Crisis Response in Higher Education

Front matter

P an Response in » Higher Education

| os “ i

How the Pandemic Challenged University Operations and Organisation

Preface

The idea for this book began to take shape in June 2019, under the working title ‘The new public university: local missions and global goals . As with many plans at the time, the ability to dedicate time to write the book and indeed the actual substance of the book were overtaken by events. The emergence of COVID at the end of 2019, and its global spread in the first half of 2020, meant that we made no progress apart from exchanging a few emails checking up on one another’s welfare.

In September 2020 we re-engaged with the idea, but acknowledged that what we had first proposed to the publisher was now out of date due to the pandemic. This led to a rethink, and a key observation was that the local missions and global goals we originally discussed had been exemplified by the reaction of universities—their students, staff, academics and leaders—to COVID. In each of the countries where we reside—Australia, Sweden and the UK—we could recount extraordinary examples of how the universities ‘leant into’ the crisis. These ranged from medical and nursing students volunteering on the front line, through to volunteering for foodbanks, as well as the more obvious examples around developing vaccines, providing testing facilities and tracking COVID symptoms through online apps.

We therefore decided to change tack by documenting, and to a degree celebrating, those stories. To do this we decided to reach into our networks and see if we could get individuals to write short ‘COVID stories’ that recounted their experiences through the lens of being part of a university community. We reached out to the group of people listed in the text box below and asked them to write a short, personal account of how vi PREFACE they and their university community responded to COVID. We sourced a diversity of stories from Australia, Sweden and the UK and from students, academics, staff and leaders. Amazingly no one turned us down.

In Part Three of this book, we have presented these 16 stories. As you will see, each story is an extraordinary account in its own right about the crisis and rupture that public universities faced in the early part of 2020 and, critically, how they adapted and responded to the pandemic. We should stress at the outset that we are not making any special case for universities—all sectors of society have similar stories and indeed it is that coming together, the sense of community, that ability to respond that may, just may, be one of humanity’s lasting legacies of this period.

But in our context, the context of universities, taken together the COVID stories celebrate what is best about universities but also crucially begin to shine a light on a possible future for the social purpose of public universities, how they operate and how they can use this moment of crisis and rupture to reset.

The book is divided into four parts. In Part I—the introduction—we set the scene by reviewing the pre-pandemic trends, debates and theories about the role of public universities and how that evolved in the twenty-first century. This sets the scene for Part II, where we review key policy trends in each of the three countries, providing an anchor for the COVID stories in Part III, before bringing the themes and where appropriate lessons learned together in a concluding chapter in Part IV.

We should stress that in setting the context for the COVID stories and then analysing them we are not suggesting that the authors of the COVID stories agree with us. We are rather using their accounts as a data source. That said, as with all research, we are indebted to their contributions, as without them we would have no data and thus very little to say.

We hope these accounts—and our interpretation of them—will contribute to the inevitable debate about how higher education recovers from the pandemic, but, equally importantly, how it resets so that the sector continues to deliver on local missions and global goals in the future.

Lund, Sweden Mats Benner Cambridge, UK Jonathan Grant Birchgrove, NSW, Australia Mary O’Kane

November 2021

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE COVID STORIES

Karim Al (3rd year undergraduate pharmacology student at King’s College London, UK, when the pandemic struck)

William Weidow (2nd year undergraduate economics student at Lund University, Sweden, when the pandemic struck)

Nicole Votruba (PhD student who submitted her thesis and successfully passed her viva during lockdown)

Anne Quain (Part-time lecturer and PhD student at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, Australia)

Nina Wormbs (Professor of History of Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)

Maurice Pagnucco (Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of New South Wales, Australia)

Jenny Buchan (Formerly Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia)

Jesper Falkheimer (Professor of Strategic Communication Lund University, Sweden)

Liz Shutt (Director of Policy at the University of Lincoln and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership)

Nicole Mennell (Engagement Lead (Vision 2029) at King’s College London)

Anna Löthman (Communication Officer, Dean’s office, Lund School of Economics and Management)

Verity Firth (Executive Director, Social Justice at the University of Technology Sydney)

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CONTRIBUTORS TO THE COVID STORIES

Mark Hoffman (Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic (DVCA) at the University of Newcastle, Australia)

Sylvia Schwaag Serger (former deputy vice chancellor at Lund University, Sweden)

Ed Byrne (former President and Principal at King’s College London, UK)

Brigid Heywood (Vice Chancellor at the University of New England, Australia)

Contents

Part I The University Mission Before, During and After COVID l1 The University Mission Before, During and After COVID

Part II An Overview of Pre-pandemic Higher Education Systems, Challenges and Opportunities in the UK, Sweden and Australia

3 Higher Education in Sweden: Unitary and Diversified Under State Authority

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

Newspaper headlines attacking universities in the UK TRAC full economic cost surplus/deficit by activity, 2018-2019 (higher education institutions in England and Northern Ireland). (https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/ media/fa2edd32-13b7-4d52-9761-94522¢e441e72 /annual-trac_2018-19_sector-analysis.pdf)

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Chapter 1

Changes in university missions across institutional and national boundaries, and at different times, form the basis for this study. While universities tend to resemble one another and confront similar challenges and tendencies irrespective of location, there are significant differences in how they identify and pursue their missions and tasks based on geographical, social and political distances, as well as institutional variations across countries and settings (Altbach, 2016). We therefore compare not only between organisational responses but also between institutional settings, which include how universities are funded, governed and led; how they fit into the political economy of their environments; notions and traditions of leadership and decision-making; and cultural conceptions of the value and utility of academic work.

Our ambition is to formulate and describe a ‘social revolution’ in universities, which is taking place in response to a new landscape of expectations, and new modes of communicating and forming directions in society. This transformation of university roles has been accelerated and put under immense stress by the COVID pandemic, but it was already underway before 2020.

PRE-PANDEMIC TRENDS, DEBATES AND THEORIES

While universities are often claimed to be immune to radical change and redeployment, their history abounds with ruptures and transformations, and indeed fundamental crises. One such transformative instance was the first ‘academic revolution’, when universities took on the mission of

© The Author(s) 2022 3 M. Benner et al., Crisis Response in Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97837-2_1 research in parallel and in addition to education (Brockliss, 2000). This transformed the task of a university and the academic profession from reproducing and preserving a cultural heritage to producing new and sometimes irrelevant knowledge as well, a challenging change for an institution wedded to social stability. This academic revolution is still to some extent unfinished and unresolved, as shown in the limited articulation between teaching and research (Hattie & Marsh, 1996).

Another transformation was when universities were turned into organisations rather than loose federations of scholars, with the inception of departments and schools in which the missions of education and research were more broadly integrated (Clark, 1983). The autocratic disciplinary chair structure was replaced with a variable and flexible system of academic positions filled via recruitment and promotion, malleable to internal and external dynamics and pressures. This transformation is also unresolved, or at least contested, as the relationship between the individual academic and the organisational setting in many instances is strained (Altbach et al., 2012). Similar tensions appear in the governance of universities, where different logics and forms of representation co-exist uneasily (Marginson & Considine, 2000), with universities having different layers of governance where professorial dictum and managerial fiat struggle for dominance.

A third and ongoing transformation is when universities include a social function (‘service’), which occurs for a variety of reasons. The role is not only mandated but also enacted by the higher education institutions themselves, in mobilising different social forces to build ‘pillars of excellence’ internally (Lowen, 1997). Universities have, of course, always been part of a social fabric, but the form and direction of that alignment have seldom been articulated or made subject to strategic considerations. In different waves, and under different historical political and social circumstances, the alignment has become articulated more explicitly. During nation-building in the nineteenth century, universities performed different societal functions, such as the land-grant system or the Californian master plan in the USA, and similar models in countries as diverse as Japan and Germany (Merritt & Rokkan, 1966). With the Cold War, the service function was skewed in the direction of national mobilisation, transcending the boundaries between national security concerns and academic work (Edgerton, 2005). More recently, the social function has evolved against the backdrop of the instabilities and uncertainties of our time, where traditional institutions and organisations have been subverted by a combination of separate but related forces, such as digitalisation, globalisation, populism and new forms of political mobilisation; marked social and regional inequalities and disparities; and mounting pressures on the public budget. The social function of universities is thus both an imperative and a constraining factor, and universities have responded very differently to the social instabilities surrounding them.

Thus the emerging social function of universities can be understood as a part of the evolution of the academic system as an organisational field, and universities within that field must devise specific strategies and action patterns to engage with the social expectations around them.

THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

How and why do universities change their missions and activities, and how and why do change processes—ways of articulating general directions, such as a greater social and service orientation—differ between settings?

The fundamental instability of the university mission has been made abundantly clear during the global pandemic, when universities worldwide have seen their directions, identities, funding and organisation strained and altered at record-breaking speed. In parallel, the importance of universities has never been greater, both as providers of education and as contributors to research to counter the impact of the pandemic, whether directly or indirectly. Universities have been mobilised as a result of the pandemic, but they have also been challenged and questioned.

What does this say, then, about how universities operate? A theoretical framework is needed that can make sense of university identity, activity and impact in order to understand how universities develop and how they change, with a special emphasis on recent changes towards a more pronounced and deeper role for universities as contributors to social development locally. For the purposes of this study, we adopt a set of assumptions that together form an understanding of universities as stable yet malleable (‘dinosaurs with wings’, as the social historian Harold Perkin once put it).

This is certainly not the first attempt at grasping what universities do. Institutional higher education studies has exploded as a field in both size and complexity in recent decades. In its initial orientation, historical and comparative perspectives dominated, focusing on the historical evolution of missions and identities (Clark, 1983). During this phase, studies included the transformation of higher education and research under a growing social mandate (‘massification’), as well as the interplay of academic and political interests in research priorities (Greenberg, 1967; Scott, 2019). Theoretical studies were mostly implicitly functional in orientation, grounding higher education in social structures and evolutionary directions occurring in stages depending on degrees of modernisation. The view was that universities reflected and boosted national identities and state formation. With the growing significance of universities as explicit contributors to social and economic development, the field aligned with the nascent field of innovation economics. Within this, universities were studied as variable contributors of economic value rather than—as previously—integral parts of national identities (Etzkowitz et al., 2000).

In parallel with the emergence of universities as engines of economic growth—which in itself was partly a historical artefact, partly based on the emergence of science-based sectors and industries (Rosenberg & Nelson, 1994)—the politics of university governance became an increasingly topical and pertinent issue. Historically framed as an outcome of the power balance between academic elites and the state (as chronicled by Clark, 1983), with the growing economic weight attached to universities—in markets for students, competition for academic elites, and for spin-off revenue and external funding—new ideals of leadership disseminated quickly across the globe. As a result, a branch of higher education studies showcased the shaping of governance in the interplay between collegial remnants and global and generic leadership models (Marginson & Considine, 2000; Kriicken & Meier, 2006). In parallel, global forces (embodied in and propelled by ranking organisations, international regulatory agencies, student and faculty mobility, etc.) reshaped educational curricula and research, with an increasing gravitation to generic and portable templates (Salmi, 2009). As a result, higher education studies came to reflect how universities responded to, and acted upon, global forces, and how they translated them into practices that were both globally legitimate and locally adapted (Drori et al., 2006).

The latter stream is still the dominant theme. In higher education studies, institutional forces form the foundation, including how universities are shaped in the interplay of normative, coercive and mimetic processes. Thus, the field has left its descriptive and largely historical heritage and become something of a sub-field of institutionalist organisation studies. Mainstream contemporary university studies deal with the alignment between the different roles and tasks of universities, and in particular how the emergence of steering techniques has (or has not) been translated into purposeful action.

While the main focus of higher education studies aims to illuminate how universities form their identities and how they incorporate and mould different forces from within and without, it does not fully capture how universities are affected by rupture and change. Instead, the field is more oriented towards gradual change and complexity—how different steering signals emerge and are enmeshed within academic organisations. The implicit argument is that universities are becoming increasingly interlaced with different layers of steering. Here, higher education studies articulate with organisation studies more generally, which tend to view organisations as sets of multi-layered steering ambitions that together create increasing complexity in setting directions and ambitions—despite proclamations to the opposite (as expressed in critiques of the ‘myths and ceremonies of leadership’). This emphasis on the ‘iron cage’ of organisational life serves as an antidote to the overly technocratic understanding of organisational leadership, and to overly prescriptive notions of managerial discretion as the driver of organisational change (Clegg et al., 2006). In doing so, it has been instrumental in forming a much more reflexive understanding of how organisations evolve and how they are constituted by a variety of sources and inputs, and has contextualised notions of steering and change. But, as a consequence, the theory is less well equipped to deal with rupture.

Hence we look at universities as an active (or latent) source of renewal, and search for mechanisms and procedures of renewal and activity in society as a whole, including higher education institutions (Etzioni, 1971). From this, the stress on the service function of universities emerges.

From their very inception, universities have evolved out of an articulation with societal interests and needs, formulated and shaped in inevitably protracted processes (Gibbons & Wittrock, 1985). We begin with the assumption that universities are formed and shaped by expectations and intentions that extend beyond the remit of the universities themselves. Universities are thus inherently social, although the form and influence of the social foundation of universities vary immensely between, say, an elite university in the USA and a regional university in India. This also means that universities are malleable to societal dynamics, albeit in a protracted manner. They evolve in contexts that are marked by waves of stability and change, both of which confront universities with dilemmas and opportunities. In stable phases, universities may experience long periods of relatively predictable conditions, but also creeping change, resulting in a dynamic steady state where many different tendencies are contained within the organisational framework (Ziman, 1994). Such periods of countervailing tendencies have, as mentioned, focused contemporary higher education studies on examining the interplay between ambitious policy streams and established routines in the academic system. In periods of rupture, change comes much more radically and forces universities to adapt in ways where the established behavioural patterns cease to give guidance and identity. Here, the very foundations of how universities function are subject to transformative forces and ideals.

Available historical and geographical evidence suggests that, from the very outset, universities articulated with societal missions, and their inner mechanisms and alignment with social processes evolved in parallel over successive waves of inception and transformation (Clark, 2006). On occasions, the connection between the inner life of universities and broader social change has taken on even more radical forms. Wars are an obvious example, as were the emergence of the post-war compact around Keynesian state policies and mass market-based economic circulation and, subsequently, the emergence of a global knowledge-based economy. During such historical ruptures, universities not only had their work modes transformed but also their societal interplay—the ‘mass university’ transformed notions of recruitment and learning ideals, while the warfare-welfare missions integrated universities into the societal fabric. The same tendencies emerged when a period of partial stability was coming to an end and a new crisis was beginning. When the frictions of the post-war societal model were becoming more obvious in the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities took on more direct roles in aligning with their immediate environment, in recruitment, urban development and service provision (Shils, 1997).

A very different but similarly radical overhaul of university missions is linked to the emergence of a socioeconomic model based on knowledgeintensive inputs within global value chains (‘academic capitalism’, Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). With it, universities became directly involved in the development of technologies, and students became carriers of technological change through spin-offs. Campus became an extension of corporate research and development, as well as a breeding ground for recruitment and networking between companies and students. This, together with the rapidly expanding global recruitment of students and faculty in turn fostered a service ecosystem around universities to cater for the much more flexible and fluid movements in and around academic settings.

Our analysis begins with this recent stage of academic development (circa 1980-2015), which is characterised by a dynamic yet volatile form of university-society articulation in a new ‘endless frontier’ of knowledge-based development. The period had many stabilising properties, including a growing global exchange of faculty and students and consequently increased global research networks, the rise of global measures of performance (ranking and bibliometrics), and public and private faith in the virtues of research and education. These translated into, among others, unprecedented resource hikes, a global proliferation of academic institutions, and academic spin-offs and other forms of engagement with external stakeholders. However, the period was also marked by signs of fragility, especially in the broader societal realm, in the form of a rampant climate crisis, an unstable global financial system, and political unrest, accompanied by rapidly increasing economic disparities and declining social cohesion (Fagerberg et al., 2015). The promise of the new endless frontier of the period, namely that a knowledge-based paradigm would deliver growth and inclusion in parallel, seemed to be elusive, and there were mounting calls for so-called purpose-driven, inclusive innovation as a new mission for universities (Mazzucato, 2018).

Along with these transformative influences, the very foundations of the long period of university expansion were questioned, encapsulated in critiques of an allegedly myopic understanding of research quality, and trivialisation of educational ambitions (Science 2.0 and similar). Universities were, of their own accord but also through policy expectations and funding arrangements, interwoven into this critique and the responses to it, which primarily took the form of ‘grand challenges’, where universities were enrolled, along with a wide variety of other actors, organisations and stakeholders, in the formulation of common goals and ambitions (Åström et al., 2020). However, the forces of stability and inertia were still strong, and no impetus for fundamental change could, it seemed, overcome them (ibid.).

This pre-COVID phase saw universities (in various forms, depending on their position in the global institutional hierarchy) searching for a wider role beyond that of tech-global hubs of varying distinction, and attempting to meet and articulate with broader societal issues such as equity and sustainability in a society constituted by a vulnerable stability around hyper-globalisation and hyper-complexity. Here, we assume that there are significant differences in the management of different forces between the countries under study, depending on their institutional set-up and legacies, as well as their political economic structure.

During COVID, our second phase, we assume that immediate action in response to the pandemic forms the core of university engagement, according to our conception of universities as malleable to external forces under specific conditions. States and governments pursue policies that go beyond the consensus of the ‘great moderation’ preceding the pandemic, with interventions in social and economic affairs of a magnitude and invasiveness unprecedented in periods without a war. We expect this to have repercussions for universities, some driven by the universities themselves, others by governments and other patrons, often in tandem. This entails changes and adaptations in the technical provision of education and research—digitalisation of education most prominently as well as online forms of scientific exchange and collaboration. We also predict that universities will be expected to make immediate contributions to resilience in society more widely—in biomedicine, naturally, but also across the scientific spectrum, given the magnitude and enormous repercussions of the pandemic. During this phase, we also envision university staffing, funding and task set-up to be strongly affected by the pandemic, especially universities which rely heavily on international exchange of students, faculty and other resources. The governance of universities will also take on quite different and untested formats. Governments will make repeated and hurried changes in resource appropriation and task assignment. University leadership will have to mitigate the effects of the pandemic through direct interventions in how units, faculty, staff and students operate; adaptations in various forms (ranging from self-organisation to withdrawal) among these groups; and potentially new forms of interaction between groups. Here, we also assume that comparisons will reveal quite distinct patterns of adaptation, depending on the societal configurations and, in particular, the structure of the political economy and adjacent institutional set-up (Hall & Soskice, 2001).

The evolution of universities after COVID, the third stage, is of course a more speculative matter. Different scenarios for social and economic directions, both international and domestic, are plentiful and contrarian, from the dystopian to the transformative (Philippon, 2019). If anything, COVID has revealed the vulnerabilities created by the endlessly combinatory hyper-flexible society of recent decades, and how that has hampered efforts to combat the pandemic. We envision an opportunity to create a more resilient and inclusive society that can better predict, frame and

1 THE UNIVERSITY MISSION BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER COVID ll counter major instabilities, involving a wide range of interests and institutions in new and more flexible relationships. However, this will probably co-exist with residual vulnerabilities and instabilities from the hyperglobalised compact of the pre-COVID phase, which may result in more contentious global relations and a wider, possibly more autocratic, role for the state in providing services and opportunities that were previously the remit of civil society and market forces (meo-dirigisme). As for universities, we expect the post-COVID period will see global relations tested, but also a rediscovery of local dependencies and relations. Universities will be seen more as assets in the direct sense of the word, rather than tokens of visibility and credibility, or as organisations that can capitalise on the international mobility of students and faculty. We also expect issues of legitimation and directionality to be critical in matters of university governance; leadership will be driven primarily by the identified missions of a university (Crow & Dabars, 2020; Gumport, 2019). We also anticipate that the methodological underpinnings of comparisons such as rankings—important as they will continue to be in a constantly evolving and complex landscape of higher education institutions—will become more inclusive and nuanced, to move away from the stereotyped global ideals of previous eras.

THEORETICAL STARTING-POINTS: POWER IN THE UNIVERSITY

Our analytical framework structures and organises these observations and the depictions of higher education systems and COVID experiences in three countries. We match them with the underlying assumption that universities are malleable, particularly in periods of radical change. This aligns with our macroscopic starting point, where we assume that universities are inherently social, forged in broad and complex contexts that largely reside outside the academic confines (even though education and research in themselves are central in the remoulding of society; Stensaker et al., 2012). While broad societal forces such as technical change, trade, financial flows, and wars tend to cross national boundaries, the contexts in which these forces play out vary, depending on institutional set-ups and trajectories, the political economies and social mobilisation. Even though there are strong globalising tendencies, policy diffusion and standards in operations, and historical and contextual differences, also form and translate such forces. This is why we identify national higher education systems as critical nodes in transformative periods and why we search for trajectories and interests that are particular to those systems and the function as filters and funnels of the transformative elements.

While a systemic analysis is critical to understanding how transformations evolve, we need to complement such a macroscopic perspective with a mesoscopic and microscopic framework that enables an understanding of how universities function as organisations, how the societal framework conditions are translated into action and direction, and how actors respond to and enact these changes. In doing so, we attain an understanding of how specific organisational settings and specific groups act as carriers of a transformative experience such as a pandemic. This also forms a critical bridge between systemic change and real-world experiences, or in sociological terminology, how systemic and social integrations are bound together (Mouzelis, 1991).

To allow for a nuanced depiction of how organisational settings interact with experiences at the level of individuals and groups in academic settings, we now outline an analytical framework—adapted from Grant (2021)—which pinpoints critical aspects of how universities are constituted and operate in a dynamic environment. The key components are: the structure of power; motivation; strategy; process and decision-making; people and recruitment; place and spatial relations; and engagement with students.

The Structure of Power

The first aspect of university dynamics is the structure of power within universities. Core dimensions of power include how different forces are mobilised within and beyond academic settings, the forms and expressions of authority, the articulation between organisational and private values and engagement, modes of engagement and commitment, and the temporal alignment between members and organisations.

Universities are multi-actor organisations with devolved and complex authority structures. They comprise different groups, each with their own specific positional assets based on credentials and accumulated experience (for faculty) but also on professional training (for staff) and access and entry (for students). These in turn are shaped by interdependent processes: while faculty holds a privileged position in the pursuit of education and research, that position is contingent on staff support and collaboration with students. Power relations in universities are therefore based on task interdependence, and even more so in turbulent times when adaptation and learning can be assumed to be critical elements.

These nested interests are in their turn blended with external inputs articulated by a variety of stakeholders holding governance functions and other positions of influence. This can partly be understood as a formalisation of the social embeddedness of universities, but also as an expression of the presumption that universities are more effectively run when they are infused with external perspectives. This we assume is more salient in turbulent times, when traditional roles and notions seemingly do not hold. The structuration of actor interests—internal and external—has varied over time, and can be expected to vary also between types of universities, depending on historical trajectories, national regulation, and the organisational direction of a specific university (such as the mission it aims to serve, or its articulation with the surrounding society). It is also dependent on authority forms in universities. Authority may, typically, either reflect a non-interventionist stance, namely to reproduce existing power relations, or a maximalist stance aiming to remould interests and directions (Lowen, 1997). Similarly, we assume that universities engage with the private commitments and engagements of their different actors to various degrees, either quietly accepting them as they are or reshaping them in specific directions (for instance community engagement, entrepreneurship or public duties). Temporality, finally, refers to the degree to which universities form relations that span the life-course of its actors, even if they are no longer formally part of the organisation. The temporal dimension therefore refers to the degree to which a university forges relations that go beyond the strictly regulated framework of membership.

Overall, this aspect points at how power is structured and enacted within universities, and—for our purposes—most importantly at how and in what form the engagement of its different actors and groups (students, staff and faculty) is mobilised and how that mobilisation is channelled within the organisation. Our basic assumption is that power is a relational aspect of any organisation, and that universities, with their flexible and malleable mandate, are particular examples of this phenomenon. In times of crisis and upheaval, the configuration of power relations is particularly salient—such configurations may be flexible and responsive to transformative forces, or may aim to disregard or neutralise them (in Grant’s terminology, ‘new’ versus ‘old’ power). For our purposes, we will be looking at how the pandemic—as a major transformative impetus—has affected the relative position of different groups within universities in specific contexts, l4 M. BENNERETAL.