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.

The American Dream

Slowly, slowly, the distinctiveness of the UK higher education system is diminishing. Perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps a bad – I’m not trying to make a judgment. But here’s some evidence.

One quarter of the UK’s Russell Group universities have moved to US-style academic job titles – that is, away from the hierarchy of lecturer, senior lecturer/reader, and professor; towards a hierarchy of assistant professor, associate professor, and professor.

Not the 51st state just yet

The rationale is simple.  As higher education internationalizes, and in particular as international league tables force comparisons across national boundaries, universities have to stand comparison. So giving academic staff titles which can be understood against the US norm makes sense.

The move isn’t there yet.  Amongst the six Russell Group universities which have moved towards the US convention, there are four distinct versions:

• One has only two grades – Associate Professor and Professor: the former being Lecturer and Senior Lecturers; and the grade of Reader being abolished.

• Another has four grades – Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and Professor: effectively retitling Readers as Associate Professors

• Another still has just three grades – Lecturer, Associate Professor, Professor: merging Senior Lecturer and Reader and retitling them as Associate Professor

• And the fourth has three grades – Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor: with Assistant Professor equating to Lecturer, and Associate Professor to Senior Lecturer/Reader.

The last of these looks most like the US norm.  But without a UK consensus on the migration of UK to US academic job titles it may not be that effective in helping the world understand our universities.

Doctor, doctor!

Sorry – not a doctor joke, but a look at what 2012-13 HESA data tells us about doctoral study.

I used the data in HESA Table 15 – HE Qualifications obtained – and looked at the intensiveness of doctoral study. Here’s a scatter plot showing the proportion of degrees awarded at doctoral level against the total number of degrees awarded in 2012-13.

(I excluded three institutions whose data were outliers: the Institute of Cancer Research, with almost 43% of its 70 degrees awarded being doctoral; the Open University which awarded almost 24,000 degrees, with less than 1% at doctoral level; and the University of London central institutes, which awarded 130 degrees, of which almost 20% were doctoral.)

Well, this seems to me to show that there isn’t a scale factor – up to about 8% of degrees at doctoral level you can find institutions large and small.

What if you look simply at the number of doctoral degrees awarded? I think it gets a bit more interesting here.  The plot below shows – using the same dataset with the same exclusions - the absolute number of doctoral degrees awarded in 2012-13 and the proportion of the whole which these represent.

I’ve picked out two clusters – one, in the red oval, are those institutions which are both large in absolute terms (all over 700 doctoral degrees awarded a year) and a high proportion (>6%).  The other, the blue oval which overlaps, are what looks to me like the institutions at the upper end of the trend line – over 350 doctoral degrees per year, but fewer than 10% of all degrees.

It looks a bit like the premier league in recent seasons – there’s three that are at the top and unshakeable, three struggling to break into that top pack; and a fair few that won’t make it any time soon, no matter how hard they try.

I’ll leave it to you to identify which institution is which. There aren’t any surprises.

Does this matter? There's many good universities doing many good things outside the blue and red ovals, and league tables often fail to show this. But in terms of university culture, the red (and to a lesser extent the blue) is where many a vice-chancellor would rather be.

The money lenders

It does rather seem that David Willetts won’t stop being universities minister. The BBC reports today on the idea, promoted by said former-minister on Newsnight yesterday, that universities take on some of the student loans debt. This will reduce the RAB charge for Treasury (and therefore make student loans more affordable for the public purse) and also make it easier for universities to argue that they could charge higher fees if the Treasury is insulated against the risk.

I was struck by two particular quotes from the BBC write-up.

Here’s the first:

The costs of the debt - currently assumed by officials to be between 30p and 40p in every £1 that it lends - are paid by the Treasury.

The italics are mine.  Did you see the word “assumption”? This is an accounting question, and it’s all about what, today, we think that graduates will be doing in 20-30 years’ time.  Do we really have confidence in these assumptions? On that time horizon we’re almost into personal jet packs, holidays on the moon and ten hour working weeks (I wish!)

And here’s the second:

Cambridge graduates have a 4.3% unemployment rate in the first year out of study; for Staffordshire leavers, it runs at 13.9%.

My italics again. We know about the first year’s outcomes. But we need to know about 20-30 years’ time. Think how much the structure of the economy can change in 20 years. I don’t know for sure what skills are needed then. (Though I would agree that a Cambridge degree probably gives you a head start for reasons other than the quality of education …)

I don’t deny that the Treasury has a real problem to contend with – you can’t ignore or wish away accounting conventions. But to make up long-term policy on the basis of short term economic data seems slightly dangerous to me – like a farmer in Somerset changing from wheat fields to rice paddies on the basis of a rainy week in April.

For a more uplifting take on accounting here’s Monty Python’s money programme (opens in YouTube) …

Room at the top?

The BBC reports today on NUS Scotland's call for more women on University governing bodies.  That's an important component of decision-making, but another angle is the make up of the executive team in a university.  I've been looking at the gender make-up of university executive teams - a day going through institutional websites.  I'll post more in due course (there's lots of data to look at) but here's a first finding:

For each UK institution, I identified the top team - usually identified as the group which meets weekly/fortnightly and advises the VC; or as the team within the Vice-Chancellor's office - and counted the number of men and women, including the VC/Principal.  I didn't differentiate between academic and professional service (eg Finance Director, Registrar) roles.

I couldn't identify the team for every institution.  There's 131 institutions represented in the data above; for the remaining 30 institutions I couldn't identify the top team from the university website.  The mean proportion of women on executive teams is just short of 1/3; there's not much difference between this and the national averages for English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish universities.

The data doesn't show equality - if there was no gender bias there'd be a normal distribution curve.  But equally it doesn't say anything about any given university, or the intentions of Vice-Chancellors.

Small things can make a big difference

In most universities I’ve seen there’s a problem with using space efficiently, and one of the issues is the small meeting room which each department has “because it’s never possible to book a centrally controlled one when you need it.”

I saw technology in use today which, in its small way, knocked my socks off.  The blurry photo below (sorry for picture quality) is one of the room controllers outside every meeting room at the Life Sciences Hub Wales.

It’s got a touch sensitive screen like a tablet device.  It shows the bookings for the room; allows a user to book the room there and then for a quick meeting; and updates automatically (its connected to the central scheduling system). So you can see if a room is free; make a booking there and then (or online, automatically).  And when a room is in use the border glows red not green, so you can see from a distance whether the room is busy or free; even better, you can use the screen to find an empty room instead. And book it there and then.

Fantastic. It would take investment for the network infrastructure and the timetabling/scheduling system. But it removes the uncertainty about a room’s usage, and also the need for the printed weekly/termly timetables which are pinned to the door of many university classrooms.

Technology in itself doesn’t solve problems, but it can create possibilities for people. And I bet that once users are confident that they will be able to find a room, the pressing need to ‘keep control’ of the departmental meeting room will fade.  Technology here really could help with efficiency.

So should every university go out and install these? Not necessarily – the business case would depend on the specific rooms, usage, space costs, and a host of other things. But they might help change the language, from “centrally controlled room” to “easily bookable room”.  And once that’s believed, change can really happen.

And they do feel very Star Trek. I’ve seen the future. In Cardiff Bay. And it looks like it might work.

[For the record - I've got no connection with the company that makes these. Other similar ones might well be available.]

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.