SRHE News Issue 29–July 2017
SRHE News 29: July 2017
Editorial: What’s wrong with politicians in HE?
The June general election disrupted normal business at Westminster in almost every sense: the summer silly season may be suspended altogether, despite the annual three-month holiday for Parliament. The unexpected election result had something to do with the mobilisation of the student and young persons’ vote by the Labour Party, probably connected to their promise to abolish tuition fees and even cancel all student debt. The storm brewing since the election was sparked into life by the intervention of Lord Adonis, self-styled architect of the fees policy and director of the No 10 Policy Unit under Tony Blair. It captured all the worst features of politicians in HE in one episode: selective attention to issues; pursuing personal interests in the guise of caring about the issue; selective memory; rewriting history; not taking advice from people who actually know how a policy might work; and - worst of all to academics - contempt for evidence.
Andrew Adonis, returning to comment on HE after some years away, wrote a scathing but completely misguided piece about fees for The Times on 28 June 2017. ‘Goodbye tuition fees. They were a sensible idea wrecked by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s decision to treble them overnight, and by the greed and complacency of vice-chancellors who thought they were a licence to print money’. His motive was apparently to protect his ‘legacy’ as ‘the moving force behind Tony Blair’s decision in 2004 to introduce … top-up fees … The intention was that fees would vary between £1000 and £3000 depending on the cost and benefit of each course. But the VCs formed a cartel and almost universally charged £3000.’
Adonis and most other politicians in the Westminster bubble have conveniently forgotten that it was always obvious, well before the vote on £3000 fees back in 2004, that virtually all universities would be charging the maximum £3000, as a Guardian report from 13 January 2004 makes clear: ‘Today's survey of 53 of the 89 university vice-chancellors in England, carried out by EducationGuardian.co.uk, reveals that, in practice, variability will be minimal while the fee ceiling remains at £3,000, though elite universities are already lobbying for that cap to be swiftly lifted.’ But Adonis is clearly a man who harbours grudges over the long term, predicting that fees would soon be abolished and ‘VCs need to start planning for real austerity. The flow of money from £9000 fees will soon dry up. They could set an example and halve their salaries.’
Adonis had stamped his foot and ‘thcreamed and thcreamed until he made himthelf thick’, in the style of Violet-Elizabeth Bott. Despite knowledgeable HE commentators pointing out how wrong he was about almost everything, his ideas ‘gained traction’, as they say in the Westminster bubble. Pretty soon Damian Green, the Deputy Prime Minister, was having to backtrack from an ill-advised response in a wide-ranging interview when he suggested that the whole fees policy needed review.
Conservative commentator George Trefgarne on 26 June 2017 blogged for Reaction, asking ‘Why is nobody in the Conservative Party talking about the broken student loan system?’ Then on 5 July the Institute for Fiscal Studies put out their Briefing Note (BN211), Higher Education funding in England: past, present and options for the future, seized on by the media with front page headlines blaring that three-quarters of graduates will never repay their debt. Steve Jones (Manchester) blogged for WonkHE on 6 July 2017 ‘Are headline writers getting it wrong on fees?’. The answer was mostly yes, but his argument was much too sensible to ‘gain traction’ when Westminster was already in full-blown panic mode.
Mark Leach of WonkHE had offered a primer on 22 May 2017: ‘The Pros and Cons of Abolishing Tuition fees’ after Andrew McGettigan gave his own version on 12 May 2017, in the run-up to the general election, ‘The cost of abolishing tuition fees’. McGettigan got back on the case with his Critical Education blog on 5 July 2017, ‘IFS on tuition fees’, pointing out that the IFS arguments were sound,
1 but inconvenient for Minister Jo Johnson, who had spent most of the previous few days arguing that the HE finance system was not broke and therefore he shouldn’t fix it. SRHE Vice-President Peter Scott wrote in The Guardian on 4 July 2017: ‘why are we not taking seriously a key message that came out of the campaign? Labour’s manifesto promise to abolish tuition fees in England, initially seen as off- the-wall, gained enormous traction. This is hardly surprising given the prospects faced by graduates – escalating debt, doubtful job prospects in a declining post-Brexit economy and decent homes out of reach.’ His piece was titled ‘The end of tuition fees is on the horizon – universities must get ready’.
Adonis wasn’t finished – indeed, he was hardly getting started. He wrote in The Guardian on 7 July 2017 under the headline ‘I put up tuition fees. It’s now clear they have to be scrapped’, saying ‘Debts of £50,000 are far more than I envisaged, and make the system unworkable’. Martin Harris (former director of the Office for Fair Access) weighed in, writing to The Guardian on 9 July 2017:
‘Andrew Adonis is right that the current fee regime cannot survive, but he understates the success of the £3k fee which he devised and which Charles Clarke introduced after the 2003 election … Adonis is unfair in attributing to vice-chancellors the decision to raise fees to £9k. This was a political diktat … Ministers were clearly told how universities would behave when presented with a fee regime which would in effect label their courses first, second or third class by price. … Since then, a series of decisions by Conservative ministers have made matters worse, especially the abandonment of the categorical promise that tuition fee debt would never increase in real terms. The current regime certainly has to go. But we need to revisit something like the Adonis/Clarke scheme rather than totally abolishing fees. Abolition will inevitably lead to a cap on student numbers and thus to fewer poorer students entering universities.’
Nick Hillman of HEPI added his three penn’orth in a blog on 13 July 2017: ‘Lord Adonis now says the whole system of funding teaching in universities via tuition fees is wrong and should be junked altogether. More than that, he has taken to lashing out at Vice-Chancellors, called for an investigation of tuition fees by the Competition and Markets Authority and is now battling away with academics on how they spend the summer on Twitter.’ Hillman said Adonis was ‘intellectually incoherent … intellectually weak. … [and making] false linkages: ‘it is silly to draw a direct line between higher tuition fees and the current levels of remuneration.’ However Jo Johnson was ready to endorse part of the Adonis rant, saying, “There are legitimate concerns about the rate at which vice chancellor pay has been growing. I think it is hard for students at a time when they have concerns over value for money and want to see real evidence of value for money from their tuition fees”.
Undaunted, Adonis made multiple media appearances, no doubt delighted to be once again in the political spotlight and feeling that his political bandwagon was gathering speed. As John Elledge of CityMetric wrote for the New Statesman on 4 July 2017: ‘Maybe scrapping tuition fees would be regressive. Perhaps we should do it anyway’, arguing that ‘Supporters of fees may be right on the policy – but they're way off on the politics.’ Adonis even attacked the Times Higher Education for allegedly not exposing the issue of VCs’ salaries, a ludicrous comment revealing his ignorance of years of evidence in THE to the contrary.
The evidence-based debate on the pros and cons of tuition fees continued, but in a different universe. The 11 May blog for WonkHE by Gavan Conlon of London Economics, a longstanding expert commentator in this territory, argued that abolishing fees is fundamentally regressive. Christopher Newfield (University of California at Santa Barbara) blogged for WonkHE on 15 May 2017 about why abolishing tuition fees is a good idea. It was a scholarly values-based argument which built on his recent book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, October 2016). The common argument in the US is that if public funding goes down, tuition fees go up, but Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute argued for the ‘Bennett hypothesis’ - former US Secretary for Education Bill Bennett said that tuition fees increase until they exhaust the availability of public funds for student support. The long-term
2 trend in the US shows a strong correlation of declining public support with rising tuition, but Delisle argued, in a report released on 1 June 2017, that colleges’ natural explanation should not be taken for granted. Becky Supiano interviewed Delisle for the Chronicle of Higher Education on 1 June 2017.
WonkHE’s weekly briefing on 5 June noted ‘New research from Claire Callender and Geoff Mason … at the UCL Institute of Education … The paper argues that tuition fees debt deters poorer and ethnic minority students from applying to university … The findings challenge the argument that the recent (post-fee increase) growth in full-time HE participation by 18-year-olds from all social classes proves that fees are not a deterrent. UUK chief executive Nicola Dandridge has responded to the paper with a blog criticising the methodology of the report. Dandridge argues that the study’s conclusions do not follow from its survey results and that the survey implies “that student loans are just like other domestic forms of debt such as credit card loans. This is far from the truth”.’
This was conveniently close to the arguments that Minister Jo Johnson had been making, since Dandridge was then unveiled by Johnson as the first chief executive of the Office for Students. It was however somewhat removed from the view of a significant number of her own current employers: later surveys would reveal a third of VCs wished to see substantial change to the fees regime. Andrew Adonis described Dandridge’s appointment as ‘producer capture’, which exercised OfS Chair Michael Barber enough to write to The Guardian on 10 July 2017 saying ‘Don’t dismiss the Office for Students’ - a clash between two former heads of Tony Blair’s No 10 Policy Unit. At least Barber, the author of ‘deliverology’, is showing early signs of realising the limitations of target-setting in his approach as OfS Chair. Adonis, on the other hand, is showing much of what seems to be wrong with politicians in HE. His memory of events and version of history is selective, his evidence is flawed, his arguments are intellectually weak and incoherent, he seems to be too concerned to ‘protect his legacy’, and he has struck an almost Trumpian note in attacking rather than listening to anyone who disagrees with him.
The fee abolitionists are an unlikely combination of more-means-worse elitism and leftist utopian economics, and as Jo Johnson continues to promote market solutions he remains onside with the for- profit providers scenting new opportunities. Abolishing loan-backed fees would be devastating for those private sector providers, and that alone makes abolition unlikely for the present government, even before we get to the economic cost. If Adonis gets his wish for reform, the messy politics might lead to closures of public sector institutions, with less diversity, fewer opportunities for disadvantaged students, new lowest-common-denominator for-profit providers offering courses with less gainful employment for graduates, continuing student debt, and growing dissatisfaction among disenfranchised would-be students. But you can be sure that when the next crisis arrives, the politicians will be blaming HE, the opposition, the media, or anyone - except themselves.
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Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics [email protected].
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4 Contents Editorial: What’s wrong with politicians in HE? ...... 1 Government and Higher Education Policy ...... 6 Policy and funding in England ...... 6 Policy and funding in the US ...... 8 Private and for-profit colleges ...... 9 Strategy, Leadership, Governance and Management ...... 9 Staff ...... 12 Teaching, Learning and Assessment ...... 13 The Teaching Excellence Framework ...... 14 Access and widening participation ...... 16 Students ...... 16 Quality, Standards, Performance, Evaluation ...... 18 Quality and standards ...... 18 Rankings and league tables ...... 18 Research ...... 20 Mind the Knowledge Gap by Paul Temple ...... 20 Research into higher education ...... 22 Exploring a ‘Sense of Belonging’ and Why It Matters in Higher Education by Gill Mills and Caroline Jones ...... 23 Publishing ...... 24 Ethics and Academic Freedom ...... 25 Ethics and Integrity ...... 25 Global Perspectives ...... 26 Asia ...... 26 India ...... 26 Malaysia ...... 27 Australasia ...... 27 Europe ...... 27 Austria ...... 27 France ...... 27 Hungary ...... 27 Society News ...... 28 SRHE Annual Research Conference: 6-8 December 2017 ...... 28 SRHE Newer Researchers Conference: 5 December 2017 ...... 28 SRHE Newer Research Awards Winners 2017 ...... 28 SRHE Research Awards 2017 (Member and Scoping Awards) ...... 29 Forthcoming Events for 2017-18 ...... 29 Appointment of new Team Coordinator for SRHE ...... 30 New position at SRHE: Development Officer ...... 30 Small ads ...... 31 Mind your language...... 32 What’s in a name? ...... 32 And finally ...... 33 Ian McNay has been working abroad … ...... 33
5 Government and Higher Education Policy
Policy and funding in England
A few things happened since the last issue of SRHE News in April. The snap general election had everyone speculating about whether the HE and Research Bill would get through before the end of the Parliament. David Morris of WonkHE reviewed the possibilities on 18 April 2017. Diana Beech of HEPI asked the same question on 19 April 2017. They both agreed: it might or it might not. Catherine Haddon, a Fellow at the Institute for Government, explained on 19 April 2017 how many of the 15 major Bills before Parliament might have to be put on hold until a new government is formed. Some Bills fell, but the HE and Research Bill became an Act. Everything you want to know about the Act is here, comprising all of WonkHE’s blog posts. Oh, and Jo Johnson stays on as HE Minister. So now you’re up to speed.
Michael Barber’s speech to UUK The speech by Sir Michael Barber to Universities UK on 23 June 2017 was his first as chair of the Office for Students; the full text was given on the UUK website. It was brilliantly annotated by WonkHE’s David Kernohan in his blog post, ‘How to read: Michael Barber’s speech to UUK’ on 23 June 2017.
WonkHE’s Monday morning briefing on 10 July 2017 pointed out some common ground between Barber and his new chief executive Nicola Dandridge: ‘Her boss, Michael Barber, chair of the OfS, shares with Dandridge an unlikely background in trade union equality campaigns. Barber was the National Union of Teachers’ lead on policy and equality in the early 1990s, while Dandridge’s first career was as a lawyer, most notably for Thompsons Solicitors working on equality law. In this capacity she literally wrote the book on the subject (the 2005 Equality Law for Trade Unions) … Dandridge went on to become the first chief executive of the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) in 2006 and is widely credited for making equality issues more mainstream in the higher education sector. … Dandridge joins an OfS which is required by law to charge a subscription to universities, and is no stranger to the often highly political question of university subscriptions which looks set to run and run under the new landscape.’
Priorities for the Office for Students Sarah Stevens, Head of Policy for the Russell Group, blogged for WonkHE on 16 May 2017 to suggest priorities for the OfS. It was a classic in self-interest, which is, after all, what the Russell Group pay her for. Among other things she suggested [with translation provided]:
‘a risk-based and proportionate approach to regulation through the OfS … shouldn’t mean ignoring the strong governance procedures and track-record of quality which many institutions have worked hard over the years to achieve.’ [no free passes for new providers, they have no chance of being proper elite universities like the Russell Group]
‘It will be crucial that students are protected from poor provision by maintaining a robust baseline of quality. It will also be important not to define the student interest too narrowly. This is not just about protection from provider failure. It is also in the student interest that teaching is properly funded and that students have access to rich and diverse learning environments.’ [only the Russell Group is rich enough, take no notice of TEF. ‘Diverse’ means lots of different kinds of research, not lots of women, ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged people among the staff and students]
‘Maintaining the world-leading status of the UK higher education system should be a key priority for the new regulator.’ [protect the Russell Group at all costs]
6 ‘Finally, the OfS will have an important role in ensuring the whole system functions well for the benefit of the UK. This will mean having an awareness of the broader regulatory requirements placed on universities by other bodies including UKRI, PSRBs, and charity law (amongst others).’ [we thought for a moment she meant the whole higher education system, but no, just the Russell Group]
On 11 May Eric Macfarlane, an experienced university academic who has also worked in secondary schools, argued in Times Higher Education that ‘The Russell Group’s power over English education must be wielded more wisely … Overemphasis of traditional academic silos is not preparing young people to address the environmental, political and biomedical abyss opening up before us.’ His critique addressed the (undue) influence which the Russell Group has over the school curriculum.
UK HE is an export industry At a conference on 26 April 2017 Lord Willetts, former universities minister, criticised Prime Minister Theresa May’s rhetoric, which emphasised recruiting the ‘brightest and the best’ of overseas students, on the grounds that it failed to recognise the importance of selling an HE service to as many as possible. He also criticised the implication that overseas students should only attend the ‘best’ universities, arguing that it failed to recognise the diversity of the UK system. John Morgan had the story for Times Higher Education on 27 April 2017.
Is HE transformational or socially reproductive? Co-editor of the SRHE books series Jenni Case has published Working Paper 23 for the Centre for Global HE. Higher education and social justice: engaging the normative with the analytical argues that HE in South Africa has a lot to do to to engage fully with issues of social justice: ‘recent student protests raise questions over the role of universities in building a just society’.
Whither teacher education and training? John Cater (Edge Hill) wrote a well-informed report for HEPI (HEPI Report 95) tracing the history of teacher education and training over the last 50 years. John Cater has been a player in the saga for many of those years, as VC since 1993 of a major provider of teacher education, and is uniquely placed to give an authoritative account. In his typically understated way he catalogued the failures of successive governments to learn from past mistakes in falling short of their targets for teacher training. The bewildering succession of ‘reforms’, multiplying potential routes into teaching, coupled with the persistent distrust of universities by governments of almost every stripe, has comprehensively failed to deliver enough teachers in many shortage subjects. Cater’s polite but devastating critique simply let the facts speak for themselves, with only the Blair government exempt from the record of failure over five decades. Even so, Cater remained positive about possible futures, and suggested ten action points which offer hope for future improvement. Unfortunately his account of repeated government failure to learn from past mistakes in teacher training and supply does not inspire optimism; more likely we can add another chapter to The Blunders of Our Governments.
Part-time student numbers fall by more than half The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that part-time student numbers in England have fallen 56% since 2010. Numbers have been declining for a decade, but fell from 243,355 in 2010-11 to just 107,325 in 2015-16.
Aggregating courses is JACSed in Just beneath the surface of most policy discussion, but influencing everything that anyone says, lies the system for collecting data about subjects and student numbers. Marian Hilditch (Teesside) explained all in a blog for WonkHE on 27 April 2017, and Andy Youell of HESA also blogged for WonkHE on 27 April 2017 about how the Joint Academic Classification System (JACS) would now be replaced by a new Higher Education Classification of Subjects. Alan Paull, an independent consultant heavily involved in developing the new Common Aggregation Hierarchy, on 30 June added his explanation of how and why aggregating subject data will be much better under the new system.
7
HEFCE grants for 2017-2018 On 9 June 2017 HEFCE announced its overall grant for 2017-2018, totalling £3,536million, assuming that the indicative allocation from Government is confirmed: £1,595 million for recurrent research grant; £1,320 million for recurrent teaching grant; £160 million for knowledge exchange; £93 million for national facilities and initiatives; £353 million for capital funding; £14 million for other non- recurrent initiatives (Degree Apprenticeships Development Fund and the Institute of Coding).
National Audit Office study of the HE market The NAO has scheduled a study for Autumn 2017 of ‘the higher education market’: ‘This study examines how the HE market is operating, with a particular focus on the extent to which students are currently empowered to act as effective consumers. It will also consider the potential impacts of ongoing reforms. The study will ask in particular: • Is the Department for Education maximising students’ ability to make informed and effective choices, both before and during their courses? • Does the Department understand the financial or other incentives on higher education providers and how these support public policy objectives? • Do existing complaints and redress arrangements offer adequate protection for students? • Is the Department ensuring there are effective continuity arrangements in place to protect students when providers fail or exit the sector?’
LEO and star subjects The Department for Education in England published the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) data by subject on 13 June 2017. David Morris of WonkHE did some instant analysis to identify winners and losers on 13 June 2017, and HEPI posted a balanced and sensible blog commentary from Diana Beech on 15 June 2017. Andrew McGettigan had a thoughtful and analytical piece about their implications for WonkHE, on 18 June 2017. In particular he argued that there seemed to be precious little justification for the investment and subsidy for creative arts graduates on the current scale.
Policy and funding in the US
Betsy DeVos wants to scrap HE law and start again Donald Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos has been speaking for some time about the need to repeal existing HE legislation and start afresh, and she said it again to a land-grant universities conference on 21 June 2017, as Adam Harris reported for The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
Tuition discounting in the US continues to rise The annual survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) for 2016 revealed that tuition fee discounting had reached a new record level, with almost half of all tuition fee revenue now being diverted to financial aid for first year undergraduates: the figure for all undergraduates is up to 44.2%. Rick Seltzer reported for Insidehighered.com on 15 May 2017.
Free tuition in New York New York Senator Hillary Clinton never got the opportunity to put her HE policy into practice as President, but New York has decided to make tuition free anyway, for all families with annual incomes up to $125,000, as Scott Jaschik reported for insidehighered.com on 10 April 2017.
8 Private and for-profit colleges
Trump administration starts to roll back Obama’s curbs on for-profit colleges As widely expected, the US Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos has suspended two of the Obama administration’s primary means of curbing the excesses of for-profit HE. Rules on borrower defence and gainful employment were scheduled to come into force on 1 July 2017 but implementation has now been suspended, as Andrew Kreighbaum explained for Insidehighered.com on 15 June 2017.
A monstrous muddle of no-profit and for-profit HE That’s what Liz Reisberg (independent) and Philip G Altbach (Boston College) called the purchase by public Purdue University of for-profit Kaplan University. In an article for University World News on 12 May 2017 they said: ‘We believe that this is an immense mistake – the two institutions do not complement one another in any useful way. Importantly, a respected research university will inevitably be changed by absorbing and managing a for-profit with different goals, different structures, different practices, different cultures, different values.’
New Phoenix president The University of Phoenix announced in April 2017 that it has hired Peter Cohen as the university's president. Cohen arrives from McGraw-Hill Education, where he most recently has been the company's executive vice president. He previously was president of Pearson Education's school division.
New CEO for Coursera Coursera, the online platform which was first known for its MOOC programmes, has named Jeff Maggioncalda as its new CEO in a public statement on 13 June 2017. He joins Coursera after a brief sabbatical following an 18-year tenure as founding CEO and President of Financial Engines. Rick Levin, a former President of Yale, will remain at Coursera as a Senior Advisor.
Strategy, Leadership, Governance and Management
University governance First published on 18 June 2017 in Higher Education Quarterly as part of a special issue on governance, Åse Gornitzka, Peter Maassen (both Oslo) and Harry de Boer (Twente) developed ‘an analytical framework on the basis of which we conduct a comparative analysis of the university governance structures along four different dimensions: (a) the internal democratic nature of the governance structure, (b) the external involvement in university governance, (c) the level of centralisation of decision-making authority in the university and (d) the concentration of authority in an individual leadership position versus authority in a collective body or spread over various collective bodies.’
Valentina Goglio (Turin) and Marino Regini (Milan) made a bold prediction in their HEQ article, ‘The evolution of university governance in Europe’ (first published 2 July 2017), reviewing the development of HE in Europe over the last 50 years: ‘… these processes have gone through two main stages and in two different directions … we expect a third stage of differentiation … In the first stage (1960–1970s) the main objective was to create a vocational track, without having to profoundly modify traditional academic institutions. In the second stage (mid-1990s) the main objective was to differentiate between the more and the less competitive universities as regards the amount of financial and symbolic resources provided to them. However, large comprehensive universities are containers of smaller units whose performance may vary widely. Moreover, research is just one of the several
9 functions that modern universities perform … empirical evidence from United Kingdom universities … [supports] the hypothesis of a third stage of differentiation.’
Michael Shattock (UCL Institute of Education) went back twice as far, also for HEQ, to write ‘University governance in flux. The impact of external and internal pressures on the distribution of authority within British universities: A synoptic view’ (first published 2 July 2017): ‘The article shows that there were distinct phases in the internal balances within governance structures ... the internal balances were always to a considerable extent contingent on external conditions … The changes in how authority is distributed were therefore decided by the institutions themselves albeit in response to external pressures. But … institutions’ responses were variable and … where a strong research culture existed the accumulation of social capital was such that radical changes in the distribution of authority were resisted. One consequence is … much greater diversity in institutional governance structures with some pre-1992 universities leaning much more towards HEC models, some HECs edging towards more traditional models and some institutions preserving significant elements of authority which others would regard as utopian. In Britain, reputation, research success and brand image are closely associated with the latter.’
Marketisation narrows mission diversity Simon Marginson’s seminar for the Centre for Global HE on 6 July 2017, following a review of HE participation in eight countries, argued that: ‘… an enhanced role for markets is associated with an increase in imitating behaviour and the narrowing of mission differences, rather than diversity. In relation to growth, it is difficult to separate the effects of expanding participation from contextual factors, but the overall tendencies appear to be (1) an increase in vertical stratification, (2) growth in the importance of large multi-disciplinary multi-purpose institutions, (3) a decline in horizontal diversity overall, and (4) an increase in internal diversity within larger institutions.’
Anyone can run a university That’s what the Wisconsin legislature seems to think, since they want their HE budget to outlaw the Madison-Wisconsin policy that requires campus leaders to have a tenured academic post, as the excellent Colleen Flaherty reported for insidehighered.com on 3 July 2017.
‘Boards have the best presidents in the world until they don’t. It’s a cliff.’ When it comes to institutional leaders, the choice for governors is to back them or sack them, according to Frank Casagrande, president of Casagrande Consulting, quoted in a story about the new season of presidential departures in insidehighered.com by Rick Seltzer on 7 June 2017.
Subra Suresh announced on 1 June 2017 that he is stepping down as president of Carnegie Mellon University with effect from 30 June. Suresh has been president for four years, and his predecessors have usually served longer terms. Drew Faust has decided to step down after a ten-year term as President of Harvard. Jack Stripling reported for the Chronicle of Higher Education on 14 June 2017 that in a widely-circulated letter announcing her intentions ‘Ms. Faust quoted lyrics from "Fair Harvard" … acknowledging that she had led the university "through change and through storm."’ Drew Faust was the first woman to be President of Harvard.
Linda A Livingstone, dean and professor of management at the George Washington University School of Business, has been appointed president of Baylor University from 1 June 2017. Baylor in Texas, the world’s largest Baptist university, has been coping with the fall-out from a 2016 investigation which showed that the university had not taken complaints about sexual assault seriously. The university demoted its president Kenneth W Starr, dismissed its football coach, Art Briles, and penalised its athletic director, Ian McCaw. Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz reported the latest developments for The Chronicle of Higher Education on 18 April 2017.
10 Florida A&M University’s deans of pharmacy, journalism, and education were fired on 1 May 2017, as Byron Dobson reported that day for the Tallahassee Democrat. Interim provost Rodner Wright said that Ann Kimbrough, of the School of Journalism and Graphic Communication, Michael Thompson, of the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Traki L Taylor, of the College of Education, had been removed from their posts with immediate effect. The dismissals came less than a year after the university’s president, Elmira Mangum, was removed six months before her contract was set to expire. The university has 14 Deans; those dismissed are expected to return to faculty positions in the university.
Professor Shearer West has been appointed as next President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham. She will take up office in October 2017 following the retirement of the incumbent Vice- Chancellor Professor Sir David Greenaway. She will be the seventh Vice-Chancellor in the University’s history and the first woman in the role. Professor West is Professor of Art History and currently Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield. She was previously Head of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford, Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Head of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Birmingham and before that was at Leicester University.
Conceptual artist Professor Bashir Makhoul has been appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA). Professor Makhoul will join UCA from Birmingham City University, where he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor, leading on academic development, student recruitment, marketing and internationalisation. Previously, he was at Southampton University as the Head of the Winchester School of Art. His appointment marks the first time a Palestinian academic has been appointed to the top position at a British University and it is believed to be only the second time an academic from a non-Western background has been made Vice-Chancellor in the UK.
The University of St Mark and St John has budget problems, with deficits projected until 2019. Cuts can mean ‘delayering’, usually a layer of middle managers, but MarJon is starting near the top, by announcing that the Deputy VC and two Pro VCs will be leaving as part of this process. Deputy Vice Chancellor Dr Karen Cook, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Professor Brendon Noble and Dr Liz Smith, Pro Vice- Chancellor responsible for learning, teaching and the student experience will all leave. Vice Chancellor Rob Warner, quoted in Devon newspaper The Herald on 16 May 2017, said: "We are very sorry to see some excellent staff leaving this summer, but in common with every higher education institution we need to ensure that our staffing profile is aligned very carefully to the future growth of the university". Rob Warner only took up his post on 1 March 2017.
Vice-chancellors’ pay Everyone who warmed to our April 2017 editorial ‘What’s wrong with management in higher education?’ (that seemed to be everyone, except vice-chancellors) will probably have seen Simon Baker’s detailed report on THE’s annual survey of VCs’ pay. He looked, mostly in vain, for any correlation between VCs’ pay and institutional performance and noted that: ‘In 2011, the economist Will Hutton, now principal of Hertford College, Oxford, was commissioned by the government to look into fair pay in publicly funded organisations. The final report of the Hutton Review of Fair Pay in the Public Sector identified universities as having the highest differential between their leaders and their lowest-paid employees. … Almost a dozen universities gave their vice-chancellors a pay rise that was above the UK average despite their seeing a significant fall in student numbers … The latest annual survey of UK vice-chancellors’ pay, compiled by the accounting firm Grant Thornton for THE, shows that in 2015-16, university heads received an average package of £280,877, including pension contributions, a rise of 2.2 per cent on 2014-15.’
Bolton University merger with Bury College is put on hold Bolton University Governors met on 24 April 2017 and decided to halt plans to merge with Bury College part of the university, blaming ‘a number of issues and complexities’. If those issues can be
11 resolved then the merger may be back on. The planned merger of Bolton College with the university will still go ahead and is unaffected by the latest development. The Bury Times had the story on 25 April 2017.
Rider faculty union votes no confidence in university president The faculty union at Rider University, a small and financially troubled institution in New Jersey, passed a vote of no confidence in the university president Gregory G Dell’Omo in April 2017. Alex Arriaga reported for The Chronicle of Higher Education on 19 April 2017 that the president had proposed to sell the university’s Westminster campus in Princeton to tackle the financial problems. Rider merged with the Westminster Choir College in 1992; the college would be closed as part of the restructuring proposals.
The best academics make the best heads of department Agnes Bäker (Zurich) and Amanda Goodall (City) wrote about their research for Times Higher Education on 4 May 2017: ‘Controlling for age, gender, tenure, discipline, position and even overall life satisfaction, we have found that academics report considerably higher levels of job satisfaction and morale when their head of department is either a “distinguished researcher” or a “highly distinguished researcher”. We have also found that having a distinguished head of department makes the academics less likely to move on. The reason is that heads of departments who are themselves active researchers are more likely to create the right work environment for their faculty colleagues, protecting them against an encroaching managerial culture.’
Staff
How academics respond to university strategic initiatives SRHE luminaries Angela Brew (MacQuarie), David Boud (Deakin, University of Technology, Sydney and Middlesex), Lisa Lucas (Bristol) and Karin Crawford (Lincoln) had an article ‘Responding to university policies and initiatives: the role of reflexivity in the mid-career academic’ in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 39(4) (online 18 May 2017): ‘How do academics make sense of university policies and strategic initiatives and act on them? Interviews were conducted with 27 mid- career academics in different disciplines, different research-intensive university environments and two countries (England and Australia). Data were analysed iteratively utilising a critical realist perspective, specifically, Archer’s modes of reflexivity. The paper argues that individuals’ responses to university policies and initiatives, to changes in policy and policy conflicts, can at least partially be understood through interrogating the modes of reflexivity they employ.’
Agency theory and performance appraisal: How bad theory damages learning and contributes to bad management practice Samantha Evans (Kent), Dennis Tourish (Royal Holloway, University of London) had an article in Management Learning (first published 26 October 2016): ‘Performance appraisal interviews … are … often castigated as ineffective, or even harmful, to both individuals and organisations. Exploring this paradox, we highlight the influence of agency theory on the (mal)practice of performance appraisal. The performative nature of human resource management increasingly reflects an economic approach within which its practices are aligned with agency theory. Such theory assumes that actors are motivated mainly or only by economic self-interest. Close surveillance is required to eliminate the risk of shirking and other deviant behaviours. It is a pessimistic mind-set about people that undermines the supportive, co-operative and developmental rhetoric with which appraisal interviews are usually accompanied. Consequently, managers often practice appraisal interviews while holding onto two contradictory mind-sets, a state of Orwellian Doublethink that damages individual learning and organisational performance. We encourage researchers to adopt a more radical critique of appraisal practices that foregrounds issues of power, control and conflicted interests between actors beyond the analyses offered to date.’
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Salaries in British universities The Times Higher Education has gathered all the data for 2015-2016 together here. And the American Association of University Professors has done the same for academic staff in the US here.
Teesside University tells all its professors to reapply for their jobs Jack Grove reported for Times Higher Education on 7 July 2017 that Teesside University had on 4 July told all its professors to apply for a redefined post of Professor (Research), or face redundancy. All professorial staff will face interviews over the summer, before the end of August, as part of moves to strengthen research in the university and rationalise the use of professorial titles.
Manchester to cut 171 posts ‘to allow strategic investment in priority areas’ The University of Manchester announced on 10 May 2017 that it would cut 171 posts as part of its ‘ambition to be a world leading institution’. Hardest hit would be the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, which would lose 65 academic posts - presumably not a priority area?
Cutting Crewe Academic staff at the Crewe campus of Manchester Metropolitan University staged a two-day protest on 24 and 25 May against the closure of the campus in 2019, which was announced in February 2017.
Teaching, Learning and Assessment
What works? Student Retention and Success The excellent What Works? series of investigations and reports, sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Action on Access and the Higher Education Academy, reached its conclusion with a report which offers ‘a series of evidence-based principles to guide institutions across the sector’ in promoting student success. The final summary report was put together by the impressively knowledgeable combination of Liz Thomas (Edge Hill), Michael Hill (Kingston), Joan O’Mahony (HE Academy) and Mantz Yorke (Lancaster). Chair of the Advisory Group Patricia Broadfoot (now back at Bristol, formerly VC Gloucestershire) said in her foreword: ‘Maximising student success is not simply a ‘nice thing to do’. It is a key element of institutional competitiveness in a higher education world that is increasingly characterised by business principles, in which teaching quality, student satisfaction and the achievement of graduates are core to institutional success. If helping students to ‘be the best they can be’ has always been a moral imperative for every university, being the best it can be is now also a concern that sits at the very heart of the institution as a whole.’
The attractiveness of programmes in higher education: an empirical approach Ferdi Widiputera, Kristof De Witte, Wim Groot and Henriëtte Maassen van den Brink (all Maastricht) had an article in the European Journal of Higher Education (online 29 January 2017) reporting their research: ‘Using a Dutch panel data set of 1300 programmes in 50 institutions, this study investigates what explains the attractiveness of study programmes. We hypothesize that the distance of study programmes plays a major role in student decisions to attend. Based on an instrumental variables identification strategy, we demonstrate that the closest distance between similar programmes offered and competition between programmes have significant effects on the enrolment of students in higher education. The results indicate that a one-kilometer increase in the closest distance between similar programmes decreases the number of students to enrol in a programme by – seven students after controlling for programme type and other characteristics.’
New Duke University curriculum is shelved after years of work Duke University tried to innovate with a proposed new undergraduate curriculum, emphasising how as well as what students should study. But after three years’ work the plan has been suspended until Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences faculty can reach a greater degree of consensus, as Colleen
13 Flaherty reported for insidehighered.com on 26 April 2017. The university's stated ambition in 2014 was to clarify and simplify the logic of the curriculum, create more opportunities for exploration and creativity, and "rethink our vision for disciplinarity." Duke’s Curriculum 2000 had supposedly reached its sell-by date; the proposed new curriculum emphasised areas of knowledge, methods of learning and classroom innovation but sought to streamline requirements, promote student decision making and create something distinctive to Duke.
Getting across the threshold This looks like a useful review: ‘Threshold concepts in higher education: a synthesis of the literature relating to measurement of threshold crossing’, from Kelli Nicola-Richmond, Geneviève Pépin, Helen Larkin (all Deakin) and Charlotte Taylor (Sydney) in Higher Education Research and Development, first published online on 14 June 2017.
How policy influences education developers SRHE member Karen Smith had an article in Higher Education Research and Development (online 22 June 2017) ‘Using multidimensional methods to understand the development, interpretation and enactment of quality assurance policy within the educational development community’: ‘The findings paint a picture of a text that presents a version of higher education that is portrayed linguistically as universally accepted. Yet, the methodological approach enables the uncovering of the complexities of the policy process that go beyond the text’s words by highlighting the debates that shaped its development and the interpretations of its textual form that subsequently shape its enactment.’
Advancing practice in academic development The book edited by David Baume and Celia Popovic (Routledge, January 2016) is now appearing in instalments on the SEDA blog and the EdGazette website. Chapter 14, ‘Leading an academic development unit’, by Julie Hall and David A Green, was posted in June.
The history of efforts to improve university teaching The WonkHE team put together a blog about the last 70 or more years of policy initiatives aimed at improving university teaching, on 8 June 2017.
The Teaching Excellence Framework
What should a new universities minister do first? Nick Hillman blogged for HEPI with some wise words about priorities for a new Minister after the general election. He pointed out that the obvious question for John Humphries on BBC’s Today programme, or any other journalist, would be: ‘Why is your first job as the Minister for Universities to tell the rest of the world you don’t think some of our most well-respected universities are good enough?’. Hillman, previously special adviser to David Willetts, a previous Minister, said: ‘despite supporting the basic principles of the TEF, personally I cannot help thinking the answer to the question ‘What should be the first decision of a new Universities Minister?’ is to pause the TEF until they understand it properly. Both the Minister and the TEF itself would be tarnished if it they end up at the heart of a political row in the early days of the new Parliament.’
Jo Johnson wasn’t listening, and the somewhat delayed TEF rankings were published a week after the election. SRHE member Andrew Gunn blogged for The Conversation on 22 June 2017: ‘TEF: everything you need to know about the new university rankings’, and WonkHE tracked the various ways in which universities chose to celebrate and advertise their ‘gold’ ratings in the TEF.
Jim Dickinson (UEA Students’ Union) noted for WonkHE on 5 June 2017 the frantic cacophony of privileged voices getting their retaliation in ahead of the publication of TEF results. He said it was a rare opportunity to celebrate the unusual exposure of the structural privilege embedded in the UK HE
14 system. London Higher managed to combine two of the common themes of complaint about TEF in one blog post by CEO Jane Glanville on 14 June 2017, before the results were published. London HEIs have tended to do less well in the National Student Survey, and TEF attracted many comments about its blindness to diversity, as Glanville pointed out.
When the results did finally emerge, David Kernohan, the new Associate Editor at WonkHE, looked on 22 June 2017 at how many institutions had moved from the ‘initial hypothesis’ based on metrics to a final rating:
‘How did the panel exercise their judgements? Three institutions had their final assessments downgraded from their initial hypothesis: BPP University, Bucks New University, and the British School of Osteopathy. Thirty-three institutions had their final assessments upgraded from their initial hypothesis, including eight in the Russell Group, and twelve in London. Seventeen institutions were upgraded from a Bronze to Silver, including University College London, King’s College London, and the University of Bristol. Fifteen institutions were upgraded from a Silver to a Gold, including Imperial College London, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Birmingham. The Royal Veterinary College was upgraded from a Bronze to a Gold!’
Chris Husbands (Sheffield), chair of the TEF Panel, had his own commentary, defending the exercise - for all its shortcomings – in his own WonkHE post on 23 June 2017. Jane Forster (Bournemouth) concluded that ‘On balance, the good in TEF outweighs the bad’ for WonkHE on 26 June 2017. But Dorothy Bishop argued it was a bad idea all along in a blog post for the Campaign for the Defence of British Universities website: ‘TEF and the reputation of UK Higher Education’.
It was almost worth suffering the TEF just to hear the squeals and see the squirming by the Russell Group members who were unaccountably ‘demoted’ to mere silver or even bronze, with Liverpool, York, Durham and Southampton being among the first to announce they would appeal. The Russell Group machine cranked into action with ‘TEF: 3 things you need to know’, aiming to ‘contextualise’ - that is, get potential applicants to take no notice of - the whole exercise in 300 words on their website on 22 June 2017.
The LSE had the quality press to argue the case for them. The Sunday Times produced perhaps the most breathtaking comment in its editorial ‘The inexact science of ranking universities’ on 25 June:
‘the London School of Economics – the LSE … is a jewel in Britain’s economic crown … Now the LSE is trying to understand its lowly ranking in teaching excellence framework (TEF) results, released by the universities minister, Jo Johnson … the LSE, with a bronze award, rubs shoulders … with the `British School of Osteopathy, Plymouth College of Art, and Cumbria and Suffolk universities. Recipients of gold awards included Coventry, Derby and Lincoln Universities.’
Savour the contempt and sarcasm dripping from every phrase, the incredulity that anyone could link such lowly institutions with the kind of university that journalists themselves attend. (Journalists are, notoriously, even less diverse than high court judges in their socioeconomic status). But this is not pure snobbery, oh no. This is because the Sunday Times definitively knows better:
‘If all this looks odd, that is because it is. The most authoritative ranking of Britain’s universities is provided by the Good University Guide, compiled and published by this newspaper and The Times. It examines a range of measures, including student experience … In the current guide, topped by Cambridge, with Oxford second, the LSE came eighth, which is closer to what you would expect from a world-renowned university … Giving top universities eye-catching but absurdly low rankings, as the TEF has done, does little to help anybody.’
15
As someone else might have put it, The Sunday Times has had enough of experts.
Andrew McRae (Exeter) managed to link TEF to Brexit in a guaranteed-to-be-retweeted kind of way, in his 26 June 2017 blog for WonkHE, ‘Soft TEF, hard TEF, or a Gold, Silver and Bronze TEF?’
TEF decoded: it’s a hyperreal simulacrum Of course, we knew that all along, but John Canning depicts the TEF as an illustration of Baudrillard’s hyperreality in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. His article examines the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF) for UK universities through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality and argues that the TEF is a hyperreal simulacrum, a sign which has no traceable genealogy to the practice of learning and teaching.
Access and widening participation
TEF might narrow participation Sorana Vieru, Vice President for HE at the National Union of Students, was worried that using retention as one of the key metrics for TEF might encourage universities to cut down recruitment of students at higher risk of failing and therefore narrow rather than widen participation. Yes, it probably will. Or, according to the comments on her blog for WonkHE on 29 March 2017, it won’t.
Access v quality (not) The Daily Telegraph never misses an opportunity to complain about university admissions not favouring their readers’ grandchildren, and they were true to form on 8 June 2017 when Education editor Camilla Turner managed to blame disadvantaged students for Oxbridge’s fall in the latest university rankings, by going to her favourite ‘expert’, Alan Smithers (Buckingham): ‘British universities are slipping down the world rankings, with experts blaming the decline on pressure to admit more disadvantaged students. Cambridge University, which for many years was ranked the best in the world and for a decade held a place in the top three, has now dropped down to fifth place, according to the QS World University Rankings.’
Are elite universities really interested in widening participation? Jon Rainford (Staffordshire) is sceptical. His article, ‘Targeting of widening participation measures by elite institutions: widening access or simply aiding recruitment?’, in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education (21, 2017 Issue 2-3: Themed Issue: Access to Higher Education) was a case study of one institution which, he argued, was not trying to widen access but simply to divert disadvantaged students from another institution to itself.
Fear of debt really does deter the poorest from going to university That’s what SRHE Fellow Claire Callender said on the WonkHE blog on 7 June 2017, so who can argue?
Students
Key factors in student satisfaction There was an article ‘Student satisfaction in higher education: a meta-analytic study’ in the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education (online 11 April 2017) by Fernando de Oliveira Santini, Wagner Junior Ladeira, (both Universidado do Vale do Rio dos Sinos), Claudio Hoffmann Sampaio (Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul) and Gustavo da Silva Costa (Universidado do Vale do Rio dos Sinos). The paper discussed the results of a meta-analysis performed to identify key antecedent and consequent constructs of satisfaction in higher education. It offered an integrated model to achieve a better understanding of satisfaction in the context of higher education. From 83 relevant studies published from 1986 to 2016 the authors analysed six antecedent dimensions - perceived
16 value of educational services, resources provided to the student, service quality perception, marketing orientation, identity of the higher education institution, university environment - and one consequent dimension related to satisfaction, with 51 interrelationships.
The best way to support student progress Anna Mountford-Zimdars (King’s) and colleagues reported on their HEFCE project in their article ‘What can universities do to support all their students to progress successfully throughout their time at university?’ in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education (21, 2017 - Issue 2-3: Themed Issue: Access to Higher Education). The answer seems to be to get the whole institution behind you: ‘We found that universities with an embedded, institution-wide approach that engaged senior managers, academic staff, professional service staff and students as stakeholders and agents in the differential outcomes agenda were most promising in decreasing progression gaps.’
All change at NUS Nona Buckley-Irvine of WonkHE blogged on 27 April 2017 about the NUS elections in which incumbent NUS President Malia Bouattia, was defeated in a stunning victory for Shakira Martin – currently Vice President for Further Education. Bouattia, who herself ousted incumbent Megan Dunn last year, had repeatedly been featured in the press for her history of anti-Semitic remarks and she focused her campaigns on the “liberation” of education, including decolonising the curriculum and an end to tuition fees. Martin, only the second NUS President not from a higher education background, attended Lewisham Southwark College.
UK Student Information Advisory Group HEFCE advertised for a student to join its newly established UK Student Information Advisory Group. Just one. SRHE Fellow Ian McNay wrote to suggest they would need more than that. It’s probably almost as hard as getting real teachers onto the TEF Advisory Panel.
Reality check The HEPI/UNITE survey of student perceptions and attitudes was well-timed to garner maximum publicity when it came out on 4 July 2017, and gave the media an easy headline, with its finding that ‘60% of university applicants expect to spend more time in lectures than they do in school lessons, yet only 19% of students find this happens.’
DLHE to GO WonkHE reported on 3 July 2017 that the previous week’s HESA release of DLHE survey data for 2015– 16 revealed that 15% of graduates were undertaking further full-time study 6 months after graduation, the highest percentage since 2011–12. This success was widely attributed to the then new availability of postgraduate fee loans encouraging graduates to stay out of what most economic indicators (and LEO) agree is a stagnating job market. DLHE is to be replaced by ‘Graduate Outcomes’, with an updated methodology developed with significant sector consultation. Graduate Outcomes will survey graduates approximately fifteen months after they complete their undergraduate studies, and will offer an improved coverage of graduates following alternative career paths. Rachel Hewitt of HESA explained the process of arriving at “Graduate Outcomes” as the new name for NewDLHE.
Parents’ experiences of HE choices Helen Hayward and Richard Scullion (both Bournemouth) had an interesting article in Studies in Higher Education (online 18 April 2017), ‘‘‘It’s quite difficult letting them go, isn’t it?’ UK parents’ experiences of their child’s higher education choice process’. They argued that parents’ overriding concern is to maintain relationships with their children as they make the transition from school to university: ‘This paper challenges the dominant discourse that Higher Education (HE) choice is a consumer choice and questions assumptions underpinning government policy and HE marketing. HE choice is largely viewed as a rational, decontextualised process. However, this interpretivist study found it to be much more complex, and to be about relationships and managing a transition in roles.’
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Quality, Standards, Performance, Evaluation
Quality and standards
Who defines expertise? At Wayne State College in Nebraska, new rules created by the college’s accreditation agency have led to some unsettling disqualifications. In one case a teacher with 50 years’ experience of teaching philosophy will not be allowed to teach it in future, and most people think this can’t be right, as Colleen Flaherty reported on 2 May 2017 for insiderhighered.com.
Nullifying quality: the marketisation of higher education Carsten Bendixen and Jens Christian Jacobsen (both Copenhagen) had an article in Quality in Higher Education (online 25 April 2017) which must be a contender for ‘Least Intelligible Abstract of 2017’: “The increasing dominance of educational markets means that quality of higher education has the character of open signifiers of periodic occurrence, embedded institutionally as ways of consensual communication on how to go on as smoothly as possible. This promotes the growth of context dependent and local interpretations of how to meet in agreement regarding quality in everyday practices. All interpretations are contextualised and as a result are nullified outside the context in which they occur. Discourses on quality promote flexibility and create periodic legitimacy through discursive nullification processes. On the other hand, institutions have to adopt standards in education as a measure of outcome indicators for benchmarking. When quality is replaced by standards and if standards are equivalent to labour market relevance this might signal the beginning of overall external control over higher education. In the long run it will hardly benefit educational programmes if institutions of higher educations fail to ‘stand for’ quality that, in the very least, can supplement the fulfilment of politically determined targets and standards. In this way the market will have not only graduates who are going into employment but also engaged citizens who can transform and challenge the market.”
Translation: if you’re talking quality and standards, you probably had to be there.
Glasgow Caledonian gets degree-awarding powers for its New York campus The BBC reported on 13 June 2017 that Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) had become the first foreign institution in New York State to gain a degree-granting charter from the state’s Education Department. The GCU campus opened in September 2013 but has not been able to award degrees; the Glasgow Caledonian New York College has now been given a provisional charter, which can become absolute after five years.
Rankings and league tables
A constant struggle for influence over a sceptical audience Miguel Antonio Lim wrote about what he calls the ‘weak expertise’ of the creators of university rankings in his article, ‘The building of weak expertise: the work of global university rankers’, in Higher Education (online 13 April 2017): ‘Drawing from a two-year field study of university ranking organizations … I introduce the concept of weak expertise. This kind of expertise is the result of a constantly negotiated balance between the relevance, reliability, and robustness of rankers’ data and their relationships with their key readers and audiences. Building this expertise entails collecting robust data, presenting it in ways that are relevant to audiences, and engaging with critics. I show how one ranking organization, the Times Higher Education (THE), sought to maintain its legitimacy in the face of opposition from important stakeholders … The paper analyzes the strategies, methods, and particular practices that university rankers undertake to legitimate their knowledge … Rather than
18 assuming that all of these trust-building mechanisms have solidified the hold of the THE over its audience, they can be seen as signs of a constant struggle for influence over a skeptical audience.’
Ellen Hazelkorn gives the 2017 Burton R Clark lecture In giving the annual Burton R Clark lecture at Senate House, University of London on 8 May 2017 SRHE member Ellen Hazelkorn drew on her paper for the Centre for Global Higher Education to argue that: ‘the pursuit of ‘world-class’ status has become a shared strategy of transnationalising elites. Professor Hazelkorn warns that one of the dangers of global rankings is that many universities have become civically disengaged. By measuring the achievements of individual universities rather than the system or society collectively, global rankings promote world-class universities rather than world-class systems. Professor Hazelkorn concludes that universities must urgently rethink and reshape relations with their publics and the state, and work towards bridging the gap between local, national and global.’
Rankings touch bottom Times Higher Education likes nothing better than a new university ranking every five minutes or so, but they surely touched bottom when they produced the ‘World Reputation Ranking’, in which they ask academics which are the best known universities in their field, and then publish a ranking, so that, er, the best-known universities are the best-known universities.
Why won’t Wolverhampton play the rankings game? The reasons, you would think, are obvious. The last time Wolverhampton appeared in national rankings it was in the bottom ten of English universities. Why would you choose to play a game where everything is stacked against you? Wolverhampton made the bold decision to opt out under its previous VC Caroline Gipps, a stance maintained by current VC Geoff Layer. But that irritates journalists like David Jobbins, who is now media adviser to The Complete University Guide. Jobbins made a Freedom of Information request ‘as an individual’ seeking publication of a report by VC Layer on reasons for the opt-out. Wolverhampton refused on grounds of commercial confidentiality, then published a redacted report after a complaint by Jobbins, but that didn’t satisfy him. The university has appealed against the Information Commissioner’s decision to require publication. David Jobbins says Wolverhampton is the only university which does not appear in the 2018 version of his rankings, and “would-be applicants are entitled to ask why Wolverhampton is excluded”. How splendid of Jobbins to make a request as a private individual, in the best interests of students - without a thought, obviously, of his own commercial interest. Ellie Bothwell covered the story for Times Higher Education on 15 May 2017. David Jobbins previously worked for the THE.
On Academic Rankings, Unacceptable Methods, and the Social Obligations of Business Schools Elliot Bendoly (Ohio State) and 20 colleagues from various US business schools had an article in Decision Science (online 25 April 2017): ‘While reaffirming the social contract we hold with society, we argue that the fundamental methodological shortcomings of existing rankings, and ultimately any ordinal ranking system, limit the value of current rankings. These shortcomings emerge from the conceptualization and the architecture of comparisons, and are evident in survey designs, data collection methods, and data aggregation procedures. Our discussion continues by outlining the minimal requirements that a socially responsible, transparent, flexible, and highly representative rating (vs. ranking) approach should employ. Ultimately, we call on academic institutions and organizing bodies to take a collective stand against existing rankings and to embrace the strategic use of multidimensional alternatives that faithfully serve prospective students, parents, and other key stakeholders. We conclude with a number of suggestions and opportunities for practice-oriented research in the decision sciences aimed to support this fundamental shift in evaluative framing.’
Good luck with that.
19 Getting out of the rankings game: a better way to evaluate higher education institutions for best fit Sonja Martin Poole (San Francisco), Michael A Levin and Kate Elam (both Otterbein University, Westerville, Ohio) had an article in the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education (online 18 April 2017) which proposed an alternative model to conventional rankings, ‘that can better communicate meaningful differentiation to prospective students: A five-step approach is followed to form clusters and classify HEIs. Cluster analysis is performed on two separate datasets containing (1) public HEIs and (2) private HEIs. For the final model, 42 variables were incorporated to group 761 private HEIs and, separately, 414 public HEIs. A five-cluster solution for each dataset is presented and described. Each cluster contains a description and a managerial recommendation. The application of cluster analysis differs from the more popular but more problematic approach of ranking HEIs. Grouping resolves the problems that stem from ranking and provides possibly more useful information.’
Research
What is Education as a field of study? Two great figures in educational research, Geoff Whitty (Newcastle, Australia) and John Furlong (Oxford), have a new edited collection, Knowledge and the Study of Education, which examines different knowledge traditions in teaching and research in Education. The book draws on a British Academy project that looked at how the study of Education is constituted in Australia, China, France, Germany, Latvia, the USA and the UK. It identified twelve major knowledge traditions, and classified these as Academic Knowledge Traditions (such as Sciences de l’Éducation), Practical Knowledge Traditions (like that practised in Normal Colleges) and Integrated Knowledge Traditions (including the currently fashionable concept of Research-informed Clinical Practice).
Mind the Knowledge Gap by Paul Temple I teach an MA session at the Institute of Education called “The University in the Knowledge Economy”. We canter through the history, starting with a few reflections on the medieval university, going on to consider the development of science in nineteenth-century Germany, noting Bush’s 1945 Science – the Endless Frontier report, examining Bell’s seminal 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and coming up to date with references to theorists such as Stehr and the policy statements to be found in any British White Paper on higher education in recent decades, or in any comparable European Commission report. My no doubt predictable thesis is that the university has steadily assumed an increasingly dominant place in knowledge production and transfer in modern societies; and that this has certain implications for the ways in which universities should be planned and managed.
But I’m now beginning to think that this rather Whig approach is looking painfully complacent. The development of knowledge economies seems to have had the effect of producing deep social divisions that are only now becoming obvious – the Brexit vote here, Trump in the US, Le Pen in France, and so on. What was widely thought to be an unarguable good - more knowledge, used in new ways – is turning out to have some troubling consequences. It doesn’t have to be like this, of course, but the understandable grievances of those left behind by the knowledge economy - stuck in the knowledge gap, between old ways of working and the new economy - have been both overlooked by otherwise progressive politicians and then ruthlessly exploited by cynical ones. Do we now have “knowledge Britain” and an “anti-knowledge Britain”, to set alongside the “locals vs cosmopolitans” and the “somewheres vs anywheres” divisions? Have those of us working in knowledge businesses assumed too easily that most people were seeing the world from a vaguely similar vantage point to our own?
Universities have got some questions to answer here. If they have done such a wonderful job in creating and transmitting knowledge, then how come the quarter-baked ideas about how a modern economy works (“balancing the books” and so on, as if the national economy were a corner shop)
20 have the currency that they apparently do? How come that the benefits of a single market for goods and services, explained in shelves-full of economics textbooks, have so little political traction? How come that the intellectually discredited idea of grammar schools is still thought to be worth even discussing? (The bitter irony here is that the idea does rest on research – mistaken when not actually bogus - on IQs.)
The idea of the knowledge economy or society seemed not to figure at all in the recent general election campaign. Actually, you could argue that the Conservative campaign’s vision of taking Britain back to the 1950s – Brexit, grammar schools, fewer foreigners, fox hunting - was an anti-knowledge one, designed to cut Britain off from the cultural and economic links on which its knowledge base (and much else) depends while at the same time deepening internal divisions. Accordingly, my feelings towards my fellow citizens became markedly warmer in the early hours of 9 June, when it became apparent that this approach had met with something less than universal acclamation.
At HEPI’s “Policy Briefing Day” in April, a former ministerial special adviser apparently suggested that “universities tailor their priorities to fit the Government’s expressed goal of ensuring the UK’s departure from the EU is a success” (translation: don’t cause trouble, get on side, or else). I suggest that the task confronting universities goes beyond helping the government to manage its Brexit damage-limitation project: it is about working to close the national knowledge gap and in doing so saying, loudly and clearly, that some ideas are just plain wrong.
SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.
David Sweeney appointed Executive Chair Designate of Research England The Higher Education and Research Act established Research England as one of nine Councils within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The government has announced that David Sweeney, the respected Director of Research, Education and Knowledge Exchange within HEFCE, will be Executive Chair Designate. He will continue at HEFCE until the end of March 2018, while working as part of the shadow UKRI executive team to set up the new body, which will open its doors in April 2018. His appointment has been widely welcomed.
Athene Donald to chair REF Interdisciplinary Panel Athene Donald, Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, has been appointed chair of the REF Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, whose members were announced by HEFCE in April 2017.
REF Equality Panel is not inclusive enough Lila Randall reported for Research Fortnight on 14 June 2017 that there were rumbles of discontent about the makeup of the Equality and Diversity Advisory Panel for the next Research Excellence Framework exercise. Seven of the eight members of the Panel are white.
HEFCE announce main panel chairs for REF 2021 HEFCE announced on 10 July 2017 that the Main Panel Chairs (designate) for each of the four main panel areas would be: Main Panel A: Medicine, health and life sciences – Professor John Iredale, Pro Vice-Chancellor Health, University of Bristol Main Panel B: Physical sciences, engineering and mathematics – Professor David Price, Vice- Provost (Research), University College London Main Panel C: Social sciences – Professor Jane Millar OBE, Professor of Social Policy and former Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, University of Bath. Main Panel D: Arts and humanities – Professor Dinah Birch CBE, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact, University of Liverpool.
21 Get to a pdf with just one click Peter Vincent (Imperial College) has helped develop a free browser called Canary Haz which will give one-click access to the pdf source you wanted, using your institutional access or looking for an open- access version.
Research into higher education
Academic disapproval of neoliberalism Margaret Thornton has edited a mostly Australian set of perspectives on neoliberalism, Through a glass darkly: the social sciences look at the neoliberal university (Canberra, ANU Press, 2013), reviewed by James Burford (Thammasat University, Thailand) for Higher Education Research and Development (online 14 May 2017): ‘As the title suggests, the university revealed in this collection is multiple, indistinct and enigmatic.’
How fields vary Monika Krause (LSE) had an article ‘How fields vary’ in the British Journal of Sociology of Education (online 6 April 2017) which aimed to identify dimensions along which fields might vary: ‘… while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other … this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy … fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub- and transnational scale. Post-national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields.’
Make me authentic, but not here: Reflexive struggles with academic identity and authentic leadership An article by Leah Tomkins (Open University) and Alyson Nicholds (Coventry) in Management Learning (first published 12 January 2017) gave a reflexive auto-ethnography of the experience of teaching authentic leadership to MBA students. It traced ‘parallels between the challenges of authentic leadership and the challenges of academic identity work, grounded in the experience of having to teach something one does not fully endorse. Both authentic leadership and academic identity work emerge as struggle – riddled with false starts, best intentions and self-deception, and entwined in the politics of pragmatism, idealism, ambition and survival. The subject position of the mature entrant to academia who is also an ‘early career scholar’ is likened to an awkward adolescent, experimenting with shades of independence/dependence, resistance/compliance and voice/silence … having authentic leadership on the curriculum involves a particular kind of identity regulation for students and academics alike, running counter to philosophical notions of authenticity as striving for one’s own way in the world. Authentic leadership will only flourish in the business school if academics muster the courage to acknowledge its relevance for our own role as teacher-leaders, rather than simply teaching or writing to its abstract, ideological appeal.’
The gamification of research and the Facebookisation of professional reputation On The Impact Blog on 15 May 2017 Björn Hammarfelt (Boras, Sweden), Sarah de Rijcke, Alex Rushforth (both Leiden), Iris Wallenburg and Roland Bal (both Erasmus) argued that ‘ResearchGate and similar services represent a “gamification” of research, drawing on features usually associated with online games, like rewards, rankings and levels. This carries obvious dangers, potentially promoting an understanding of the professional self as a product in competition with others. But
22 quantification of the self in this way can also be seen as a way of taking control of one’s own (self)- evaluation.’
‘“Facebook for Academics”: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic’, an article by Brooke Erin Duffy (Cornell) and Jefferson D Pooley (Muhlenberg College, USA) in Social Media and Society (January-March 2017: 1–11), argued that: ‘Given widespread labor market precarity, contemporary workers—especially those in the media and creative industries— are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. Academics, we contend, are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices, particularly as universities become progressively more market-driven. Academia.edu, a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed “Facebook for academics,” has grown rapidly by adopting many of the conventions of popular social media sites. This article argues that the astonishing uptake of Academia.edu both reflects and amplifies the self- branding imperatives that many academics experience. Drawing on Academia.edu’s corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site’s business model and (2) its social affordances. We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of “sharing.” In addition, the site’s fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self- monitoring—one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact. We conclude by identifying the stakes for academic life, when entrepreneurial and self-promotional demands brush up against the university’s knowledge-making ideals.’
It was posted on academia.edu, obviously.
Exploring a ‘Sense of Belonging’ and Why It Matters in Higher Education by Gill Mills and Caroline Jones
Report of an SRHE Student Experience Network Event Friday 9 June 2017
This was the first time we had attended an SRHE Event: we were optimistic and excited to experience and develop new knowledge aligned to the subject area of, ‘A sense of belonging within Higher Education’ and we were not disappointed. The SRHE venue provided an intimate but not intimidating environment where we were exposed to speakers covering a range of different elements that linked into the common theme. There was initial insight into the issues of admissions; clearing and contextual data from research delivered by Mansor Rezaian, from the Queen Mary University, then a qualitative exploration of non-traditional students’ journey into an elite university from Debbi Stanistreet of the University of Liverpool. Following these opening speakers there were opportunities for participant questions and answers and whilst we did not pose questions we found great value in listening to the elaborate and interesting discussions that took place. This part of the event created an academic community feel with professionals from across institutions, faculties and disciplines debating contextual dilemmas and experiences.
The latter part of the day explored the construction of ‘spaces’ of student friendship, with an in-depth delivery from Mark Holton of the University of Plymouth followed by some thoughtful ideas on how to use innovative approaches to research for under-represented students in urban settings, courtesy of speakers from the Queen Mary University. There was an extremely thought-provoking presentation by researcher Daniel Hartley and students from Queen Mary University - Dushant Patel and Nadia Hafedh - who are undertaking participatory action research relating to the recruitment of a sensitive community and implications of employing qualitative methodology in generating institutional change. Capturing the students’ voice and listening to their experiences as part of this research brought to life the importance of collaborative research and we found the idea of capturing data using a ‘long table’
23 approach fascinating. It was also refreshing to hear honest and frank discussions relating to the difficulties that the researchers had encountered thus far, with participating academics offering solutions and suggestions for resolutions or alternative approaches.
The day culminated in small group discussion on key issues affecting a sense of belonging and analysing why this matters in higher education. The opportunity to share ideas and knowledge through these professional networking discussions provided a valuable and timely end to this academic research collaborative event.
The style of the presentations was relaxed, thorough, informative and we found them insightful, enabling us to consider the impact of how the different pieces of research would sit within the context of our own institution. The day gave us valuable time to reflect and develop our professional knowledge based on evidence gained through the sharing of the work of others within academic research and across a range of institutions. We are already looking at the calendar to see which event we can book next! Thank you to SRHE for this opportunity; an exceptionally enjoyable day which helped us develop our own ‘sense of belonging’ to the SRHE community of researchers into HE.
Gill Mills is Course Leader for the Foundation Degree in Health and Social Care and Caroline Jones is Lecturer in Health and Social Care at University Campus, Oldham, which supports their SRHE membership.
If you’ve attended an SRHE event and would like to report on your experience we’d love to hear from you: please contact SRHE News and Blog editor [email protected].
Reconstructing relationships in higher education: challenging agendas
SRHE member and Editor of Higher Education Quarterly Celia Whitchurch and George Gordon, former SRHE Chair, have a new book out in the SRHE series Research into Higher Education: ‘Drawing on two international research projects, this book looks behind formal organisational structures and workforce patterns to consider the significance of relationships, particularly at local and informal levels, for the aspirations and motivations of academic faculty. It reviews ways in which institutions are responding to more agentic approaches by academic faculty, particularly younger cohorts, and the significance of local managers, mentors and academic networks in supporting individuals and promoting career development.’
Publishing
Blogging probably helps increase citation rates That was the finding of an exploratory study by Carlos Arrebola and Amy Mollett reported – where else – on The Impact Blog on 7 June 2017.
A brief guide to citation indicators A very useful short blog by Phil Davis (independent publishing consultant) on 15 May 2017 for The Scholarly Kitchen explained the various citation indicators in use by academics and publishers: Ratio-based indicators: Impact Factor; Impact Factor (5 yr); CiteScore; Impact per Publication (IPP); Source-Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP) Portfolio-based indicators: h-index; h-5 Network-based indicators: Eigenfactor; SCImago Journal Rank (SJR); Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)
24 He blogged again on 30 May 2017 for The Scholarly Kitchen about citation manipulation, with a telling story about skulduggery in the field of soil science, where Artemi Cerda had been forced to resign as editor-in-chief of Land Degradation and Development for practices including self-citation and citation stacking, boosting the impact factor of his journal from 3 to 8 until it was suspended by the 2015 Journal Citation report issued by Clarivate Analytics.
Louisiana State University sues Elsevier for breach of contract LSU and Elsevier have been arguing about whether the University’s contract with Elsevier, worth $1.65million pa and covering 35,000 staff and students, should in future include the university’s veterinary school, which used to have a separate contract with Elsevier. LSU says yes, Elsevier wants a one-off payment to reflect the changes, and now they’ll end up in court. The Association of Research Libraries put out a blog post describing Elsevier’s actions as “deeply troubling”, but presumably it will all depend on how lawyers construe the contracts involved. For the full story read Carl Stromsheim’s report on 3 May 2017 for insidehighered.com.
The evils of publishing? Stephen Buranyi (independent) wrote a piece for The Guardian on 27 June 2017 that conflated the current publishing bugbear Elsevier with the notorious Robert Maxwell, in an attempt to condemn the current structure of academic publishing. Trying a bit too hard, we thought.
Ethics and Academic Freedom
Ethics and Integrity
UNC appears to ban a course on athletics scandals in universities After the very high-profile academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as reported in earlier issues of SRHE News, you’d think the university would be trying quite hard not to make it worse. But now Jay Smith of the UNC history department has been told he cannot offer again a course called ‘Big-Time College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956 to the Present’. The course, which he taught last year, is based in part on his research for Cheated, a book he co-authored with Mary Willingham, a former UNC learning specialist and whistle-blower in the scandal over nonexistent “paper classes” to boost students’, especially athletes’, academic records. Colleen Flaherty told the story for insidehighered.com on 5 June 2017.
American Historical Review mistakenly assigns review of civil rights book to white supremacist American Historical Review, a leading history journal, sent Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (University of Chicago Press), by Ansley T Erickson (Teachers College of Columbia University) for review to Raymond Wolters (emeritus, Delaware). Wolters criticized the book for neglecting sociobiology, reflecting his widely-known views on ‘white identity’ which many have described as racist. The journal’s interim editor Robert A. Schneider, interim editor of AHR and professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington, took full responsibility for the decision and published an apology: ‘The AHR deeply regrets both the choice of the reviewer and aspects of the review itself. … ‘. Scott Jaschik reported the saga on 18 April 2017 for insidehighered.com.
Springer retracts 107 articles by Chinese authors Yojana Sharma reported for University World News on 27 April 2017 that the Springer Nature publishing company had retracted 107 papers by Chinese authors in Tumor Biology, after discovering that referees’ identities had been misrepresented in the peer review process: real academics had been named as referees but with false addresses.
25 Students cheating in Ukraine, Sweden and Wales David Matthews reported on 27 June 2017 for Times Higher Education that student cheating is apparently rife in Ukraine. Research by Elena Denisova-Schmidt (St Gallen) surveyed 600 students in Lviv and found that 48% had paid bribes and ’almost all admitted to cheating in exams and plagiarism’.
In Sweden, a review of 33 universities by TT Newswire/The Local on 6 June 2017 found 733 students had been suspended due to cheating in 2016, 16% more than the previous year. Since 2013, which saw 533 suspensions, the figure has increased by 37%. The Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslerämbetet, UKÄ) previously kept its own annual records of suspensions of higher- education students, but stopped doing so last year. UKÄ Legal Advisor Pontus Kyrk thinks the increase is mainly due to increased awareness, and that universities have got better at catching cheaters.
Shane Brennan reported for The Daily Post on 28 June 2017 that there had been a 50% increase in the number of students caught cheating in Welsh universities. The figures, revealed by a BBC Freedom of Information request, showed that the 2013-2014 figure of 1370 students had risen to 2044 in 2015- 2016. Students’ union officers approached for comment suggested that this was not an increase in cheating, but an increase in universities’ success in identifying the perpetrators.
South Korea jails university staff for admissions favours for President’s friend’s daughter Aimee Chung reported for University World News on 24 June 2017 that Choi Soon-sil, the friend of South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye who was impeached in March, had been sentenced to three years in prison for soliciting favours from Ewha Womans University for her daughter. Choi Kyung-hee, the former president of the university who was forced to resign last October over the scandal, and Namkung Gon, the university's former head of admissions, were both found to have complied with Choi Soon-sil’s requests to admit her daughter. They were sentenced to two years and 18 months in prison, respectively, on the same charges as Choi Soon-sil. Choi Soon-sil’s 21-year-old daughter, Chung Yoo-ra has already had her university place and her high school diploma revoked, following an official investigation which found that her high school attendance and test grades had been forged.
Fake U’s The unaccredited Corllins University was in the news in April when students at a Kansas high school discovered that their new principal had master's and doctoral degrees from the institution: the principal then resigned. Then Wake Forest University took a look at the photo on the Corllins home page and realised that the happy graduates were theirs. They have asked for the photo to be taken down. Corllins denies that it is a degree mill, and they may have a point. Degree mills have real students with fake degrees; these are fake Corllins students with real degrees. Scott Jaschik had the story for insidehighered.com on 10 April 2017.
Global Perspectives
Asia
India
India plans to introduce a single HE regulator Anubhuti Vishnoi reported for The Economic Times on 6 June 2017 that the Indian government is planning to replace the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) with one higher education regulator, likely to be named the Higher Education Empowerment Regulation Agency. Presumably they thought Office for Students was already taken.
26 Access v quality? Elite policy caste out Ranjit Devraj reported for University World News on 30 June 2017 that a government initiative to make 20 Indian universities ‘world class’ had fallen foul of policy that requires half the places in higher education to be reserved for students from socially 'backward classes' and castes.
Malaysia
Malaysian university autonomy is only ‘superficial’ Wan Chang Da wrote for Malay Mail Online on 19 May 2017 that his series of interviews with academics in Malaysian universities had prompted the realisation that autonomy, supposedly now granted to 17 of the 20 universities in Malaysia, was only superficial: ‘the power to appoint leaders in public universities remains in the hands of the Minister instead of the governing body of universities. … Although in theory, public universities are Federal Statutory Bodies and the staff are not civil servants, lecturers still have to follow the same pay scale as civil servants and universities do not have the autonomy to hire and fire staff. Likewise, public universities have to adhere to the procurement and financial procedures of the Ministry of Finance and Treasury. More troubling, in recent months, staff of public universities have to seek permission from not only the Vice Chancellor, but also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the university as well as the Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Higher Education, before they can travel abroad to attend conferences or present a paper.’
Australasia
Australian government budget plan for universities is an ‘incoherent mess’ Australian universities seem to be united in condemnation of the latest government proposals for budget cuts in HE. The Group of Eight, the self-styled elite, has pronounced the proposals to be a ‘contradictory, incoherent mess’ and Universities Australia Chief Executive Belinda Robinson said that careful analysis had confirmed how deeply the funding cuts would force universities to cut staff jobs and student support services, as reported in University World News on 9 June 2017.
Europe
Austria
Austrian universities facing funding crisis Michael Gardner reported for University World News on 9 June 2017 that Austrian universities were facing a ‘worst case scenario’ of an admissions freeze and suspending teaching in some subjects, after talks over a new funding formula collapsed amid a coalition government crisis, with elections scheduled for Autumn 2017.
France
University president is Macron’s new minister for HE Frédérique Vidal, president of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, was appointed Minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation on 17 May 2017, in the new government of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, under President Emmanuel Macron.
Hungary
Mass protests against Hungarian government attempt to close Central European University Kirsten Roberts Lyer (Central European University) blogged for The Conversation on 10 April 2017 about the protests against attempts by the Hungarian government to close the Central European University in Budapest, calling it a ‘campaign against liberalism’ and an assault on free speech.
27 Society News SRHE Annual Research Conference: 6-8 December 2017 Celtic Manor, Newport Wales, UK
Firstly, we would like to thank all who have submitted papers, symposium proposals, or made other contributions to this key event in our 2017 calendar. This year’s conference theme is Higher Education rising to the challenge: Balancing expectations of students, society and stakeholders
To register your place at the conference, go to https://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2017/submit- abstract-register.asp and note the reduction for early registration ends on 30th September 2017.
SRHE Newer Researchers Conference: 5 December 2017 Celtic Manor, Newport Wales, UK
This linked SRHE conference provides a unique opportunity for postgraduate and newer researchers to share and discuss their work with peers in the higher education research community in a supportive and developmental environment.
Booking and further information are available via http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2017/newer- researchers-conference.asp
SRHE Newer Research Awards Winners 2017 We are delighted to confirm the winners of this year’s SRHE Newer Researchers Awards as follows:
Networked publics: investigating the bounds of personal and professional selves presented by academics through social media platforms
Dr Katy Jordan recently completed her doctoral studies within the Institute of Educational Technology, the Open University. Her research interests focus on the intersection of Internet Studies and Higher Education research. She has published research on topics including social media use by academics, massive open online courses, and semantic web technologies for education.
As an undergraduate, Katy studied Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, to conduct research into teaching and learning in the department and develop e- learning resources. Following the Plant Sciences project, she worked on further Higher Education research and technology-enhanced learning projects in the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology. To formalise her move from Plant Sciences to Educational Research, she undertook a Postgraduate Certificate in Technology-Enabled Academic Practice at City University London, and a MPhil in Educational Research at the University of Cambridge.
The SRHE-funded project will build upon the findings from Katy's doctoral research. The project, entitled 'Networked publics: investigating the bounds of personal and professional selves presented by academics through social media platforms', will provide the opportunity to explore a model of personal and professional identities expressed across different social media platforms proposed in the thesis. The study will also extend the work to explore the contrasting imagined audiences associated with different sites, and what academics perceive to be indicative of significant research impacts in different online contexts.
28 Exploring undergraduate students' conceptions of 'teaching excellence': a phenomenographic study
Dr Mike Mimirinis is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education Studies in the Department of Education and Social Care at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Mike gained his MSc in Computer Based Learning from the Research and Graduate School of Education at the University of Southampton, and his PhD from Middlesex University. His doctoral work looked into student approaches to learning and studying in higher education blended learning environments.
While his early studies centred on evaluations of technology-enhanced learning, he later moved on to design and implement mid and large scale academic development initiatives within and between universities in the UK and overseas. Drawing on these initiatives, his most recent study with colleagues at Uppsala University, Sweden investigates qualitative differences in doctoral students’ conceptions of university teaching.
This SRHE-funded project will allow Mike to explore variation in the way undergraduate students experience excellent teaching. The study will involve phenomenographic analysis of student interviews from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. It seeks to identify whether/how students’ ways of understanding of excellent teaching relate to current discourses derived from, and emerging in response to, the UK government’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
The spaces and places of deaf academia
Dr Dai O’Brien is a Lecturer in BSL and Deaf Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics, York St John University. Dai’s current research interests are focused on deaf people’s spatial experiences on different scales, and exploring creative research methods.
Dai, who is deaf and uses BSL as his preferred language, completed his PhD in 2012 in which he explored the transitional experiences of young deaf people in the UK using photo- elicitation interviews. Dai also holds an MSc in Deaf Studies, an MRes in Sociology and BSc in Biological Sciences, all from the University of Bristol.
This SRHE funded project will allow Dai to explore the experiences of deaf academics working in higher education in the UK. The project aims to discover the pathways deaf people take into academia, and the networks which support them once they are involved in academic work. The project will utilise a combination of walk-through interviews and participant mapping to tap into deaf people’s visual experiences of the world.
We would also like to thank all those who put together proposals for this year’s awards and hope that at least some of the many other innovative and well-written proposals will be able to find alternative sources of funding.
SRHE Research Awards 2017 (Member and Scoping Awards) Applications for these £10,000 and £5,000 awards are currently open and will close on September 1st. Further details, including application forms, guidance notes, and reference forms are available via http://www.srhe.ac.uk/research/annual_research_awards.asp
Forthcoming Events for 2017-18 See www.srhe.ac.uk for details
29 Appointment of new Team Coordinator for SRHE
We would like to welcome Katie Tindle to the SRHE Executive Team in our newly developed role as SRHE Team Coordinator.
Katie began her role on July 10th, and will be working across all of our activities, so do please make her your “go to person” on any matters you are seeking support or help with.
Katie graduated with a BA Honours Degree gained at Central St Martins, University of Arts, London (UAL) in July 2015 and joins us with 2 years post-graduation experience in administration and management roles, within voluntary organisations and latterly as a manager within the Arts Student Union, which covers all the UAL campus sites in London.
Katie takes over from Emily Gosden-Kaye, who had been covering this role on a temporary basis and leaves us to get ready to start her MSc in Psychology (Neuroscience and Linguistics) in September, studying at UCL in London. It has been a pleasure having Emily with us for a few months and we could not be more delighted that she has managed to secure her place on the course she wanted at UCL. We wish her every success in the future.
New position at SRHE: Development Officer
As part of the new staffing structure in the executive team, the Society is seeking a Development Officer to support the work of the Society. This newly created role has three primary objectives:
To develop and sustain a range of communication tools and contacts for the Society, connecting us and our membership with key researchers and policy influencers internationally, making full use of social media and innovative IT approaches to support and extend our reach and impact.
To undertake a wide range of investigative and research projects aimed at mapping the global higher education environment and identifying opportunities for the Society to contribute effectively in the global higher education discourse and development.
To work with the Society Director, members of the SRHE team and academic colleagues in the Society in driving forward the Society’s future plans and introducing, developing and delivering new initiatives and strategies, innovative programmes and wider forms of engagement aimed at connecting the Society directly within a global network of higher education research and researchers and establishing the Society as a major source of knowledge, expertise and advice on issues of policy and practice.
Over the next two years we aim to build on our international reach and impact across the global higher education sector and to develop a strategy to increase our engagement and activities. We also need to continue to strengthen our national presence especially in policy debates and discourse.
For further details, including the full job description and application form, see https://www.srhe.ac.uk/about_us/vacancies.asp Applications must be received by 12.00 noon on 15 September 2017 and should include the names and addresses of two referees who, unless clearly stated otherwise, may be contacted prior to the interview.
SRHE Team Helen Perkins, Director [email protected] Rob Gresham, Manager Operations and Finance [email protected] Franco Carta, Finance Officer [email protected] Katie Tindle, Team Coordinator [email protected] François Smit, Conference and Events Organiser [email protected]
30 Small ads
External examiners, referees, reviewers wanted News will be happy to carry advertisements for external examiners in the broad field of research into higher education, for publishers’ referees, for book reviewers, and so on.
Doctoral Thesis Supervisor – University of Liverpool Online EdD Laureate Online Education, in partnership with the University of Liverpool, invites applications for Thesis Supervisors for the EdD programme in Higher Education. The University of Liverpool’s Doctor of Education - Higher Education (EdD) is an international professional doctoral programme focused on the latest practice, research, and leadership thinking within HE environments. The programme emphasises the development of an understanding of universities, operating in a global context, as places of learning and as learning institutions.
We want to augment our current team of thesis supervisors for our online students. Thesis supervisors are expected to maintain regular contact with their research students, primarily on an individual basis using appropriate forms of communication technology. Thesis supervision is conducted as part of a small supervisory team. The ideal candidate is a specialist in Education and HE, experienced in doctoral supervision and familiar with educational research methodologies, preferably in HE contexts. Previous supervision of research degrees should be shown through successful completion and/or experience of external examining of research degrees.
Essential Criteria A doctoral level qualification (or equivalent) in a relevant discipline. Conduct of recent research relevant to the study of HE. In the last five years the candidate should have: three peer-reviewed publications in journals that are at least of national excellence, or two peer-reviewed publications in peer-reviewed journals and four other publicly available intellectual contributions. Presentation of papers at recent and relevant conferences. Prior experience of supervising or examining doctoral candidates. Excellent skills for oral and written communication in English. Capacity to maintain good personal relations while working remotely. Desirable criteria Engagement as a member of an editorial board or as a reviewer of articles submitted for publication in a recognised academic journal. Previous experience of supervising remote doctoral students.
Applicants should review the relevant module details in our programme brochure http://university-liverpool-online.com/programmes/doctorates/doctor-of-education/outline The post is advertised at http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BCG326/doctoral-thesis-supervisor-university-of-liverpool-online-edd- professional-doctorate-in-education-higher-education/
Application is by CV; this should include a list of recent research and/or publications and evidence of relevant HE experience, duration and subjects taught as well as details of two referees. The deadline for applications is 4 August 2017. The Doctoral Thesis Supervision Training-Induction take place online over a two-week period commencing 28 September 2017.
31 Mind your language
The lost art of minute writing Wise words and a lament from Paul Greatrix (Nottingham) about the loss of a crucial skill which will diminish universities, in his Registrarism blog for WonkHE on 6 June 2017.
I ate it wen tat appens A missing “h” forced University of North Florida to reprint all 1,634 diplomas for students who graduated April 28. The diplomas dropped the letter from the word eighth in the date at the bottom of the diplomas, making it read: “This Twenty-Eigth Day of April, A.D., 2017”, as Dan Scanlan reported for the Florida Times-Union @jacksonville.com on 13 June 2017.
Georgia’s campus carry bill may be shot down for bad punctuation Georgia Governor Nathan Deal vetoed a campus carry bill in 2016 which would have allowed guns to be brought onto university campuses. He asked for guns to be barred from some areas including staff offices, and that’s what legislators thought they had achieved, but the lack of a comma might still scupper the bill. The bill as written does “not apply to faculty, staff, or administrative offices or rooms where disciplinary proceedings are conducted.” Democratic aide Stefan Turkheimer wrote on GeorgiaPol.com that the absence of a comma after the word “offices” could change the application of the legislation. Without that comma, guns might still be legally brought into most offices and rooms, since they would not be areas ‘where disciplinary proceedings are conducted’. Punctuation - a matter of life and death.
What’s in a name?
Plymouth University will rebrand as … University of Plymouth Gayle McDonald for the Plymouth Herald on 24 May 2017 reported the latest strategic shift for the university with barely-concealed bemusement. Things have never been the same since the institution stopped calling itself Polytechnic South West.
More building names The University of Victoria, in British Columbia, will rename a residence hall named for a 19th-century politician, Joseph Trutch, because of his views on race and his treatment of indigenous people, the Times Colonist and CBC reported. Trutch was British Columbia’s first lieutenant governor. He refused to recognize indigenous land rights and reduced the size of reserves, describing First Nations people as ‘savages … the ugliest and laziest creatures I ever saw.’
Meanwhile Stevens Institute of Technology, a small private college in New Jersey, proposes to name a building after Greg Gianforte, who briefly became famous worldwide in May 2017 after he was cited for misdemeanor assault for allegedly "body slamming" a reporter, days before he was elected to Congress. Gianforte has also lobbied against LGBT rights in Montana and his family’s foundation has donated extensively to anti-LGBT rights, anti-abortion, creationist, and climate-change skeptic organizations. The Congressman and his wife, Susan, have given a combined total of $20 million to the institute for the new facility. However some alumni, students, and faculty members have objected, saying the proposal contradicts the university’s commitment to scientific inquiry and inclusivity. Tensions have escalated in light of the body-slamming incident (for which Gianforte has apologised), and the Institute is "seriously deliberating" about whether to go ahead.
On 9 May 2017 the University of San Francisco changed the name of a residence hall from Phelan Hall to Burl A Toler Hall. Alumnus James D Phelan was mayor of San Francisco from 1897 to 1902 and
32 served as a US senator from 1915 to 1921. However he was known for his use of anti-immigrant rhetoric and was particularly known for encouraging anti-Japanese sentiment. Toler was a football player, a rare African-American star on a predominantly white team in 1951. The team opted out of postseason bowl games rather than leave Toler and another player behind, as would have been required. Toler went on to become the first black high school principal in San Francisco.
And finally
Honour for John Biggs Congratulations to eminent higher education researcher and university educator John Burville Biggs, who was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to tertiary education, particularly in the fields of curriculum development and assessment, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June 2017. John Biggs is perhaps best known for developing the concept of constructive alignment: his Teaching for Quality Learning is now in its fourth edition and his article What the Student Does: teaching for enhanced learning remains the number one cited article in Higher Education Research and Development.
Monument to an anonymous reviewer Russia’s National Research University Higher School of Economics had a useless lump of concrete cluttering its campus and staged an internal competition on what to do with it. The winning suggestion was that there should be a monument to celebrate anonymous reviewers. And here it is.
The doctor will sing to you now Paul Greatrix amassed a good selection of honorary doctorates awarded to musicians in his Registrarism blog on 20 June 2017.
You can’t please all the people all of the time As proven by the late Kenneth Arrow, among many other remarkable achievements.
Being an ombudsman in higher education: a review Rob Behrens, previously the chief executive of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator and now a Visiting Professor at UCL Institute of Education, wrote a report published by the European Network of Ombudsmen in Higher Education on 26 June 2017, arguing that ‘Ombudsmen in higher education are a growing and distinct cadre’.
Summer reading The Chronicle’s Ms Mentor (aka Emily Toth (Louisiana State)) has produced, as she usually does, another list of campus novels to keep you thinking about the office over the summer, and this year there seems to be a murder of Deans (or should that be a forest?).
Ian McNay has been working abroad …
SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich.
33