The twenty first century academy?
Seventeen years ago, when I was a Labour councillor, one of the ideas I explored with colleagues was whether the solution for Blyth might include an element of higher education as a driver of regeneration. The idea wasn’t particularly original, or outlandish. There’s a good review of the literature here. Our thinking was that the town could support a small scale, specialist institution with no more than 1000 students, lots of them living at home or off campus, studying practical and locally focussed topics like renewable energy, regeneration and governance.
The plan came to nothing, of course. It may have been a good idea but even a short discussion with anyone who knew the Higher Education sector and the government’s ambitions would know that small towns were not deemed to be the locations for the future of HE.
The Blair era was an era of expansion and growth for higher education, but it was growth centred on major cities and existing institutions. The growth trend has continued, and, even before the pandemic, it was arguable that the sector was experiencing some of the symptoms of a competitive market place where institutions were located on a spectrum with thriving and surviving at its poles. (This report by the Office for Students covers this area, and the impact of the pandemic, quite well.)
The agglomeration of institutions in major cities conceived of as significant regional places was originally offset by the development of 1960s campus universities in locations like Lancaster or Warwick, but the growth post 2010 seems to have been disproportionately centred in cities, with smaller institutions merging or cutting outlying campuses to address financial challenges. Histories of twenty first century universities are as likely to be written by experts in property and construction as by pedagogues, reflecting the focus of university management’s activities.
Understanding the way in which the belief in higher education as a prerequisite of twenty first century education has come to dominate policy and practice isn’t what this blog is about. However, when I think about that ambition to see Blyth acquire a higher education institution, I also think about the fate of the University College at Stockton on Tees, established in the late 80s / early 90s, and abandoned as a part of Durham University in 2017 to make way for a preparatory college for overseas students (run by a commercial provider) hoping to study at Durham. I can only presume that the financial outcomes are better for Durham that way.
If you’re concerned about place management for smaller places, like Blyth (where I live) or Berwick, where I work the pursuit of economies of scale in education, and the tendency to agglomeration, is a real challenge. For the last couple of weeks I’ve sat in on informal discussions of regional economic policy amongst a group of academics and practitioners who are trying to explore the intellectual underpinnings of current government practice.
One of the themes that’s clear to me is that government is not concerned with changing the commitment to cities as the engines of growth in the UK, leading to the logical conclusion of a super city around London, the Thames estuary and the Milton Keynes — Cambridge arc. Rather, it seems to me that schemes like the Levelling Up fund are not meant to change the economic profile of the country, but rather to act as a kind of palliative care to enable places to fulfill their role, in relation to the cities, as incubators, safety valves and retirement spaces.
If you care about smaller places, like Blyth or Berwick, it’s questionable whether that approach is the only one that should be given house room. That’s one of the issues we were talking about fifteen years ago. Another is the prevailing sense, in English politics, of a binary divide between places that are to be valued, and places that are not. Here’s a quote from WIll Hutton, whose place at the heart of the centre of British politics becomes more and more certain as his grip on relevance becomes less and less firm. “London is not a nine million-strong island of liberal elitism in an otherwise safe sea of conservatism. The same virus infects Bristol, Liverpool, Cardiff, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Brighton, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Oxford … anywhere, in fact, with a mass of young people, strong universities, vigorous theatre, new business startups and a network of great restaurants. Such places are prone to the temptations of openness.” How do the small places gain a seat at the table and resist this tendency to be other, to be placed in the category of places that Will Hutton doesn’t cherish?
One way, and it’s a tempting way, is to point out to the likes of Will Hutton that the London he lauds is also the place that harboured and made the killers of Stephen Lawrence; far from being only an island of liberalism London is also the heartland of the peculiar blend of English nationalism and Nazi fetishism that is the far right that has shaped and distorted English politics for a generation. Warren Mitchell was a quintessential Londoner; witty, Jewish, left leaning and liberal, but he’s best known for playing Alf Garnett, a bigoted, racist Cockney. Or to put it another way, Lee Hurst is a Londoner.
That form of argument is tempting, but should be resisted. The challenge for those who wish to enable and empower small places is not to denigrate London, but to give a voice to those othered places, to enable them to empower their residents so that London is no longer so different that it is the place young people assume they have to be when they consider ‘leaving in the morning with everything they own in a little black case’.
That’s where I’m lucky working in Berwick. I’ve written here before about the notion of a guerilla academia, the coming together of groups of individuals outside the official education system to develop, share and exploit new knowledge. In at least one case that I love, the Academic Archers series of events and publications lovingly curated by Cara Courage and Nicola Headlam, it’s become a phenomenon. This article by Aimee Morrison is hugely telling about the strains and stresses of being a scholar within the modern academic system, and the reasons why it inhibits the distribution of knowledge. The problem with guerilla academia though, and its adjunct, guerilla research, is that it risks defining itself by what it’s not, or by its positioning to the formal academy.
I’m lucky to work in Berwick. My day job brings me into contact with people who are at the heart of creative activities. I spent part of today in a wonderful meeting with people from events like the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Berwick Music Series, talking about how their events will respond to the post pandemic climate this autumn. When you start thinking about the work those two events do, in conjunction with the brilliant archive and archaeological work associated with our Heritage Open Days team, the Literary Festival and the Berwick Educational Association, it’s clear that our residents and friends aren’t just consuming culture, but making and co-creating it in an informal academy.
Now this is ranging a distance away from the traditional preoccupations of a town clerk, which go further than just reading and understanding the standing orders, but not by much, and it begs the question, at what point do we recognise the realities of a changing world?
That’s a huge question, that extends far beyond the academy to the practicalities of every day life. The business of buying and selling the essentials of life, the retail high street, was already changing before the pandemic; the experience of a year of lockdowns has, arguably moved the tense. The high street has changed for ever.
Why should we not also be asking ourselves if the pandemic is changing, or has already changed, the idea of the academy, and the idea of how education can be delivered, and enabled? I’m a post grad at a university that I haven’t been to for a year. It is as if the idea of the Open University, Jennie Lee’s gift to us all, was an idea waiting for its time, and yet not fully blossomed, since it functioned still as a means of delivering education from above.
What I see in Berwick is not education from above, or below, but education from amongst us, an academy built on networks of individuals whose ability to collaborate and co-create is transformed by networked technology. When Castells [p.18] talks about ‘new forms of technology and pedagogy, … content and organization of the learning process’ he might be read as suggesting we wait for the conventional academy to transform itself, or he might be urging us, in a paraphrase of bhis words, to become self programming scholars, flexible in our learning and research.
For a town clerk, though, the power of that twenty first century academy might be that it enables us to create knowledge and derive insights about out places, using a new generation of scholars to enable us to make and influence policy. The key task is not to try and design a new academy, but to try and help the new academy come into being, devising standards and providing funding and support. That’s a contribution parish and town councils can make, and one I’m proud we already do in Berwick.
