Good afternoon everyone. Good to be here
So
What ARE universities for?
This place is normally used to defend doctoral theses, so I will start by
setting out my theses; which are that:
SLIDE 1
1. Universities are long-lived institutions because of their capacity to
adapt their unique strengths to contemporary needs.
2. They must not over-adapt to transient needs in ways that
undermine their fundamental strengths.
3. The current vogue is to see them as direct agents of economic
growth.
4. This is an illusion, as are many of the assumptions that underlie
current activities.
5. One of its consequences is that the relationship between research
and education has become perverse and needs to be re-balanced.
6. Governance is crucial - the trend towards top-down corporate
governance can subvert university strengths, and associated
marketization can undermine its honesty.
7. Therefore: universities need to have a greater sense of
themselves rather than merely being instruments for the purposes
of others.
So – where do their fundamental strengths lie?
Universities are amongst the most long-lived of human institutions. In
Europe, there are about 65 institutions that survive from the 16th century,
operating in much the same way and in much the same place that they
always have. Of these, 56 are universities; the others being such as the
Papacy, the British monarchy and the Bank of Siena. The reason that
universities have been so resilient is that they have been adroit in reinventing
themselves and adapting to contemporary needs. They have adapted by
making themselves indispensible to the requirements of an autocratic
state; or an autocratic church; or, as many at the present day do, to a state
that is their paymaster or gives them formal license to operate.
It is often easier to define university purpose in a secular or religious
autocracy than in a pluralist democracy, where the babel of voices rarely
creates a settled view. Culture however is a common determinant.
SLIDE 1 Voltaire or Confucius
The European secular tradition favours the approach of Voltaire – how things
should be done - rather than that of Confucius - why things should be done,
as is the case in modern China for example. And it is the how that I shall
concentrate on.
Given that the state is the paymaster, what does the state believe to be the
purpose of universities that justifies the large investment of public funds in
them? And, is the state’s belief correct?
In recent decades, Universities have moved from the margin of governmental
concern to near to its centre. That is largely because of a firmly established
view amongst governments around the world that high quality, internationally
competitive research and higher education, mostly contained within
universities, are pre-requisites for long-term success in globalised economies.
Here is an example of such a view.
SLIDE 2: Australian Chief Scientist
Our universities and their representative bodies have enthusiastically taken
up this refrain and routinely extol their economic impact. Indeed we have put
so much emphasis on this aspect of our activities that many governments
now believe that universities exist mainly to directly bolster the economy.
A consequence has been dramatic global expansion of university provision,
greater diversity of style and purpose, increased mobility of students and staff
and a massive increase in public investment in research, particularly in
science, technology and medicine.
The crucial question is whether the view of universities as national
instruments of economic growth is either correct or wise. I will argue that the
view set out in this slide seriously mistakes the true value of universities; that
it is based on illusions; and though we should know better, that we universities
often collude with governments in this view, possibly because it suits our short
term aims us to do so.
So let us look critically at what is thought of as the bedrock of the university
enterprise: research and education. What are the benefits they confer on
society?
Lets look first at research
Comprehensive universities, such as this one, are unique amongst human
institutions in the range of knowledge they encompass. They have both an
unrivalled capacity, when they break out of their disciplinary silos, to combine
their skills in creative ways to address vitally important trans-disciplinary
issues – climate change, infectious disease, migration, the global economy
and so on – but also that they are able to reconfigure their structures to
pursue new, unexpected avenues of understanding.
They explore the deepest and most intractable problems that challenge
human understanding; they test, reinvigorate and carry forward the inherited
knowledge of earlier generations; and they seek to establish sound principles
of reasoning and action. It is an enterprise that has produced many great
achievements that have had, sooner or later, powerful practical applications or
deep philosophical, scientific or social insights that change the frameworks of
human perception or the practicalities of life. However, we should resist the
sin of hubris,
(SLIDE 3 EINSTEIN EXPERIMENT)
particularly as we are beginning to see that systematic attempts that have
been made to reproduce research results, have found that in the majority of
cases they are not reproducible; with the fascinating possibility that most of
the conclusions of university research are just wrong. Does it matter – maybe
not!
This very fecundity however tempts some to believe, as it did Australia’s chief
scientist, that universities’ research can be channelled so that it becomes a
direct driver of commercial innovation and an engine of economic growth. But
some of the most penetrating research of recent years indicates that this too
is an illusion, as exemplified by this slide,
SLIDE 4
McKinsey global
…. which concludes that “major economic growth directly through licensing,
spin-out, start-up and stimulation of research is, and always has been, a pipe
dream.”
There are two specific common and fundamental errors that we need to be
aware of. Firstly the assumption that financial value to the University is
equivalent to economic value to society. It is not.
SLIDE 4 – MEDIEVAL HISTORIANS
And secondly, that a University’s economic value to society is largely created
through science and technology. And I offer as an interesting counterexample the fact that one of University of Oxford’s biggest returns on
intellectual property came from the work of two medieval historians.
It is also important to recognise some of the inconsistencies of our approach
to research training. Implicitly, and in many national systems, we train doctoral
graduates as if the only goal is to produce professors.
SLIDE 5 - DOCTORAL TRAJECTORY
This diagram, produced some years ago by the Royal Society to illustrate the
career trajectories of doctoral graduates, shows what a tiny proportion of the
starting cohort eventually reach the professorial destination. We need to think
more profoundly about the purpose of the training of researchers in relation to
the roles they will subsequently play in society.
It is crucial to recognize that research-derived concepts, largely carried into
the non-university domain by graduates (& not by published papers), are a
latent resource for the short- or long-term futures. Forty years ago, scientists
who studied climate change, and I was one of them, wore brightly coloured
socks and were regarded as irrelevant but harmless. But the serendipitous
investment in their work revealed processes that we now recognise as
threatening the future of human society, and the successors to those
scientists are playing a crucial role in assessing how we need to adapt. If we
look at any major modern technology, the mobile phone, genetic sequencing
or composite materials, we see that the component discoveries that underlie
the technology have long historical roots, in some cases of more than a
century before the modern end-point was even dreamt of, and the idea that
the mobile phone for example was invented at any one time is a far from the
truth.
Lets now look at the university’s teaching function.
Academics and their universities, particularly in Europe, are deeply attached
to the idea that university teaching has long been and must continue to be
research-led in any university that is worthy of the title. This is a historical
illusion. A 1971 study using data from the mid-1960s in the UK, where the
teaching-research link is fiercely defended, showed that universities were
overwhelmingly oriented towards teaching and not research. A mere 10% of
staff were even “interested” in research, whilst only 4% regarded research as
their primary responsibility. A similar study in the USA as late as 1979, found
a similar result, and I suspect that this was also true elsewhere.
That has now changed fundamentally, and in ways that have had serious
consequences for teaching. The participation rate in university education has
greatly increased over the last 50 years. Typically, there has been tenfold
increase in student numbers with only a doubling of academic staff numbers,
producing a dramatic decrease in the ratio of staff to students. At the same
time, the explosion of research, the higher status that it has been given, and
the dramatically increased proportion of staff time allocated to research have
meant that an even smaller proportion of academic staff time is now devoted
to teaching. Arguably, rather than research being a necessary support for
teaching, it may have become its enemy. It is vital that we correct this
perverse balance, and change the incentives that motivate universities and
academics to act as I have described.
There is an illuminating tale of Princeton University that reflects a more
balanced view, from the 1970s when William Bowen was its President. He
was approached by one of the University’s mathematician’s, a distinguished
Fields Medallist (a Nobel Prize equivalent in mathematics), who had been
offered a post at the University of Chicago, with the lure that he would be
exempted from teaching. “I would far prefer”, said our mathematician to
Bowen, “to stay at Princeton if only you would make me a similar offer”.
Bowen replied that though he would be sad to see him leave, Princeton could
survive his departure, but it would not survive as the place it was, if it
permitted its professors not to teach.
What then is the target of our teaching? The outsiders want the students
trained for their first job out of university. Academics teaching them want the
student to be educated for 50 years of self-fulfilment. The trouble is that the
students want both. It is the ancient collision between each student's shortterm and long-term goals, between 'training' and 'education', between
'vocational' and 'general', between honing the mind and nourishing the soul. It
divides the professional educators, divides the outside critics and supporters,
and divides the students, too.
I would argue however that these dichotomies are false ones. What we should
be doing, is to make students think, by feeding and training their instinct to
understand and seek meaning.
It is a process whereby students are taught to question interpretations that are
given to them, to reduce the chaos of information to the order of an analytical
argument, to identify problems for themselves and to resolve them by rational
argument supported by evidence; not to be dismayed by complexity but to be
capable and daring in unravelling it, and to verify for themselves what is stable
in that very unstable compound that often passes for knowledge.
These are deeply personal, private goods, but they are also public goods,
because they underpin the highly applied skills of engineers, doctors, artists
and teachers. The annual flood into society of skilled graduates armed with
these capabilities continually refreshes society’s technical excellence and its
economic, social and cultural vitality, and is crucial to its capacity to take
bold, imaginative and principled action in the face of an uncertain future,
rather than cowering in fear of it. They are the qualities which every society
needs in its citizens.
SLIDE 6 – NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
I argue then that we have an indispensible responsibility to help our students
learn to think. Building on that to develop the creative & practical skills that
society needs is important (though hopefully not, as Charlie Chaplin here, as
merely a cog in an industrial machine). To do the latter without the former is to
betray our students.
If we are to maximise these profoundly important goods, we need to ensure
that our pedagogy adapts to reduced staff:student ratios and exploits
technology to best effect. Too much of the time of academics is taken up by
the communication of information that is already available electronically to
students. If we were bolder, we could be more effective by pointing students
towards IT as a source of curricula facts and theories, freeing up academics’
time to return to more intimate styles of learning where the consequences of
the encounter between minds, between a mind, a problem and evidence, and
between the minds of successive generations can be profoundly and
marvelously unpredictable and could again be at the heart of university
learning. Somehow we must escape from the position where University
teaching is like a fast food outlet – a standard product for the largest number,
rather than a process that adapts to the diversity of human talents and gives
them the opportunity to flourish.
If a university is to benefit its society in the long term, it must not assume that
current demands are a good guide to the long term. A university that moulds
itself only to present demands is one that is not listening to its historians.
History is at its most illuminating when written with full consciousness of what
people wrongly expected to happen. Several years ago, discourse about the
so-called Knowledge Economy was highly influential. It would be a high
growth, high wage economy based on deep technical skills, with a massive
demand for graduates and research - a European Commission estimate 10
years ago was that Europe needed 10,000 more PhD graduates per year.
History has yet again failed to live up to expectation, as supply has increased
and demand has fallen. The demand for bachelors graduates is weak – in
some European countries less than 50% get what have been called
“graduate jobs”; strong supply has generated qualification inflation, with a
Masters rather than a Bachelors degree being required for formerly bachelor
jobs, whilst Graduate unemployment exceeds 50% in some countries in
Europe. The most financially successful entrepreneurs focus on inventing new
styles of coffee bar or the provision of cleaning services at less than a living
wage, rather than promoting new uses of biotechnology. Maybe this is a
transient phase too, but maybe it is the future. Have we thought clearly of the
role of the University in such a future?
If universities are to have a greater sense of themselves and of their real
value to society rather than merely being instruments that serve transient
government policies, the way they are governed and how they manage
themselves are crucial. But the variety of almost irreconcilable demands on
them, to be practical as well as transcendent - to assist immediate national
needs but to pursue knowledge for its own sake - to be open but yet to protect
commercial confidence - to both add value and question values, all place
great pressure on university governance. An understandable response has
been to increase the size, diversify the roles and extend the reach of
increasingly centralised management in order the control the practices and
define the purposes of universities so that they converge with national
priorities.
Whilst greater professionalism in management is to be welcomed, the risk is
that universities come to behave as corporate organisations with centrallydefined priorities to which all their members must acquiesce, rather than
acting to protect their members’ untrammelled freedom to think, to explore
and to broadcast their views in novel areas of critical enquiry. Indeed, there
have been growing numbers of cases where universities have felt it proper to
defend the corporate entity through disciplinary actions against staff and
students, justified on nebulous and inappropriate grounds such as “breaching
confidentiality” or of “undermining a university’s good name”. One of the
dangers of corporatism is that it can crush one of the most powerful agents of
university creativity, that of academic freedom.
Moreover the recent incidences of corporate corruption, incompetence and
greed in business do not provide encouraging models of efficient or ethical
behaviour for university management. It would be ironic if universities were to
pursue the corporate route just as many growing companies are adopting flatlying structures and the absences of bosses, much in the way of the
traditional university model.
A major contradiction of university governance derives from the relative
freedom and autonomy of academics, and the lack of inhibition of its students;
which are the sources both of the university’s greatest strength and its
greatest weakness. On the one hand it generates a hubbub of creativity and
entrepreneurial initiatives that stimulate diverse and sometimes towering
intellectual achievements. On the other, it can be the source of profound
resistance to managed change. One could say that changing a University is
like changing a graveyard – you get no help from the people inside! A central
dilemma for university governance is therefore how to retain the sense of
ownership of the enterprise by its members. The freedom to enquire, to
debate, to criticise and to speak truth to power, whether it be the power of
government, of those that fund the university, or those who manage it, it is
central to the vitality of the university and its utility to society. It is crucial that
rectors and university governing boards understand this essential source of
university strength, that they are steadfast in its support, strong in its
defence and are not seduced by the fallacy of managerial primacy: that
things that make management difficult, necessarily need to be removed or
reformed. An easily governed university is no university at all.
There has been a vogue in recent years to prioritise the philosophy and
practices of markets. In these, higher education comes to resemble any other
service industry, where branding, a tool of a company’s sales and marketing
department, is regarded as a powerful device. A good university is no longer
one where a student might simply expect to get a good education; it is one
with a distinctive brand, which is a means of providing customers with
reassurance prior to product purchase or experience. At its simplest, it seeks
the response “the handbag must be all right if it's from Chanel”. Applied to
universities, or even to handbags, a brand does not reflect the real utility of
either the university or the handbag.
A symptom of this increasingly marketised environment is a plague of PR that
eliminates truthfulness as a measure of worth, giving absolute precedence to
the image over the real. There are no commonplace objectives that are not
“visionary”, no research that is not “cutting edge”, no prize that is not
“prestigious”, and “international excellence” lies around like litter. It is a
corruption of language that corrodes the capacity for a university to speak
truthfully, plainly and fearlessly about subjects close to its heart.
This developing higher education market also now has its stock market
quotation in the international ranking tables that purport to reflect the relative
excellence of universities worldwide. They commit errors that we teach our
students to avoid. Whilst their logic and their claims to relevance and utility
can be readily demolished, league tables are a seductive device. Their
pathology is to encourage universities to converge towards the researchdominated model that generates high ranking scores, thereby reducing the
vital diversity of a university system and undermining the potential of many to
contribute to society in other ways. I was delighted to see that German
university sociologists have all agreed not to collaborate with the rankers.
More should follow their example. I encourage you to do so.
In conclusion, there are two important points to derive from these
propositions. The first is that it is the totality of the university enterprise that is
important. One cannot simply separate one element and say that is what we
want and that is what we will pay for. Human society is not separable in the
way that governments would necessarily wish to decompose it for the purpose
of discrete policy actions. It is a complex interacting whole, which needs to be
understood as a whole. No one discipline suffices to seize the whole –
whether the whole individual or the whole social construct. Of course, public
policy will place a premium on this or that aspect at different times, but it
cannot simply set about neglecting the rest on the purely temporary and
therefore relative grounds of a present concern. Indeed, universities are the
only place in society where that totality of ourselves and our world is brought
together. It is universities in their diversity of preoccupations that are the
strongest providers of rational explanation and meaning that societies need. Universities are not just supermarkets for a variety of public and private goods
that are currently in demand, and whose importance is defined by their
perceived aggregate financial value. I assert that they have a deeper,
fundamental role that permits them to adapt and respond to the changing
values and needs of successive generations, and from which the outputs
cherished by governments are but secondary derivatives. To define the
university enterprise by these specific outputs, and to fund it only through
metrics that measure them, is to misunderstand the nature of the enterprise,
undermine its potential to deliver continuing social benefit and ultimately leads
to disillusion. In conclusion, Universities are remarkable and long-lived as institutions with
value and values that are of perennial importance; namely the reinvigoration of inherited and the creation of new knowledge and their
communication, and, in the profound words of Ben Okri, the Nigerian
poet, “setting up their students for the act of self-discovery”. They are of
fundamental relevance to the contemporary societies of which they are part
though expressed in changing ways. At each stage in their history they are in
the hands of contemporary staff and students, who in comparison, are here
today and gone tomorrow, but it is incumbent upon them to ensure that those
core values are maintained, rather than changing with every swerve of
contemporary fashion.
Henryk Szerynk, the great Polish violinist expressed this when he spoke of his
priceless Stradivarius. This is not my violin, he said, I am its violinist. It
was born long before me, it will continue to sing long after I am gone.
That responsibility lies with us for the university – we must ensure that it
continues to sing.