Examination of Witnesses (Questions 536
- 539)
WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 2007
PROFESSOR ALAN
GILBERT AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
WORTON
Q536 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
Alan Gilbert and Professor Michael Worton to our deliberations.
In order to get as much oral evidence as we can, we do have to
do these double sessions. Everyone knows that on a Wednesday it
is Prime Minister's Questions and, even more important, when the
Chairman has question number three for the Prime Minister, we
will have to keep to time. Alan and Michael, you have very contrasting
backgrounds. Would it be unkind of me to suggest that there is
Professor Alan Gilbert, who is in the process of merging two major
and fine institutions into one, and Professor Michael Worton,
who decided with colleagues not to merge with Imperial College?
Was it you who made up that joke which Richard Sykes was supposed
to have said, he was going to be totally equally fair in that
merger, he was going to have part of his name and part of your
name so it was going to be called Imperial College? That is not
true, Michael, is it?
Professor Worton: I would just
point out that we have wonderful collaboration with Imperial College,
which is a 50-50 partnership in the London Centre of Nanotechnology;
50-50 partnership on our land, in our building!
Q537 Chairman: Excellent. You have
both got the chance of your two minutes if you want it. Professor
Gilbert?
Professor Gilbert: As you may
detect from my accent, I came half way around the world to the
University of Manchester a few years ago because it seemed to
me then to be one of the most exciting and challenging higher
education jobs in the world. By that stage, I had been a Vice
Chancellor for 13 years, so it was not the excitement of being
a Vice Chancellor and it was not just that Manchester was merging
two fine institutions but the fact that the so-called merger was
a double dissolution. Both institutions ceased to exist and a
new institution was formed. That was what was arresting. I think
mergers are uninteresting if they merely produce aggregation.
The double dissolution was an invitation to all of us involved
to rethink the idea of a university in the 21st century. Behind
that was a very powerful commitment to try to create in the north
of England one of the best research-intensive universities in
the world. We decided that meant (on any commonly adduced measure
of the kind that was emerging, particularly with the Shanghai
Jiao Tong Index), an institution which could regard itself as
a peer of the top 25 universities worldwide from time-to-time.
Inertia in higher education is an enormously powerful thing but
we have tried systematically to rethink everything. We abolished
every committee, we inherited none by default; we abolished all
regulations, statutes and by-laws, and we operate under a new
Royal Charter. Just as a way of illustrating, for example, we
used the language of "mission", deliberately and provocatively,
differently from the usage you heard from earlier witnesses. We
do not think of the first mission as teaching and research and
the second mission as industry-facing or industry-linked activity;
we think of first mission as producing graduates—the teaching
and learning agenda—and the second mission as research,
and we make no distinction between fundamental research and industry-facing
research. Indeed, we have systematically created promotions procedures,
appointments procedures, IP policies, to accord parity of esteem
to research taken in collaboration with industry, or which is
applied or clinical or relating to patient care in the clinical
arena. Such research is not more important but as important as
fundamental research. People will be appointed, promoted and esteemed
equally on both grounds. We have tried to do that systematically.
Our third mission is, in fact, the impact of the university on
the world. Just let me end by saying in that area too we have
tried to be innovative. I suppose the thing I am proudest of all
about in our university is what we call the "Manchester Leadership
Programme" which tries to mobilise particularly undergraduate
students to think about, in what I suppose are triple-bottom-line
terms, what it is going to mean to be a citizen of the world in
the 21st century. That is a course which focuses on social entrepreneurship,
commercial entrepreneurship, and leadership, which asks students
to interrogate their own value systems, and which demands of them
60 hours of formally monitored voluntary or community work as
part of the programme. This counts towards their degree, so it
is a formal part of their education, and it means that this year
we have been able to release into the immediate community, and
to a lesser extent overseas, between 20,000 and 30,000 student
hours of voluntary work. Most of this is being invested in primary
and secondary education and remediation in Ardwick and Moss Side,
some of the most educationally disadvantaged areas in the UK.
There is a seamlessness about an attempt to think what a university
ought to be like (not what a "Russell Group university"
ought to be like or a "post-92 university" ought to
be like), but what a university ought to feel and look like in
the 21st century.
Q538 Chairman: Thank you for that,
Professor Gilbert. We recently visited Australia and met some
of your former colleagues and got a very good view of what UK
higher education looked like when we were halfway around the world,
and it was a very energising experience. We would like to tap
into your knowledge of that in a moment. Professor Worton?
Professor Worton: I had been intending
to talk about the HEFCE/AHRC group on metrics, but I might leave
that until later. If I may, I will just say a few things about
the way that UCL has tried to position itself. In terms of some
of the comments which were made earlier by Tim and by what Alan
has been saying, when we decided three years ago that we needed
an international strategy, and I was charged with drafting it,
I decided that this should not be based on money. We are an institution
like the other top multi-faculty, research-intensive universities
that run to deficit, but this was not going to be about solving
our deficit, it was going to be about a much more moral mission.
Rather like Alan, we are using a terminology which I think would
have been considered to be anathema 15 to 20 years ago, talking
about the moral purpose of universities, the ethical purpose of
universities, but whilst we are working very closely with India
and China in terms of the great economic drivers which are happening
in those two countries, we also must be working just as much with
Africa, sub-Saharan Africa especially, with the poor countries
in South America and so on, and a global, research-intensive university
does have a moral responsibility to deal with global problems
and contributing to solving problems around global health, global
poverty, climate change, issues around water, and so on. Therefore,
the moral is something which comes into a programme we have just
launched this year on "global citizenship," which is
a term which is all too easily overused or rather casually used.
What we mean by this, and we are quite explicit, is when we are
producing our students we expect them to be ambitious. We say,
"We expect you to be ambitious but also idealistic and committed
to ethical behaviour". We expect all of our students, be
they philosophers or pharmacologists, to be committed to entrepreneurship
and to understand what entrepreneurship is. Employability is an
enormously important issue for us but not direct vocational routes
into employment. We also consider it very important that our students
can understand how they can engage in celebrating cultural difference.
This is a major issue for us in London, but it is increasingly
an issue in terms of our international relations. We also use
a term which has been the subject of much debate inside our university,
as you would expect; we say that we expect all of our students
to be willing to assume "leadership" positions. The
term "leadership" can cause antibodies. People will
have a notion that we are somehow talking about a testosterone-fuelled,
Anglo-American MBA model as the only model of leadership, and
we say, "No, we are talking about leadership in the community,
the family, the workplace, and it is not a constant leadership
role, it is understanding that you assume leadership roles at
certain positions", and that ties in very much with what
we think the purpose of a university is. It is about education
within the discipline, but also in a much more holistic way.
Chairman: Thank you for those opening
statements. Let us go straight into questioning.
Q539 Stephen Williams: Thank you,
Chairman. You mentioned at the start Prime Minister's Question
Time, but what you did not mention is that today is Budget day.
Of course it was a year ago when the Chancellor announced that
he was going to abandon the RAE and move to a metrics-based system,
so the sector has now had a year to cogitate about this. Are the
two of you convinced that is the right way to move?
Professor Worton: If I could start
from the position of the arts and humanities, although I have
been working very closely with subject associations in the sciences,
we honestly welcomed what the Chancellor said back in March, ie
that he and the Government were still committed to the dual-support
system. Also, we were very pleased, certainly from the point of
view of the HEFCE/AHRC group which I chaired, to see that the
Treasury's view had changed between March 2006 and the Chancellor's
pre-Budget statement in December 2006, the notion that we should
not consider there to be some kind of unbridgeable chasm between
the STEM subjects on the one side and the arts and humanities
on the other with, as it turned out, the social sciences nowhere,
hovering above this abyss. Certainly in the work that we did,
and in extensive consultation with the community, there was overwhelming
support for dual- support and I think that is something we would
want to keep banging the drum about. It is enormously important
for us because we are talking about retrospective funding and
speculative prospective funding, and that kind of balance, that
kind of creative tension, is essential if we are going to have
sustainable universities. For us, we said that for purposes of
research assessment there is no fundamental difference, therefore,
between STEM and arts and humanities, but also there needs to
be within any assessment system sensitivity to disciplinary difference.
That is something which I think is already being taken forward,
both in terms of the Chancellor's speech in December and in work
that is currently going on in HEFCE. From the point of view of
the arts and humanities, we wanted to argue very closely that
the research landscape has changed a lot. The notion of the lone
scholar, the individual scholar, ploughing his or her lonely furrow
is largely outmoded. That still does exist, but we are working
increasingly in research groups, we are working increasingly with
PhD students as part of the research process, postdocs still being
part of the research process, and we need, therefore, to find
an assessment system which is looking at the holistic research
process rather than simply outputs, so a model that looks at inputs,
activity, outputs and even perhaps outcomes, if you like, notions
of significance, which I do think we need to be looking at. Perhaps
the last point I would like to make is there is a difference between
the views of researchers, who tend to be either curiosity-driven
or user-focused or collaborative, and the views of government.
Government is naturally very concerned with international benchmarking.
I would argue very strongly that the Research Assessment Exercise,
or whatever follows from it, should be helping DTI, OSI, to establish
robust international benchmarking and I think metrics is one of
the ways forward on that.
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