Chapter 10

Ten questions about the future of universities

Ten questions

1. Will the research-led university, which has been the key model for a century and a half, persist into the future or has it had its day?
2. Will the multi-faculty university survive?
3. How many universities will be there be, and what size?
4. Will the proportion of international students increase or decrease?
5. How many students will be studying courses by different modes?
6. Will technology take over and eliminate current approaches to teaching? With increasing e-education, what will happen to the current geographic institutions with large campuses?
7. What will happen to the quality of university degrees and ‘grade inflation’?
8. Will freedom of speech be maintained in universities?
9. Will academia continue to be an attractive and sustainable career?
10. How much will thriving economies devote to the university sector in GDP terms?

Question 1

Will the research-led university, which has been the key model for a century and a half, persist into the future or has it had its day?

We have discussed the background to this existential question at some length, particularly in Chapters 2 and 4, and we do not really believe that it has a ‘Yes or No’ answer.

This model – where research and teaching are combined and where teaching is, in principle, informed by research – works well for staff and most would say reasonably well (though this proposition has been challenged, for example in the teaching rankings) for today’s students. Many great people are attracted to university life by a desire to contribute new knowledge in an important field, that is the entirely honourable research motivation.

For staff, it provides a career structure where new knowledge creation is combined with teaching others. That is an extremely satisfactory emotional position for most academics. There are important issues around tenure (and permanent contracts) that may last decades beyond an individual’s creative research contribution or teaching capacity. Particularly in some disciplines, great research often takes place relatively early in an academic’s career. Tenure, which lasts for life in countries where it exists, is, however, very highly valued for the good reason that it maintains the academic independence of the individual researcher and prevents investigative and challenging thought being compromised by seeking advancement for venal reasons.

However, one important consequence of long-term tenure is that it makes it more difficult to give younger people the academic security they need to be able to conduct their research. There is an echo of this dilemma in current controversies about the appropriate retirement age for academics in an era where discrimination on the grounds of age is illegal. The lack of an established retiring age for senior academics undoubtedly leads to significant cross-generational inequities.

There are parallel dilemmas around the university complacency that this can create and that makes it extremely difficult to reform traditional academic staff and university structures, sometimes despite very obvious needs for change, such as the arrival of new modes of teaching, or the need for more flexible forms of learning.

However, it’s likely that academic life, at least in the vast majority of universities, will have to come much closer to work expectations in the rest of society, in that ongoing employment will be linked to performance.

It also defines, at one level, the traditional difference between a university teacher and a secondary school teacher, the fact that the academic creates as well as imparts knowledge. This is at the core of much of the prestige and most of the appeal associated with academic life. The very close alignment between teaching and research still pertains in most universities for most academics. However, even top research institutions now often have teaching-focused parallel promotion schemes that recognise the crucial value of the non-research-active dedicated educator.

For students, the benefits of research-led teaching are less immediately visible. It makes empirical sense that the teacher who is at the forefront of knowledge creation could well be able to inspire students with the excitement of the new and lead many of them to research interests themselves in a way that someone who has never been research-active may well find more difficult.

It is also probable that the intellectual environment in an institution where new research ground is being broken is more vibrant than in a purely teaching institution. On the other hand, in spite of some efforts, there has been a tendency in the great research universities for research to dominate career structures and promotion prospects and for teaching to take second place. This has been recognised in the UK with the introduction of a Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) to balance the well-established research excellence framework. This is clearly an attempt to rebalance university priorities in a way that will probably also rebalance academic careers.

It is also undeniable that an excellent university education can be provided by institutions that are not research-active in a major way. The private Laureate group is a more complete example. It runs excellent universities, especially in the Spanish-speaking world where research is carried out as needed to meet registration criteria and not part of their core mission.

These institutions teach well and have first-rate professional schools. What do they miss that research-active institutions can offer? Certainly, stimulation of students to probe new frontiers themselves and perhaps (though this is highly questionable) a vitality of intellectual excitement at the highest level. Does this matter to most students? Possibly not. Most wish to get an education that fits them for a career in the wider world. Only a small proportion will choose to pursue a direct academic or research career and, if they do, their first degree in a teaching-only institution, they are always able to develop research interests through postgraduate experience and qualifications at many points in their life.

The reductionist national policy analysts note that teaching-only institutions are more efficient, they are more focused on the educational outcomes (again this can be disputed) and they are perhaps less turbulent! In short, going to such an institution may not be so different from the senior years of secondary or high school.

Of course, those who argue for teaching-only universities as the predominant model may miss the ‘ghost in the machine’ – that co-existence between research and teaching that has served universities so well over the past 150 years.

Universities that are set up in this way tend to be the most productive in brilliant graduates and, for obvious reasons, attract the most outstanding research staff. It is their existence that marks academia as an exciting career profile and helps draw brilliant people into it.

Research and education can, of course, be separated. To some extent, this happens in Germany where the Fraunhofer and Max Planck Institutes co-exist with a vibrant university sector. It works in Germany because tight alliances are developed with PhD opportunities being offered through universities in affiliated institutes. Perhaps if the great scientists in the Max Planck institutions were more engaged in teaching roles, German universities would be stronger again!

None of the above reflections answers the question as to whether the research-led education university model will survive as the general model over the next 50 years. For the reasons set out above, biased academics who have spent careers in this system often think its merits should prevail but it is far from sure that they will.

Reductionist thinking from governments and others may fail to see or value that special spark that makes the research university shine. It could be legislated out of existence. The way that the current UK Government has developed the TEF has the potential to unravel and do great harm to very strong institutions that are still doing great things for the country and more widely.

If university teaching were simply to be offered in the most cost-effective way, then the current research-led model may find itself under fatal pressures as it faces competition from both public and private universities using a variety of modes of learning.

That would be a great shame for the reasons set out at the beginning of this book – that for universities as a whole to contribute to addressing the rapid process of change in the world, we need universities that operate well in all of the four pillars that we identify:

• understanding and interpreting change in the world;
• offering approaches to harness the process of change for general benefit;
• educating and training the specialists whose skills are necessary to address change;
• creating an intellectually engaging climate and culture across societies.

Teaching, vital though it is, is just one of those key university roles and we need universities that can play the wider role that we have identified.

We are clear that neither the ‘resist almost all change’ dodos, nor the ‘avalanche of change’ advocates offer a helpful way forward. One of the key things that frighten all education reformers is that what looks like sensible reform may be overly simplistic and damage the valuable heritage of universities that has contributed so much to our society.

The golden key to this process of change is to find an organic development that blends the positive opportunities that technology and other forms of change can bring and the strong university values that are so important.

In this book we try to offer suggestions as to how this organic development could be fostered through better relationships between research and teaching, more fluid networks of institutions, more positive and dynamic interaction between workplaces and universities, less rigid mechanisms of teaching and learning, better international relationships and more promotion of university-level learning through life to enable people to address accelerating change in their lives ever more effectively.

Our conviction is that a positive attitude to this process of change will not happen at the behest of governments but has to be embraced by universities themselves and their leaders.

In each of the areas that we describe there have been a few initiatives and projects in the places where change is needed. Some have been extremely positive and encouraging. But there are very few, if any, examples of the kinds of systemic transformation in any of these areas that would give confidence in the capacity of the university system to transform itself to meet modern needs.

Government cannot impose a process of change that meets these needs, but it can encourage it, including by creating a legal and sustainable funding framework within which change can flourish.

The question that we pose does not have a clear ‘Yes or No’ answer. The key to successful transformation towards universities of the future will depend upon high quality leadership and thought, both in individual universities and in governments and that has to be fostered.

Question 2

Will the multi-faculty university survive?

It is interesting that most of the world’s really great universities are now multi-faculty, another way of saying that they encompass the sciences and the humanities broadly. In Chapter 4 we mention Paul Wellings’ demonstration of this.

The humanities interpreted in this way include law and business schools as well as the social sciences and the arts and humanities. The sciences include the applied sciences of engineering and medicine, information technology and the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and mathematics. Traditionally, these came together because it has proved more efficient to maintain academic structures that relate to a number of faculties and have a critical mass. This co-existence has been significantly reinforced over the past decade by the rise of interdisciplinarity in both education and research.

The intellectual power that can be brought to bear around the challenges of the age, both large and small, is significantly enhanced when individuals from different disciplines who look at the problem from different perspectives can be brought together. Universities are just starting to educate the next generation of students in a way that puts interdisciplinarity at the core of their thinking processes. This is already proving immensely valuable.

At its high point, one can see examples such as the Earth Institute at Columbia University, probably the leading environmental institute in the world, but examples abound in every university. Much of the most exciting work going on in the university world at the moment brings different disciplines together to attack important problems. This is increasingly recognised through research funding bodies, notably the research councils in the UK. That is not to say that disciplinary depth does not continue to be crucial. Of course, it does.

One cannot build a house on bricks of straw. But institutions that crack the interdisciplinary problem in their structures will thrive more than those that do not.

In some countries, single discipline universities have been the standard model. This is reflected to varying extents in a number of European countries. In the US, some of the greatest institutions specialise in a small number of disciplines. MIT is one example but it is noteworthy that expertise has been built up in a wide range of disciplines over the years and that wide collaborations with other institutions have filled the gaps.

Imperial College in London, a great engineering and natural sciences university, has now acquired a first-rate medical school and spawned a leading-edge business school.

Other institutions continue to thrive in a narrow space and do extraordinarily well. Researcher for researcher, Caltech may well be the strongest scientific institution in the world in university terms. It is very small but it is outstandingly strong. UCSF and the Karolinska in Stockholm are outstanding medical universities not closely affiliated with other disciplines. The London School of Economics provides superb training in the social sciences. All of these exceptions to the rule do not disprove the key point. Each of them has overcome disciplinary isolation in novel ways. It may be by a focus on those areas that are attackable through single disciplinary approaches and they are many, or it may be through appropriate alliances with neighbouring institutions.

Their success does not negate the proposition that a multidisciplinary approach is a massive asset in today’s university world. The grand challenges, as defined by international authorities, all require a multidisciplinary approach to effect solution whether it be healthy ageing or a sustainable economy and a sustainable planet. It is likely that the multidisciplinary institution is here to stay, at least for a while longer!

These arguments for multi- and cross-disciplinary study, which apply very strongly in many fields of research, pertain perhaps even more strongly in undergraduate teaching. Despite recent developments in permitting single discipline universities in the UK, such as the University of Law, there is little doubt that both individual and the wider society benefit from education across the range of knowledge. The ‘Two Cultures’,² about which CP Snow wrote 60 years ago and which so alarmed policy-makers at the time, remains a pressing policy concern both in the purely educational arena and in the cultural politics of what makes an educated and civilised society.

As we argue elsewhere in this book, one of the central functions of universities is to educate, in the widest sense, citizens of society to deal with the complexity and range of challenges that arise increasingly rapidly across the world. That is better done in a multi-faculty context and for us will remain a convincing argument for the dominant role of multi-faculty university, at least in the early stages of university student life.

We suspect that the demand from researchers to work in a cross-disciplinary way, and for potential undergraduates to learn in a multi-faculty context, will be powerful agents to encourage multi-faculty universities to go from strength to strength, perhaps enhanced by a stronger international dimension.

However, monotechnic university teaching will increase its challenge to multi-faculty universities for reasons of cost and also quality, even if perhaps narrowly defined.

Universities need to work harder to create internal structures that promote interdisciplinary research and teaching and build strong partnerships with other universities. This may well mean breaking down the walls of some silos that exist.

And governments need to keep under close review the decision to allow monotechnic institutions to use the title ‘university’, a decision that, in the UK, happened only recently.

Question 3

How many universities will be there be, and what size?

What is the right number of universities for a city like London?

The current 40+ is the result of organic change over centuries, but has no particular rationality. It includes a collection of entirely different types of institution, some great research centres, other strong teaching institutions, some multi-faculty and some just researching or teaching one discipline.

A large number go back well over a century, though many have only relatively recently been called ‘universities’. This pattern of universities in one city may or may not well reflect the needs of the future, either in research or teaching. And the same could be said of other cities both in the UK and the rest of the world.

Since 1945, many Western economies have moved to about two universities per one million citizens. This ratio may well turn out to be quite durable, even with the advent of new technology. It would mean a significant reduction in the number of universities in the UK.

In most other worlds, such as business or government, there would have been a process of ‘rationalisation’, either through government diktat, or through a process of ‘mergers and acquisitions’ influenced predominantly by market factors.

In the university world, the way forward has been much less clear. Mergers certainly happened in the past, notably when the polytechnics were created and before they became universities. And they are happening in the present, for example when recently the Institute of Education, a world-leading research institution, joined University College London in 2014. And the major university merger between the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology, created the current University of Manchester in 2004. This was intended to add competitive research strength in the North West of England, well away from London and the South East of England where England’s strongest research universities are concentrated.

Other proposed mergers, such as that between Liverpool and Lancaster universities, have crashed in flames when exposed to academic opinion. A planned major Australian merger that attracted a lot of international attention, that between the Universities of Adelaide and of South Australia, has recently collapsed because of cultural mismatch.

There is a series of different types of motive for ‘mergers and acquisitions’ in the university world. They include merging to maximise research strength and cross-fertilisation; merging to develop a better student experience, including a wider range of modes of learning and more efficient use of teaching facilities of all kinds; and merging to create a range of business and functional economies, both of scale and for other reasons.

It might additionally be the case that where universities are facing financial difficulties, as some are at the moment, it might well be better for them to merge, or to be ‘acquired’, to create institutions with the strong financial base needed to develop their teaching and/or research.

Many communities across the country desire to build university capacity in their own city, a motive that reflects the civic approach to the foundation of many of the oldest universities, as we discuss in Chapter 2. And, as we discuss in Chapter 5, this desire to have a university in their locality is usually justified by the experience that the presence of a local university can provide an additional economic boost to the locality, in a variety of ways. This certainly includes teaching and the provision of courses, particularly when there is an increasing proportion of home-based undergraduate students. But it often also includes applied research which can contribute directly to the local economy.

Following the 2003/4 legislation, the establishment of universities was deeply welcomed in counties like Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk and Worcestershire, which had previously had no universities at all. Visits to some of those places now, 15 years on, show clearly the major positive local impact that those universities have created for their communities.

And one important side-effect of this reform is that many of the higher education institutions that became universities at that time changed from being mono-faculty institutions, for example in teacher training or art, to multi-faculty. This happened, and continues to happen, in many creative ways.

The issue of size is less clear. It used to be the case that, in the UK, the size of individual universities was essentially determined by the government, through its control of funding mechanisms. However, the decisions in 2012 (Australia) and 2015 (England) to end the ‘capping’ of university numbers has enabled more of a free-for-all to emerge and remains a subject of political controversy including at the 2019 Australian General Election.

Competition between universities now takes place in a more aggressive way, primarily around brand and perception, and the current state of affairs is rapidly evolving.

The competition based on fee level in England, which was anticipated from the 2004 reforms onwards, and strongly expected after the increase in maximum fee from £3,000 per year to £9,000 per year in 2010, has simply not taken place.

It would be difficult to maintain, on educational grounds, that any particular university, or even faculty, size is optimal though some note that the great Ivy League universities in the US in general enrol rather fewer students than many of the successful research universities in the UK. However, as online learning becomes more prevalent, there will probably be a reducing correlation between success and size.

As a result, we do not expect any ‘preferred’ size of university to dominate, but university size will simply be a residual arising from the process of mergers and acquisitions that otherwise takes place. It will be right for some universities to increase student numbers, like UT in Canada or UCL in London, while others’ strategic ambitions may cause them to contract in student size and many of the very best universities are small in student numbers.

So how will this pattern of universities develop in the future? When new legislation was being considered in 2003/4, Charles was urged by some regulators to give powers to the Secretary of State to require universities to merge if this was in the national interest, for example for reasons of raising research quality or increasing local choices of courses or increasing economic impact.

Obviously, such a power, while seemingly attractive, was potentially threatening to university autonomy and these suggestions were not followed through for reasons of both principle and politics.

However, it was fully expected that, even without such a governmental power, there would be a natural and organic shift towards fewer universities and more co-operations and collaborations between them than has in fact been the case over the succeeding decades.

This is not because the current distribution of universities is optimal but is more a credit to the fundamentally conservative nature of universities that are very cautious about change of any kind, least of all one that leads to the disappearance of a university.

However, it should be noted that one impact of the increased competition between universities, which follows the uncapping of student numbers, may well be one or more university closures or bankruptcies, which many anticipate. One solution to such a crisis is likely to be an ‘acquisition’ by another university, local or not.

There may also be more positive motives, for example to establish universities in parts of the country that currently don’t have one, for example in the way that the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex combined to create what ultimately became the University of Suffolk in 2016.

We are very doubtful whether the current pattern of universities can last as it is for long, given the massive changes, particularly in modes of learning and technology, to which we refer throughout this book.

We hope that university leaders will face up to these challenges themselves. It would be far better for universities themselves to consider, together with their local communities, what might be the best way forward, possibly with new international connections. The alternative is that government – at least in the UK – will come under increasing pressure to take the powers that were not taken in 2003/4 and themselves create a more ‘rational’ pattern of universities. This is not the best way to make this type of change happen.

So, we would suggest that universities in particular cities should give active consideration to the most rational pattern of university research and teaching in that locality and consider what steps should be taken to enable that to happen. And governments should consider what incentives they can offer to encourage a more rational pattern of universities across the country.

Question 4

Will the proportion of international students increase or decrease?

We discuss in Chapter 4 the place of international students and researchers in universities. World student numbers are projected to double in the next 20 years. Will they come to the UK or will the UK have to go to them?

In addition to their educational benefits in improving the university culture and quality, international students have played a vital financial role. They provide the fee income which is absolutely essential for many UK and Australian universities. This is less important for most universities in the US and continental Europe.

The question is whether these numbers of students, and so this income, will continue in the future.

We think that there is a general complacency about the prospects. The fact is that the number of tertiary level students around the world is expanding rapidly and all the projections are for this number to continue increasing. For all the reasons we set out in this book, we think that these projections are in the right direction. The number of tertiary students will continue to increase.

Moreover, English (including the Australian and North American versions) will continue to be the dominant world language. English fluency will continue to be highly desirable, if not an absolute requirement, for those seeking to work in major economic and social sectors around the world.

The only effective linguistic challenge comes from China but we do not believe that even the growing importance of China will threaten the dominant role of the English language in global higher education.

Indeed, it is notable that, in China as well as many other countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, English is continuing to expand as the language of higher education in many countries where English is not the language of the country concerned.

But the reason for this expansion is a key to understanding why the dominant position of the UK and Australia may be threatened. The world market for international students is now so large and opportunity-rich that universities in many countries around the world see benefits for themselves in offering high quality undergraduate courses, through the teaching medium of English, to attract those international students.

Universities making that decision to pursue internationalisation of course offer a measure of competition for the universities that have traditionally been the natural home for international students. But there are three even more serious threats to British and Australian global market share and standing.

The first is the US where there have been relatively far fewer opportunities for international students. In absolute terms, there are many university places for international students in the US, though it is a relatively small proportion of the total number of students in US universities. This is changing as more and more US universities are attracting international students. Universities like the University of Southern California in Los Angeles are able to attract very large numbers of students from countries on the Pacific Rim and more widely, who are ready to pay substantial fees. We believe that this trend will intensify, even if the Trump administration leads to long-term tighter immigration control and a trade war with China. Even in those circumstances, we expect that the US will become a more and more realistic option for students from around the world seeking undergraduate qualifications to enable them to work in the upper levels of the world economy.

The second is the massive expansion of high quality university education, including in English, which is taking place in the main countries of origin themselves, such as China, India, Japan and many others. These universities are themselves becoming increasingly enmeshed in the world economy so that English-speaking graduates of those universities can realistically look to work in world companies on the basis of good qualifications from their home countries, which is for them a far less expensive option than seeking university abroad in very expensive countries.

The third threat is the growing strength of online university-level qualifications. This of course means that students are increasingly able to study for their university qualifications from their own countries, perhaps with only a relatively small number of visits to their university campuses.

So the complacent view that international students, with their funds, will keep coming to UK and Australian universities for their undergraduate and master’s qualifications is one that will become increasingly stressed in coming years. It will be an increasingly competitive world within which current destination universities really will have to look to their laurels.

This is of course why the UK Government’s self-harming focus on erecting visa barriers to international students coming to the UK is so deeply damaging in a number of ways. This is not the place for a discussion about the policy illusions that have preoccupied the government’s decisions, not to mention the whole Brexit psychodrama, except to say that now is absolutely not the time to be building additional hurdles for international students wanting to come to the UK to study.

But it goes beyond that idiocy. In the increasingly competitive marketplace that we predict, universities need to be very sure that they are both welcoming international students properly and providing education at a high level of quality for all students who come to study. There are issues that need to be addressed here and future success will depend upon how well that is done.

Whether the proportion of international students increases or decreases will depend upon the way in which the various factors that we have identified here play out. On balance, we would expect the proportion to decline over the next two decades, but strong university performance could well swing that expectation in a more optimistic direction. But that requires university leadership and government encouragement, if it is to happen.

Question 5

How many students will be studying courses by different modes?

There have been many efforts to increase the number of modes of acquiring an undergraduate degree.

The three-year course traditional in the UK and similar systems has gradually become the norm that other university systems have moved towards, not least through the European ‘Bologna process’.

The British approach was seen as far more efficient than the type of extended university life, up to six or seven years, which had been conventional, for example in German universities.

In parallel, there have been regular efforts to offer different approaches from studying for three academic years in two or three terms or semesters that provide, say, 32–36 weeks’ study a year (or about 100 weeks’ study over three years) with consequent under-utilisation of equipment, teaching and learning facilities and staff time.

In 1968, the then universities minister, Shirley Williams, proposed two-year degrees. Her proposal has been followed by a whole series of models, including Diplomas in Higher Education (DipHEs), foundation degrees, sandwich degrees, with full-time work interspersed with study, and now degree apprenticeships. Most recently, we have seen ‘accelerated’ and ‘fast-track’ degrees.

All of these, and similar models across the world, have their merits and are designed to meet certain types of educational need, often valuably relating study more closely to work opportunities. Changes towards a more significant ‘work’ component in a university degree could well lead to a renaissance of ‘sandwich-style’ study.

A different form of variety was stimulated by the Open University in the UK, now with many imitators across the world – many of which are extraordinarily successful. Online education has developed rapidly, though perhaps not yet as rapidly as many people expected, with entirely new types of university as well as an extension to this mode of learning from more traditional universities. This type of degree could well be supplemented by strong residential components with a price premium.

As these different approaches to degree qualifications swirl and eddy across universities in every continent, many of them opening up university possibilities to students who never had the chance before, the question arises how the patterns will develop in coming decades. With these challenges it is not at all certain that the conventional three-year degree will continue to be the absolutely dominant mode as other forms of getting a degree become increasingly commonplace.

The new modes of learning may even come to dominate the number of degrees that are awarded so that most students get their degrees online, with the ability to study at the times and in the environments that seem most convenient to their own circumstances.

The only prediction that we feel able to make with any confidence is that, over the next couple of decades, there will be a declining proportion of students getting their undergraduate degrees through the traditional route of a residential three-year degree away from home.

We do not predict this because the absolute number of students following such a course will decline, but because there will be an expansion in the number of students getting their degrees by other, more diverse, routes.

In fact, we think that it is unlikely that there will be a great deal of change for university study from 19 to 22 after leaving school. There is little doubt that, students, their families and potential employers will continue to see this residential degree as valuable if it can be afforded. Whatever its educational merits it has become a rite of passage for a very large proportion of the children of middle-class families across the developed world, and an increasingly large proportion of the children of working-class families. Changes will be more likely to enhance this experience, for example through a more substantial international component, than to reduce it.

The decision to take a break between school and university may become more common, which both enhances the quality of students’ choices about their courses and improves their capacity to work at university. But it will not reduce significantly the number of students choosing the traditional university course mode of study.

So, our conclusion is that a wider range of course modes of study will be developed, which will have the effect of increasing access to university qualifications, and so the proportion studying by the conventional route will decline. But the conventional option will remain popular and desired. And we expect a larger number of students to take qualifications later in life for the reasons we discuss in Chapter 7, and that almost all of these will be through online education with limited residential elements.

The universities that will achieve most success will be those that can best improve the quality of student education on that basis and so improve the overall student experience.

And governments will need to find funding systems that encourage diverse forms of learning.

Question 6

Will technology take over and eliminate current approaches to teaching? With increasing e-education, what will happen to the current geographic institutions with large campuses?

We have discussed in our answer to question 5 the development of online learning which we think will open far wider opportunities and enable more people to study, but will not close down traditional residential education.

Many people have observed with great interest the chess battles between the best players of the day. In the world of chess, Garry Kasparov held his own against Deep Blue but Watson in the end proved unbeatable. There is no doubt that new computer-based learning paradigms will have the capacity to take some of the strain at the early stages of undergraduate education in the years ahead. It is just conceivable that by mid-century this will have replaced the human component and it could be seen as an extension of the technology-enhanced learning methodologies currently coming into practice. In science fiction, it is uniform to have computer assistance in managing complex databases.

This has not found its way into everyday life at the moment but it is reasonably clear that eventually it will and it will be a small step from scanning a database of information to asking one’s computer to do more analysis and more of the intellectual groundwork. We look forward immensely to the day when that comes to pass but I’m sure that academics and other teachers will still be talking to students and assisting with their development many decades into the future.

Joseph Aoun’s book,³ to which we referred in Chapter 3, discusses this in detail.

The technology will, however, significantly change the way in which much teaching is delivered. This process of change will have a big impact on current university buildings and infrastructure. This is already happening.

If conventional on-campus education is transformed by the irresistible onward march of e-education, then of course current massive campuses used for undergraduate educational purposes for a relatively modest proportion of each year will no longer be needed and will be converted into apartments, townhouses and whatever else will generate money for developers!

Whatever the level of technological change in learning methods, significant changes will occur. Increased inroads from technology-enhanced learning into highly traditional schools are both appropriate and unstoppable. The large lecture, typically to first-year students, where 500 or more students may sit in a room and listen to a lecture little different from information they could read in any standard textbook with no opportunity for questioning or dialogue, has almost certainly had its day. Most academics enjoy the lecture process and many great universities are wedded to it so change will be slow. Even modest steps like lecture capture on video meet resistance.

Technology-enhanced learning re-badged as large group learning, where a single tutor oversees and contributes to a large number of students working in smaller groups, probably is viable.

More and more educators’ time will be spent in direct dialogue with small numbers of students using new technologies to lighten the teaching load. This means, at the very least, that the plethora of large lecture theatres currently seen on most university campuses will be a thing of the past. More and more learning is likely to be done in informal surroundings which may well continue to be on university campuses but may also be in people’s homes, community centres or even their other workplaces.

This also means that individual students will get more personalised teaching attention, really focusing on their own individual learning needs, and this is likely to be beneficial, though of course is potentially very time-consuming and expensive, possibly prohibitively so.

Research needs in terms of laboratories and workshops are likely to continue more or less as they are at the moment.

Whatever the level of e-communication between students and teachers, a physical hub where personal communication takes place is still likely to be both educationally desirable, and desired.

The end result is that university campuses may be a little smaller and on-campus student numbers may even be reduced a little. But the university as a significant campus entity is likely to continue even in the age of e-education.

But the way that will work requires a good deal of thinking and preparation.

Question 7

What will happen to the quality of university degrees and ‘grade inflation’?

‘Standards aren’t what they were in my day’ is a refrain that echoes down the ages at all stages of education, very much including in modern universities.

The views of such critics, often broadcast widely in the media, give rise to a genuine no-win situation for universities: if universities get better at teaching and learning, as we should wish, the likely outcome is that a higher proportion of students will get first class or other good honours degrees and a lower proportion will get low grades. That should be seen as a sign of university success, and not of insufficiently rigorous attention to standards.

If the proportion of ‘good’ degrees goes down, then universities are seen not to be doing their job properly. Students paying large fees may also expect high grades and some have even taken legal action to try to guarantee the return in their investment!

And, if universities decide to give first class degrees to a specific percentage of students, do they end up giving degrees to individuals who in previous years would not have got a first class degree in order to fulfill the quota; or, conversely, are they not giving certain people the first class degrees that they deserve because that would mean too many first class degrees? Either way, there are significant issues of equity between generations.

Equity between institutions is also problematic. We do not believe that all first class mathematics or law degrees from any university in the country demonstrate equal levels of achievement. And certainly public perception values similar degrees from different universities very differently. Whether fairly or unfairly, degrees from some universities, mainly the most research-intensive, are given greater status by employers and sometimes universities when considering people for doctoral studies than others.

It is very difficult to test the fairness of such perceptions, which can have significant consequences for the students concerned.

Moreover, there are challenges around incentivisation. As the world of university entrance becomes more competitive, there is a contest for students (and their fees) which can lead to more ‘unconditional’ university offers⁴ and the controversy that invites. At the same time, universities, not unreasonably, want to be able to assure applying students that they have a good chance of a ‘good’ degree if they come to their university.

These issues of course affect schools as well as universities, and they mostly reflect educational and political fashion rather than issues of substance.

But they do pose challenges to universities and will continue to do so.

It is very important to ensure that the quality of qualifications is protected against cheating, plagiarism and other such problems and rigour is needed in that respect.

And it is even more important to put in place systems of assessment that help students to learn and to develop themselves so that they emerge from university with the highest possible capacity to fulfill themselves and to meet the challenges that they face.

We suspect that the issues in this area will continue to flurry, without the imposition of a national system of awarding degrees which removes this right from individual universities.

It is yet another matter to which universities will need to continue to give focused attention if they are not to find themselves unduly criticised.

Question 8

Will freedom of speech be maintained in universities?

Given the history of universities, this question really should be quite unnecessary. Freedom of speech has been central to the development of universities as we know them. But as we have discussed in Chapter 6, there are a number of important issues of conduct and controversy that universities need to address.

In recent years, it has inescapably become true that there are increasingly frequent challenges, in a variety of ways, to freedom of speech. Forty-five years ago, the controversies swirled around ‘no platform’ for racists and fascists, with all kinds of definitions of those words and, as always, the conflicts in the Middle East were a significant part of the disputes, notably around the proposition adopted by the United Nations between 1975 and 1991 that ‘Zionism is Racism’.

Today, the same arguments continue in universities, with additional reference to terrorism and a wide range of other concerns, such as transgender identification. In historic institutions, there have been campaigns to remove statues of individuals such as Cecil Rhodes who are deemed to have played an unacceptable role in establishing the British Empire or a repressive role more generally in history.

In the UK, the government created significant difficulties for universities by including them, mistakenly in our view, in the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, which gave UK universities a statutory duty to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent individuals from being drawn into terrorism’.

And, over the years, the legal situation has moved on as the statute now seeks to prevent ‘incitement to hatred’ on grounds of race and religious belief.

It should be no surprise that universities are places where the boundaries of good practice, and the law, are tested most sharply.

But it seems to us exceptionally important that universities, as the homes of controversy and critical thinking and challengers of conformist thinking, should not, in general, accept the position of those who believe that they have the right to prevent others speaking their views, however offensive and provocative.

In fact, we would go further and maintain that it is the duty of universities to go further and take whatever steps are necessary to protect the ability of such people to express their views.

This is often difficult because of potential public order issues, which do need to be dealt with sensitively – often easier to write about than actually to do.

That said, the principles should be clear:

1. Universities should act within the law of the land, and it is the responsibility of the police and security services to uphold that law.
2. Within that constraint, universities have a duty to uphold freedom of speech under the law, and to sustain a university culture that gives priority to a true and rounded intellectual and cultural history that deals with history as it is and not how it might or should have been.

This is, of course, not easy but we remain convinced that universities without genuine freedom of speech are ultimately unable to fulfill their responsibilities for preparing for the future.

Question 9

Will academia continue to be an attractive and sustainable career?

This is a very difficult question because, at one level, academia has never been more attractive as a career option than it is at the moment. Why do we say that? Because the pathway to academic life is still a PhD and there are now more students doing PhDs at universities around the world than was ever the case in the past. Granted, many of them will end up working outside universities in productive roles in industry and business but others will be the great academics of the future. This all sounds rosy but of course there is a downside.

The jobs for life, which tenure used to imply, are not the norm in wider society. And here academics need to be a little careful. It sometimes seems as if their work expectations in terms of issues such as tenure, workload and pensions don’t align fully with what’s going on in the rest of society.

In today’s world, lifelong tenure is unusual and pensions based on final salary are going out both because of the financial implications of dramatically increased longevity and because of intergenerational fairness.

Workloads where the educational component is centred on less than half of the calendar with very high degrees of personal freedom aren’t the norm.

These very well-established characteristics of academic life are bound to change in the coming years. The movement may well be significant.

The majority of individuals who do a PhD and who succeed in getting a postdoctoral position (the first step in an academic career) will find it very difficult to progress to the next level and get a lecturer’s position (‘Assistant Professor’ in the US) in their university or another simply because there are a lot more postdoctoral students than lecturer positions and even fewer new lecturer positions become open each year because of retirement or new creation. The result is a lot of young researchers struggling to establish research careers.

Many of these will leave with a degree of disenchantment. Others will persevere and of course outstanding individuals will always find a way through. This does lead to a degree of cynicism which at times can be palpable when careers are discussed with young researchers and aspiring academics. The key thing that draws most academics to an academic career is the opportunity to do research and to teach. Most individuals who become academics do so because of an attraction of this rather unique mix. If the research component is diminished or eliminated in the future, academic careers are likely to be significantly less attractive.

If one looks at the march of history, however, more and more human endeavour is now devoted to new knowledge generation than ever before. This is likely to continue to grow, possibly exponentially, and academic life will be at the heart of this activity. Given a little good fortune, therefore, academic careers will be even more attractive in the future than they are now.

Some would regard this is as an optimistic view and any number of missteps could result in a very different picture. At the end of the day, university work and academic work is a real privilege and exposes people to the most vibrant of intellectual atmospheres. While there are many pressures now in academic life, it could be argued that they are less than in the commercial world with a lot more freedom to pursue one’s interests.

But the fact is that high quality university leadership will need to work hard to create academic career structures which both reflect more modern scenarios of working life and ensure that academics are fully equipped to play the very important roles which society is seeking from them. If that is done successfully, they will retain the confidence of the rest of society which, at the end of the day, pays for it all. But it’s a massive challenge.

Question 10

How much will thriving economies devote to the university sector in GDP terms?

As with most areas of national life, resources matter for the quality of university life. Whether the resources come from the individual ‘consumer’ (as in student fees) or the state, through taxation of some form or another, scrutiny of the way that money is spent is both inevitable and, we would argue, desirable. An example of this scrutiny is the increasing scepticism about the financial value of a university degree and the suggestion that relatively more public money should be focused upon ‘technical’ or ‘apprenticeship’ qualifications.

And the arguments about resources bring one inevitably into the fields of politics, both partisan and not. Through the political process, choices are made in the way that money is raised and spent. In the past 35 to 40 years it has been extremely difficult to win arguments that citizens should pay more taxes for the services that they receive. In our view, this state of affairs is unlikely to change significantly, though it is the case that the more attractive services are to ordinary citizens the easier it is to raise money. That is why money has consistently been allocated to raising standards of health care.

And this similarly explains the dramatic reductions in spending on defence the further that we move away from 1945, the constant focus upon welfare reform to ensure that welfare resources go to those who really need them, and the rise of alternative means of funding public investment.

This is the context within which education spending, and university spending in particular, has to fit. There is strong popular support for spending on pre-5 education and schools, and indeed significant research demonstrates that money invested at earlier ages is more effectively spent in reducing educational and class divisions.

It is the case that research and university investment is, as it should be, a high priority for promoting economic growth and knowledge about our world. But this truth should not permit the university world to escape the kinds of discussions in Chapter 4 about where research is located and how it contributes to our national life.

These are all very relevant points as governments consider what proportion of GDP should be spent upon universities. The share varies quite a lot at the moment. If one takes private investment and public investment together, approximately 1.5% of GDP is devoted to the university sector in most countries in the old West. In the UK, it is of that order, in the US a little more and most parts of continental Europe somewhere between the two. China, as it grows its university sector at an exponential rate, is currently investing a much higher percentage of GDP but it is likely that that will fall as the Chinese university sector matures and the major capital investments made in recent times flow through.

It is unlikely for the reasons set out in earlier chapters that the contributions universities make to life will become less important in the years ahead than they are at the moment. Increasing participation rates among young people, major increases in university engagement at later stages in life, the importance of university research outputs, especially interdisciplinary outputs and the increasing focus on education and knowledge as the information revolution continues to evolve exponentially, all make it likely that the place of universities in national and community life will strengthen rather than weaken in the decades ahead.

All of these factors make it more likely that there will be a good case for increasing the percentage of GDP invested in higher education over the next two or three decades. But this outcome is by no means pre-ordained. In a hugely competitive field for public resources, there is absolutely no room for complacency about the future resourcing of universities. There can be no sense of the entitlement that can sometimes raise its head in the university world. The case for resources, and for the public value of universities, has continually to be made and justified.

That is why in this book we have focused on what we think are the four pillars of universities:

• understanding and interpreting the process of change;
• offering approaches that would harness the process of change for general benefit;
• educating and training to high quality the specialist workers whose skills are necessary to address change properly;
• creating a general intellectually engaging climate and culture across societies that promotes the virtues of understanding and science.

Each of these are difficult in principle and even more difficult to sustain. Each of them requires focused and committed university action. And each of them makes an enormous contribution to the capacity and strength of our societies and economies, which more than justifies the relatively small proportion of GDP that is needed to fund the work of our universities.

Universities need to commit in practice to these ambitions, face up to the challenges of reform that this would mean, and explain and justify how they are achieving these goals and so deserving the public support that they need.