Where you stand depends on where you sit

A former colleague was very fond quoting what I now know to be Miles’ Law: where you stand depends on where you sit. That is, what you think about something depends on your perspective. (A corollary of this is, of course, that we are less objective than we might think.)

Several problems on which I have recently advised bring this phrase to mind. The conundrums have been variations on a theme: how to help people who are not physically close together, work well together.

Rufus E Miles: Lawgiver

In a university context this most often doesn’t mean people who are in different continents. There are plenty of examples of research teams on different sides of the world who work effectively together: meeting every now and again to discuss results; corresponding by email; sharing findings by email or over the web; and talking by phone or Skype. Of course, in these situations there is likely to be an agreed goal and methodology, often tied to specific funding; and the success of the project will reflect on all participants (or at least on all of the Principal Investigators), so the incentives to collaborate are there.

More likely the problems arise when people are on the same campus, sometimes in the same building, but not so close together that they bump into each other habitually. For instance, maybe an academic department is spread across several different buildings; or maybe there’s a problem in getting administrative staff within a faculty office and those in a registry to work well together. And often the answer cannot be to simply move them closer together – the reality of the physical estate, or at the least the cost and relative priority of doing this, make such things impossible.

So what to do?

Firstly, help them to see why it matters. Think about how their working together contributes to a bigger goal. And then tell them the story of this – in newsletters, face to face in meetings, make a short film, however you need to bring it to life. But make the narrative real – not about corporate goals and abstractions, but about the difference that they can make to real people’s lives. Help them to see that they’re involved in a big and noble task. Now this is easy if your team is helping to bring peace to the world, harder if it’s about resolving timetabling squabbles. So sometimes you have to look to a bigger goal (for instance the benefits education bring to people’s lives, and the role of effective timetabling in making this happen in a cost-effective and sustainable manner) to make the story. But unless you’re working for an evil crime lord, there’s a positive narrative in there, waiting to be found.

Secondly, regular information flows about what’s going on help bring people together. You could initiate - or help to initiate, if you’re not the one in charge - a system of team briefing, so that everyone gets the same information, face to face, on a regular basis. Once people have a shared knowledge base its easier for them to make the connections between others they need to work with, and understand why someone else’s problem is their problem too.

Finally, there’s a need to help the people know each other as individuals. An email address is easier to ignore than a voice on a phone; a person who you recognise and meet with from time to time is harder to ignore than an extension number that sometimes you dial. Who’s who lists with photos can help – whether on the intranet, in a printed (or emailed) guide, or a noticeboard, they help to make staff members individuals rather than simply cogs in the machine. Or how about finding an excuse to bring them physically together from time to time - ideally a combination of work (makes the reason to be there compelling) and some social, get to know you, time.

These ideas tie in with John Adair’s thinking on good leadership: which means a necessary focus on task, team and individual. Get these things right, and your problems of disconnect amongst your team or your colleagues will begin to disappear.

Plagiary

The Times today reports on a ‘crisis’ in universities, with high levels of student cheating, disproportionately committed by overseas students. The Times story is here, behind a paywall – I’m loathe to give Mr Murdoch any money, so I’ll summarise from other media sources.

From The Times, 2 January 2016

It seems that the Times surveyed UK universities and found that nearly 50,000 had been ‘caught cheating’ over the past three years, with 362 being expelled. In a subset of 70 universities- presumably those which collated data via fee status – overseas students accounted for 35% of cheating cases, but made up only 12% of the student population.

Thanks to The Guardian for their summary of the Times story.

The story focuses on plagiarism – with Geoffrey Alderman asserting that ‘type 1’ plagiarism (copying someone else’s words) is declining, with ‘type 2’ plagiarism (paying someone else to write your coursework for you) is on the increase. No data are given to support this, but anecdotally it feels plausible.

It is an interesting issue. To understand it better you’d need to discuss the nature of plagiarism detection (much more sophisticated than it used to be) and issues around the nature of assessment, and what it is meant to demonstrate. One thing which I’ve noticed across in dealing with student tissues in a number of different UK universities is that expectations of higher education, and of the role in examinations of independent thought, vary across education systems. In some systems, memorising and repeating back the words of authorities – your professor, books and journals – seems to be considered good. So students who copy may, at first, think that they’re doing the right thing. This seems to me to be an educational issue more than a moral one.

Notice also the emphasis on overseas students cheating disproportionately. Multiplying out the proportions, some 32,500 home and EU students were caught cheating over three years, compared to 17,500 overseas students. Yes, it’s disproportionate. I’d be interested to see how many of these were ‘first offence’ plagiarism as opposed to repeat offences (or indeed other sorts of exam cheating.) If you factor in the cultural/educational differences it doesn’t seem like a crisis or a moral panic. But are we meant to understand that overseas students are somehow lowering standards? If so, it’s all grist to Theresa May’s immigration mill. And very unpleasant bread it makes, as well.

I don’t expect we’ve heard the last of this – I’ll be reading ministerial speeches closely to see whether a ‘cheating foreigner’ theme begins to emerge.

Statuary

The controversy at Oxford over Oriel College’s Cecil Rhodes statue is the gift that keeps on giving. In today’s episode, Oriel alumnus and former Australian PM Tony Abbott has written to the Independent to argue against the campaign to remove the statue. To my mind, there’s (at least!) two different arguments going on here, and it’s important to unpick the issues.

An Oxford statue which is causing offence

The background: Cecil Rhodes, an Oriel alumnus, led activities in southern Africa in the nineteenth century – political, business, colonizing - which played a large part in the development of the British colonies in that area, and out of which grew great personal wealth for him and also a political establishment which morphed into the evils of apartheid. (Note: better and more nuanced historical accounts are no doubt available: I’m not trying to make historical points about Rhodes here.) His wealth supports the prestigious Rhodes scholarships, which fund non-UK students to undertake postgraduate study at Oxford. Tony Abbott was a Rhodes scholar.

An Oxford statue which is not causing as much offence

There is agreement that Rhodes himself did things and caused things to happen which were Bad and Wrong: racist and exploitative, or, in the words of Oriel College’s statement, “…Rhodes was also a 19th-century colonialist whose values and world view stand in absolute contrast to the ethos of the Scholarship programme today, and to the values of a modern University.”

From this two further arguments are derived. Firstly, that the statue should be removed because it symbolises a past which we should abjure. Secondly, that the statue should be removed because it contributes to the oppression of minorities which in turn causes, so the argument goes, the demographics of Oxford’s student population to be skewed against Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students.

(And on this latter point, the Oriel College statement concedes that there is work to be done to improve the experience and representation of BME students. Amen to that, and please could you have a think about public school bias while you're about it.)

To take the first argument – that we should remove the statue as we no longer wish to commemorate its subject - there are points to be made on both sides. Can history be changed by taking down a statue? Of course not. Further, many British institutions, including more than one or two universities, have pasts which include associations with people and activities which would today be thought of as horrifying, and assets which include the financial gains from these. If we did a thorough historical clear-out, we’d be too busy sorting out yesterday’s wrongs to prevent today’s wrongs from being done. But equally, it’s only a statue, and the logistics of removing it are not insurmountable. And we do have a duty to think about the actions of our forebears, and the part they play in the narratives we shape today about our past. History is not uncontroversial, what we say and do about our history tells others about who we are today.

(Personally, I think the problem is with having public statuary at all. There isn’t the room or resource to make a statue for everyone that someone admires, and history will always cast different lights on actions and consequences. I’d favour portraiture which is actively curated. If a painting is moved every couple of years anyway, then no-one notices if it’s here or there. It’s making the representation a fixed object of note/commemoration which is the problem, and sculptures tend to be bigger and heavier than pictures.)

I suspect the first part of the argument will be dealt with, at some point in the summer when students aren’t around, by a quiet removal of the statue to somewhere less public. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a clause in a trust deed which makes its total removal impossible, given the terms of a bequest or lease, but equally a particular position could be re-thought.

The second argument, though – the one about it contributing to oppression – is harder to make, I believe. And I do find it hard to believe that of and in itself a statue is the real problem. There’s a trend for some in university to argue that there should be safe spaces in which students are free from acts, symbols or words which cause them to feel oppressed. Witness as part of this the hoo-ha at Goldsmiths Students’ Union in relation to the speaker Maryam Namazie, and the disruption by members of one student society of her talk at a meeting of another student society, in part on the grounds that what she said was insulting and oppressive.

If universities are safe spaces – safe in the sense of being free from ideas that challenge a person’s views or understanding of the world – they will become sterile and not worth attending. It’s the process of becoming able to understand and analyse things that are just plain wrong, and provide good and convincing arguments and reasons why they’re wrong, which is part of becoming a graduate. And it’s also learning that a Manichaean view of what is right and wrong is not always very helpful – both in terms of understanding a situation and in terms of working with others. And you’ll find it harder to get these if the intellectual environment you are in does not expose you to contrary thoughts and opinions.

Safe spaces are the bigger challenge to universities than statues. There’s a legal narrative – arising from equalities legislation – with duties to promote better relationships between people, based around protected characteristics. The legislation aims to deal with actual wrongs and I’m not seeking to criticise it. But the argument which goes from a duty to promote equalities to an argument that seeks to prevent all situations in which an individual may be challenged intellectually is not a good one in a university. How to make that argument well enough, and make it stick in the face of activism, is going to be tricky, I suspect.

A new way to cheat the exam system?

I’ve posted before on the issues of cyber security for Universities. Not from the perspective of a tech-expert, of course but in relation to the management challenges that it can pose.

A tried and tested method of cheating

This week saw another example – as JISC was subject to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. As I understand it, this is the internet equivalent of getting lots of people to go into a shop at the same time to effectively stop it trading.

The attack on JISC, according to the BBC, prevented some students from accessing internal systems and submitting coursework by the right deadline.

So who’d benefit from such an attack? One obvious answer might be, a student who was facing a deadline that they couldn’t meet, but who would have a much stronger case for an extension if it was the University’s systems which had broken, not their own ability to work to a deadline.

I have no idea whether JISC are able to pinpoint the source of the attack, and if they did they probably wouldn’t share it, so this might be an area where a student with enough resources – either tech savvy or financial – could secure an extension without it looking like their fault.

Am I saying that this is definitely how and why it happened? Of course not – I’ve no direct evidence and there’s plenty of cases of DDoS attacks for other purposes (including just for the sheer devilment of it). But equally I have seen students facing an exam problem do some desperate things, and this wouldn’t be the worst of them. Academic Registrars up and own the land (and probably across the world) would, I am sure, concur.

If you want to use this as the basis for a film script, by the way, please do get in touch …

The national interest(s)

The UK has four separate national higher education policies. It’s a devolved matter, so the governments in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh set the policies in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland independently of policies determined by BIS in London for England. But it is also the case that there’s a single higher education system in the UK – at least when viewed from the perspectives of staff, students and research funders. Staff move freely between the different nations; there’s plenty of student mobility between nations, and research funders look for the best research, which often spans the UK’s internal borders. So there’s two contrary facts on the go at the same time.

Universities Wales, the local franchise of UUK in Wales, has today published a manifesto which speaks to the tension which arises because of this. The manifesto, which aims to help shape party policies in May 2016’s assembly elections, sets out six ‘fundamental commitments’ for universities in Wales. Let’s take a look.

The first of these fundamental commitments addresses access to maintenance funding for students: “Provide means-tested maintenance grants for Welsh students from foundation through to postgraduate level to ensure that everyone in Wales has access to the life changing opportunities provided through higher education.”

There’s two things going on here. Firstly, a recognition that access to money to live on whilst studying is a major factor in widening access and enabling students to succeed. Future fee repayments are much less of an inhibiting factor than cash for food, rent and clothes. Secondly, the range of the funding – undergraduates are not the only students, and with postgraduate loans available in England, Welsh universities and Welsh students are disadvantaged if similar funding is not available.

The second commitment addresses affordability: “Prioritise university funding towards the policies that both provide opportunities to access an internationally competitive, high quality university education and deliver economic and social benefits for individuals, government and businesses in Wales.”

At the moment the Welsh Government provides a direct fee subsidy for all Welsh-domiciled (ie, living in Wales before they went to university) students, no matter where they attend university. So, Welsh government HE money is being spent to pay fees at universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (although in practical terms the vast majority of Welsh students who study outside Wales do so in England.) And the plain truth is that this commitment places great pressure on other Welsh HE priorities. The Diamond Commission is currently looking at HE funding issues (and is due to report after the election – where have we heard that before?), and Universities Wales is aiming to help change policy. Welsh Labour has previously made a clear anti-fee commitment, so all policy help will be important. And it’s clearly tied in with the maintenance grants point in the first ‘fundamental commitment’: give something good to students before taking something else away.

The third commitment speaks to a very real concern for the larger universities in Wales: “Maintain in real terms the quality-related (QR) research budget that underpins Wales’ world leading research.” The size of the sector in Wales means that government can be far more selective in research funding, and REF 2014 showed that the quality of research in Wales as measured by GPA was high. What is also important that scale factors aren’t used as a reason for the Welsh government to reduce QR funding as a response to financial pressures.

The fourth commitment speaks to the variety of access to higher education: “Continue investment in part-time provision both to widen access to higher education and develop crucial skills within the Welsh workforce, mindful that part-time provision requires distinct support and investment in order to deliver for Wales.” This is an area where the English funding model has hit universities hard, with significant declines in part-time study.

The fifth ‘fundamental commitment’ relates to HEFCW: “Retain a funding and oversight body for higher education in Wales to manage risk and provide stability to the sector, provide assurance to Government and enable universities to continue delivering for Wales.”

The proposed changes in English HE would see the abolition of HEFCE. English universities value the buffer HEFCE provides between government and any individual university, and a removal of that buffer, with the more explicit possibility of government choosing which subjects and universities to fund, causes concerns. In Wales the issues are magnified: in a small country it’s easier for government to interfere.

And finally, Europe: “Actively support Wales remaining a member of the European Union.” Wales gets a great deal out of Europe – in terms of funding for economic regeneration, for instance – and it’s a matter of concern for Welsh universities that access to research funding, as well as staff and student mobility, should continue. In practical terms, Welsh government commitment to membership of the EU will mean little in the event of a referendum ‘out’ vote, but the ‘fundamental commitment’ helps emphasise the significance of the EU to universities.

So of the six commitments, the first five – maintenance grants, access to funding for all levels of study, research funding, part-time funding, and regulation – seek directly to counter, address, or improve upon, the changes which have or will happen in England. Welsh Universities know that if their part of the HE system isn’t finely tuned with respect to that in England, they’ll suffer the consequences.

Research and Development

So the review of the Research Councils by Sir Paul Nurse has been published, and what a report it is. A much better read than many government reports – it felt like the innocent scientific positivity in some of John Wyndham’s novels, or even better, in The Black Cloud by Sir Fred Hoyle.

I studied philosophy at the LSE, and the focus was very much – unsurprisingly for a department built upon Karl Popper’s work on epistemology and scientific method – around the philosophy of science. So it isn’t every day that the reading lists given to us crop up in government policy documents. But here we are: Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, and TS Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I was hoping for a bit of Imre Lakatos or Paul Feyerabend too, but perhaps that was asking too much.

It’s also got a lovely opening section into the whys and wherefores of research. And a historical gem: the funding of the Medical Research Council from National Insurance contributions at a rate of “a penny per working person per year” in the 1911 National Insurance Act. By my calculations – and using the historical data set available from the Bank of England – that would equate now to 3 shillings and 11 pence  per working person, or just under 18 pence per head in post-decimal coinage. By comparison, the total science budget of £2.6bn in 2014-15 equates to £68.82 per working person per year. So it’s fair to say that government investment in research has grown over time.

So, from my reading, what are the key points of the review?

• Research in all disciplines is really important to a nation, and can be focused on discovery, on applying knowledge to a problem, or translating basic research to applied problems (translational). And a great line: “To rush into translation may result in becoming lost in translation.”
• Research Councils waste a lot of time engaging with bureaucracy, and bringing back control of support in house rather than through the UK Shared Business Services is necessary.
• RCUK should be given more strength as a co-ordinator of the efforts of the seven research councils, acting as the interlocutor with government and enabling the research councils to focus on research funding. It should become a new body – Research UK – with a single Accounting Officer replacing those in the individual research councils.
• Management of the funding process needs to improve, with better arrangements for international peer review, panel discussions, diversity, transparency and speed.
• There needs to be better collaboration with other research funders, and especially business, charities, devolved administrations, and Europe.
• Relationships with government need to be clarified, and a new structure to work with Research UK is identified.

Sir Paul’s report contains a curious mixture of realism and optimism.

On the realist front: “Given the many and varied demands made on the public purse which Government will need to balance, it is probably more likely the funding level will be set too low rather than too high.”. You're telling me.

On the optimist front: “The changes proposed through this report are not complex and could be easily adopted without disrupting on-going research activities”. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Will it do the trick? It doesn’t actually reduce the number of BIS quangos, although it does create a single infrastructure, so costs should go down. It does reduce complexity, by having a single Accounting Officer. And it certainly makes sense about funding high quality research.

But ... Jo Johnson’s response included an ominous last paragraph:

I encourage everyone with an interest in the future of our research and innovation landscape to consider this review alongside the proposals set out in the Higher Education Green Paper we published recently.

Sounds like a watch this space to me…

Will the green paper lead to EVEL legislation?

There’s lots written already on the HE green paper and no doubt more to come. My first two-penn’orth is on the question of scope.

David Kernohan on Wonkhe points out, rightly, that the impact of the green paper will not be restricted to England. Quite apart from Sir Paul Nurse’s research review, the impact of the green paper proposals, if enacted, would be felt in universities across the UK. For example, differentials of funding, student information, and perceived status could all increase. If the rest of the world routinely understood the nuances of the UK’s nations (and that fact that England does not equate to Britain, and vice versa) this might also impact upon international issues.

A number of the proposals in the green paper would require primary legislation. HEFCE has a statutory basis in the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, for instance, so abolishing it needs an amendment to that Act. Would any legislation be considered under the English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) procedure?

EVEL was introduced earlier this parliamentary session, and essentially gives English (and Welsh, sometimes) MPs a veto on legislation which affects only England (and Wales too, on some occasions). It was meant to answer the West Lothian question, but of course it doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer – it was hurriedly thought through to deal with politics, not governance.

It means that legislation which affects only England (or England and Wales in variant b) cannot be passed without the assent of English (and Welsh) MPs, but it doesn’t mean that legislation affecting England (and Wales) will necessarily be passed just because it has a majority of English (and Welsh, sometimes) votes. Any bill still needs to be passed by Parliament as a whole, and as the UK government is finding out at the moment in relation to Sunday trading, that isn’t a given.

The green paper has mixed messages here. Firstly, and one would think unambiguously,

46. Higher education is a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so most of the proposals in this document apply to England only. However, the funding delivered through the Research Councils and some broader elements of research policy are reserved matters, so the proposals in Part D have UK-wide applicability. (pp16-17)

But then consider later on, in relation to TEF:

16. Our intention is that the TEF develops over time to be comprehensive and open to all HE providers in England, including alternative providers and further education colleges delivering HE provision. As part of this consultation, we are also discussing with Devolved Administrations, whether and how they would like to be involved in the TEF. (p21)

Let’s be blunt – they won’t really have a choice. Universities in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are operating in the same environment as those in England – students are making choices between them, research funders are comparing them. It is in their interest to be in an environment which broadly mirrors that in England.

Devolved administrations will know this, and whilst in Scotland there is an attempt to follow a different path, Wales and Northern Ireland have adopted policies which recognise the connection with the English environment. Sometimes the devolved administration has done it better than England. Despite some worries about close scrutiny, for example, Wales has a simpler approach to access than England, with HEFCW signing off fee plans (the equivalent of access agreements) as a condition of funding.  The link between higher fees and the public interest, which is what OfFA was set up to ensure, is (pleasingly) clearer and easier across Offa’s dyke.

More significantly, perhaps, is that even though HE is a devolved matter, it isn’t a fragmented system in the eyes of staff and students. Cross border flows of both are real, ideas and practices are shared. I’d hope that when it comes to primary legislation, the bill isn’t regarded as EVEL.

Which isn’t to say that it won’t be evil – there’s lots to argue about in the green paper - but please, Mr Speaker, let’s make it an inclusive debate.