Do we value universities enough in Britain? with Vivienne Stern | The We Society S4 Ep1

My pleasure.

Well, I mean, knowing something of some of your previous guests, I was just very flattered to be asked. But I don't know. I mean, I think that, you know, I'm quite a fan of doing something to draw attention to the importance of the social sciences given perhaps the current political environment where people don't necessarily recognize the importance of the social sciences in national life.

I mean, we think, you know, whether it's economics, whether it's law, whether it's geography, whether it's statistics, whether it's finance, sociology, political science, we can go on. I mean, this covers the gamut. And actually, you can't make policy in the public and private sector without the insights of some very evidence-based social science. And actually they're pretty interesting degrees in their own right because they combine elements of a kind of quantitative evidence gathering along with qualitative assessments and insights into what makes the world happen.

Well, it's funny. I mean, I was listening to the interview you did with Hillary Clinton and you asked her the question, you know, what does the We Society mean to you? And it made me think of something that I've always thought. Well, I've had the privilege in my professional life of representing this enormously powerful set of institutions who do, in my view, colossal good in the world. And the longer I've worked in the university sector, the more deeply I have come to feel that they are, for all the bits that are rough around the edges, for all the things that on any day of the week might be good or bad in university X or Y, they're kind of like a perfect expression of something that is rather wonderful about human beings, which is that we want to work together. We want to find stuff out and then tell the next person. And if you think about the essence of what is happening in universities — generating ideas not in a vacuum but because you're listening to what other people have thought and said and then trying to pass those on. The core idea of universities is create new knowledge and share it, and I think it's a perfect expression of something that's rather wonderful about human beings — which, you know, human beings aren't altogether wonderful, but that is rather wonderful.

Yeah. There's also something they're pretty unique in, in that they're spaces where people are allowed to take up blind alleys and fail and get things wrong. I think the essence of the international research effort is: have an idea, test it a little bit, see if you're right or wrong, but being wrong is okay. That ability to be places where people can take risks, I think, is also rather wonderful and special and pretty unique actually.

I think you said it. Universities have got to be places where people can, within the law, debate ideas and listen to views with which they do not agree. They should be places where we educate students to encounter things which are radical or uncomfortable or possibly even unpalatable and meet those ideas with critical challenge, not with 'I don't want to listen to you because I find what you say upsetting.' Now, the lived experience of a university trying to manage and navigate all of that — it makes it sound very simple. And there are people who will give you to understand that it's a simple case of anybody should be allowed to say anything on a campus. Of course it isn't as simple as that because you butt up against all sorts of things like an interlocking set of legal obligations. There are the requirements around being able to maintain public order, all of that kind of stuff. So it's not as simple as some people would like to pretend, but fundamentally I think there's a consensus amongst the university leadership in this country that the job of higher education institutions should be to help those people who pass through this system to disagree.

Don't know. I mean, partly I feel that universities are places where gears grind. Social progress sometimes plays itself out in messy and ugly ways in universities. That happens. That's historically been the case. And what we're partly seeing is society adjusting its views on certain topics and those gears grinding in universities. I also think that it's very easy for people to dismiss those people who talk about their safety in relation to hearing somebody say something which they will find very challenging and upsetting. But my dad's a Holocaust survivor, right? So I've grown up knowing that words can have consequences. So I don't think it's as simple as to say — there are people who, when they hear predominantly but not always young people saying 'I don't feel safe because you have expressed a certain view,' they might roll their eyes and say well that's completely nonsense, nobody's threatening your safety. But if you think about it, of course we know words can do real harm. They can catch fire in awful ways. And so I feel more ambivalent around that question of is it a clear-cut case of these people just need to grow up and learn to listen to views they disagree with? I'm not sure that I feel that. I think that we ought to understand that there are ways that you can talk about certain topics which can do real harm to real people.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that is in most part what universities try to ensure happens — that people are allowed to express contrary opinions and deserve to be listened to with respect. Not every university gets it right in every case.

I think universities, because they're right there at the sharp end of what I've described as the grinding gears of social progress — of course it's sometimes a bit hot, but can we help them learn from each other? Can we help them manage it better? Can we help to navigate the competing responsibilities including legal responsibilities universities have in this space? I think we can, and we can probably do it without being too dramatic about the state of British universities.

So, it's not a new phenomenon, this charge that universities are teaching, quote, Mickey Mouse degrees, unquote. I started working in the sector 20 years ago and that was a feature of the political debate then. I believe it was a feature of the political debate when English literature was introduced as a subject in probably the 1870s and people thought what on earth are you doing adding this to the academic suite of degrees on offer. I also think — I suppose this might sound rather naive — but I think if students, if potential students have access to good advice and guidance about where the choices that they make going to university might lead them, you should more or less let them decide what they want to do. Because something funny happens when you let students study something they're interested in, which is whether or not there is already an avenue for them to apply the things that they have learned productively. If there isn't, they'll probably create one. I'll give you one example. You mentioned Dundee in your introduction. If you had been having this conversation maybe 10 years ago and you had been a different sort of person, you might have said, what's all this nonsense about people studying computer games design? How can that possibly be a subject that you would study in a university? That sounds like a complete waste of time. They probably would have dismissed it as people spending three years playing computer games. If you're Dundee, which is not a particularly affluent city, it doesn't need to be explained to you that the fact that principally Abertay Dundee, so not an institution that's in the upper echelons of the rankings, has this extraordinary strength in digital arts and computer games, which has created a group of people who probably didn't find it easy to get jobs. So they created their own. They set up their own little companies and from that they attracted in the big players and now there's a computer games industry in Dundee which is really quite significant and a massive economic force. And I guess my lesson from that is let people study what they want because they'll find a way to make that useful. It doesn't mean that every single graduate will look back and think I would make exactly the same choice again. I'm sure there is always a proportion of graduates who if they had their time again would do something different. But I think we shouldn't be overly — the desire to control the choices of students entering the system, I think is a mistake.

I mean, look, I think we're in a position which if you let it drift, the consequence will be that we used to have one of the world's best higher education systems. That's what I think will happen. The way I describe it is we're kind of at a little bit of a fork in the road. And if we take the path we're currently on, you just see the slow diminution of something that we used to be really, really proud of. And I think our collective responsibility — not just ours in Universities UK, but nationally — is don't let that path be the one that we take because it's rather important to us as a country in an extremely competitive age that we have a higher education and research system that serves our national needs. And so we've got to make that happen.

Well, I think this is the hardest problem I've ever seen. And it's a bit like a puzzle box. I keep turning it around in my mind and we discuss it all the time. I wake up thinking about it in the morning, I talk about it all day and I go to sleep thinking about it in the evening. And you are told by those people holding ministerial positions right now, forget about it. Even if we had any money, which we don't, it wouldn't be coming to you. There's schools and FE colleges all need more money than you. And then that's before you even get anywhere near the health service. So it's a hard problem, right? We've got to work out — if you don't want a system which slowly runs into the sand, we've got to collectively work out how do we get off that path and onto the other one. But you can see already what's happening. I know academics in leading universities who really think that actually you may have to retreat from teaching altogether and just take postgraduates and research and build the university around that because teaching undergraduates is lossmaking and nobody's going to fund it or you charge an amount which is so high that only a minority of people can ever come to your university. You can imagine, unless government grips this, our universities could transform in front of our eyes.

Because unfortunately teaching is lossmaking, research is even more lossmaking. At the moment universities recover about 70p in the pound for the research that they conduct. And actually the reason that we've had a reasonably buoyant research system is because universities are kind of quite unusual in that they can bring in cross subsidy. Particularly cross subsidy from international student fee income. So this system needs a bit of balance. You lose money on research, you lose money on social science subjects which are quite cheap to teach and quite profitable and cross subsidize. Actually, I don't think even the social sciences are profitable anymore under the fee regime that we currently have in England — and I should mention that because it's a different system across each of the four nations — it may have been possible to cross subsidize from humanities and classroom-based subjects into more expensive kit-intensive lab-based subjects, but now I think we're getting to the point where nothing really is. But as I say, the cross subsidy becomes very important.

In fact, if you were a student who was affected by the MAB, by the marking assessment boycott, and your grades were withheld and you couldn't graduate with all of your marks or your graduation was delayed, it's no comfort me saying you were part of a very small proportion of students who were in that situation, but it was about 2% — which means most of the academics marked their students' work and the students graduated on time. And I think that's important because, as you say, they've got relationships with their students. I don't think targeting, holding students hostage as part of the industrial dispute was a terribly popular tactic. But leaving that aside, universities are collections of people. They're good because they've got good people teaching and conducting research. And it is very important that we get out of the position we've been in the last few years where the industrial relations have been just pretty difficult. We've got a bit of responsibility for that through the USS pension scheme which Universities UK has a formal role in representing the employer perspective, but it's been really tough. I think it's going to get easier on the pension front. On pay, you know, these forces that drive institutional finances also affect the freedom that universities have got to sort out the industrial relations territory.

So I describe it as kind of a little puzzle box. I think you just have to keep turning this one round and round. First of all, I think we need to try and get to some sort of cross-party consensus on what the solution is for the medium to long term because I don't think us continually tinkering with the higher education funding system is a good idea. I personally believe that the system that we've got — the design of a funding system which depends at least to some degree on the individual beneficiary of higher education contributing on an income-contingent basis through loans. So they don't pay upfront but they pay when they're earning and they pay to an extent which is connected with their earnings. That seems to me the right basis for a funding system.

I was chatting to two football Premier League chairs completely kind of happenstance and they volunteered the view that a town with a university in the 21st century is analogous to a town having a cathedral in medieval Britain. The universities were the modern cathedral. They actually bring in students, they bring in life, they bring in youth, they bring in clusters of economic activity around them. Now, I'm not sure that universities themselves want to think of themselves in that way. When you think about leveling up, one of the ways of leveling up — it's already happened to a degree. If we hadn't got such a strong university system in some of our Midlands and Northern cities, they would have been in a really parlous state.

They absolutely are. To pick up on your point about these being amazing economic anchors like the cathedrals — Blackpool is a great example. So there was a period of expansion of the university sector in the 60s where towns were invited to put in bids to found a new university. And my understanding — and I apologize to the people of Blackpool if I'm getting this wrong — but my understanding is Blackpool sort of about it and maybe they did and maybe they didn't, and then by the time the great and the good of Blackpool got round to putting in a bid for a university, the door had closed. You look at the cities that did establish universities and what happened to them as a result. We just commissioned a piece of work to look at the economic impact of universities across the whole of the UK — just through the direct and knock-on effects of university activity, the value is about 130 billion. The sector is colossal — that's 5% of GDP. And when you look at things like we were talking about international students earlier, when you look at places that may not be otherwise particularly pulling in money from the wider world — I was in Paisley, to give you a perfect example, visiting the University of the West of Scotland two weeks ago. And I checked into the hotel near the university and I got chatting to the guy behind the front desk who turned out to be the owner. And I wish I'd just videoed it and stuck it on social media because he basically said, 'Oh, the university is fantastic for my business.' These students bring their parents over for graduation or when they're coming to visit and the university brings people into Paisley.

I think it would take more than a week, but I'd reintroduce maintenance grants for students because I think we've got a problem with maintenance. I would invest more public funding. And I'd index the fee from 2026 onwards, hoping that inflation has come down a little bit. So, a combination of those three things I think might get us into a slightly better and more sustainable place.

I am beyond delighted. Elated. Beyond delighted. I cried when we found the news. I mean, it was just — this is something we've been working on for seven years. It's good for everybody. Seven years. Yeah. I mean, since we left. It's been a very, very long road. It's good for all of us. I think that it might sound like the kind of thing that only matters to researchers, but if you've got a rare disease, you want our researchers to be working with all of those people in other countries who also have little populations of people with that rare disease putting their heads together and trying to work out what to do about it. So, it's good for all of us.

It's been a long and very stressful road, but I'm delighted and I think the government should actually be warmly congratulated for having secured a deal, which is actually a pretty good deal in the end.

Well, you know, it feels to me like we might have turned a bit of a corner. There will be people who would like to see a bit of consideration of whether the Erasmus scheme might be worth thinking about again. And I think that would be extraordinary.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.