This week, I’m in Manchester for a panel on Ethics in Academia at MANCEPT. I think, after fifteen years in this business, I can pretty accurately judge how much I can say in a 50 or 60 minutes slot, but somehow I find I run over when I have to speak for anything less. As this slot is 30 minutes, I thought I’d write out what I’m going to say. So that’s what this is. A lot of this is based on ideas that Tom Sperlinger and Josie McLellan and I spelled out in our manifesto/book Who Are Universities For?. And some of the presentation is based on a précis of the book I gave at Mansfield College, Oxford a few years ago.
Ethical issues arise in any area when you are the steward of a certain sort of good, or you occupy some position that has power over who gets access to that good. Managers in companies or organisations face ethical questions about hiring, workplace culture, and firing because they have power over who gets to be employed and that’s a substantial good; charity workers have duties to distribute the goods that they hold ethically, fairly or justly, whether they are medicines or funds or housing; doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers face the same questions and have analogous duties because they are entrusted with the good of healthcare expertise and the exclusive license to provide certain treatments. As people now say, all of these individuals are gatekeepers of a particular good, and with that status comes responsibilities, duties, and obligations.
In academia, we have power over who has access to a range of goods. And indeed we do talk about gatekeeping, but it’s most often about goods held by academics, or administrators, or institutions as a whole, and distributed to other academics. We talk of the responsibilities that come from editing prestigious journals, since editors gatekeep access to the prestige that comes from publishing in them—we might say they have an ethical duty to anonymise the review process, for instance. We talk of the obligations of those on hiring committees for secure research or teaching jobs—we say they shouldn’t succumb to prestige bias. And so on.
But another very important sort of good that an academic gatekeeps is the range of goods supplied by an undergraduate education. That’s the ethical issue I want to discuss today. And I want to try to reorientate the way we talk about it. I’ll say something as we go along about what goods are included in this range that an undergraduate education supplies.
Of course, if you’re an academic yourself, you might think this is not something that you yourself gatekeep, even though the institution to which you belong does. Perhaps decision-making about undergraduate admissions has been centralised, or taken out of the hands of academics. As I’ll try to explain, I think that only partially mitigates the ethical issues—academics have power they often don’t realise they have.
Usually, when we discuss who gets admitted to universities to undertake an undergraduate eduction, we make tacit assumptions without even realising that they are assumptions. For instance, we assume that the good that universities gatekeep in this area is the undergraduate degree programme—a programme of academic study taken full-time over three, four, or five consecutive years. And we assume that this good is valuable to someone at a particular time in their life—roughly speaking, as soon as possible after they finish high school or secondary school. We then look at people at that stage of life from different groups, and ask whether they are facing barriers to accessing this good. We typically come up with certain answers: people from these socio-economic backgrounds are admitted at a far lower rate than people from these other socio-economic backgrounds; ditto people from these sorts of school; people who have experience of the care system; and so on. And we typically come up with certain fixes: we make contextual offers, so that applicants from certain demographic groups and educational backgrounds are offered places on the basis of lower grades than those from other demographics and educational backgrounds; we provide support for writing personal statements and choosing A-Levels and perhaps we offer tutoring or mentoring in certain schools to help with academic performance or to provide a window into the world of university that might not otherwise be available to the prospective applicant. These analyses and these interventions are certainly valuable, but I want to argue that they aren’t nearly as radical as we need.
To get a clearer picture of the changes we really need, we must defamiliarise the current system of higher education. I’ll be talking mainly in the UK context, but higher education systems are reasonably homogeneous now, and so similar considerations will hopefully apply to most systems. Defamiliarising an institution you wish to reform is often an important first step along the way towards reforming it. Seeing the ways in which it is not inevitable, seeing the aspects of it you wouldn’t include were you building it from scratch, help us to understand what might be changed and how that might improve matters.
One way to defamiliarise our current system of higher education is to describe the sort of individual whom it best serves, and appreciate how small a group that is; another is the complement to that—to describe the sorts of individual the system currently excludes, and appreciate how many of them there are. Thinking about this will allow us to imagine a different sort of higher education system; one that is more suited to the lives we actually live.
The sort of person for whom the current university system is well designed will live a certain sort of life. They will know at exactly the right time what they would like to study and how. Aged 13, they will know whether they want to go to university and, if they do, what they want to study when they’re there; and they will select the subjects then and again at 15 to suit the degree they’d like to do. Aged 17, they’ll study for and sit their A-Level exams in good health and with a stable home life, so that their marks will correctly measure their abilities. Aged 18 or 19, they’ll start their degree and they’ll move with only minor obstacles to its conclusion three or four years later, where they will graduate successfully. In short, their young life—mid-teens to early twenties—will have a very particular shape. A shape that rather few people’s lives really have.
Much of what I’m going to propose comes from a book, Who Universities Are For?, I wrote with two colleagues at the University of Bristol—Josie McLellan, a historian of communism and community organisations, and Tom Sperlinger, an expert in English literature and radical pedagogy. We came to appreciate how bizarre, historically contingent, and exclusive the very structure of our current higher education system is when we designed, in 2011, and then directed, from 2013 onwards, the Foundation Year in Arts and Social Sciences at Bristol. This is a one-year, pre-undergraduate course designed to prepare students for undergraduate study in any of our degrees in the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences, and Law. The course has no formal entry requirements at all; admission is via a personal statement, a written assignment, and an interview; all teaching is concentrated on two days back-to-back during childcare-friendly hours to allow students to continue part-time with any employment they have; half of the course is a sort of liberal arts tour through the wide range of subjects our faculties teach; the other half provides study skills for the students, preparing them for writing essays, taking notes, participating in seminars, managing their time, and thinking about what they want to get out of their time at university; and if a student completes the course satisfactorily, they are guaranteed a place on a degree programme in our Faculties.
Here are some statistics for the programme just a few years ago, when I was last involved in running it. Of fifty incoming students: half are men, half women; a third are over 25 years old, and a sixth over 40; a little over half are from local postcodes, which is very unusual for University of Bristol; one in three are students of colour, whereas the statistic in the arts faculty more broadly is closer to one in twenty; around a half are the first in their family to go to university, again diverging dramatically from the wider faculty average; 40% are from the low participation neighbourhoods known as POLAR 1 and 2. Over two-thirds of our students sit in three or more of the official widening participation groups; over one-third sit in four or more.
But in a lot of ways, these statistics mask a much richer picture of the range of people who might wish to study at university but who, without an access route like this, could not. Our students have included: a woman in her mid-seventies who emigrated from Jamaica to the UK when she was 14 with no formal qualifications, trained as social worker and spent a career doing that, and decided she wanted to get a university education when she retired—she studied on the Foundation year, then as an undergraduate and as a Masters student, graduating at 81 in 2022; a man approaching thirty who was told by his school careers service that he was suited only to an Army career, spent five years there, and wanted out; people who suffered bereavement or serious physical or mental illness during their high school career and could find no way back into the education system as they recovered in their mid-twenties; many women in their forties and fifties who had borne the vast majority of care for their children with special educational needs or disabilities growing up, and who wanted to study now that their children had left home or entered residential care; many people in their fifties and sixties for whom higher education had never been a possibility, perhaps due to family circumstances or expectations; some people whose experience of high school was demoralising, unsupportive, unhappy, who had rejected the idea of continuing with education at the end of high school but who now wanted to study. These people, and many many like them, are made to feel that their life has been the wrong shape for our higher education system; that they don’t fit. Of course, it is our higher education system that is the wrong shape; it doesn’t fit the population it exists to serve.
So what might a higher education system look like that was built to fit around the lives I have described, and the many more besides them around the country? I should say at this point that there is almost nothing we propose here that isn’t being done in one way or another already in this country by further education institutions, or by the Open University, or by community universities, or by institutions overseas, or by new experimental institutions like Black Mountains College in Wales. There is a danger, when academics trained and working in large wealthy research-intensive universities write about widening participation, that they erase or sideline the achievements and insights of many working in different institutions with fewer resources, but which have often been leading the charge for many years. What is new here, if anything, is our attempt to stitch these proposals together to imagine an entirely new system for the whole country.
One of the features of our current university system that it is easiest to defamiliarise is the three-year degree structure. In this model, all of your undergraduate education is taken in one intensive, all-consuming dose, usually at the end of your teenage years, or shortly thereafter. Most of us in universities think that they provide an education that is valuable in many different ways: they satisfy curiosity, nurture intellectual development, enhance understanding of various parts of the world, provide space to think openly, freely, and carefully about countless features of our world and our lives; they they train their students in skills that help them in their future careers; and so on. It surely seems bizarre, then, to think that there is one privileged three-year period in a typical life of 70 or 80 years in which it is appropriate to gain these benefits, and thereafter no need.
This was always a bizarre idea, I think, but it is becoming stranger and stranger in a world of such fast technological change that our economy will increasingly require people to reskill at various points throughout their working lives as various jobs are automated, or simply disappear. Teachers in universities are good; but no-one’s good enough to provide someone with an education at 18 years old that will see them through until they’re 65 or 70.
And that’s just when we look at the role of universities in preparing people for employment. While it is tempting to view the distributive ethics of higher education primarily through this good, I think it’s a mistake, for universities prepare people for so much more than employment. Like all education, they give us cognitive tools we can use to understand our world better; or they can satisfy intellectual curiosities. But, for better or worse, the cognitive tools I needed as I left undergraduate study in the mid-2000s are very different from the tools I need to understand the world today. And what piques my intellectual curiosity now is different from what piqued it then.
What’s more, the three-year degree is a very daunting prospect for people whose lives are complicated, who carry commitments to dependants, who have certain mental or physical illnesses or disabilities that might flair up, who simply don’t have the self-confidence required to believe that they’ll be able to get through that three year period successfully. And for those people, the three-year degree is an enormous risk. Drop out at any point and you’re left with almost no qualifications to show for it. So:
Proposal 1. We would make modules and not degrees the fundamental unit of academic study.
These might be taken at any time throughout your life, and you would register for individual modules, rather than whole degree courses. While people might still wish to build up to a full degree, either in one go or over many years, there would be no formal point of graduation; no point at which you would say you had finished, and gained everything a university could give you. Because there is no such end point, or there should not be.
A concomitant of the idea that university study should come all at once in a three-year burst, studied to the exclusion of all else, is that teaching is usually scheduled within standard weekday working hours, 9-5; and lectures or seminars take place weekly, making up an 8 or 10 or 12 week semester. But it’s not hard to imagine who this excludes. The traditional solution, of course, is the evening class, as Birkbeck models, again taught once per week for a two or three month period. But that isn’t suitable for everyone either. So:
Proposal 2. We would teach our modules on a range of different schedules: on weekdays, once per week; in evenings, again once per week; in intensive weekend courses; in week-long residential teaching; as mixed distance and in-person learning; and so on.
What’s more, as Adrienne Rich urged in ‘Towards a Women-Centred University’, childcare would be freely available on campus for all students, so that parents might visit their children during lunch hours, in a break between classes, and so on. If the shape of your life involves care for a child, the university should accommodate that shape in such a way that childcare is as much integrated with study as possible.
As we change who we make our universities for, we must change also how people are admitted onto courses of study, or in our system modules. We’ve two proposals here:
Proposal 3a. The less radical is a mixed approach. For those with recent high school qualifications, we take a much more serious approach to contextual offers, tailoring offers based on more fine-grained statistical information about the relationship between high school achievement and achievement in degree programmes; for those without, we use interviews, written assignments, or diagnostic tests, just as we do on the Foundation Year.
Proposal 3b. The more radical proposal is a lottery system. In line with how French universités admit students, we would allow anyone to join basic, introductory modules, perhaps with an aptitude test for certain technical or mathematical modules; we would use a lottery to deal with oversubscription; and then we’d require a certain level of achievement on a basic module to progress to the more advanced versions.
The proposals we’ve looked at so far would surely broaden participation with higher education dramatically. People at all stages of life and with lives of dramatically different shapes would be able to study, and indeed study together. This latter is important. Too much discussion of widening participation is concerned with keeping the university very much as it is, but opening the doors wider, allowing more people to come in, as if the university is owned by the current cadre of academics, or chief administrators, or members of the governing bodies. But it is not. Or, more precisely, it should not be. It should be a public resource, owned by the public and working for the benefit of the public. That public should have a greater hand in determining its activities. Our conversation about higher education should change from assuming the university is internally shipshape, but currently not sufficiently accessible, to thinking of the positive consequences of wider participation for the health of the university. So:
Proposal 4. Those outside the university should have a greater part of play in its running, the design of its courses, its strategic direction.
You might say, of course, that this is populist; it ignores the great expertise built up within universities; expertise that should guide the teaching and research priorities of the university. And surely that expertise should play a role. And yet decades of feminist and Marxist theory, disability, gay, and trans rights activism, and critical race scholarship have revealed how deferring solely to the expertise within universities can lead to a certain parochialism and conservatism within the teaching and research they value and undertake. In each of these cases, the university’s teaching and research has improved as the power to shape agendas has been shared more and more widely. So the expertise of universities should work with the insights of those outwith them to create their courses and research agendas.
Universities are major, powerful institutions within our society. We couldn’t change them as dramatically as we hope to without changing significant other features of the country of which they are a part. We welcome those changes. One significant change would be that the choice to attend further or higher education would no longer be important. For structural reasons, and because of different resources they need, it might well be that higher and further education institutions might remain separate, but as pathways through education, they need not. You could easily imagine a person like one of our Foundation Year students who trained and worked as a self-employed electrician for a number of years, moved to role in a small local company as a health and safety officer, then decided they wanted to pursue their interest in local history further, and joined the Foundation Year with an eye to a degree in that subject. On the model we’re proposing, this sort of pathway would surely be more common and more accessible. Indeed it might become something like the norm.
Our proposal would also have a significant effect on schools. They would be freed from having to keep a constant eye on university preparations. Their students would be freed from the pressure to perform in exams exactly at the time in their life where they are developing who they are going to be. And there would be fewer incentives for parents to game various parts of the system to gain advantage for their children.
There’s a lot here that seems utopian. But, as I mentioned, there isn’t a single proposal that hasn’t been tried at local versions already, in post-92 universities, in the Open University, in further education institutions, or in community education initiatives. But we won’t see large scale change until the different proposals are knitted together. It’s not much good having an evening class or part-time provision if your admissions requirements still exclude nearly everyone over 30; it’s not much good changing your admissions requirements if all you offer is a three-year full-time degree taught in one-hour slots scattered throughout a week in a way that prevents your students for continuing a career through part-time work as they study.
I hope I’ve convinced you that there is nothing inevitable about the structure of our current higher education system; that its bizarre, historically contingent features play a significant role in excluding large numbers of people from that system; and that it is ill-suited to its role. But I hope I’ve also convinced you that there is an alternative version not a million miles away that fits that role better. The key is to ask first: who are universities for? Then take your answer and build a system that fits the lives of those you wish to include.
I think it's very valuable to consider these sorts of alternatives - but it's also valuable to think about what features make the current model not just a completely bizarre and historically contingent model, but one that is actually suited for particular purposes.
The modern university is an outgrowth of a historical apprenticeship into certain aspects of the priesthood. It's no longer an apprenticeship for the priesthood specifically, but postgraduate study really is an apprenticeship to academic research. Apprenticeships make sense as a start of a career, but transitions from one career to another usually take a different form (that has some things in common, but usually leverages the person's accumulated skills in their other profession, rather than taking the form of a training).
Universities also function, for better and for worse, as enculturation into a transnational cosmopolitan social class (as well as providing more fine-grained enculturation into various professions). This kind of enculturation into any culture works more effectively with young people in an immersive environment. There are of course ways in which people at other life stages enculturate into various cultural groups, but again, they are usually immersive, and entail significant disruption to the person's existing career and family life (and in some cases, that disruption is part of the point).
To the extent that universities also serve as the place where people can get discrete skills and particular bits of knowledge, those may well be separable from these other functions, and we may want to develop multiple forms of institution that provide them in ways that are separable from enculturation and apprenticeship. And we probably don't want to tie all the goods that people get from a university degree to enculturation and apprenticeship.
But if the enculturation and apprenticeship are themselves valuable things, then we should be careful that the features we try to eliminate in the name of accommodation aren't important features in the effectiveness of these things.
I'm interested in taking this in a different direction, which treats university as one element of a system of post-school education and vocational training where (as now with high school) the norm is that of universal participation. This means that notions like "admission" would be replaced by "sorting", working out which programs students are capable of completing, and allowing them to choose among them.
Part of this process would be a flattening out of status hierarchies among universities, most obviously by redistribution of public funding on a needs basis. To put it as bluntly as possible, instead of being a set of quasi-indpendent charitable NGOs serving a limited elite (their historical position), unis would represent one option for years 13-16 of a standard education.