While I clearly wish to work with four different, but related, strands in this blog, I seem to have begun with one in particular; the questions around the New Collegiality. There are various reasons for this but as the blog is here to enable me to respond to things that are happening around me then I guess I have to say this is the area that is probably uppermost in my mind at this particular time.
I cannot fully develop the elements of the New Collegiality, however, unless I do at least set out some of the basic starting points and assumptions that are part of my thinking. That, therefore, is the purpose of this posting. The idea comes from my current work within the University of Birmingham. Here I am Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Staffing and in that I role I act as an academic voice within a number of different staffing and student related agendas. There are three in particular that I have focussed on in the last year or so. The first is Equality and Diversity, the second Employability and the third is the development of Performance Development Reviews across the University. It is not my place here to comment on how these have developed or to talk specifically about the University of Birmingham. It is thinking through these agendas that has led me to ask about the more general principles on which staff development (in its widest sense) within the University could be developed.
These more general principles can, perhaps, be labelled as 'performance', 'diversity' and 'innovation'. Let me, therefore, just explain what I mean by each of these and then I will aim to bring them back together at the end of the post to say how they might be combined in the concept of the 'new collegiality'.
Performance can be understood in many different ways within a University context, from the role of individuals (as in a PDR) through the performance of teams, departments, schools (or whatever other structural units are relevant) to the performance of the whole institution. The measures of performance will also change depending on what kind of level is being looked at and the reasons why the measurement is needed. There is no question that all Universities are aiming at 'excellence' and as such some kind of incentive to performance is going to be essential. The real issue, however, is the way in which a particular institution, or sub-section of the institution, is going to understand 'excellence' and therefore how they are going to measure it. I am not, at this early stage, going to set myself limits on what I might mean by performance (I am still reflecting and thinking about the concepts) although I will note that I am currently looking at the idea of performance in terms of essential attitudes or behaviours rather than through specific targets and this, I think, will end up being more in tune with the other features of the overall model.
Diversity is something that we all live with in the modern world and particularly in the University. The equality and diversity agenda tends to assume that we are talking here of specific characteristics, be that gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability or whatever. I am fully committed to the wider equality and diversity agenda as understood in these terms and would even go so far as to suggest that teams and groups will always work best (perform to their highest standard) when there is a good range of different types of people involved. Diversity, however, can also mean other things. A great deal of work on team building suggests that a research team, a teaching team or any other kind of collaborative arrangement will need a very diverse range of personalities and talents within it in order to deliver whatever it is that is required. In a very different sence, and treating diversity from a completely other perspective, I am also fully committed to interdisciplinarity and cannot see how any contemporary academic study can be undertaken without at least some commitment to an interdisciplinary context. This can also be understood as 'diversity'.
Innovation is the final piece of the jigsaw. Here I am thinking perhaps of the need for a flexible structure, an entrepreneurial attitude and outlook, and the willingness to take risks and to try out new things. Many of the large traditional Universities in the UK do not have a good track record on innovation as institutions, although many of their research staff in particular take the principle of exploring the outer edges of their disciplines in new and innovative ways totally for granted. This can, of course, create internal pressures as researchers and institutions pull in different directions. From the work that I have done within employability, however, and the consequential engagement with businesses that this has led to, I see no reason why innovation and flexibility cannot be introduced much more widely within the University. My guess, however, is that of the three principles that I have outlined this will be the most difficult to persuade many managers to embrace (at least beyond the ideological assent).
Performance (excellence), diversity (equality, teamwork and interdisciplinarity) and innovation (flexibility, entrepreneurialism) are all interrelated. To bring the three together within a particular institution and to maintain a critical tension between all three would demand, I would expect, a focus less on the individual and more on creative, and perhaps ever changing, teams, whether in research, teaching, outreach, student support or whatever area of the University's work we might be talking about. It is this complex, creative approach that I want to give the overall title of the New Collegiality and what I wish to do as this particular strand of the blog develops is to explore different ways in which the individual strands, and their points of overlap and interconnection, can be developed.
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