For Everything to Stay the Same, Everything Must Change

... a riposte to academic nostalgia

TL;DR: Higher education is struggling not because it has failed, but precisely because it has succeeded in delivering mass access and participation. Universities are consequentially experiencing a loss of morale, rooted not only in issues such as pay, workload and insecurity but more fundamentally in the erosion of professional autonomy, trust, and collective governance. Looking backwards will not help, if we want continuity of values, we must be willing to change how universities are built and run.

I have been an academic, with some intervals for government and other work, for a considerable period. Much of that time spent in ‘management’ roles of one form or another. There have, during this time, been ups-and-downs in the sector. Policy changes have had impacts, some quite significant. Broader national, and occasionally global, political currents have washed through universities. Yet, I cannot recall a time in which morale amongst academics has been lower. I am by predilection a ‘glass half-full’ sort of person, so the fact that I acknowledge it, says something. I do wonder why other university leaders appear reluctant to confront this directly, perhaps I will, as a result of this article, find out.

This is not a simple plaint. I remain disinclined to negativity. I intend to finish this article with a positive and forward-looking, though possibly uncomfortable, set of prescriptions. To do this however, we need to be clear about the issues we face.

Sector Strains

First then, it is vital to recognise that, in large part, the bruised morale has immediate and objective justifications. Some of these are primary and material; others are consequential but no less problematic. Let us consider the obvious issues of remuneration and job security. Sectoral pay awards have lagged those of public sector employees. The last pay award was, by any standards, gravely disappointing, reflecting the parlous financial state of universities operating a ‘business model’ that scarcely covers its costs. This award was made at a time when the escalating cost of living was becoming most apparent. Pay settlements have in large part favoured, for good reason, lower career grades. The structure of the pay spines leaves many mid to late career individuals ‘stuck’ at the top of their grade. Whilst the pension offer remains excellent, disputes over valuations and sustainability have eroded confidence in the associated value proposition.

In many universities the situation is sharpened by redundancies, or at least the prospect of redundancies. Even where the numbers are relatively small, and the subject disciplines distant and vulnerable, the effects are felt well beyond those immediately affected. Uncertainty has a sapping effect, and there is limited prospect of near-term relief.

Alongside these financial pressures, the operational environment has become markedly more demanding. Change is happening at greater pace, as universities seek to secure their position in a tighter, more competitive environment. Familiar structures and ways of working are replaced. Resources are tighter, and their use more heavily scrutinised.

There is simply more work for academics to do. There are more students, many of whom require support of a different kind to that offered hitherto. Their expectations are higher, and their willingness, as consumers, to manifest dissatisfaction is more developed. The forms of pedagogy must, as a consequence, change, but many academics feel, and indeed are, ill prepared to address this.

Many universities have invested in their estates (a few incurring barely manageable debt in the process) and now have better campuses but, for the most part, the improvements have been directed towards the student experience and large showcase research facilities. The staff experience has been less consistently prioritised. Shared offices and open plan workspaces have become the norm. Remote work, whilst allowing for individual flexibility, has undoubtedly damaged the sense of a campus community.

Important though these factors are, they do not by themselves account for the depth or persistence of the loss of morale. The more fundamental issue lies elsewhere.

Professional Autonomy

At the heart of the challenge is an accelerating decline in professional autonomy and in the capacity for self-determination on the part of academics. There is more oversight and an increasing element of performance management. Workload is allocated in an ever more granular manner. Academics feel hemmed in by process and directive policy.

This loss of autonomy is not confined to workload or management practice, but extends into the organisation of research, the framing of academic careers, and the weakening of meaningful collective governance.

Research is, for many academics, a key part of their identity and satisfies their intellectual drives. It is why they entered the profession. It is, however, increasingly difficult to afford and the ‘connected time’ required is ever harder to secure. Expectations relating to funding and, of course, publication now tightly frame research performance.

There has been a marked decline in the mechanisms of collective governance, accompanied by a shift towards more managerial models. The system of committees and boards conducting business by consensus on extended timescales and with limited accountability for outcomes has been replaced by committees that may retain the same names but are largely executive in character and carry the associated responsibilities. Those opportunities that exist for collective governance have been wholly, or in substantial part, given over to the theatre of grievance.

Eroding Trust

The social licence that universities have enjoyed is under increasing threat. It may seem somewhat counterintuitive that our increasing societal importance, greater accessibility, and our centrality to agendas for growth and prosperity, should actually coincide with a sharper critique and less trust in our ability to fulfil the role demanded of us. For academics motivated by a sense of public purpose this feels particularly painful.

Inevitability of Change

Now to the essence of the argument I wish to present. Most of what I have described follows directly from the growth in social participation in higher education and the trajectory towards an ever more knowledge-centric economy. What we do matters more to society and the cost of delivering it has a significant impact for individuals and taxpayers. We are the venues for cultural and intellectual contest with broad ramifications for the way society is organised.

We are operating in a globally competitive, geopolitically challenging environment. The nature of the research endeavour is changing with greater requirements for investment and scale to secure advances at the knowledge frontier and to deliver the benefits of those advances.

It follows from this that we are expected to be accountable, that we are subject to scrutiny, that our position is not abused, that we reflect and act upon public concerns (for example in relation to immigration), that we are frugal and responsible stewards of what are seen as public resources, that we look after those who are paying to study with us and give them a ‘good deal’. To ensure that these expectations are met, we are subject to increasingly stringent regulation and policy direction. We must also demonstrate high levels of transparency. These in turn demand much greater levels of accountability from governing bodies and executive leadership.

This is simply the environment we operate in. To act as if it were not, is not nostalgia, rather it is irresponsibility. I am not sure I would even wish it were other than it is is. Because to wish that is to wish that we were not extending access and participation and providing the benefits of higher education to more people. To wish that is to wish that we do not remain a high-skill economy. To wish that is to wish that science and technology was not advancing in the way it is and as a global endeavour.

Nostalgia may provide psychological comfort but it impedes clear-sighted analysis and action. We were never going to be able to sustain a wasteful and indulgent elite model of higher education. And it was never the right thing to do. We had to change … we have to change further.

I promised however, a positive conclusion, and I try to keep my promises. I also said it might be uncomfortable.

I believe fundamentally in the importance of appropriately rewarding hard work, talent and excellence (and I see a great deal of this in universities). I am deeply pained by the uncertainty in the sector. I wish to see a campus environment that fosters creative and community engagement. I believe in the value of academic autonomy as a vital basis for innovation and challenge. I believe in collective governance as a means of binding together a community of scholars, educators and committed professionals. I also think this is the bedrock of assurance of standards. I abhor process for processes sake, and stultifying regulatory ukase. There is much in higher education, as it was, that I am grateful for the chance to jettison, but not all.

Change as the Price of Continuity

We can have the system we want, if we are prepared to contemplate substantial change. This is the central irony, that the things we wish most to preserve of higher education, as it was, can only be secured by disruptive change. Some of it, frankly, painful. What follows is not a programme, but a direction of travel. It matters less whether or not you agree with these particular suggestions, than that you concur with my primary assertion which is that only major, long-term, forward-looking change will allow us to restore morale. This is possible, but difficult.

No more money is coming to the sector, at least not to support our core educational business model. We must move, rapidly, to a sustainable system in which universities can deliver at lower cost and retain the capacity to invest. This likely entails digital transformation at pace, and a radical programme of business process reengineering requiring the shedding of complexity and removal of duplication. Sectoral consolidation and reorganisation will be necessary, as will rationalisation of collective provision. This must necessarily be directed towards creating a more heterogeneous sector.

Deeply unpleasant though it is, higher education providers must match their staffing complement to their income, and do so quickly. We probably need fewer people, paid better. Our workforce structures must change alongside this. I envisage more learning designers, student advisers, experience managers, technicians, career coaches, practitioners in residence, faculty associates, and similar. Our current approach cannot sustain the student experience that is demanded and we have too many people in roles poorly aligned with student-facing support for what is in essence (and I know the term does not fit exactly) a ‘service-business’.

The existing system of research and education, and education-only, academics needs a substantial rethink. We likely require fewer academics with research in their remit, but those that do need greater time allocated, and must be subject to a strategic research management regime with a more sophisticated and developmental approach to performance management. We need to organise for careers with greater role mobility. In these circumstances we could, and should, restore models that confer greater trust and professional autonomy albeit for fewer individuals.

Management needs to be professionalised, reflecting its responsibilities in a more regulated and financially constrained context. There is no necessary contradiction between expert professional leadership and leaders who possess the skills, models and frameworks required to enable the complex, resource-aware but essentially collaborative models that a university of the kind we envisage should exhibit.

If, as I (and many others) envisage, education shifts from more didactic to more experiential then our campuses will need to change. This is the moment to reconsider the staff experience on campus, and what we want the intellectual life of our campuses to look like. I understand the move to greater remote work but it may be that, whilst it is individually beneficial, it has diminished the collective benefits derived from a ‘scholarly community’.

Clearly, the renewal of our social licence is vital. I have addressed some aspects of this in other articles and it deserves a much more thorough analysis that I can present here. My sense is however, that if higher education demonstrated a greater capacity for uncomfortable change it would secure greater institutional trust.

Finally, and most critically, we must rethink university governance. It should not be impossible to build the means for oversight, shaping and co-development, alongside the capacity for executive initiative and proper systems of accountability. We are some way from that, and most universities operate a system that no longer serves any of the proper purposes of governance. It deprives academics and professional staff of a voice whilst simultaneously frustrating the executive direction of the institution.

Taken together, these changes describe a more differentiated, more professional, and more sustainable university system, that reflects academic values. They offer the possibility of a new equilibrium.

If morale is to be restored, it will not be through reassurance or a retreat into idealising accounts of how universities once were. It will come only from confronting reality, making difficult choices, and redesigning our institutions for the world as it is. The paradox remains: the values we most wish to protect in higher education can now be secured only through deliberate and sometimes painful change.