A fine romance

An interesting item on the BBC website today – the University of Sheffield has abolished library fines for students.

The BBC rightly identifies this as stemming in part from the OFT’s advice against academic penalties for financial debts. And it also speaks to the growing recognition that students are customers (see also Goldsmiths’ decision to have a student member of its Remuneration Committee.)

But there’s a small sting in the tail – students have to bring the book back when someone else wants it, and won’t be allowed to borrow any more books until they do. So it isn’t quite a free-for-all, and the students will still need to learn to share. Although students in plural may be king (or queen), a student in the singular still needs to do what they’re told. The student contract isn’t quite dead yet.

I’m filing this under ‘straws in the wind’. There’s clearly a changing relationship between a university and its students, and some benign changes like this will occur, as well as some which may seem more threatening.

Do universities really not care about students?

The Daily Telegraph today carried an article by Graeme Paton, the gist of which is that top universities don’t care about students. Let’s look at the arguments cited:

• Tuition fee income is a minority of the income for top universities 
• Some researchers aren’t interested in teaching undergraduates
• League tables don’t recognise teaching quality as important (because it can’t be measured)

Tuition fee income

There are two problems with Graeme Paton’s argument. The first is that university income is currently in a moment of transition. The new tuition fee regime started in England and Wales in 2012-13, with a phase out of teaching grants to universities. Tuition fees in many cases do give universities more income, per student, than the grants they replace, but in 2012-13 only the first year of this new income is recorded. So, the numbers will not reflect the full extent of the contribution of tuition fee income to universities’ overall income. Once all years of the new policy are in place, income from education will represent a larger share of universities’ income, and, as it can fluctuate annually (unlike many programme research grants which can cover 3-5 years) universities are paying attention to students and teaching. It is simply not true to say that universities don’t regard teaching as important.

The second problem is the selection of data. I will now make an uncontroversial statement: Cambridge is atypical of the UK higher education sector. It’s atypical even of ‘top’ universities. The following graph – using HESA data for 2012-13 – shows the proportion of each Russell Group university’s income which depends upon teaching:

The red bar is Cambridge. It’s an outlier. Caused, in part, by the income from the university press and the exam boards. The mean for the Russell Group is 42% of income, a proportion which is likely to rise as the tuition fee regime comes fully into play. Universities don’t ignore 42% of their income.

Some researchers aren’t interested in teaching undergraduates

Graeme Paton was right that universities are complex places. They exist to propagate and generate knowledge, which gives two related but distinct missions: to teach and to research. Every university does both of these, to differing extents. And just as every large organisation employs specialist staff, so do universities: there are academic staff whose main focus is research; and those whose main focus is teaching. But the standards that they use when selecting staff are the same: the excellent teachers are expected to be every bit as good at teaching as the excellent researchers are expected to be good at research.

It follows from this that there will be staff who don’t really engage with teaching undergraduates and, as Graeme Paton’s article points out, some research staff only engage with students who are doing PhDs. But using a Nobel Prize winner as your example is slightly naughty: we’d probably all rather that Nobel Prize winners spent more time doing the thing that got them the Nobel Prize in the first place.

League tables and teaching 

It’s certainly true that the QS world rankings don’t weight teaching highly, and also true that there isn’t really a good comparative measure of the quality of teaching across nations. That’s more a criticism of leagues tables than it is of universities, and there’s plenty of criticisms of league tables to be made. But that doesn’t imply that universities don’t care about teaching. Many ‘top’ universities identify both an international league table target and a UK one – for example, Cardiff has a world ranking target and a UK target.

And universities do try to demonstrate that they are good at teaching. In the days of QAA subject review, league tables had a measure which was the average subject review score (out of 24) or the proportion which had achieved ‘excellence’ in teaching (22 or above out of 24.) This target made it into university strategies, and enormous effort was expended in demonstrating the quality of teaching.

There is definitely a need to find a good measure of teaching quality for league tables, but the absence of a measure of teaching quality doesn’t mean the absence of effort or of concern. Nowadays there are professors in ‘top’ universities who have got the title not for their research, but for their teaching. This is a change unthinkable twenty years ago. It really is time to stop trying to make a simple argument that teaching doesn’t matter as much to universities as research: remember, these are complex organisations. Just like the man from the Telegraph says.

Occupational hazard

The NATO conference in South Wales this week – preparations and protests! – has given me cause to think about student occupations, and what to do about them. It’s a matter which I’ve become familiar with from the point of view of the occupied.  Many years ago I was an occupier: I can confirm that it’s much more fun.

If you’re occupied – or more precisely, if you’re the one who’s responsible when an occupation happens in your university – there are good things to do and mistakes to make. I speak from experience.  Here’s my top tips.

Make contact with the occupiers. You need to know who they are, why they are there; how many of them there are. Expect hostility initially, but the more you can develop a rapport with the occupiers (they may elect a small number of spokespeople) the easier things will be.  Often an occupation will adopt very participative democratic forms, so don’t expect a quick answer. (I once spent an evening making many phone calls to the leader of an occupation: every suggestion I made had to be discussed and voted on. It was a very long evening.)

Negotiations with occupiers can look like this. I'm the one in the suit.

Sometimes it can be a good idea to put a bit of distance between yourself personally and the occupiers. I worked once with a splendid director of estates who turned out to be a great siege negotiator: he would not overreact to any provocation, and was trusted by the occupiers.  It also gave us a stronger hand, as he could represent our position without being able himself to make concessions. I think he quite enjoyed it, really.

Try not to get medieval. It is very tempting to treat an occupation as a siege, but this is problematic. You run the risk of losing goodwill on campus, and when you get the building back (and you will, sooner or later), the mess will be yours to clean up. So keep the power and wifi on (they can use mobile phone signals anyway, so there’s no advantage in turning the wifi off) and if possible arrange to have cleaners go in to keep the place hygienic.  You may still have a duty of care, even if you can’t get normal access to the building.  Making sure that there are university security staff nearby all of the time is a good idea: to keep an eye on what is going on, and to be able to intervene in case there’s trouble.

Try to find out how long it will last.  Some occupations are symbolic, and if they’ll be leaving in 24 hours then doing nothing might be the best plan. If the occupiers have demands, then find out what they are. The demands may be beyond your control, but if they are things that you can control, don’t dismiss them too quickly.  Occupations in the end run out of steam: although its not always the right tactic, patience can be very rewarding.

There’s a legal route to ending an occupation involving injunctions and bailiffs.  Get legal advice quickly, by all means, but if the occupiers are all your students, then think carefully before gong to court. It’s a balance between the disruption caused by the occupation and the costs; but the costs can include long-term loss of trust on campus.  If they are all external, then it is an easier option, but the physical act of removal can be dramatic and messy.

Manage the media. I don’t mean the papers and TV - managing that goes without saying - but definitely the social media within and beyond the university.  Make sure that staff and students in the university (the vast majority will not be taking part in the occupation) know what is going on. This will also make clear that you’re aware of and dealing with the situation. Make sure to follow any twitter feeds or blogs associated with the occupation: no state secrets will be given away, but at least you’ll know what rumours you need to squash, or who seems reasonable that you can deal with. Authenticity matters a great deal, if you post on social media in such situations. Remember that however irritating they may seem to you, most people taking part in an occupation are idealistic and sincere.

Be aware of other impacts. People who can’t get into their normal workplaces can feel very angry about things, and it helps a lot to explain fully what is going on, and why you can’t just call the police in. (Because they won’t just come in, by the way: trespass is a civil not a criminal offence.)

There are a couple of longer-term things to do, as well.

The first is to cultivate your Students’ Union.  You can’t expect them to be stooges for you in an occupation, but they may be able to act as interlocutors, between you and the occupiers; they may also be a good source of information. Sometimes it can be very helpful to have the SU officers vouch for your sincerity, when there’s a baying crowd. And in the aftermath, you’ll need to work with them to help rebuild trust and confidence on campus.

The second is to make sure you can prove your ownership of the university estate.  If you go down the legal route, you need to be very specific and precise about what and where the occupiers are; your rights over the building; and the other areas of campus where you don’t want them to occupy.  A folder of all the title deeds is a very handy thing when you’re trying to expedite a hearing in a court.

As I said at the start, it’s more fun to occupy than be occupied.  The increased instrumentalism which seems to have come from increased tuition fees might mean fewer occupations; or occupations more directed at on-campus problems. If it does happen to you, I hope that this is helpful.

On regulating student behaviour

Mike Ratcliffe has been posting some wonderful photos on twitter, from Freiburg University’s 1497 student regulations.

Thanks to Mike Ratcliffe for letting me use this image

I’ll leave you to look at the other pictures themselves in Mike’s Twitter feed, but here’s some of the text of the regulations:

No one shall have the right to open locked doors and windows in the house of wisdom

Dice, cards and sticks for casting lots and all games of chance are forbidden. Disregard of this rule will be punished with the loss of wine for a week. Chess, however, is allowed

So clearly Freiburg in 1497 had a problem with people sneaking into locked rooms, and gambling. If in doubt, rule it out. Or get them to play chess instead.

Universities are steeped in this tradition.  The ancient universities had Papal Bulls and Royal Charters which gave them legal autonomy from the towns and cities in which they were located. This gave the university meaningful legal power over its students.  Universities were corporations, in the same way that medieval towns and cities were corporations with charters.

And as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben says, "with great power comes great responsibility": not only could universities discipline their students, they were responsible for their students’ behaviour and therefore had a positive duty to intervene.

But the presence of a rule does little to enforce it. Consider this from the Rule of St Benedict (the regulations for another medieval corporate body with responsibility for its own members):

This order of Matins is to be kept on Sundays in both the summer and winter seasons– unless by chance they get up late (which should not happen) and some abridgement of the readings or responsories has to be made. But great care should be taken that this does not happen, but if it does, the person whose carelessness it has occurred must make adequate satisfaction to God in the oratory.

The legacy of these kinds of rules is still to be found in universities today. There’s all sorts of apocryphal stories about Oxbridge students demanding free beer at exams, and the like, but more modern foundations also have student disciplinary regulations, with clauses like:

Any act or omission, whether occurring on University premises or elsewhere, which improperly interferes with the functioning or activities of the University or of those who work or study in the University, or otherwise improperly damages the University or its reputation, shall constitute misconduct under these Regulations, including but not limited to the following:

…

d.      Violent, indecent, disorderly, threatening, intimidating or offensive behaviour or language;

(These are taken from a UK university’s student regulations, but as it’s to make a general point I’m not saying which one.)

When you think about it, this isn’t really that far removed from Freiburg’s wish to prohibit the unlocking of doors and windows.  But Freiburg had the legal power to do something about it.

The Office of Fair Trading’s reports – in the last throes of its existence before the Competition and Markets Authority (SMA) took over its functions, had a fair amount to say about this. Let’s pull together two of the strands.

First, who has the power?  The OFT thought that

Generally undergraduate students can be considered vulnerable and in a relatively weak position compared to the university. Some are likely to have limited experience of contracts …

(This comes from the OFT’s February 2014 report on Universities' terms and conditions - OFT 1522. I can't find a working web link, I'm afraid)

And yet to allow a student to enrol, universities often seek to bind them to an entire regulatory framework: that is, when they sign on to study they are agreeing to be bound by regulations which cover a broad range of matters.

Secondly, what service is being provided?  Again, from the OFT February 2014 report:

We have concluded that use of and reliance upon contract terms that allow the university to withhold graduation or progression or otherwise to exclude students from tuition for non-payment of ancillary services, in a blanket fashion and regardless of the circumstances, is open to challenge as potentially unfair under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 ('UTCCRs') and/or may be unreasonable under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 ('UCTA').

This is beginning to sound threatening. To unpack it a little, the OFT thought that the bundle of services which a university provides for its students (for instance halls of residence, libraries, IT as well as tuition) cannot automatically be considered as one whole package, in the way that university regulations often seek to, at least in abstract.

Now, let’s be clear. The OFT wasn’t saying that universities cannot have disciplinary codes. Nor were they saying that it wasn’t ok to have library fines and the like.

What they were saying was that universities need to sort out their contractual relationship with students. That means a university understanding clearly what is covered by its educational offer; and having a clear contract for that (which students can understand and which they can access if they want to). And understanding what other (ancillary, to use the OFT’s word) services it provides, and recognising that these are a separate contractual matter from a student’s registration at the university.

This sounds like a more consumer oriented approach, which will sit badly with the culture of higher education and the classroom. But it has the virtue of relating to today’s legal framework, not that of 15th century Freiburg. Perhaps it’s time for universities to review their student contracts and the framework within which they sit.

Setting the boss's pay

The decision by Goldsmiths, University of London, to include a student member on its Remuneration Committee points, I think, to a new way of looking at universities' responses to student demands in the post-Browne era.

The increase in fees for home/EU undergraduates in English and Welsh universities has had much written about it, some by me. What is unarguable is that it has had an effect on universities. Some have seen increases in income, notwithstanding the reduction in HEFCE/HEFCW T funding. Some have seen falls in demand and in enrolment numbers, with a sliggish recoverey so far to pre-2012 levels.

All universities have sought to respond. Some have opted to invest in learning and student experience facilities  - new libraries, sports pitches, and the like. All things which can be addressed by capital spend.  Goldsmiths, we see, has also opted for increased transparency in relation to salaries of senior managerial staff. This is a move which many universities have tried to avoid: it will be interesting to see if other universities now follow suit. It's a cheap (although potentially very disruptive) student demand to concede.

These responses - investment in facilities; greater transparency - are no doubt commendable. But many student demands relate to class sizes and access to tutors. This is recurrent spending which is not so straightforward for universities to commit. I'll be keeping an eye on HESA data over the next few years to see whether student:staff ratios also fall.

Sorry for the absence of links. I'll put some in next week when I'm back in the office.

MOOCs ado about nothing?

I've blogged before about MOOCs and whether they are the approach which will disrupt the traditional university business model. An article on the BBC website which I saw today adds an angle to the discussion.

First of all, what do I mean by disrupting the traditional business model? It’s like what Apple did to the market for CDs – they took a bundle of different technologies (mp3 players; the internet) and by selling iPods and setting up iTunes changed the whole business of selling music. Goodnight record shops. Ben Hammersley writes about this in his (very excellent) book, 64 things you need to know Now for Then. His argument (it kind of grows out of the different chapters in the book, rather than being explicitly stated) is that disruption via digital technology to an existing business model is inevitable – a question of when not whether.

At the moment MOOCs don’t seem like the disruptive model – there are real questions about non-completion rates, certification and standards on the one hand, and how to make it pay on the other (but see also my blog post about this, and the University of the People idea). And this is where the BBC story comes in.

Sean Coughlan reported in April about learning centres for people studying MOOCs. Basically, these are organised and facilitated sessions (classes, if you like) for people following a particular MOOC in a given locale, to meet together help them study. The article reported that there’s a much lower drop-out rate for students who attend a learning hub. And also, interestingly, that the classes become something else:

"When students are gathered for their Mooc classes it becomes a focus for other spin-offs, such as firms wanting to recruit staff or to get students involved in developing commercial projects."

This gives more options for ‘monetizing’ (to use the business jargon) the education process via MOOCs – if innovative companies or recruiters can find a way to gain economic value from a learning centre, they might pay, leading to more learning centres, more people gaining educational value from MOOCs, and possibly MOOCs becoming a realistic alternative to registering as a fee paying student at a university. It probably won’t mean the end of the motivation to go to a campus university for UK students (if that were the case the Open University would have taken everything over years ago) but it might tip the balance for some international students. And that would nibble away at a really important part of the business model for many UK universities.

Just a straw in the wind. For now.

Don't tell him, Pike

A couple of wise souls I follow on Twitter observed last week that there was a lot of activity from HEFCE and on Higher Education generally:

@registrarism: There really are a lot of #HigherEd posts being pushed out today

@SophieBowen1: Are staff at HEFCE about to go on hols? Large number of reports out today ...

And it seems to be true. One recent HEFCE post that caught my eye – but not picked up by the twittersphere that I could tell – was Circular Letter 06/2016 – Supporting Public Accountability: presenting income and expenditure income to current students.

This is the outcome of some work done by HEFCE, BUFDG and the NUS on students’ desire to know more about what universities spend their money on, and a finding that

of 2,400 current students conducted by NUS Research Services ... there was significant interest in this type of information but that:

• Of the students who looked for this information, 40 per cent were unable to find it.

• Once the information was found, 44 per cent of students reported that the format it was presented in was difficult to understand.

Not a surprising finding – I have often wondered at the number of staff in universities who aren’t familiar with financial statements, so why should the students fare better?

The guidance is clear enough:

The research identified several priorities for improving the presentation of financial information for students:

• It needs to provide a useful but not overly complex level of detail.

• It needs to be accessible to students who may not have expertise in interpreting financial information.

• It needs to be up-to-date.

• It needs to be clearly signposted on institutional web-sites (which are where students look for it), with technical language clearly explained.

And the actions also admirably clear:

Institutions are asked to identify their solution by the end of October 2014, ready to publish information from their 2013-14 audited financial accounts by January 2015. 

It’s unquestionably a good thing that universities are encouraged to work with their students’ unions to agree an approach. But I found the examples interesting.

Four approaches were suggested:

• Actual numbers and a narrative
• A pie chart of expenditure, by category (no figures)
• A bar chart of expenditure
• An infographic

These range from minimal data but really clearly presented for accountability (that is, the actual numbers and narrative) through to confusing presentation (the infographic) but with a lot more detail and granularity in there. I’m not clever enough with pdf to export the contents to the blog post, but have a look and see what you think. To me, the guidance presents clarity and content as if there’s a trade-off between these two aims.

Why are students interested? Well, my guess is that it isn’t idle curiosity but all because students want to understand the value that they’re getting. A Sir Humphrey quote from Yes Minister is apposite here:

We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way

It’s all in the annual accounts anyway. My message to universities would be, work sincerely with your students’ unions, agree a format which makes sense, but don’t try to conceal anything with a fancy chart. Authenticity and transparency with your students will be better in the long run, even if you don’t like it now.

The Customer is Always Right

My Student Power post on Monday gives me a bit of theme for today – the student as consumer. There have been a couple of straws in the wind about changing habits and expectations. And my expectation is that universities will have to adapt.

Firstly, the Office for Fair Trading (OFT), with its recent report into Universities Terms and Conditions. This looks at how some universities use academic sanctions (ie non-progression between years; or withholding exam results) as part of their strategy to deal with debt owed by students for non-academic matters (eg halls fees; library fines). Another day I will post on the report itself, and implications for ‘the student contract’. What is interesting for me, on this occasion, is the focus on student as consumer, and the clarity with which consumer protection legislation applies.

The report identified the following legislation as relevant:

• the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 ('UTCCRs')
• the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 ('UCTA')
• the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 ('CPRs').

That’ll be some new acronyms for university administrators to get their heads around. And consumer protection legislation is a long way from academic matters not being justiciable in the courts.

The OFT also commented:

Generally undergraduate students can be considered vulnerable and in a relatively weak position compared to the university. Some are likely to have limited experience of contracts, and contractual obligations are unlikely to be at the forefront of their minds at a time when they are seeking to enrol at university.

Universities often fall back on the line that students are adults and must be responsible for their own decisions: a lot of practice in relation to exam irregularities, for instance, rests on this assumption. The need to take into account the imbalance of power between the university and the student is clear.

The second straw in the wind is the consultation by the Office for the Independent Adjudicator into Higher Education (OIA) about a new framework for managing student complaints and appeals.

This is a really good document, the work of some great collaboration between sector bodies and students. And the draft guidance is clear that in managing student complaints and appeals universities need to raise their game to meet more challenging timescales, to resolve complaints sooner, and to treat students more fairly. It reads much more like a consumer complaints regulation than any previous framework.

How will universities react to this? Seriously, I’m sure: I haven’t yet come across a university which doesn’t take student complaints this way. But might we see, in a few years, student complaints teams being called student care or (eek!) customer care? That is what it is, after all.

Just straws in the wind, but there’s a definite breeze picking up. See Registrarism’s blog post today about the changing role of the NUS too. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that The Student is the Customer Now, and we’d all better get our Corporate Smiles going. Manifestly in the classroom the student isn’t a customer but is a learner. And so it should be. But universities need to get more used to the notion that robustness in working with students needs to be tempered by considerations of power.

Student Power

Bologna. Berlin. Manchester. No, not the words on the bag from a fashionable boutique, but important places in relation to student power and the development of the University.

First, Bologna. The University of Bologna is the oldest university with a continued existence from its foundations, in 1088. Its foundation was not the result of top-down recognition – no papal bull, such as at Paris, Oxford or Cambridge – but the result of student federation. Students were attracted to Bologna by the presence of notable scholars, who taught for a fee. But for students from other countries, Bologna was a tricky place - at the time it had laws which provided for collective responsibility for acts committed by foreigners. Thus an English student in Bologna was legally liable for the act of any English person in Bologna.

Not a good situation to be in. So students grouped together in associations – for mutual protection – based around their country of origin. And these associations – or nations – then came together to form a single corporation (or universitas, in Latin) which employed the teachers. The universitas was student governed, with two from each nation on its general council. The universitas employed the professors, and the scary-sounding Denouncers of Professors – a group of students – reported to the student rector on any bad professorial behaviour. (The source for this is Law and Revolution: the formation of the Western Legal Tradition by Harold J Berman, Harvard, 1983.)

Second, Berlin. Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of education and society influenced the foundation of the University of Berlin, and in particular its model integrating both teaching and research into the scholar’s role. The notions of lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach) and lernfreiheit (freedom to learn) set out the roles of staff and students. For staff, the right to teach what they in their own judgement determined, without interference from any other person or body.  For students, the right to study whatever they chose from the courses of lectures or labs offered by the staff of the University. This model infused the development of university systems in other countries – notably the USA – and led to the course catalog (sic) and credit hours.

Thirdly, Manchester. Right now. Students in the Economics Department of the University of Manchester, dissatisfied by the failure, as they perceive it, of the undergraduate economics curriculum to include alternative approaches to economics, are taking action. The Post-Crash Economics Society has been established with the following aims

Society Constitution
1) The Post-Crash Economics Society has been set up to try and broaden the range of perspectives and the teaching methods used by the Manchester Economics Department.
2) We will run a campaign to build student support and engage in dialogue with the economics department.
3) We will run events, workshops and other activities.
4) We aim to be a society that is accessible to all students and staff with an interest in economics whatever their economic and political beliefs.

The debate picked up publicity last week when the Times Higher reported that students were being encouraged by the society not to complete the NSS until the University had committed to including a particular module in the curriculum next session. According to the Times Higher:

Joe Earle, campaign coordinator at the society, told Times Higher Education that urging students to make their voice heard through the NSS was a legitimate way to influence the university. 

He said that the society had collected 245 signatures from economics students at Manchester who want the new module to be accredited, but he believed that the university would take the threat to NSS scores more seriously.

And from the same Times Higher story

A spokesman for the University of Manchester said that the society was “leading a national debate on the way economics is taught in higher education” and that the ensuing discussions had been “positive, useful and informative”.

It’s not quite the Denouncers of Professors, but nor is it lehrfreiheit.

Where will be next?