Student Sex Workers, Disclosure and Stigma

Last Friday I attended an event to announce the results of the Student Sex Worker Project. The full details can be found on their web site but the headlines were interesting. Most surprisingly the number of men involved in all kind of sex work, and in each of the different categories, is higher than that of women. This challenges the assumption that sex work is essentially a 'women's issue'. We were also told that the range of sex work that students are involved in is extremely wide, with a majority involved in indirect sex work (naked butlers, stripping, dancing and web based work), but a sizeable minority involved in the direct form. Finally, while it was clear that many of those involved were motivated by financial concerns this was by no means the only motivation and many also said that they entered the profession for sexual pleasure. The real impact of the morning I attended, however, came not from the results in themselves but from a film that had been made based on the video diary of a female student sex worker. What came out of this film was the isolation that was generated by the work, the lack of support for the young woman involved, and the very strong sense of stigma that was felt, and imposed, on the woman because of the work she did.


The Student Sex Work Project is very keen not only to provide information, but also to provide support and counselling to those involved in the project and to engage Universities in exploring the kind of support that might be available. What comes through so strongly, however, is the way in which the stigma associated with sex work determines the response and so often defines the lives of those involved. From Universities who are reluctant to be seen to engaged in student support in this area because of potential reputational damage to individual sex workers who fail to seek the most basic social and health care support because they are ashamed to admit that they are involved in the profession. There is a very clear relationship throughout the whole of this debate between 'stigma', the way society constructs the stereotype of sex work, and their responses to it, and the level of disclosure among sex workers. The call was for more support, a challenging of the stigma, and to hope that more young people, who choose this work for many different reasons, would come forward and seek the support they need.


This question of stigma and disclosure has been one that has bedevilled the work we have been trying to do around equality and diversity. It has been particularly problematic in the areas of LGBT and disability, although for very different reasons.


I had a number of conversations last week about handing on the work that has been undertaken around LGBT issues within the University (work that by any standards can be considered extremely positive and valuable). With my new role, and the moving on of another senior manager, there is no longer a clear and obvious 'role model' for LGBT activity among the senior management team. The University can cope with this, I am sure, and the work here is strong enough to continue without our involvement. What I found interesting about the conversations around this issue, however, was that we realised just how few employees at the University (academics and professional services) feel the need to disclose their LGBT status. In the case of bisexuality and trans issues this does still relate to questions of stigma, I think that is clear, but in the case of lesbian and gay disclosure it is probably as much to do with 'normalisation' (the total lack of concern about a person's sexuality) as it is to continued stigma. Does the move towards normalisation mean that we no longer need LGBT role models among senior management? I doubt it some how. But as normalisation grows, then active disclosure declines and that is an interesting observation.


The other area where disclosure is a continued concern is around disability, and particularly mental health. Here the overlaps with the student sex workers are very clear. The stigma that is still felt, and imposed on, those with mental health problems, along with the expectation that this will be held against individual employees by managers, leads to a significant under-disclosure. At one level, in order to emphasise the level of the problem (and perhaps to increase normalisation) then we need more people to disclose, but that will not happen until people feel confident that they will not be in any way (formally or informally) discriminated against should they disclose. It is a difficult decision for anybody to make, but support cannot be forthcoming until at least some level of disclosure is made. The tragic consequences of this can probably be seen in the situation around the German Wings plane crash in Switzerland that so dominated the news last week.


There is much to do in order to 'normalise' so many factors that provide the potential for stigma in society and within Universities. Each issue has its own particularities, but I am also struck by the commonalities. As I am also changing jobs I know that, probably for the first time in many years, it is a live issue for me as I choose when, and whether, to disclose my sexuality or my dyslexia in a range of different conversations over the next few months. Interestingly it is the second of these that I feel more nervous about disclosing within the University management role that I am now moving in to, and that is perhaps more interesting in relation to this wider discussion of disclosure and stigma.

Is Pride in our University a Sin?

This might seem a rather strange question. The series of Lent talks at our local church this year has been on the seven deadly sins, and 'pride' was the latest in this list of talks. Also last Thursday we had the Annual General Meeting for the University of Birmingham. As ever, this was excellently done, a chance to showcase the very best of the University to the senior leadership and to about 150 ‘friends’ from across the city and beyond. The event was held in Elgar Concert Hall and was compared by our Chancellor, Lord Bilimoria, with an excellent mixture of formal speaking, informal anecdote and obvious pride in both the University and the city. The theme of the whole evening was built on the relationship between the University and the city and the very best that Birmingham (in both senses) has to offer was presented to the gathered audience. It was a truly uplifting evening.

 

So why should such pride be a ‘sin’? On Saturday I travelled down to Swansea to look at possible accommodation as I contemplate starting a new role at a new institution. Does Swansea do these public events with the same panache and style as Birmingham? I have yet to find out. As we drove down we noted that Wales were playing Scotland in the Six Nations at the Millennium Stadium and David, my partner, commented that changing Universities must be a bit like being a footballer suddenly changing teams. While you have been totally committed to Stoke City, for example, for twenty years, and have been telling everybody that this is the best team ever, now you are off to play for Swansea United and suddenly it is Swansea that has the ultimate in footballing prowess. And here is me, travelling from England to Wales, to play, if not for the opposition, or at least for a very different team.

 

One of my colleagues at Birmingham, who has more experience of switching Universities than me, described this situation as a kind of serial monogamy, a total commitment to each institution for the time that you are working for them. I have no particular problem or issue with that and will, obviously, commit myself one hundred percent to Swansea as of May 1^st (while still maintaining a real affection and pride in Birmingham where I have spent the last twenty two years.) That is not really the point that struck me particularly as I sat in the Elgar Concert Hall looking at an amazing 3D film of all the new building works that are being developed around the University of Birmingham campus. That is not why I might call pride in the University a ‘sin’.

 

It was not the knowledge that I was about to jump ship that gave me a feeling of hypocrisy last Thursday. It was more the memory of so many colleagues over the years at Birmingham who would have been sceptical, at the very least, by such a show, and probably down right cynical. It is alright telling us about all the things that are going well, they would have said, but what about all those areas that have suffered ‘restructuring’ when things have gone wrong? What, they would have asked, about the increased workload across the staff base that has made all these wonderful achievements possible? Are the people whose work has created this achievement really getting the credit they deserve? It is true that many of these people, the lecturers, support staff, administrators, cleaners and others, were not in the room that evening.

 

Having said this, I have always been somewhat surprised by those colleagues who do express pride in the University, along side, it must be said, a healthy dose of scepticism and mumbling about all the many problems. I was talking on Wednesday evening to a colleague from another local University and he was complaining about the building work at his institution, hoping that it would not have a negative on the student experience. Interestingly the general feedback from the Birmingham campus, where there is considerable disruption due to the new building work, is a real sense of pride among the students about the investment that the University is making for future generations. I was also surprised, looking at Facebook a couple of years ago, just who did post a comment expressing pride in Birmingham’s achievement of University of the Year. It was not always the people I was expecting.

 

The reference to awards takes me to my last point. On Tuesday I chaired the Athena SWAN working group and later I attended a session for the LGBT mentoring scheme (the only one of its kind in the country!). At both these events I commented on the string of Stonewall awards the University has won this year as a consequence of rising over 150 places in the Stonewall Employers index to establish a place in the top 100. Of course this does reflect some significantly positive work that Birmingham has done around LGBT support and action, both with students and with staff. I am also very conscious, however, that it also has to do with the fact that we decided this year to pull all this work together and to put considerable energy into making the best application that we could. The application was not all spin by any stretch of the imagination, but it did paint some rather mediocre activities in the best possible light, and it did achieve its purpose. The opportunity to say Birmingham University has entered the top 100, that the Rainbow Staff Network has been highly commended, and that we are officially the most improved institution in the Midlands is all very satisfying, and does actually go along way to making that positive spin on the application form a reality going forward.

 

So is pride in the University a sin? Of course not, so long as there is some real achievement underneath the words and so long as we continue to retain a healthy dose of scepticism among all the awards. I now look forward to having the same pride in Swansea over the next few years that I clearly have, and will always have, for Birmingham.

Gender Equality: Measuring Success

Yesterday I attended a summit on Delivering Equality: Women and Success at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. It was designed for leaders in Higher Education and was very well organised with some important speakers and a number of interesting things to say. The emphasis was on 'honesty', recognising just where we are in terms of gender equality in higher education, on making pledges towards practical steps that would lead to change within the sector, and on learning from other sectors. An important event, even if it was somewhat Cambridge focussed.


One of the things that I cam away with was around the idea of 'success'. The subtitle of the summit had two kinds of focus within the discussions during the day. The first was to ask how we might measure success within the terms of the agenda itself. How, for example, we would be able to increase the number of women in senior management and professorial positions above the 17-20% that appears to be the current norm within the sector. There was considerable discussion of this and a range of ideas put forward, none of which were exactly new in themselves. The answer here really lies in a common commitment and a concerted effort, paying constant attention to the metrics, and doing everything that we can to push the agenda forward. Dogged determination and not taking our eyes of the ball are the essential features of achieving this kind of success.


The other referent to the idea of success was, however, much more interesting. This was to ask what success in higher education might look like, when considered from the perspective of the individual career. Part of the wider issue of gender equality is the persistence of a model of academic success that is built on individual research (or occasionally team leadership), grant capture, publications, conference invitations and global recognition. This is not a specifically male approach to success, many women do achieve this, but it is something that the system makes much easier for men than it does for women. The question, of course, is whether we should be changing the system in order to make it easier for women to achieve this kind of success, levelling the playing field as it were, or whether we should, in fact, be redefining, or at the very least widening, what it means to achieve academic success in a way that opens up other possibilities?


The general view is that 'ideally' we need to talk about academic success in wider terms, to include excellence in teaching for example, an element of good citizenship, a recognition of the nurturing roles of mentoring, student support and so on. In this way some of those elements that have been traditionally seen as 'women's' roles within the departments would be recognized and play a more significant role within decisions around promotions etc. As ever, I have no problems with this, the whole of an individual's contribution needs to be taken into account and different individuals have different strengths, each of which should be cultivated and rewarded. To see this as a way of balancing the position of women specifically, however, may not actually achieve the desired results. There will always be a sense of the star researcher as the 'real success' and teachers, managers, mentors and the others as 'very good' but still somewhat second class. I can see what such strategies are trying to achieve, and I do accept and want to endorse, a far wider range of potential measures of success within the academy, but not just to allow in those who are otherwise excluded from being the star researchers.


The other way of looking at this came from another thread in the summit, that I am increasingly hearing being stated as fact. This is the idea that diversity in itself is a positive good and has a beneficial impact on the institution, including on the bottom line. As one speaker says, it goes without saying that there is a significant business case for diversity. This is stressed particularly at the level of the boardroom in industry and commerce, where it is increasingly being recognised that a range of skills and personalities (genders, ethnicities and sexualities) brings a breadth of experience and approach that is much more creative than the old monochrome boards of old boys. The evidence is clearly there to support such a view, but I am not entirely convinced that the message has really got across and even at the seminar there was a sense that such a message needed to be asserted in the strongest possible terms to make it stick. However, I am convinced that a positive bias towards diversity at all levels, and a recognition of the value of diversity within research teams, within teaching groups, within departments and schools, in professional services, and on University executive boards, is absolutely necessary and the best way of ensuring that a full range of individuals are recognised and rewarded, whether financially or through preferment, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or any other characteristic.

Third Time Lucky

It has now been some months since I made great promises to go off to Morocco and think about a Sacred Sociology. As it happens, I did that. On a number of bus and train journeys across Southern Spain and down through Morocco to the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, I thought about what a Sacred Sociology for the twenty first century might look like. At some point I may even come back to it and write out some of my thoughts.


The issue was not the holiday, it was coming back, hitting the new term and never quite getting around to putting something down on the blog again. Time passed and it was already Christmas, the New Year, the new term and my life just seemed to be getting ever more busy. Then, last week, it was announced that I am to begin a new job in two months time, on the 1st May, as Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Swansea. That will no doubt be even busier than the current role, but it has given me an excuse to get back to the blog and, at least mentally, to make a commitment to keep it going through the transition and hopefully on into the new role itself.


One of the things that this does mean is that I can in fact begin to refocus the blog much more clearly on the four distinct strands that I began with (over two years ago?) which now make even more sense within the new role. It is the relationship between the strands of my quartet, and my own ability to see links and juxtapositions between them, that is going to make the new role particularly intellectually exciting for me.


First: there will be a commentary on the Higher Education scene more generally (perhaps seen from a distinctively Welsh perspective in the new role) but always, from my own point of view, with an eye on the international context. Much of what I do will be reflecting on policy, strategy and practice and as that is the day job the chance to comment more speculatively within the blog will be helpful. This will not, however, be a blow by blow commentary on the role of the PVC.


Second: what I called the 'post-post-modernism'. My role at Swansea will cover a number of different areas but at its core is an oversight of the research agenda for Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences. I have always been keen to develop a much more integrated, interdisciplinary approach within these fields and the role at Swansea, engaging with some really top quality researchers across these disciplines, will, in part, give me an opportunity to explore this further. Whether the focus will be on complexity, post-post-modernism, or even the Sacred Sociology, this will be where, intellectually and practically, much of my thought will focus.


Third: the new role is not intended to be a research post, but I will, of course, continue to research and at the core of that will be the continuing development of my general theory of religion. This term I am really enjoying myself giving a series of lectures to our first year here in Birmingham on Myth. A colleague described the study of myth to me as the history of ideas over the last hundred and fifty years. The next book I write, after the Dogon text, will be on myth (volume four of the general theory) and much of what I read will be in this area so no doubt I will have some very interesting comments to make on this in passing.


Fourth: meanwhile I still have the Dogon book to complete and I am on target to complete the main draft by the end of the summer. I am really enjoying doing the research on that, reading in so many different fields that I had not even known to exist, discovering patterns and connections and that often just leave me speechless, and even enjoying wading through great early twentieth century tomes in French. It has been great fun and a real eye opener. Even when the book is completed, however, I will not be able to leave the Dogon alone, they are one of my real passions. And so, they will be the fourth string to my bow (as it were).


My aim is once a week, so let's see how I get on this time...

Being an Entrepreneurial Academic

In a newsfeed on Higher Education issues from the States there was a recent series of blogs on academic entrepreneurship. It offered advice over four weeks with suggested exercises in order to help readers get their own particular ‘business’ off the ground. The section that particularly struck me was on the differences between the academic and the entrepreneurial mindset. I am not sure there was anything new here, but it was the way in which it was laid out, so simply and so clearly, and the way the comparison was made with the ‘academic mindset’ that particularly struck me. The author identified five elements to the entrepreneurial mindset:

• Academics move slow. Entrepreneurs move fast.
• Academics study problems. Entrepreneurs solve problems.
• Academics function in constraint. Entrepreneurs create possibility.
• Academics focus on patterns. Entrepreneurs focus on the exceptions.
• Academics loathe promotion. Entrepreneurs live to sell.

There is probably some element of stereotyping going on here and the text does recognise a little more subtlety than is suggested by the titles, but the basic principles should be clear enough. It was the text under the first of these headings that really made me think:

‘As an academic my approach to change was to move slowly, deliberately and cautiously. I believed that the best way to minimize mistakes was through extensive conversation, committee meetings, producing volumes of written material, etc. In other words, the best way to make a decision was by slowly moving through a process that involved lots of talking, thinking and analyzing before doing anything. As an entrepreneur I act first and analyze later. Quick movement is essential because my goal is to get into action and fail as fast as possible. Every time I fail, I can evaluate what worked (and didn’t work), make quick adjustments, and get back into action. Failing gives me lots of data that I can use to adapt as I’m moving forward.’

That willingness to fail, and the learning from failure as part of the process of development, was something that others had also commented on in relation to entrepreneurship and something that I am more than aware that we discourage within the academic world.

 

As part of my role of Deputy Pro-vice Chancellor (Staffing) I have aimed to apply something of this logic to the process of culture change within the University. It is usually said that culture change takes time, and to fully embed any particular change that is undoubtedly true. With only three to four years to make any kind of impact, however, I have had to think in much shorter time scales. My line manager commented in the annual review earlier in the summer that I seemed to have a knack for start and finish projects. I would prefer to say that I am applying entrepreneurial methods: establishing agendas, making changes, achieving results and moving on.

There are three or four areas where this has been particularly successful (although the exact methods have changed in each case, and that goes back to the idea of learning on the go). With employability I was asked to chair a review. I identified the issues (the lack of embeddedness) constructed a strategy and, with colleagues in the Careers Network costed out what was possible. We took this to senior management, got the go ahead to make the changes (although on a lower budgets than originally requested) and created a model for employability that has by any standards been successful, lifting Birmingham close to the top of the league tables. What is more the model has been taken and applied in different ways in a number of different UK universities, becoming known as the ‘Birmingham Model’, a clear sign of recognition and success. I followed this up with the establishment of an in-house student employment agency (Worklink) despite being told that we could never deliver on this internally, given the University's track record on such projects, and would be better off buying an existing model off the shelf. I made the case for doing it ourselves and the result has been groundbreaking and succesful.

Switching areas slightly, I was asked to act as academic lead on a Higher Education Academy sponsored project on Valuing Teaching at Birmingham (VT@B). This aimed to identify how academic staff perceived teaching across the institution and to make recommendation to improve the outlook and value of teaching as a part of the wider academic process. The issue here was perhaps more of perception than reality but there were clear things that could be done and I made it my task to get these on the agenda of senior management and delivered. We now support the academic promotions process with workshops and training for Heads of School, placing teaching alongside research as well as addressing other equality and diversity issues. We have also established a Birmingham Teaching Academy and advertised for international Birmingham Teaching Fellows to encourage and promote excellence and innovation in teaching. The landscape has changed and teaching is now talked about alongside research as one of the strengths of the University. More importantly, however, the fact that the project existed, was very well publicised and that I spoke to the senior team about it constantly meant that the valuing of teaching became part of the conscious messaging of the institution even before the project reported and that, in itself, has made a significant difference to perceptions.

I could point to similar action around academic performance and on issues of equality and diversity, perhaps with less obvious or visible success at present, but in each case I set out with a clear objective, a sense of urgency in terms of implementation and what I would generally think of as an entrepreneurial mind set (as defined in the points set out above). I think I have surprised myself, at least looking back on the last three years, on how successful some of this has been. What I probably need to do now, however, is to see whether the same principles can be applied to research as well as to the management of the institution. Whether I can make the entrepreneurial mindset work for me individually as well as for the University as a whole.

Teaching as a Protected Characteristic

Last week I went to Leeds to present some of the findings from the Valuing Teaching @ Birmingham (VT@B) Project to those who are taking part in this year's HEA Change initiative. VT@B was an Higher Education Academy supported project undertaken here at Birmingham University to look at the way in which the balance between teaching and research among academic staff was understood by the staff themselves. It consisted of a series of interviews with a wide cross section of staff, feedback from a web survey and a number of focus groups and discussions with senior managers within the University. The project led to a series of recommendations aimed at redressing the balance between the recognition of teaching and research in academic contracts within the University.

This is not really the place to go into the specific results in great detail. The overall conclusion, which will probably reflect many other research intensive universities (and others from the responses at the HEA event) is that as we approach the REF submission, many academics feel that teaching is being undervalued, at the day to day level within specific departments, when considering issues such as promotion, and in the wider messaging of the University, especially on the outward facing web site. With the emphasis on increase grants, however, an increasing discourse around student experience, and the importance of NSS and other elements of national league tables, then it was noted that this might be changing.

One interesting point struck me, however, as I was preparing the presentation for the HEA event, and that I raised in the final few minutes of the presentation. This was the similarities between much of the language and structures of discrimination that we had heard around teaching within the project and the debate that is happening more broadly around gender, race or sexuality within the whole field of equality and diversity. I am responsible, within the University, for our Equality Executive Group and like so many other Universities we have been struggling with things like the Athena Swan charters, questions of BME attainment gaps, recognition for our work on sexuality and even interfaith activities across the University. Within all these areas the question is not so much overt sexism or racism among staff or as an institution. Attitudes of that kind are very rare these days, although perhaps still too common for comfort. The issue in all these 'protected characteristics' is actually one of implicit prejudice.

I could perhaps take the example of religious faith as an example. Many colleagues, and even whole individuals, will claim quite legitimately that they have no faith position and that they do not take faith positions into account in relation to teaching, to promotion practices within the institution, in relation to research or in relation to expectations in terms of workload models or whatever it is. However, almost by saying that they are demonstrating an implicit prejudice and if they took the time to make themselves aware of the specific needs and experiences of people of different religious groups, then they would realise that whether it is in relation to prayer times, washing facilities, food provision, failure to recognise faith perspectives in learning and teaching, or whatever else it might be, by claiming to do nothing detrimental they are in fact limiting the chances of some of their students, or their colleagues who hold committed faith positions.

Another element of implicit prejudice comes through experiments which show that even those who have a good track record on, for example, race issues can still react differently (more quickly, less consciously) when confronted by pictures of individuals from different racial backgrounds holding guns. the prejudice is so ingrained that we do not always note that we display it. This has also been shown to be the case when names are added at the top of essays, or promotion documentation. Even if the individual is not known, our assumptions about gender, race, or perhaps even religion, will determine, perhaps only slightly, but still measurably, our response to the paper concerned.

In the case of teaching, therefore, what we see in our data is the idea of teaching as a 'protected characteristic' among academics. We say all the right things. We assert as institutions that individual academics have as much chance of promotion or reward on their teaching as they do on their research. We claim to recognise teaching excellence in colleagues and at times of promotion etc. If we stop to think about it, and are clearly challenged to do so, then this is what we do. However, when we are under pressure to deal with a pile of forms, to sort out next year's work load, to think on the spot of who to recommend for reward or recognition (however that is done) at any one time, then across most research focussed Universities, and perhaps we could say most universities, we revert to type, and our implicit prejudices come to the for. I am probably as guilty of this as any other manager. The solution, however, is one of raising awareness, noting and drawing to the attention of boards and managers, asking our colleagues to stop and think about the consequences of their actions, becoming self aware. These are exactly the same solutions that we are learning to take on board for all protected characteristics and perhaps, in the University context, we need to add 'teaching' to that list.

Seeking the 'Entrepreneurial'

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event in London, organised by the National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education on the Entrepreneurial Institution. It was a really stimulating day and I would want to praise the organisers for putting together an interesting and thought provoking programme. It has, however, taken me a couple of weeks to think through some of the implications of what was being said and how this relates to some of my own thinking. If entrepreneurship is going to have a place in my model for the New Collegiality then it is going to be under the general heading of 'innovation and flexibility'. One serious question, however, is whether 'entrepreneurship' is the right word for what it is that I am really trying to get at within my own model.

Earlier in the academic year we held a focus group at Birmingham as part of a wider project on teaching and the curriculum. At that focus group colleagues were asked to look at the values that were set out by the University as they relate to teaching and learning. The group endorsed all the stated values apart from 'entrepreneurship'. It was not that they were against entrepreneurship as such, it was that they did not think that this was the right term, or perhaps the most useful term, to express the values that they wanted to endorse and to encourage staff and students to engage with. The general feeling was that entrepreneurship was too closely associated with Dragon's Den type start ups, too closely focussed on business and those who wanted to go into business. While it was recognised that it was perfectly possible to be entrepreneurial in social work, the health service, in art and culture and even in education, the term did not sit easily within many disciplines and would not, so the group thought, encourage the desired behaviours in the students. Unfortunately, despite a number of attempts, they could not really come up with a suitable alternative.

The NCEE event opened with an introduction from Paul Hannon who stressed that we needed to widen our understanding of entrepreneurship and begin to see how the values and behaviours that the term implied could be embedded throughout the institution; among students, among staff and as a key value/behaviour for the institution as a whole. This event was focussed primarily at the institutional level, but it was clearly recognised that this was not going to happen unless the individuals within the institution were also working in an entrepreneurial fashion and with entrepreneurial values.

When Paul, and the other speakers, began to define the term, isolate the values and behaviours that it might contain, and to offer examples of entrepreneurship in practice, then a number of key ideas kept being repeated. I do not intend to outline all of these, this is not an NCEE blog, but there were a number that struck me, either because of the centrality of the ideas, or perhaps because of their novelty. These all relate to what I have called, in my model, innovation and flexibility.

The first is creativity. Entrepreneurship is about new ideas. Creativity is not, of itself, entrepreneurial, but entrepreneurship cannot exist without creativity. Of course this is not just creativity in terms of original ideas, but it is also related to new processes, new ways of looking at old problems, new methods of working and so on. It is that willingness to try something new and to see how it works. This leads on to the second point that struck me, which is the need for flexibility and/or freedom. Creativity is only valuable if it is able to be expressed. There are two sides to this, one is a willingness to listen to, and hence to encourage, new ideas however odd they may seem at first, the second is the courage to test them out. This does not mean that we should not be critical, or even careful in our analysis and project planning, we just need to be more open. Finally, therefore, and perhaps most significantly for many Universities, entrepreneurship as it was presented to us, very explicitly on more than one occasion, was being willing to allow failure and to learn from failure, to live with a little bit more risk. This is something that we find difficult to instil in our students, certainly something that we are bad at celebrating among our staff, and something that many HE institutions would find very difficult to encourage as an institutional value. It is, however, perhaps something we should think about a little bit more...

The New Collegiality - Starting Points

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.

Theology and the University, Reflections on Nostalgia

Yesterday evening (Tuesday 5th Feb) John Milbank came to give the Cadbury Lecture here at the University of Birmingham on the theme of 'Theology and the Idea of the University'. I have always enjoyed reading John's work and I actually enjoyed the lecture. My overall view, however, is that while I tend to agree with much of his analysis of the 'problem', I very rarely agree with his particular 'solution'. Last night's lecture was a very clear case in point.

I may have got some of the facts, or points in the argument, wrong so please do take this as a definitive presentation of John Milbank's ideas. However, as I understand it, the main point he wanted to make was that of the three primary characteristics of the University, universality of knowledge, independence of institution and freedom of expression, the first has its roots clearly in the Christian theological tradition, the second in a more secular reaction and the third sat somewhere between the Christian and the secular.

As ever John provided a clear and detailed exposition of the history, or genealogy, of the 'university' as an idea and an institution. It was the question of universality, however, that formed the bulk of the lecture and John traced this back, not to the University as such, but rather to the idea of the Cathedral school as an arena for the widest range of possible disciplines. It is only when we include God within the preview of what that universality of knowledge, or study, might include that, according to John, we can really talk about 'universality of knowledge' at all. This suggests, therefore, that theology must have a role within the University and John went on to argue, drawing on the tradition of Newman's 'Idea of a University', that it ought to be possible to explore a theological reading of history, sociology, literature, biology and even maths. He did acknowledge, however, that this would probably be best done in the modern world within the context of a Christian (or other faith based) institution.

I am very certain that I do not share John's view of what 'theology' is or could be (although that is a discussion for another day). I am also unsure whether any 'theological' understanding of, say, science, might have a place within the contemporary University. What concerned me, however, about the kinds of solutions that John was presenting for the contemporary University is that they did not seem to take account of where Universities are in the real world. John did use the word 'nostalgic' and one of the questions from the floor suggested 'romantic', although this was clearly rejected by John. There is, however, always a sense with John's 'solutions' that we have to look back into history, usually pre-reformation Christian history, and lift something from that time and space into the present, that we can only go forward by looking back. Of course we can all learn from history, and I would be among the first to suggest that we should explore all the different possibilities and potentialities that exist in our past, but this could never be a blueprint for the future.

In these notes I am presenting one strand on what I have called 'the new collegiality', a new future for the University. It would be easy to see this also as mere 'nostalgia' for a lost past. The use of the term 'collegiality' in my title certainly suggests that that is where I want to go. That, however, is not the case. We are in a different space, a new space. We cannot go back to models from the time when Christian (or even religious) discourses were dominant. We cannot go back to Newman's context of the mid-nineteenth century (although I would, and will, argue that there is much we can learn from this time). Nor can we go back to the cosy 'collegial' ideal of the 1960s, or whatever period we care to choose. That does not mean, however, that we have to accept the status quo or that there is nowhere else to go. In these notes I do want to present a clear vision, based on where I believe we have got to and where we need to go forward. Theology may have a place in that vision (alongside many other disciplines) but will certainly not be my own starting point, at least not in the way John Milbank understands 'theology'.