Building Better Universities

Strategies, Spaces, Technologies

Jos Boys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135127633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Building Better Universities provides a wide-ranging summary and critical review of the increasing number of groundbreaking initiatives undertaken by universities and colleges around the world. It suggests that we have reached a key moment for the higher education sector in which the services, location, scale, ownership, and distinctiveness of education are being altered dramatically, whether universities and colleges want it or not. These shifts are affecting traditional assumptions about both the future 'shape' of higher education institutions, and the roles of—and relationships between—learners, teachers, researchers, managers, businesses, communities and other stakeholders.

Building Better Universities aims to bridge the gap between educational ideas about what the university is, or should be 'for', and its day-to-day practices and organisation. It roams across strategic, operational, and institutional issues; space planning and building design; and technological change, in order to bring together issues that are often dealt with separately. By analysing the many challenges faced by higher education in the contemporary period, and exploring the various ways universities and colleges are responding, this powerful book aims to support a 'step-change' in debates over the future of higher education, and to enable senior managers and faculty to develop more strategic and creative ways of enabling effective twenty-first-century learning in their own institutions.

1
RESHAPING UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES

‘Higher education’ is an educational process that may or may not be found in universities: it is a critical concept that provides standards such that educational processes in universities (or institutions of higher education for that matter) can be assessed as to the extent to which they fulfil the criteria implied in the idea of higher education.

—Barnett (2011: 2–3)

Contemporary public universities, as the major providers of higher education, have developed a common shape—with, of course, many variations—out of their local and national traditions and practices. The history and contemporary state of the typical western university has been written about many times. As outlined in the Introduction, universities tend to offer a variety of subjects, usually covering a comprehensive range across the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. They offer learning as a structured experience over several years, organized through levels, and with entry controls and exit accreditation at each stage. They (mainly) break learning into components such as modules that are then built sequentially by students into a coherent set. They have powers of accreditation that benchmark levels of achievement and quality against national and international norms. They combine knowledge creation with its dissemination and application. They develop different subject and vocational expertise that is then ‘passed on’ to others, both for their own personal and career development and for developing the academic discipline area and university itself. Although there are many differences in how subjects are bundled, taught, researched, governed, and funded across various educational institutions, this underlying educational model remains recognizable yet also has inherent tensions and difficulties, which are returned to throughout this book.

I explore in more depth how this typical university shape is being challenged by for-profit educational providers and new kinds of public–private partnering in Chapter 2. First, however, I want to explore some of the new forms of higher education—sometimes calling themselves universities and sometimes not—that are currently emerging. Are there hints of alternative kinds of educational models, offering different ways of learning, teaching, and researching? Can (or should) universities restructure the conventional model, and if so, why and in what different kinds of bundles? How and why might the student experience be different—and even better—to the ‘norm’? And can we support students more effectively in their studies? Examples of efforts in each of these areas are examined, both to open up debate about what universities are for in the early twenty-first century and to investigate how this is affecting their actual reshaping ‘on the ground.’

More or Less the Same?

The current view of contemporary universities from its disaffected critics in the English-speaking world is well summed up by Rolfe, is his comments on the ubiquitous mission statement:

Most university mission statements tend to express more or less the same aims, observations, aspirations and assumptions […] and which ‘all claim that theirs is a unique educational institution.’ They ‘all go on to describe this uniqueness in exactly the same way’. (Readings 1997: 133) One possible reason for this conformity is perhaps, because, as William Melody observes, ‘the primary measure of the modern university is simply to do what its funders want it to do.’ (1997: 82)

(2013: 54)

University mission statements often exemplify the complexification of our educational models and the tensions and dilemmas involved (Pinheiro et al. 2012; Pinheiro and Stensaker 2014). As higher education accumulates more and more—potentially contradictory—activities, it still maintains a preference for a comprehensive ‘all things to all people’ version of the university, in too many cases just adding more items to its mission list. Beyond the elite institutions (that can continue to build on their national and international prestige) this is having the effect of many educational institutions competing for the same territory. They promote themselves as multipurpose organizations, providing ‘excellent’ or ‘quality’ education to attract the ‘brightest and the best’—copying and reproducing the existing system rather than innovating in new directions. Within a context predominantly about developing differentiation generated by the market, this is unwittingly supporting a simplistic bifurcation between vocationally oriented colleges (together with many new for-profit providers) and universities ranked by status and reputation. It is potentially leading to a world in which colleges and their equivalents only do ‘one’ thing—locally relevant or massively scaled-up vocational courses, whereas universities offer a full array of learning, teaching and research and scrabble not to drop to the bottom of the league table or—if the worse comes to the worse—find themselves ‘merely’ teaching universities. However, there are in fact many alternatives to such a self-perpetuating system. Here I explore some examples that have taken different views on how to reshape these conventional components—both at the level of the whole university and within it. This chapter thus considers some of the emerging educational models of new providers, being developed across the public, private, and open sectors. Three themes are drawn out. The first is an increasing lack of relevance of formal accreditation, even that provided by a recognized ‘prestigious’ university. In fact, reputation and status are potentially disaggre-gating from certification; new entities are selling themselves on the quality of their academics alone or on the value of the learning, not on the heritage of the institution. Many of these new organizations are thus positioning themselves as apart from, and therefore better than, conventional universities and colleges. The second theme concerns the radical restructuring of current degree delivery. Here, the challenge is to the assumptions behind what constitutes a ‘standard’ university course and what types and combinations of courses universities should be offering. The final theme explores some examples of rethinking relationships between university and student, such that the learner is not merely a passive ‘receiver’ of services.

Theme 1.1: Alternative Universities?

1.1.a Singularity University, Silicon Valley, USA

The Singularity University (SU) starts not from a model of the typical all-purpose university but from a specific, focused, and unifying theme, as expressed in the strap line on their homepage: to “assemble, educate and inspire a new generation of leaders who strive to understand and utilize exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges” (http://singularityu.org/). Such a thematic view cuts across separate subject areas. It is a direct response to the contemporary moment, in which the rate and the hybrid nature of technological change creates a demand for education across many academic and applied disciplines. As cofounder Peter Diamandis says, he “realised there was no place I could go and learn this stuff without getting a PhD in multiple fields. I said to myself, I bet there’s a great market for an international interdisciplinary university teaching all the exponential technologies” (Rowan 2013).

Cofounded with Ray Kurtzweil in 2008—and linked to his work in The Singularity is Near (2006)—the university is based at NASA’s Ames site. It began as a summer school and is now expanding into a much larger operation, with an intended global reach. Its business model comes from the conventional logic of achieving a high ranking, status, and reputation. Its market is an elite audience, paying large fees for a variety of events and courses, and benefiting from working with world-famous guest speakers, specialist faculty, and having access to high-quality equipment and resources:

The four- and seven-day executive programmes—six this year—help to fund the ten-week graduate-studies programme, in which 80 carefully chosen international students split their time between lessons and “creating projects that will impact humanity”. After about 160 lectures and several days of intensive workshops, they work on business ideas that could potentially affect a billion people. Last year there were 4,000 applicants from 120 countries for the 80 slots. […]

The project is also scaling up. The university recently acquired the Singularity Summit conferences and the Singularity Hub web portal; and it will launch two-day Singularity Summits in various cities. Online education will be “a huge initiative for 2013”, according to Gabriel Baldinucci, in charge of development and strategy. “It will be a paid course. We see ourselves as very complementary to graduate schools.”

(Rowan 2013)

The university has also moved from nonprofit to a for-profit benefit corporation, because a central aim is to create business incubators and take stakes in spun-out companies. Crucially, SU is not accredited and does not plan to become so: “You need to fix your curriculum for that,” says Salim Ismail. “We change ours five times a year! One of the deans at Stanford proudly told me they update theirs every six years. But if you’re doing a master’s degree today in neuroscience or advanced robotics or biotech, by the time you finish you’re out of date” (quoted in ibid.).

So, here is a university that does not give awards but still promotes itself as a high-quality and innovative educational institution, albeit via the conventional norms of the sector: based on the reputation of its academics and on the excellence of the provision. It is also likely to be successful in competing for, and attracting, high-achieving students who, in turn, will cement its reputation. For Diamandis, “we’re building a university here, a community, a family of people who are thinking about the future. And we’re iterating. This is just the beginning. In a world where the biggest problems on the planet are the biggest market opportunities, why wouldn’t you be focusing on them?” (ibid.). SU, then, competes with the most elite universities worldwide, with a unique selling point (USP) that challenges a reliance on history and tradition to guarantee quality. But unlike the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, say, that also combines courses with start-up opportunities, SU can be very flexible and adaptable, offering a variety of courses at market prices with fewer overheads or external oversight demands. It cross-subsidizes single semester courses with commercially priced one-off events (in the summer of 2013 $12,000/£7,650 for a seven-day program) and aims to ‘sweat’ all its assets, including offering its faculty up as guest speakers (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Singularity University’s ‘request a speaker’ webpage

Source: http://singularityu.org/faculty/. Reprinted with permission from Susan Moran.

The underlying tendency—toward an emphasis on current technologies and interdisciplinary development—is, of course, being reflected elsewhere, often linked as with SU to direct entry into the elite global educational market. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology opened in 2010 and is already the world’s sixth-richest university, with a $10 billion endowment. Like SU, it does away with academic departments, instead having four interdisciplinary research institutes focusing on biosciences, materials science, energy and the environment, and computer science and math.

1.1.b The New College of the Humanities, London, UK

The philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new London-based educational institution, the New College of the Humanities (NCH), also aims for an elite clientele, but this time not so much looking ‘forward’ as ‘backward’ based on precisely the idea of tradition and heritage as a marker of quality. It offers a traditional liberal arts education, reclaimed from what Grayling considers the latest fads and unnecessary bureaucratic requirements of existing universities, to focus on the “study of the humanities [which] provides personal enrichment, intellectual training, breadth of vision, and the well-informed, sharply questioning cast of mind needed for success in life in our complex and rapidly changing world” (NCH 2013: 4). It is framed around the Oxbridge model of small-group teaching, very regular writing tasks and individual tutorials with faculty. Begun in 2012, NCH is still a tiny organization, but has received a lot of media attentio...