Professor Sir David Watson is Director of the MBA in Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London. Between 1990 and 2005 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton. For a fuller elaboration of some of these arguments, see his article Universities Behaving Badly? in Higher Education Review, 40:3 (summer 2008).
Foreword
This paper is a revised version of a talk given by Professor Sir David Watson to QAA's subscribing institutions at their annual meeting held on 4 June 2008 in Manchester. It was greatly praised on that occasion and there was universal agreement among the participants that it deserved a much wider audience.
The question of 'who owns the university?' is a timely one. Unique in the landscape of British institutions, universities have moved from their original role as small, private, self-governing groups of scholars to multi-million pound global enterprises which are thought by many to hold the keys to both future economic prosperity and prevention of the apocalyptic consequences that economic prosperity may bring. But what are these chameleon-like institutions, part public, part private, and how can their essential characteristics and purposes be preserved in the face of the conflicting demands placed upon them?
David Watson examines universities within the framework of British institutions. Who are their stakeholders? What actually is a stakeholder in a university? What obligations does autonomy bring? How can universities juggle the multiple and sometimes conflicting expectations that students, staff, employers, local communities, governments and society in general have of them? Should there be more or less diversity and differentiation between universities? Is there a plausible model for the future of the university in the twenty-first century?
All these are burning questions for today and the paper offers not only an analysis but also answers to them. In Manchester the paper gave rise to a day of stimulating and thoughtful discussions. I very much hope that its appearance now in QAA's Quality matters series will provide a wider opportunity for those discussions to be taken forward by the whole higher education community and, more broadly, to include all who recognise the vital role of autonomous, responsible and responsive universities in our society.
Peter Williams
Chief Executive, QAA
Who owns the university?
I think that we can easily fall prey to lazy thinking about 'stakeholding', in the public service in general, and even more so in the peculiarly hybrid world of public-private ambiguity occupied by higher education institutions (HEIs).
According to the conventions of corporate governance, organisations are governed in the interests of either shareholders (the institutions, groups or individuals who own the shares - and expect dividends) or stakeholders (the individuals and groups, including the employees, whose interests might be affected by aspects of the organisation's performance). To the frustration of several commentators, most universities are neither shareholder nor stakeholder institutions. On one end of a spectrum, institutions with the university title may be wholly 'for profit' institutions, especially in jurisdictions where the title is relatively unprotected in law. At the other end they may be unmediated emanations of the apparatus of the state. However, in the vast centre ground they are unashamedly sui generis, with, as many commentators have argued, institutional autonomy lying at the heart of the conception of the modern university.
They are also symptomatic of what I think is a breakdown of old-fashioned distinctions between public and private. When vice-chancellors are asked whether their institutions are in the public or the private sector, the correct answer is 'yes'. In the early twenty-first century, are there any large, complex businesses that are purely public or purely private?
Here's an exercise I do with my students on the Higher Education Management MBA. Where on this spectrum of 'hybrids' does the university sit? Are they most like:
- the Armed Forces - a command structure but very dependent upon outsourcing
- the Church of England - a consensual community, but one that is legally 'established'
- the National Trust - a private charitable society (but one which guards much of the nation's 'heritage' - and acts as a tax dodge)
- the National Health Service - a constantly re-structured devolved service
- schools - a local authority service, but nationally regulated and 'governed' on an individual institutional basis
- or BAE Systems - a private company with a majority of public contracts.
The correct answer is, I think, closest to the final case (uncomfortable though it might seem at present). Universities are private corporations, with a lot of important public contracts.
In these circumstances, who owns the university (or pieces of it) or thinks that they do? There are several potential candidates.
The state, directly and indirectly, is invariably a major funder. It will also claim to represent the people's share by investing the proceeds of taxation. However, attempting to co-opt universities into taking on politically-influenced national priorities is dangerous. Nor is it likely to work. Just look at the current agonies of adjustment going on in the former Eastern bloc states.
Other big investors may be other public services, the professions, business and employers, including through sponsorship and purchase of student places. The professions are a particularly interesting case. They were in at the beginning of the modern European university - law at Bologna and theology at Paris. They played their part in the nineteenth and twentieth century expansion of the system: science and technology in the civic universities - especially engineering throughout the Commonwealth and beyond - and more recently the addition of health professions to the traditional formation of doctors of medicine.
Then there is the public more generally, especially as its prejudices are refracted through the media. There are contrasts between cultural roles of universities and colleges in different national contexts: in the United States they are more loved and respected than may be deserved; in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) they stimulate more opprobrium than is objectively fair. This picture may, however, be changing, as US higher education is facing - almost for the first time - a combination of cuts in public subsidy, consumer resentment and consumer debt.
These constitute the various external communities that interact with and within the university.
But probably most important in the historical sense are the internal communities: the members of the university - its staff and students.
To describe these all as stakeholders is by no means straightforward. Stakeholder is one of those words that has almost exactly the opposite meaning from when it was originally coined. (The stakeholder used to be the person who held the coats - and the prize money while the fight was on; the notion was one of scrupulous disinterest.) Stakeholders need to understand that if they are to live up to the modern designation (as having invested something themselves), they have to put something at risk. If a university were to undertake a rigorous analysis of its stakeholders, that might raise some difficult questions, including the following.
- Whose stakes are on the table (really) in the sense of sharing risk?
- Who can most effectively (that is legitimately as well as logically) claim to hold the third party stake (the celebrated people's money) on behalf of the community as a whole? The politicians would like to claim it - through democratic validation - although they too can fail the stewardship test, not least through self-serving and short-term policy interventions.
- What about the wider loyalties of staff - to subject and professional communities beyond their employer's boundaries?
- How do students - now aggressively enjoined to act as customers - express their interest?
By any objective analysis of sharing risk, our biggest stakeholders have to be our students. They make the very 'lumpy' investment (usually a one-off purchase at each level - undergraduate and postgraduate) and they have the most bound up in the lifelong meaning of those investments.
If I am right about any of this (I won't expect to be right about all of it), then some very big, stakeholder-related questions arise for institutional leadership and management.
How do we use our autonomy?
UK HEIs are - by international comparison - extraordinarily autonomous, and hold that autonomy at the institutional level. (In contrast, autonomy - when it is held, as in some jurisdictions, at the faculty or local level - can restrict institutional freedom of action.) However, HEIs are very ambivalent about autonomy. We pay excessive lip service to the idea but we are also hooked on earmarked funding. Lots of university leaders won't do what they know they should unless, and until, there is a special fund to support it. And they stop as soon as the so-called initiative ends. This can lead to a very curious inversion of institutional priorities. The thing that we assume to be most important becomes not the first but the last call on our institutional resources.
How do we balance our obligations to civil society and the state?
Self-interest can trump stewardship responsibilities and the notion of a wider public interest. At the height of the era of expansion through officially induced competition, our governing Boards and Councils were basically enjoined to look no further than the bottom line; certainly not to any kind of wider set of interests which might call this into question. And (as in my allusion to central and eastern Europe) universities can be seduced into an inappropriate relationship with government. University history has some classic cautionary tales here (like Heidegger's Rectoral Address to the University of Freiburg in 1933) and we live permanently at the top of a slippery slope. What, for example, are the underlying implications of political decisions about who is 'under-represented' in higher education?
How do we treat each other (the other members of the sector)?
What lies behind much of the historical success of the UK sector is the concept of a controlled reputational range - ensuring that no individual university's reputation deteriorates to the extent that it could call into question the academic standards and standing of the whole sector. It is important that institutions at each end of the reputational pecking order can recognise each other, and have something tied up in each other's success. The self-appointed 'gangs' in the system (the Russell Group, the 1994 Group, Million+, University Alliance and GuildHE) don't help much in this respect. For them autonomy is mostly bound up in getting a third party (the Government) to restrict the freedom of manoeuvre of their rivals.
How do we provide service at local, national and international levels?
How do we handle the 'Russian Doll' (or 'onion skin') question of providing service simultaneously to the neighbourhood, the sub-region (which may be a city), the region (officially and unofficially defined), the nation, the international region (like Europe) and the global enterprise of higher education?
Stakeholders will exist at all of these levels. Starting with the local: until the advent, in the late twentieth century, of company or for-profit universities, all HEIs grew in some way from the communities that originally sponsored them. These acts of foundation varied according to a range of local circumstances, in time and location. Many such founding commitments have been transformed - positively and perversely - over the ensuing years. It's revealing, for example, to look at the charters of the Victorian and Edwardian 'civics', where local and regional themes abound. In this context, the familiar image of a university as somewhat separate from its community - as, for example, an ivory tower - is curiously unfaithful to the historical record.
Understanding the 'pattern' of university foundations is essential. So, too, is the use of founding purposes - however and how far they need to be updated - in testing university strategic choices. Understanding their institution's history is an important part of any university management's drive to contribute to contemporary society, including on a global scale. At Birkbeck College, I am told that the senior staff, when faced with a difficult issue, ask 'what would George Birkbeck think?'
Meanwhile at the more expansive end of the scale, simplistic analyses of whether HEIs are winning or losing in a global marketplace undervalue the historical role of higher education internationally, which has been much more profoundly structured around cooperation and mutual support than competition and nationalistic breast-beating. They can also be allied with a naive, melioristic view of globalisation.
From the ethical point of view there are questions about:
- the mutual support between national systems of higher education at different stages of development
- the asset-stripping of key personnel
- a potentially pre-emptive 'western' model of intellectual property registration
- 'dumping' of poor quality e-learning materials.
This is not the kind of 'market' that works simply by driving out all of the competition.
How do we best preserve the 'ethical idea' of the university?
There is a kind of presumption that, as stewards of responsible knowledge creation, testing and use, universities are expected to behave well. Most of the pre-conditions for behaving well seem to rely on aspects of emotional intelligence at all levels of the institution, as well as serious corporate self-study. They include establishing and nurturing a grown-up internal culture, avoiding the naive extremes of academic populism on the one hand and management triumphalism on the other. This in turn relies on a secure institutional grasp of the corporate strategy - what is called in some charters and governing articles 'character and mission'. Institutional insecurity - notably financial - can quickly fracture common purpose (to put the point crudely: getting the money right is a necessary but not sufficient condition of institutional success). It also needs a general sense of responsibility for what is done in the institution's name - from marking to marketing, from ethical research to being a good neighbour.
The terms of exchange are similarly important: mature institutions cultivate a discourse that neither over-claims nor over-blames. They also maintain a culture in which intellectual excitement, joy (and even fun), co-exist with a sense of responsibility and even mercy (not all academic exercises - on the part of individuals and groups - should be expected to succeed). In other words, they choose to behave well - towards all of their legitimate stakeholders.
In conclusion, I would submit that our collective commitments through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education are tied up in all of five of these areas. It is a shared understanding of the quality and standards of our academic processes that:
- places institutional autonomy in context
- reassures the institutions of civil society and the state about our intentions and their outcomes
- threads together the diverse parts of a higher education sector
- confirms the currency of our awards at local, national and international levels
- reminds us what it is - in our core business - to behave well.
So what (finally) is the answer to my question: who does own the university?
One answer is very simple, it is the university itself: the members of the corporation or of the governing council. They have the powers that are traditionally associated with ownership. Another answer is harder and more ambiguous: it stretches away from narrow ownership horizontally (or as the social scientists would say synchronically) in terms of all of those other parties who share our risks; and vertically (or diachronically) forwards in time - our governors are temporary stewards of an enterprise with goals that will outlive them.
As a result, nobody owns the university for ever, and everybody can own the university from time to time.
A note on Quality matters
Quality matters is a series of occasional briefing papers that are either initiated within or commissioned by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, as well as selected papers offered by other authors. The series is intended to complement QAA's other publications which include the many factual reports of audits and reviews carried out within the UK and overseas, and what has, through retrospective reflection, been learnt from them.
Like all QAA publications, Quality matters will be evidence-based, but it is also intended to do more than simply report - it is intended to promote discussion and debate about topical and important issues concerned with the management of quality assurance and particularly with its inter-relationships with 'enhancement'. Whilst many papers will of course be concerned with, and it is hoped support, the evolving quality assurance/enhancement debates within the UK, the series will also seek to include international perspectives.
QAA provides a foreword to each Quality matters that sets out our stance on the issues discussed. This enables us - where appropriate - to distinguish our position from any position or argument advanced by the author.
ISBN 978 1 84482 864 7
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