Transcript: Open House Day speeches

Transcripts from the Public Engagement Open House Event, 25 November 2009

Paul Younger

Why should universities engage with the public? Well, the first reason is because we have to - I'll unpack that in a bit. The second reason, and it's actually the reason that most of us who get involved in it start with   because we ought to, not just because we have to. It's not just contractual obligation; it's because you should. And finally - because it helps us to do our jobs better.

Looking at the first one, I've thought about all sorts of universities, and I've yet to think of a university that wasn't originally founded, to some extent at least, to serve a public need. The crucial thing that seems to have been overlooked throughout my time I've spent in university until very recently is that the universities in this country   with a couple of very minor exceptions of small private institutions - are formally charities. Our very existence, therefore, is to deliver public benefits, but that's been comprehensively forgotten throughout the sector to a very large extent. You hear people saying that their university is a business like any other -no, it isn't. It's a business like any other charity, but not like any other. We're like other businesses, but the ones we resemble are not-for-profit, charitable organisations, not the rest.

Finally, as if the first two weren't enough, a large proportion of the funding we get in our universities comes from the public purse, so the public have every right to ask what they get out of this deal. We're putting money in here; what do we get out of it?

That is the 'contractual obligation' bit.  What about because we ought to? I think that we ought to because we in universities are privileged. I was at a lecture by Noam Chomsky last month, and he said that intellectuals, when you think about it, are intrinsically privileged. It's nice work compared to a lot of work, and we can only do that because other people are doing all the other stuff that we rely on in order to sit round and pontificate. Not that I do much of that, as you can imagine, but you know... I agree with Chomsky: intellectuals are intrinsically privileged, and whichever belief system you want to choose, solidarity with those less privileged than ourselves is a very widespread ethic. It's certainly one that I sign up to. I come up from a Catholic background.

Because universities have a lot of bright people who are brought together in the learning community, I think the best universities are lifelong learning communities in and of themselves. We never stop learning; we might be doing teaching but we need to learn to teach, and it's endless. Because we've got all these brains gathered and in the privileged position of grappling with interesting problems, we are a force to be reckoned with. We've got in our hands the means to contribute to social transformation and I thoroughly sign up the notion that education is a very liberating, empowering and rewarding thing. On that point, here's a quote from one of my favourite thinkers and writers on education. Here's what he's saying:

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or else it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world" (Paulo Freire)

For me, when I talk about university as a learning community, it's the second part of that quotation I have in mind. It's about giving people the ability to think critically and creatively, and it's a hell of a privilege to be in a position to do that within the formal and informal structures of our society.

Let's move on to third point of' why': we should do it because it helps to do our jobs better. Here's a quotation from our own vice chancellor, who has a very colourful past. Before he came to Newcastle, his job was trying to turn the university which was the intellectual powerhouse of apartheid into an inclusive institution:

"We are far more likely to learn from those we don't know than from those we know only too well." (Prof. Chris Brink)

Academics are very good at framing arguments, but we have no monopoly whatsoever on insight, and this insight comes from a wide range of perspectives. We might be good at helping people think creatively and critically, but we don't have a monopoly on anything else.

Moving on a bit more briefly then: how should universities engage with the public? My answer to this is that it's through the day job, really: engagement isn't another bloody thing that we have to add to the list. Through our teaching and our research, if our work's gonna be fruitful, it will be fruitful because we frame the questions which research answers in collaboration with those other voices I've spoken about. As far as the University of Newcastle is concerned, we say there's no such thing as third strand; we want rid of the phrase 'third strand'. It's not an additional burden; it's a critical approach to how we do the day job. Even when we're doing undoubted public service work like clinical practice, it's inextricably bound up with learning, teaching, research and so on, and if it isn't, we shouldn't be doing it.

A common objection is that this is all very well, very nice, touchy-feely, but it doesn't apply to my discipline. People are always saying, "I agree with you, but it's not for me". We've already come to this point about education being the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality, and if there is any discipline in the university for which critical thinking is not the stock in trade, then we should abolish it. It shouldn't be in the bloody university. I would argue that critical thinking being applicable to the full range of human experience is a generic skill, which any discipline on any subject can be used to exemplify, illustrate and so on. I just don't think it's good enough to say, "It doesn't apply to my discipline". We did a big survey of engagement in our university, and thought we'd get a couple of hundred returns; we got 1,200, and you wouldn't believe where they came from. Lots of departments, we thought they were pretty pure, we're not going to get much from them - we had avalanches of great stuff. If you think seriously about this, you can do a lot of good stuff, because the basic thing that we can bring to the rest of society is critical thinking.

Here's a question that I sometimes bother myself to think about: do you think it's fair when people talk about academics in their ivory towers? I'm kind of on the 'yes' side of this, despite being in a university that likes to pride itself on being a civic university. But if it is still a fair gibe, I think the question we need to ask is, which side are you on? With that, I shall hand over to Gerry.

[Applause]

Gerry Kelleher

I think that the engagement agenda is at the heart of us providing a coherent response to government and others about what the universities are about. It covers everything from research to teaching and learning to actually what our estates departments do, in a way that shows that what we're trying to do is to maximise the economic and social benefits that universities provide. In case you think that it's something that's kind of nice, it's particularly stark if you're sat where I'm sat in Manchester, on Oxford Road. There are two universities, Manchester University and MMU, and we have 70,000 students, 15,000 staff and a joint turnover of £1 billion a year. That's just the kind of basic figures about the two institutions. On either side of Oxford Road, there are three wards that are not just the most poorly served in terms of economic and social benefit within the UK on indices of multiple depravation, but actually in the whole of Western Europe. For us the issue is certainly doing things about communicating what our research is about, and communicating what education is about but it's about actually making that case that the universities, which are blessed with all of this stuff, are actually making a difference to this.

The traditional approach of my university to this kind of agenda would be to see ourselves as missionaries. What we would do is we would go out to communities and say, 'We're the university, there's this really good stuff that we can do, and you should be grateful', and then look confused when we don't always get a positive response to that. If you talk to the communities about this, they do see the positive benefits of the university but you also get a much more mixed message. You get messages that actually, the issue isn't that we are a hard-to-reach community, but that the issue is that the university is very hard to reach for us.

What I'm saying is, what happens when you rephrase the question?. And the question was, why should the public engage with the university? That's an interesting way round of trying to think about it, and I think that's at the heart of what we've done at MMU, to try to change that question. Now what I'm going to try to do in a very short space of time is say a little bit about what that might mean.

The first thing I'd say about it is that it takes a while. Whilst this says you have to map out your path, what that means is being very, very flexible, and being very responsive. This is one of the things that we did: we organised a lab, like a number of the Beacon projects have done, and basically, what the lab was, we got people in from outside to talk to the university, the very senior management of the university. Some of the people we got to talk to were other universities. We also, though, talked to other people, as both of these groups were very, very good at public engagement but came at it from a very different perspective to the one that traditionally, universities come at it from.

The other thing that we did   the 'be creative' is a bit patronising, but I don't intend it to be   what it should be is that the Beacons gave us the opportunity to take risks, to go out to our research community and say, 'We have some fellowships on offer. Here's the deal with the fellowships: first of all, you don't write a huge paper; what we want is 250 words and a picture, and we're going to decide who gets the fellowships on the basis of 250 words and a picture, and how good you are at community engagement.' What that means is that first of all you've got to have a partner who has to be signed up to this. Also, what we're going to do is, having shortlisted down from about 30 original applications to about 12 in the end, is let people vote on it. But we're not just going to let people in the institution vote internally; we're going to let people externally vote. When I was told about this I thought maybe we might get a few hundred people externally; we got 2,500 people responding to this.

Reward and recognise: quite often it comes up as being something like, actually what you want to do is promote people, and what you want to do is to change your promotional criteria for professors and readers. I think you have to do that as well; to be serious about this stuff at an institutional level, you've certainly got to do that. But actually what we find is overwhelmingly, people aren't that fussed about the reward, and certainly not that fussed about the monetary reward. The people who are going to engage in this and be good at this are going to do it anyway, but what they do appreciate is being valued.

Leadership is vital. By that, I don't mean the vice chancellor or deputy vice chancellors or whatever. What we found, and I think this is common across many of the Beacons, is that certainly you need the institutional leadership   and the institutional leadership have to get it and have that kind of coherent vision about what it is that they're trying to do   but for us, it was that vision that it's about an ecology, it's about the whole institution, it's about estates as much as it's about research, teaching and learning.

So, that's a slightly less erudite approach to this than Paul's, but I hope it gives you a flavour of what we did and what I think has been, I genuinely believe, a profound impact on my institution. That's it.

[Applause]

Steve West

Just to give you a little bit of background as to why do I think public engagement is so important. Probably because one of the other things that I do alongside being the vice chancellor is that I'm a non exec on a strategic health authority. The way in which health engages with its public   that's patients, carers, politicians and everyone, because everybody has a view on health   is really important, and it's sort of right in the centre of what the health service is trying to do in terms of reform and change. When I reflect back in terms of where we are as a university, there are a number of things that I just want to put out there which might provoke some thinking. UWE is describing itself as a 'partnership university'; when we started to think about that and try to articulate what did we mean by a partnership university, it was trying to capture within the university community a sense of excitement and understanding about what the university was there to do. We thought that we better start asking that question of ourselves, because increasingly, our external publics are asking that question of us.

We started to capture that in the university by saying, we are one university, and the university is about people. It's not about buildings, it's not about the estate; it's about the people doing work and engaging with each other and communicating effectively with each other to co-create ideas, to co-create solutions to problems and to learn off each other and to work effectively as teams. In terms of where we are on the public engagement front, we needed to get it right internally first, before we could start to really engage externally. What we have to do is work out how we ensure that it's embedded within the universities in a way that makes sense to academic staff, and increasingly make sense to the entire workforce in the university, because the public engagement agenda is not just about the academics. It is about professional colleagues and technical colleagues also engaging in that agenda. So, I think we have a very serious challenge, which is about that you say that it's important, you're giving us all the right messages, but is it embedded in career pathways? Is it as recognised as doing very well in the REF? Is it as recognised as learning and teaching? Could we have public engagement fellows? Could we have professors who are promoting and leading around the public engagement, civic engagement agendas? I think that's a real challenge in universities. Some universities will be able to navigate a course through that and will make it happen and other universities might find it more challenging, but if we don't do that then I think we're in trouble, because we won't have embedded it. It won't be mainstream and we won't be doing what I think we need to do, which is to demonstrate to our publics   our students, our staff, the politicians, the general population, Fred or Freda on the street   what it is that a university can do in addition to that which is already recognised in terms of excellence in learning and teaching and research. It's about impact: how do we change the societies that we're living in, how do we engage with them in a realistic way, and how do we shape together those futures?

If I think about what's going on in Bristol, in the last two weeks and for the next couple of weeks we've got degree ceremonies, so we're working with Bristol Cathedral. You'll see all the students out there dressed up. Part of the message that goes on in that is demonstrating to the parents, partners and families what universities are about; that's one demonstration of our engagement. After here, in about two minutes I'm whizzing up to Bristol council. There's a group of five of us, sitting down with the leader and the chief executive to sort out how we are going to save £30 million from Bristol's budget this year. So, increasingly, universities are being used as vehicles to begin to engage, debate and shape what is going on in the societies and the communities that surround the universities. The idea of ivory towers is really disappearing.

I guess one of the things that we need to be thinking in terms of public engagement is how we capture enough enthusiasm, enough energy to embed our universities into those communities, so the universities are seen as part of those communities, informing and shaping those communities, in a model that is probably more like some of the American universities, I'd have to say, where they have significantly changed the face and shape of communities by being totally immersed in the community and working with employers, with public organisations and authorities, to change the shape of a city or a town. That, for me, is when you can say you've really embedded public engagement in a way that is sustainable.  If we view public engagement as an add-on, as something that's not core to a university, I think it will wither and die on the vine. Therefore, what we have to do is find a way of linking it to the work that we do in learning and teaching and research in our ordinary day jobs and make it part of our fabric, if it's to be sustainable. If we don't do it, we'll have failed, and if we don't do it, I think we're in for a really rough time because our publics will continue to ask us what the added value is. There is no point in us articulating that in a way that we understand; we have to be able to articulate it in a way that touches each and every one of those people who are asking those questions. That's about us learning a different language; I think it's about us learning how to communicate and engage more effectively, and it's about us also accepting that on this journey that we're on, we are going to be learning from others in partnership. We don't have the answers; we may be able to create the answers together. We will also need to learn from what's going on across the world because there are other continents that are probably doing it a lot better than we are.

That's an honest view I think of where I am. It is hugely important to our university because we are badging ourselves as a university that wants to engage and wants to work effectively in partnership. So, it's high stakes; it's high stakes for a vice chancellor that's flying that flag because if it doesn't happen, board of governors get grumpy and boards of governors are the only ones that have the authority to sack a vice chancellor. I think we are onto something: the challenge is about scalability and embedding it. Thank you very much.

[Applause]