Reflections on Higher Education 5: the mixed academic economy. #Education

The 3 Es: employment, ‘ealth and education

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

Universities continue to evolve and the fact that some have survived a millennium, with many being over a century old, may conceal the extent of the structural changes they have survived.

I did my PhD research in the bowels of the Physics Department where Professor Poynting once weighed the earth and I was down there for much the same reasons, in search of a highly stable environment for experiments. Quite apart from our contrasting fortunes – not least my lack of a legacy from my time in the basement – the world he worked in and the world I walked out into were mutually unrecognisable (although the lift I used may have been his installation, I don’t know).

In this post I look at the three foci of universities and explain how I saw some of the disconnects and why running a university is fiendishly difficult. They are:

• Teaching and learning

• Research

• Enterprise

I have a vague inkling of where universities started, ironically in what we call the dark ages. They were seats of learning and staffed by teachers.  Clearly, there were other posts, to manage money and perhaps accommodation, but the focus was on learning.  I don’t suppose it was a surprise that such institutions attracted scholars, leading to a mixed agenda of scholarship and teaching.

Again, I’m not a reliable source, but it seems to me that modern research is really, er, modern. Clearly by Isaac Newton’s time, there was experimental work, but hardly research.  As Keynes explained (see here):

‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.’

Thinking made him famous, but alchemy didn’t make him rich until he transferred those skills to reforming the Royal Mint.  As already noted (see here) big science was simply not around even 100 years ago.

Finally, universities have an additional line in knowledge transfer and enterprise.

Over a millennium universities have morphed by attracting people who felt comfortable with what they were and who then reshaped them in stages for new roles. But how far can this evolution go before fundamental change breaks through?

Teaching and Research

One of the most frequent complaints I heard was how teaching conflicted with research, which is hardly surprising since most universities engineer the split all the way to the top with separate people responsible for each. There is (at least) one PVC or DVC for Teaching and another for Research, with posts in Enterprise, etc. I’ve suggested survival strategies for individuals on YouTube, here.

The bottom line is that most staff behave like mice beneath mating elephants, never knowing which is going to stamp on them first. It’s not a great strategy but it was common: do what you want for as long as you can until someone absolutely demands you drop everything to meet their deadline.  Of course, deadlines are published well in advance, but that’s hardly an integrated strategy.

It wouldn’t matter if staff were appropriately trained or selected from a pool of self-organisers, but meeting deadlines usually falls below time for thinking with those most attracted to academic life.  It would be tenable if time management were easy at universities, but it isn’t. Every academic is good at some deadlines; I don’t think I met any who met them all, and those who succeeded most worked into the early hours most days.

Nor do academics help themselves. If you tried to rationalise assessments by running a couple of days off-site to produce everything for the year, you would hear more excuse than puppy-owning pupils have confected over homework. The independence streak runs deep.

This means that the head of department (or equivalent) is the toughest campus role. Someone who managed at another university told me that every time you make a decision you hacked off 10% of the department.  By the time you had made 10 decisions, everyone hated you (yes, I know, if you do the sums and if the decisions are essentially independent then 35% of the department is still indifferent to you, but you get the point).

When I went on the Top Management Programme, I was surprised at how little interest prospective university leaders (and those we met in post) had in these structural faults. The discussion was usually at stratospheric levels, as though the cracks were readily papered over and the question was simply about pattern matching on the wall.

Research and enterprise

When I worked in R&D, university engagement in UK funded programmes was at the expense of industry: the deal was 50:50, so industry had to cover its half and half the university research.  The incentive to minimise university involvement was clear, but there wasn’t much regard for academic research, anyway.

When I moved to academia everything flipped, and I found myself fighting for industrial cash, resisting industrial requests to be written into grants and even some ‘in kind’ offers. Meanwhile, everyone believed that peer reviewed research, especially research council funded research, was better than anything else.

My experience is in the middle – there is great practice on both sides and there is certainly key research that will never happen outside universities, but the government will have to be a lot smarter in the next 50 years than it has been in the last 50 if it is to cash in.

In terms of economic growth, I saw stellar examples of university collaboration with industry. I would argue that they are the exception rather than the rule, and that the scale at which the UK is missing out is hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands of times greater than the existing successes.

The main problem is that the UK’s innovation supply chain is broken. It is great at invention, but scaling up, manufacturing and systems applications (which is where significant wealth is created) always goes abroad.

I saw it happen in photonics. When I joined GEC in 1985, photonics was the next big thing. We heard of corridors in a sister research centre piling up with kit that arrived faster than clean rooms could be created. Our Materials, Applications and Devices Laboratory (yes, it was MAD in those days) was exploding, and staff were packed into Portakabins that were packed on top of one another.

I left the same site in 2001, when there was hardly any photonics manufacturing in the UK and despite our patents, our companies were integrating and installing components from abroad. Wonderful arc, but no crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

When I visited Manchester in the noughties I had a sense of déjà vu with graphene. There was funding and great excitement about the science but little open or realistic discussion about what a graphene industry would look like in 2040 and how much would be in the UK.

On a smaller scale, many mechanisms confounded collaborates.  As an example, say you persuaded a managing director to put £100k pa into your programme.  The half-life of a CEO is maybe 18 months, so you are soon talking to his or her successor – perhaps even before a grant is awarded and only then if you’d secured the right signature with a deadly-magic non-cancellation spell attached – who passes it down a level to their head of this or that.  In time, you’re collaborating with someone who has inherited a (colossal) £100k hit to their (modest) internal P&L account and must therefore milk as much short-term benefit as possible from your programme. It’s a tears-before-bedtime story.

All under one roof

These three industries – learning, research, enterprise – are all housed together, paid for on common pay scales, driven one way and another by policy trends, institutional directives and powerful personalities. I think universities are in a precarious place: great places with great people but straddling too many fault lines.

In the final post, I’ll try to square the circle.

Professor Young: inventor and R&D Director who deep-dived into Higher Education.