The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education

Front matter

The Distributed University

for Sustainable J Higher Education

SpringerBriefs in Education

Preface

My life as an educator in the university sector started in 1969 in Chicago when, as a first year resident, I was appointed as an instructor in Medicine. This was an automatic appointment to recognise the role of junior doctors as teachers of medical students, so no credit to me. Since then, I have had more than 50 years working in the higher education sector, including two university chairs at the University of Manchester in the UK and the University of Newcastle in Australia. I had a leadership role in the International Clinical Epidemiology Network—a Rockefeller Foundation funded capacity building programme for 26 medical schools across the developing world. I was the founder and coordinator of a fully online programme to provide master’s level Public Health skills for health professionals which has reached more than 100 countries. I have spanned various types of educational offerings, large lectures, small groups, problem based, and online learning. I have also held relatively senior management roles, as head of department, centre director, assistant dean for finance, and deputy dean, but all as additional responsibilities to a primary academic role as teacher and researcher (with around 400 publications in the peer reviewed literature). My field has been health, more specifically epidemiology and Public Health, although I have worked at the clinical coalface as a consultant hospital physician in general medicine. I was in at the start of what has come to be called evidence-based practice—the movement to ensure that evidence underlies practice in the health arena.

I started my personal experience of university education as a medical student in a small medical school, part of the University of London. With 45 students in each year, this was a personalised small group system with a few lectures and few formal assessments other than final examinations. We followed our teachers around their work and picked up what we could.

As a junior doctor, in the USA and the UK, this approach morphed into more of a doing type of apprenticeship system. Learning on the job and quickly moving to teach others—‘see one; do one; teach one’.

I was never part of a training programme and just applied for positions that would give me experience and help my progression up the career ladder. Self-study was my method to gain further professional qualifications.

vi Preface

With no formal educational expertise, I was then appointed as a lecturer in another London University medical school and again learned on the job. Attendance at some short courses was followed by self-study to gain a doctorate, personally mentored by a wonderful teacher. Appointment as a senior lecturer at another medical school in London followed and I did some lecturing and small group tutoring while continuing to develop a research portfolio and applying for research grants to support this.

It was a mid-career move to Australia in 1984 that opened my eyes to the importance of educational theory, organisational structure, and global education needs. The appointment was funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network, where mid-career clinicians from the developing world were to be given skills in the population health sciences—my first real exposure to the needs for education to boost the global workforce. I found myself at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, where an exciting educational experiment in active learning—problem based learning—was taking place. During my time in Newcastle, I saw how managers progressively took over university governance and built the importance of the business model, while downgrading academic leadership.

It was in what I thought to be a final career move to the University of Manchester back in the UK that I fully became aware of the dominance of the competitive and managerial business model in the university and the reduced importance of education. The lack of any fundamental attention to environmental sustainability was increasingly apparent. During my time at Manchester, I was able to establish a fully online master’s course in Public Health and began to realise the real potential of online learning.

On my retirement from Manchester, the university doubled the fees for overseas students—this not only reinforced my understanding of the reach of the business model but demonstrated the failure of universities to respond to global educational needs. It stimulated me to establish Peoples-uni (http://peoples-uni.org)—aiming to help build Public Health capacity in developing countries through volunteer led online education for health professionals at low cost.

While my career working in university education may be rather more varied than that of some other academics, spanning three continents and 50 years, many others will have drawn similar conclusions from their own experiences. It is my participation in the International Clinical Education Network and Peoples-uni that has given me a global perspective and has led to some potential answers to the problems. I do not suggest that my observations of the individual problems are original, but by bringing them together, I hope to demonstrate the breadth as well as the depth of the issues facing the university sector today. I also believe that [have some solutions that could help improve the situation for the future health of the university sector whose success is so important for us all. These solutions can be applied under any political regime, left or right. I do not propose to stray into the politics of the support for university education in general.

In writing this book, I have tried to take an evidence based approach, and you will see that I do quote the literature extensively in the narrative. However, it is evidence from my experience that forms the basis of what I have written and I have used

Preface Vii anecdotes from this to illustrate some of the issues. You will see some general as well as detailed ideas, and while my experience is drawn largely from the health arena, I hope that readers will see the applicability across the university sector.

Milsons Point, Australia Richard Frederick Heller

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife, Ann, for her unfailing support throughout both the writing of this book and the career that has led to it.

Thanks also to Ann, my daughter Jane Heller, and my friend and colleague Rajan Madhok who each read and commented so helpfully on draft versions of the book and whose discussions have contributed to and enriched my thinking.

Contents dis sie EE EE OE OE EO EL OE OE adar a OE IN 4 2.1 Managerialism Creates Burdens for Academics with No Evidence of Benefit is RE EER ein DR RE pees BR GER REG GEE SIRS 6 2.3 Needless Competition Between Universities Leads COUPON. 214456 DEER EERS EG ee ES GE DS DR teens cues 13 2.4 Research Imperatives, Including for Academic Advancement, 2.5 Local Educational Needs are Ignored for Overseas Student MOO EA EE EE EA a OE EE 19 2.7 Universities have Not Kept Up with the Way Young People Gain terme iis SRSA DRS ER RES oi iade hiron SENS EOS 26 RESONEER ks cub ke ee ER RE DRR AE GR ER RES ED OES GR GE ee De 34 Ki AR EE EE EE OE EED GR 39 3.3 A Proposal for an ‘International Baccalaureate’ for Higher ER ie ie EER AR IE EO EE EE EE 48 33 Moveto Online Learg ia GESKREE DES ORDE BOERE GR be 33 3.6 Place Education in a Framework of Environmental 3T «© Use Open Educational Resources: ..ccciecscrsatansasacuddadaat 58 3.8 Take Advantage of Modern Technology and the Fourth misma Reels ss oes GERED EER DE De EE ER Ee beg DA 61 xi

Contents

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Chapter 1 Mm Some Context: From First to Fourth gese Generation Universities

Abstract The evolution and governance of the modern university, the balance between the needs of the consumer (students and employers) and the community (knowledge stock and needs of society).

Keywords Societal needs - University governance - Third generation university

It might be helpful to start by thinking about the role of a university, how it fits into the educational spectrum, how universities evolved and how they work today. In essence, universities take over when school education finishes, and offer people the opportunity to gain a higher academic degree and to perform research.

There is considerable debate about when universities started to exist. What we now know as a university can be traced back to the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries where establishments in Bologna, Paris and Oxford appear to have been the earliest examples (https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4153). Although they were able to award a degree, they were very different organisations from what we now know as a university—they did not own buildings for example. Even earlier, there are examples of institutions where scholars could come together to study—the University of Nalanda started in fifth century India and contained buildings and a library (https://nalandauniversity.wordpress.com/about/) and the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco was founded in the ninth century and has been going ever since (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_al-Qarawi yyin). Many of these had religious underpinnings.

The early universities seemed to focus on education, and have been termed first generation universities. Along with the enlightenment the next, second, generation iteration added research to education. Those were the simple days.

The third generation universities (Wissema 2009), discovered that there were ways of adding value to teaching and research—they could have a role in building national capacities, be involved in policy generation, and they could partner with actors outside the university sector. Enter the commercialisation of education and research, the involvement of entrepreneurs, and the creation of the professional university administrator to cope with increasing student numbers. As you will see in the next chapter, it is the managerial consequences of these developments that created many of the problems which we continue to experience.

© The Author(s) 2022 1 R. F. Heller, The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6

2 1 Some Context: From First to Fourth Generation Universities

It might be useful at the start of this book to summarise the place of universities in the education system, and how universities function, although I suspect that most readers will be familiar with this. Terminology varies, and we should understand that there are many types of post-school education, usually defined as “higher education’. The university sector is only a part of this. Education for trades maybe offered through apprenticeships to a skilled tradesman, or courses run by different bodies, and there are various ways of gaining certification of such training. This is often called vocational education and training. In Australia, for example, there is a system of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) which provides qualification awards. There is usually a national qualifications framework which defines various levels of post-school education, and national bodies that accredit organisations to provide education at these levels.

Professional bodies offer education and training towards professional accreditation, so that lawyers, accountants, architects, veterinarians, medical specialists etc. can be accredited and work in their various professions at an appropriate and accredited level. Universities may collaborate with and provide some of this professional education.

Thinking back to my own education after leaving school, it has been a mixture of apprenticeship, university education and professional accreditation.

Universities provide undergraduate education, and then graduates have the opportunity to enrol in postgraduate education. Awards at the undergraduate level are called bachelor’s degrees, and postgraduate awards may be certificate, diploma, master’s or doctoral degrees. The ability to award a degree is key to the importance of the university sector. Accreditation is granted to individual universities by national regulatory authorities, according to agreed criteria, which also apply to a review and renewal process.

The possession of a university degree is key to advancement to the next stage on the academic ladder for those who want a higher degree, and to professional advancement for many people. Beyond the role of a university degree in the career development of individuals, we should also ask about the overall purpose of universities for society. Is it to increase the stock of knowledge and disseminate it to improve society, or to give people the skills for the jobs they will have in the future? Put simply—are the drivers of the university sector consumer or community? Once the consumer, student or employer, is the driver, we run into the need to market and to compete. Forstenzer (2017) puts it nicely “Allowing universities to be defined primarily by their capacity to meet market criteria (such as balancing the books and delivering customer satisfaction) is a radical departure from the idea that universities exist to serve the public.”

In the diagram, I have shown the balance between consumer and community in driving university priorities. Failure to achieve an appropriate balance between these has led to many of the problems I am going to describe in later chapters (Fig. 1.1).

The consumer driven approach leads to competition between providers, and requires a business-type model, which then defines the way that universities are managed and governed. In most countries, the governance of universities is overseen by a university council or board. Council members may come from local or national

1 Some Context: From First to Fourth Generation Universities 3

Consumer: Community: Student Knowledge stock

Employer Societal values

Competing drivers of the university sector

Fig. 1.1 Competing drivers of the university sector organisations, including industry and academia, and will be chosen according to the skill set they can provide. The council’s main job is to set overall strategy and appoint the chief executive officer (vice-chancellor or president) who will then be key to appointing the other senior executives such as deputy and pro vice-chancellors. If the Council, and the vice-chancellor appointed by the Council, have a business focus, that will set the scene for the way the university is run.

The governance structure within each university varies somewhat between different universities and also globally, and covers academic and business governance. Usual structures have the university divided into faculties which have a common set of interests—such as health, or humanities, or science—which are themselves split into more focused schools and then departments. Each has their own administrative structure including academics, such as deans and administrative support staff. Educational governance comes through university-wide committees, and committees in each of the faculties, schools and departments. There are also university-wide administrative structures to support finances, human resources, educational design and research infrastructure. This all usually involves a top down centralised oversight ‘command and control’ structure, with limited autonomy for faculties and schools and even less for departments and individual academics. Where historically the university was run by academics, it is the administrators who now have the leading management role.

Most universities offer a similar suite of courses, and span teaching and research, although there are a few specialised universities. Academic members of staff are expected to split their time between teaching, research and ‘service’, although the proportional split varies and there are a few teaching only and research only appointments. As we will see later, criteria for appointments and promotions depend on performance in these various roles.

4 1 Some Context: From First to Fourth Generation Universities

Beyond the notions of individual university governance, and national accrediting bodies who attempt to ensure quality, there are broader issues to consider. All countries provide funding for the university sector, and direct their funding in a way that attempts to meet national needs. The extent of this government support (and control) varies, as does the mix between public and private universities and the reliance on student fees. Going back to the notion of consumer or community, the greater the proportionate government input into funding, the greater can be the attempt to meet government perceptions of national and community needs—according to its political priorities. But how do other broader societal values such as fairness and equity, in particular global inequalities in access to education, and environmental sustainability find their way into university governance?

This scene setting has identified many of these themes that are picked up later in the book, which I hope will help us prepare for the next, fourth, generation of universities.

Forstenzer J. We are losing sight of higher education’s true purpose. The Conversation; 2017. https:// theconversation.com/we-are-losing-sight-of-higher-educations-true-purpose-73637.

Nalanda University. https://nalandauniversity.wordpress.com/about/.

Norman J. The Universitas Guild: Early Origin of What We Characterize as a University. History of Information.com. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=4153.

University of al-Qarawiyyin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_al-Qarawiyyin.

Wissema JG. Towards the Third Generation University: managing the University in transition. Edward Elgar Pub; 2009.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Chapter 2 R) The Problem with Universities Today get

Abstract Managerialism creates burdens for academics with no evidence for its benefit. Business imperatives override educational. There is needless competition between universities. Research imperatives override education. Global inequalities in educational need are ignored, universities have not kept up with the way young people gain information and initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of higher education are ‘tinkering’ rather than the required total re-thinking of higher education.

Keywords Academic - Universities - Managerialism - Global inequalities - Collaboration - Environmental sustainability

The first section identifies some of the key problems associated with the universities of today, from the perspective of the academic. After all it is the academic staff, the teachers and researchers, who are the people without whom the university cannot function. Universities contain so many excellent and committed academics, creating the next generation of educated members of society and performing wonderful research to underpin our future, that I do not want this to sound too negative and I do want to pay my respects to the excellence that does exist in universities at all levels. However identification and dissection of the problem is the first step in finding solutions.

I have started with managerialism, as this is what drives the unhappiness of so many academics. The chapter continues with the issues of industrialisation and commercialisation of universities—of course these are bound up with managerialism as the sector regards itself as an industry and industries have managers. Then follows a digression to discuss the way in which universities, initially created to teach, have evolved a hierarchy which places research above teaching, and in the process downgrades its core teaching business. Tied up with commercialisation is the problem created by the lure of fees from international students, cruelly exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic which at the time of writing has reduced global travel to the extent that it has put many university academics out of work. Before Covid-19, the focus on international students had, perversely, ignored the real global inequalities in access to education and had skewed educational priorities within the countries to which international students come. This leads on to a discussion of how universities have not kept up with changes in the way that young people learn, and finally how

© The Author(s) 2022 5 R. F. Heller, The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6506-6 2 they have ignored the massive and growing need for environmental sustainability. This chapter is really to set the scene for the following chapter on solutions—which I propose for each of the problems identified.

2.1 Managerialism Creates Burdens for Academics with No Evidence of Benefit

My exposure to the issue of the increasing role of the manager in university structures started at the University of Newcastle in Australia. As Professor of Community Medicine, I held a large capacity building grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for many years. Initially, I was allowed to administer the funds, use them to work out the spread of academic and support staff required to meet our obligations under the grant, and advertise, interview and appoint the relevant people. This was done in accordance with University processes, but in the context of the needs of the grant and based on the internal processes within our group. Since this was a capacity building programme, the development and delivery of courses was fundamental to the work, and we were able to decide on the need for, and methods to, adapt the courses. We developed a completely new adaptation to a distance learning format, and we could add and subtract courses as the breadth of the programme grew. The programme was aimed at developing countries, and travel was an essential component. We were also able to book our own travel, using a self-selected travel agent (in the days when these existed) with whom we developed a close working relationship and who knew and was able to respond to our needs.

Over time, the independence that we had experienced was eroded, the grant was subsumed into the general funds of the University and appointments were made by the University. The carrot held out was that if we lost the grant, the funds for the salaries would be underwritten, at least for the length of the contract and we would have security. However, we lost the ability to respond to the direct needs of the grant, and had the extra burden of the paperwork and discussions and meetings required by the University in seeking approvals at each step. We also lost the ability to tailor our travel requirements to our needs—for no obvious benefit. These examples of managers replacing individual academic independence would seem trivial in comparison with examples of managerial oversight at which any university academic could point today. However they might serve as an illustration of a turning point in academia.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines managerialism as “belief in or reliance on the use of professional managers in administering or planning an activity”. The word ‘belief’ in this definition is indicative of the fact that universities have adopted managerialism in the absence of evidence. Deem (1998) defines ‘new managerialism’ as “the adoption by public sector organisations of organisational forms, technologies, management practices and values more commonly found in the private business sector.” She goes on to equate new managerialism with the ‘hard’ form of managerialism which involves rewards and punishments for those who can’t be trusted, and

2.1 Managerialism Creates Burdens for Academics ... 7 suggests that this is a masculine approach as opposed to the more feminist collegiality or ‘soft management approach. The issue of trust is key here—and I will be making the case later on that trust in academics is the alternative to managerialism which we need to explore. Deem and Brehony (2005) call ‘new managerialism’ an ideology “to serve the interests of manager academics and help cement relations of power and dominance, even in contexts like universities which were not traditionally associated with the dominance of management”.

Some history of how managerialism developed is also helpful to understand the issue. Davies (2003) identifies that “New managerialism, which is also referred to as neo-liberalism in the UK and total quality management in the USA, is a system of government of individuals invented during the Thatcher and Reagan years. It may well involve the most significant shift in the discursive construction of professional practice and professional responsibility that any of us will ever experience. It is characterised by the removal of the locus of power from the knowledge of practising professionals to auditors, policy-makers and statisticians, none of whom need know anything about the profession in question (Rose 1999). Neo-liberalism is characterised by Thatcher’s ‘death of society’ and the rise of ‘individuals’ who are in need of management, surveillance and control.” One of the key aspects of managerialism is the notion that there are generic skills that a manager has that can be applied in any organisation.

Managerialism, which was designed to improve performance in public services, has been adopted uncritically by universities. I can find no evidence of the benefit of this approach, nor even of any attempts to evaluate its benefit. As Shepherd suggests (2018), even its theoretical construct is poorly defined. Shepherd also reports a survey of a number of senior university managers which shows that they “appear to have fully accepted the idea that university management is both necessary and beneficial” —at least managers think that management is important! Aspromourgos (2012) suggests that there is no economic case for the managerial approach “a quality university product, of research plus teaching plus service, cannot be reduced to key performance indicators, and therefore its provision cannot be ensured merely by recourse to more or less explicit individual contracts....Not only are managerialism and quasi-competition not substitutes for traditional quality assurance grounded in professional ethics, they serve to undermine it”.

McKenna (2018) refers to the changes associated with managerialism as “bureaucratic bloat’ and says: “The issue is that introducing significant, expensive administrative structures too often comes at the cost of the pursuit and development of knowledge...The blame for this bloat of bureaucracy doesn’t only rest with executive administrators. Academics have ceded the academic project to the empty rhetoric of efficiency.” As Graeber in Bullshit Jobs laments (2019), this has led to an explosion of jobs for managers. Over time this growth has outstripped the growth of academic jobs in universities.

Having created new jobs in management, the people holding the jobs have to find work to do. However, this involves not only the managers themselves, but the academics—more forms to fill and meetings to attend. As infrastructure jobs are reduced over time it is the academics who have to do all this work, adding to or replacing their academic workload. Orr and Orr (2016) give some delightful examples of the expansion of tasks given to the academics under what they define as ‘managerialism, metrics and bureaucratisation (MMB)’. The figures, reproduced from their paper (with permission) compare the tasks under MMB (on the left) compared without MMB (on the right) in authorising travel and creating an exam (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).

Having put managers at the top of the university hierarchy, the academics find themselves undervalued by all levels of university administration. If a low level member of the research administration demands some paperwork from the academic, this becomes a requirement to be met, not questioned, despite any doubts from the academic. Timetabling becomes a task for the academic, not the manager, despite this taking time and energy away from teaching and research.

As well as adding to the academics’ workload and taking them away from teaching and research. The academics suffer from lack of control over their own activities. Control is exerted by others who are neither expert in their field nor have experience

1. Notification of planned travel 1. Human judgment: “Can / do this travel without odversely impacting 2. Response for clarification to AS my teaching, research and service responsibilities”

3. Response to clarifications

4. Request for additional clarifications 5. Response to additional clarifications 6. Preliminary approval granted by AS 7. Notification of planned travel form

8. Request for more information 9. Information given

10. Travel Form sent to SS

Academic Staff

11. Approval given

Sa | School Supervisor

Fig. 2.1 Numbers of emails sent in the process travel authorisation outside the semester

1. Request for exam description for coversheet L Sending exam to tutor (teaching assistant) to print 2. Response with exam coversheet 2. Confirmation that exams are printed

3. Notification to create exam

4. Response with exam attached

5. Notification of formatting change 6. Response to (5)

7. Notification to business supervisor B. Supervisor request for changes to Prevent going over budget tor markir B. Response to (8)

Tutor / Teaching Assistant

10. Approval Given 11. Sent to Central Exams 12. Notification

From central exams Central Exams Office

Fig. 2.2 Numbers of emails sent in the process of the creation of an exam

2.1 Managerialism Creates Burdens for Academics ... 9 in the provision of education or conduct of research. Locus of control is a psychological concept—the lack of which has been identified to create stress and anxiety. As summarised by Whitehead and colleagues (2016) “Observational evidence showed that employees who experienced the twin pressures of high job demands but low control in their work were at higher risk of psychosocial stress, which has been linked to physical conditions such as coronary heart disease (CHD). These twin pressures are just what so many of today’s academics face—largely as a result of managerialism.

A number of authors tell us that managerialism a form of bullying. David West has said in a provocative piece in the Sydney Morning Herald (2015) “The increasing incidence of bullying over the last few decades coincides with the relentless rise of managerialism....Why does the current model of managerialism almost inevitably give rise to cases of bullying? University reforms of the last decades have been driven by neoliberal assumptions or what has misleadingly been called economic rationalism: the primacy of economic principles of productivity and efficiency; the central role of management and incentives.”

Skinner and colleagues in a study of bullying and harassment in Australian universities (Skinner et al. 2015) says: “All these findings point to organisational culture, whether driven from within or from without, as important in understanding harassment and bullying in the workplace....These health impacts would then be expected to result in increased absenteeism, lower job satisfaction and lower morale. These have organisation-related effects, with workplace bullying damaging productivity and reputation. The diverse range of costs organisations incur can include lost productivity, the cost of replacement workers when victims are absent, recruitment costs resulting from higher staff turnover, the costs of processing formal complaints and lost business due to reputation loss”.