A little while ago, my old colleague Nic Mitchell asked me to comment on the recent British Academy report ‘Cold spots: Mapping inequality in SHAPE provision in UK higher education’ for The University World News publication. The report discusses the increasing areas of the UK that are no longer offering social sciences, humanities, and arts degree subjects within a commutable distance. One of those regions is the north-east of England. Nic thought that, as I was an anthropologist who understood the NE, but now had a little externality (and crucially knows how to hit a media deadline), I might have something useful to say. You can judge for yourself whether I did or not.
It’s really hard to articulate why people should study, say, anthropology. I’ve long said that for these sorts of subjects, it’s not enough to simply say ‘because it’s important’. It is, but unless we articulate why more clearly, then it can be easily dismissed as ‘not important right now,’ in the face of more immediate societal imperatives such as more nurses or green energy scientists. I do think that we need to get better at articulating ‘the why‘ in a way that resonates with wider society. I’ve said the same about universities too. Talk of ‘added value’ or our ‘knowledge economy’ is often too abstract or ephemeral. Let’s be honest with ourselves, who actually talks like that? I mean, who says ephemeral? None of my family or friends outside of the sector think of universities in that way. Surely it’s better to say ‘because it employs hundreds of thousands people’ or ‘brings in billions to a region’. I recently highlighted an article in The Guardian which showed just how much the general public misunderstands the scale of the HE sector in the UK. When I was Dean of Health & Life Sciences, our main buildings were on the edge of the Teesside campus and I said that my aim was that any person walking down Linthorpe Road wouldn’t be asking ‘what goes on in there’ because they would know. They would know because what we did would touch their lives in a tangible way – in the hospitals, dental practices, in our physical therapy clinics, whatever.
I was thinking about all of this when I saw a report on Euronews. I start every day with Euronews, a precious cup of coffee, and if I’m feeling indulgent, a few slices of soda bread. Mmmm. Covered in butter and blueberry & raspberry jam. Delicious. When people ask me what I most like about Ireland, I always say the welcoming community. But it’s not. It’s the soda bread.
Anyway, the report was describing how the average time that employees stay in any one job was reducing, and that Gen Z in particular, was moving from one employer to another on average every 1.1 years in the first five years of their career. The report further notes that “While employers may perceive this as a lack of loyalty, our findings suggest it’s a reaction to unmet expectations and a keen desire for progression“. This chimes strongly with other work which highlights the move to a more portfolio career. And this is where I think we can really drive home the importance of SHAPE degrees. If you are skipping around from job to job, and maybe sector to sector, what you need are not necessarily technical skills, but those broad competencies and literacies associated with communication, critical thinking, cultural understanding and so on. In fact one colleague (who leads our award-winning first year seminar modules, Critical Skills) was discussing this as dispositions. That is, having a curious, critical or resilient disposition was a learning outcome in and of itself.
The other challenge we face when we try to meaningfully address the skills agenda, is that the skills that the economy wants and needs will ebb and flow over time. It’s hard for universities, which have long lead-in times for degrees, to keep up. For sure, universities could speed up, but don’t forget that a degree is also a mark of quality – it requires appropriate staffing, a rigorous quality approval process, recruitment plans, external validation, etc. This all takes time. Perhaps there is another approach which is more agile?
At Maynooth, we have a three-pronged approach. In our modules, our students learn and experience a range of disciplinary literacies and skills. This is supplemented by our Critical Skills offer, which is an elective first year module based on the North American model of a ‘first year seminar’. It is popular with students (over 800 a year take it) and has excellent outcomes with consistently highly positive feedback. By separating it from specific disciplines, it allows for a more interdisciplinary approach and removes the pressure on academics to teach some of these more fundamental academic skills. Then we also have a series of modules and support through our Student Skills & Success team which is more individualised and coaching in style. I’m going to go on record now as saying that I really am not a fan of the term ‘soft skills’. I think it undermines the importance of these skills. And in my experience giving an engaging and impactful presentation is way more challenging than using a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy machine. I digress – what this all means is that we can flex and adjust to meet developing societal and industrial demands, support our students’ individual needs, all the while ensuring a consistent education but not having to develop new degree programmes etc.
Lets get back to anthropology and that British Academy report. Well despite how important we all feel our disciplines are, we can’t make people study them. But we can explain why they should seriously consider it in terms that relate to their future aspirations. Likewise, we can’t make universities run specific courses – but they do function within a market system (whether we like it or not) and therefore if we can generate interest from students, the courses will follow.
When I was speaking with Nic, he said that I didn’t sound very optimistic about the situation. Well I’m not, not optimistic about the situation. I do think a lot of this is in our gift to address, but it does require collaboration and a boldness that perhaps we’ve not seen yet. Also, as we know in HE, subject preferences are often cyclical: we shouldn’t forget that and we don’t want to completely remove our capacity to flex our portfolio when needed. For me, collaboration is an interesting tool, and the UK will see increasing pressure to collaborate between institutions. While these might initiate in response to financial pressures, they could bear unanticipated fruit. In terms of the NE England, which I am most familiar with, I’m personally interested in what the new Universities for North East England group can do in this space.
Now, I’m going to use my webmaster’s privilege and go back to anthropology specifically. The world seems increasingly complex, and I think people are drawn to very simplistic answers about what is happening and why. But actually, anthropologists thrive in complexity and we are well placed to help society work through these challenges in a nuanced, human-centric way. Anthropologists are also everywhere. That sounded more threatening than I had intended. Or maybe not. Anyway, you can find us working in areas as diverse as healthcare, conservation, heritage management, public health and epidemiology, education, policy development and government. To go back to my previous argument, if we want to convince people to study anthropology, we could do worse than start there. As an aside, I Chaired the QAA Anthropology Subject Benchmark Statement review last year, and this has some useful high level points about Anthropology generally which you should check out.
Part of addressing all of this, as I’ve said above, is about framing our work to match the way in which those outside of HE are framing it for us – within reason, of course. We still need to push back and hold firm on the broader importance of having a good university education. But there’s no point in continually saying the same thing if it’s not making any difference. We use a phrase in our team ‘meeting the student where they are’. Perhaps we should apply the same principle to everyone else too.
Also, extra credit if you know the film reference in the title of this post. It’s a film where academics take their disciplinary knowledge and apply it to industry in innovative (and lucrative) ways…