The news has broken within the last 24 hours of the expansion of the Russell Group by the introduction of four further universities. I have known for some weeks that this was in the offing (and also have the name of a potential fifth addition), but it was a meeting of the Russell Group VCs last week that agreed on this action. The four additions are Queen Mary (London), York, Exeter, and Durham. During the day various people have been asking for my opinion on this. They have been surprised by my reaction that the most obvious of these is Queen Mary, which advanced impressively in the last Research Assessment Exercise, which has a large medical school, and which has a broad range of departments including great strength in Arts and Humanities. York seems to me rather small and lacking in a range of key disciplines (although there is an expansion programme). I also have some doubts about Exeter and Durham - but one consequence of their addition will be to make Sheffield's widening participation position within the Russell Group look even more favourable than it already us. Someone once joked to me that for every five applicants to Oxford and Cambridge four are rejected - and they then head straight for Bristol, Exeter, Durham and either Edinburgh or St Andrews. Whether that is true or not I do not know, but some of the new Russell Group entrants certainly have very high proportions of students who could not be described as being from under-privileged backgrounds.
I am ambivalent about the existence of strong mission groups in UK higher education. They certainly create a 'brand' for their universities collectively - and the Russell Group is arguably the most successful of those. They facilitate comparisons with similar groupings of universities elsewhere - the US Ivy League, the Australian Group of 8, the German universities that have been identified through the 'Excellenzinitiativ'. But they also fragment higher education such that the universities of this country find it difficult to speak with one voice. That has been particularly true over the last two years, when every initiative from government has been interpreted favourably by at least one part of the sector and unfavourably by others. In some ways the universities have divided themselves in ways that enable others then to rule them,
That thought came out this evening when I appeared on a platform with four others for a 'Question Time' style discussion about the future of higher education, organised by the Students' Union. I was joined by Gavin Douglas, the Head of our Recruitment and Admissions Office, by one of the Student Union officers, by a postgraduate student from Philosophy, and by one of the Presidents of the National Union of Students. Thinking about the campaigns of the last two years - since the days of the Browne Report - I argued that there had been an inclusiveness about the NUS arguments, but that the same could not be said about universities themselves, which had in part divided along mission group lines.
But one thing where all universities in England share a common interest (we now have further divisions with universities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland over funding regimes) is the need to get an understanding of the new fees regime out there into the general public. Even a relatively well-informed student audience this evening clearly did not have a full grasp of the repayment structures for the new regime, as they showed in some questioning addressed to Gavin Douglas. Perhaps that's something all universities could rally round - after all we are all institutions that seek to educate those who come into contact with us.
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