alive through gifts.

    And it’s when that ramps up that the interaction with any tuition fee system that will really start to matter.

    Since 2015/16, DfE figures for England tell us that between 10.1 and 13.6 per cent of entrants at Level 6 have self-funded. Some of that will be PT/CPD type activity, some of it students running out of SLC entitlement, and some not drawing down debt for religious reasons – but most will be people who can just afford it.

    Of course what a fixed-ish percentage hides a bit is the number growth – if HE participation has been growing “at the bottom” of the social-economics, a fixed-ish percentage means that more on equivalent incomes are paying upfront. In 2022/23, a record 54,700 entrants were marked up as “no award or financial backing”.

    In the original £9,000 fees system, it made little sense to opt-out of student loans – because the vast majority never paid it back in full by design. But now with a cheaper (in real terms) tuition fee, a frozen repayment threshold and an extended term of 40 years, the calculation has changed – suddenly it makes much more sense to avoid the debt if you can.

    And so given that paying for your younger relatives’ tuition fees represents a way of investing some of that inheritance in way that avoids inheritance tax, we’d have to assume that unchecked, not only will richer graduates in the loan scheme get a much better lifetime deal than they did a few years ago, more and more won’t be in the scheme at all.

    (The green line is the system we had for most of the last decade – the grey line the system the Conservatives slipped past everyone on their way out).

    Even if every penny of an inheritance was drained away on paying for HE upfront, if we compare two graduates – one with 40 years of graduate repayments ahead of them, and one without, it doesn’t take long to clock how impossible social mobility becomes for otherwise notionally equal graduates.

    Then assume that those getting their fees and costs paid for them while they’re a student are clustered into the Russell Group and its signals already – and lay on top of that the fact that those without a windfall coming are more likely to be those with a pretty thin “student experience” and so without the skills or cultural capital to cheat the socio-economic odds, and you pretty quickly need to give up and go home.

    The problem that that all leaves is pretty significant – partly because wealth inequality is already more stratified than income, partly because it drives the type and value of HE experience a student might have, and partly because HE participation has a much better track record at delivering salary gains and salary redistribution than it does at delivering wealth gains or wealth redistribution.

    Put another way, it might be a rite of passage, and it might be good to have a better educated population, but without the prospect of it delivering social mobility, it will lose both real and symbolic value.

    Hierarchy or diversity?

    So in reverse order, what can be done? On the way out, if there must be a graduate contribution system, not only does it have to return to attempting to redistribute from the richest to the poorest, it has to do so by expecting a fair chunk of that boomer windfall to fund some redistribution.

    An above inflation interest rate has to return – and upfront fee payers shouldn’t be able to just buy a better education for themselves, as they can in the US – they should be expected to contribute more into the pot for everyone’s benefit. Higher fees, but only for for upfront payers – DfE needs to dust off that consultation from the last decade, and fast.

    During, we’ll need to redouble efforts to re-establish at least a notional run at the school uniform principle – carefully calibrating student income and experience to return to a baseline where everyone experiences something similar.

    Some of that is about reducing the costs of participation rather than loaning more money to meet them, some is about defining a contemporary student experience so that those who need to work can do so with dignity while extracting educational value, and those that don’t are expected to. It’s also about a credit system that recognises the educational value of extracurricular activity – so that everyone has time to take part in it.

    Then on the way in, we need more mixing – we do need Scenario 1 to return as a much tougher target.

    As well as that, the clustering up the league tables as a way of avoiding harder questions about access in our elite institutions almost certainly needs to stop. Taken to its logical conclusion, in a couple of decades there will only be 24 universities left (and in the minds of the press and parents, we’re arguably already there) – but if Labour facilitates only 19 cities having students and graduates in them, both it and everywhere else is doomed.

    Labour, in other words, has to start saying no:

    • It could say “no” to current university growth altogether, letting further education grow to soak up demand as polytechnics did when universities were capped in the 80s;
    • It could say “no” to any more university growth in current locations, allowing expansion into other places with all the economic and social benefits that would bring;
    • It could say “no” to any more “residential” places at universities, causing colleges and universities to become more comprehensive as they rush to make commuting more normal;
    • Or it could say “no” to “low value” courses, on the assumption that supply and then demand will flow into “high value” ones – if, of course, it could find a credible way of differentiating between the two.

    Part of the balancing act to choking off clustering is one other thing that should matter to Labour. The scandal isn’t that applicant X can’t quite get into the Russell Group with 3 A*s. It’s that we still have a system that somehow writes off the student and the university they attend if they don’t.

    Making it much more attractive to commute (coupled with a domestic Erasmus), talking up not just alternatives to university but universities that aren’t the Russell Group, abolishing the archaic degree classification system, ripping up all the quality systems that have singularly failed to “assure” the press and the public that quality can be found elsewhere, and forcing through some institutional subject specialisms (and obvious vocational excellence) within the system would all help.

    Do all of that, and maybe one day, a senior figure in HE might be able to claim that mass higher education – and all the rich benefits it brings – both survived and thrived because it finally found a way to celebrate diversity rather than forever turning it into hierarchy.

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