Friday 30th March 2012 - Risk analysis

I first met risk analysis when I was, for three years, head of the Department of Economics.  It had been decided that all departments should analyse the risks they faced in delivering their strategies and should rate the likelihood of these risks happening, and the effect they would had if they did, by plotting a point on a graph with likelihood and effect as the axes.  I wasn't very used to graphs with conceptual (rather than numerical) axes, and made a series of stabs in the dark.  It turned out that I had gone further in plotting our risks than had several other Heads.

I am much more familiar now with risk analysis, and today we had a meeting of the University's Risk Review Group.  It takes a certain sort of mind set to be able to envisage how things could go wrong, and then to think through the overall effects, including secondary knock-on issues, that would be troubling if they did.  I now find this sort of exercise intellectually interesting.  And then there is the further activity of seeking how to mitigate the risk - in other words how to reduce the chance of the risk occurring.  Beyond that there is the possibility of mitigating the outcome - seeking to find ways of reducing the adverse effects of the risk if it were to come to pass.

For example, we could fear that the loss of key staff would be a significant risk to aspects of a department's operations, and that the effect would be severe.  But we could seek to mitigate the risk of those staff leaving by valuing them more highly and rewarding them better or improving their work patterns.  And we could seek to mitigate the problems if they were nevertheless to leave by starting to train up others to understudy them.

Over the years a strong element of my research has been on migration.  And I have come to see how risk analysis methods can be brought to bear on the study of migration decision-making.  Potentially migrants are taking a chance if they decide to move, and weigh up the possible consequences of doing so.  They can reduce the risk of moving by, for example, not moving the whole family at one time, or by undertaking temporary moves prior to taking the plunge and moving permanently.  And they can reduce the severity of the things they fear by, for example, grouping with others.

So I have taken something that I was introduced to through administrative duties, and suggested it to postgraduate students as a useful approach to their own conceptualisation of a significant research problem.   We often talk about research-led teaching, and sometimes about teaching-led research. I think I've ben describing an example of administrative-led research. 

Friday 23rd March 2012 - Towards gender equality?

I have sometimes thought that a marker of gender equality will be when, on boarding a plane and making one's way to the back, one observes that there as many women as men in the club class section.

Twice before in my acacdemic life I have been in situations where the gender tables have been turned.  I was once a member of a research group at one of the Paris universities (Paris IV, occupying an outbuilding of the Sorbonne, further up the rue Saint-Jacques) in which women outnumbered men.  We were all working on the ways in which social marginality often translates in to spatial marginality - the most excluded groups in society being relegated to the poorest and least attractive spaces (urban peripheries, or next to noxious factories and motorways, for example).  But the actual leader of the group was a man. 

Secondly, and more recently, I have been involved in research groups in two Portuguese universities. In these cases women have been in positions of authority as well - heading research units, and as Pro-Rectors: indeed, there is a female rector of one of the universities I have been involved with.   I sought an explanation once and was told that women managed to get a foot on the acacdemic ladder in the early 1970s when many Portuguese men were conscripted to fight in the ill-fated African wars to hold on to the colonies, and they have managed to stay ahead throughout their careers.  Whether the next generation of women will be able to maintain that position is another matter.

But these days I am once again often in a room with a majority of women.  Last week I was at a regular meeting at HEFCE.  There were 21 of us present - 13 women (including the chair) and 8 men.  This week I have been at a meeting in another university: 12 were present, with 7 women and 5 men.   So in what areas are women now coming to the fore?

These have been meetings about teaching.  The HEFCE meeting was the strategic advisory group on teaching; the Birmingham event was the regular meeting of the Russell Group Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching.  Of that latter group (in total of 20 - I won't count in the newcomers quite yet), 10 are men and 10 are women.

Yet in relation to other areas of university business there is a very different balance.  Among Russell Group PVCs for Research 18 are men and 2 are women.  Among Russell Group VCs Nancy Rothwell (Manchester) is the only woman. 

So teaching seems to be an area where women and men enjoy some equality, at least in the UK context.  Yet it doesn't stretch to senior roles in other spheres.    And actually it doesn't really go right to the very top in the teaching area either.  Admittedly there are four VCs on the HEFCE teaching committee - 2 men and 2 women (among whom, as I said earlier, is the chair).  Yet over the last week I have been in the presence of the chief executives of all the main bodies affecting English universities - HEFCE, the Higher Education Academy, the Quality Assurance Agency, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, and UCAS.  Only one of those is a women (Mary Curnock Cook, the Head of UCAS).

Nevertheless, my gender performance indicator of an equal distribution of men and women in the club class section of a plane could be more easily achieved with a gathering of PVCs for Learning and Teaching, than with a gathering of PVCs for Research or of VCs.  Thoughts and comments on this would be welcome.

Tuesday 13th March 2012 - Mission groups in higher education

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. 

Thursday 8th March 2012 - The possible value of university consortia

I'm not sure when the White Rose University Consortium, linking the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York, was founded, but it was probably about 15 years ago.  The Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching of the three universities meet up regularly - as do those for research: and there are meetings of the Vice-Chancellors, along with the Chief Executive of the Consortium.  Today we had one of our regular meetings.

The purposes of the Consortium are becoming increasingly differentiated between those relating to the research landscape and those relating to learning and teaching.  And that reflects much wider chanegs across the sector.  As Alan Langlands, the Chief Executive of HEFCE, observed at a recent meeting, research is becoming increasingly about collaboration, whilst teaching is becoming increasingly about competition.

To secure significant research money, or particularly research studentships for the training of postgraduates, it is becoming increasingly important to bid as groups of universities.  A particular strength of the White Rose group is that it has a track record of success in this area - nowhere more so than in competitions for doctoral training centres for research students.  The joint Economic and Social Research Council centre is the most powerful in the UK, and there has been recent success in winning a joint centre from the BBSRC for studentships in the Biologies.  The Arts and Humanities will, we hope, be the next in the list.

At one time there were things to be bid for in learning and teaching too, and joint initiatives were successful in creating the White Rose Centre for Enterprise and the Centre for Excellent in the Learning and Teaching of Enterprise that followed it. The White Rose universities, with other partners, also won the competition for the National Science Learning Centre, and for an Excellence Hub for Gifted and Talented young people.

But in the learning and teaching area these pots of money are things of the past.  So what might the Consortium universities do jointly in teaching?  We discussed this issue earlier today.  A number of opportunities exist.

For example; there are certain high threshold but low volume activities where together we could create the scale of demand needed to meet demands.  In Sheffield we already have the example of the Virtual Dutch collaboration with two other universities whereby students studying Dutch have access to resources created not just by our own small number of staff but also by the other universities in the group.  I know there is a demand from medical students for simple courses in community languages, which at the moment is not being fulfilled - perhaps our three universities could create virtaul courses in Urdu for Medicine and so on jointly.

Another example would be in the sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER) between us.  We are all research-intensive universities with similar approaches to education: I am sure that there are excellent teaching materials created in each of our universities that we could share.  My own students very commonly draw down materials from the sites of other universities - not always of reputable quality: we could signpost them towards resources from colleageus and institutions that we now have similar standards to our own.

I would be interested in other suggestions of areas where, despite the fact that we are competing for the best students, we could nevertheless use our joint brand to enhance what we can offer.