Professor Michael Worton

Michael Worton is Vice-Provost of UCL (University College London). He was chair of the HEFCE/AHRC Expert Group on Research Metrics, and is a member of the HERA/European Science Foundation Steering Committee, 'Building a European Index for the Humanities', a member of UUK/SCOP/HEFCE Measuring and Recording Student Achievement Steering Group, and of the Advisory Board, Clore Leadership Foundation. He was recently appointed Higher Education Advisor to the British Council. He is also a member of the judging panel for the Philip Lawrence Awards.  He has spoken widely in the UK and continental Europe on the Internationalisation of HE.  He is also a Director and Trustee of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA).  From 1998-2006, he was a member of the AHRB/AHRC Council, chairing first the Museums and Galleries Committee and then the Knowledge and Evaluation Committee.   He is a member of the International Committee of the French Research Council (ANR) and also of the Advisory Board for the Programme of Artistic Research of the Austrian Research Council (FWF).  He has just undertaken a personal review for HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) and the UK Government of language provision in UK higher education.

His research focuses on 20th and 21st century literature and on aspects of critical theory, feminism, gender politics, and painting and photography. He has published nine books and more than 70 articles and chapters in books.

The Importance of Dialogue

The world of Higher Education is currently in a state of anxiety, as Government cuts begin to bite, and we face the prospect of much deeper cuts in the next couple of years. Yet as we face the inevitable cuts that will come, it is important that we also reflect on the successes of the past decade. 

Government investment

We have seen unparalleled investment in research by the UK Government, which has enabled UK HE to reinforce its global position, second only to the USA.  Furthermore, ever increasing numbers of UK students are choosing to go to university to study for a degree, and we are finally making real progress with regard to young people from non-traditional backgrounds.   

Universities now focus much more on interdisciplinary work, both in their research and in their teaching. They have also been putting in place international strategies, which have not only increased the number of overseas students and staff coming to UK universities but also the mobility between the UK and other countries. This outreach to the world (although it has a considerable way to go) has been accompanied by an increasing focus on local community work, which has been driven to a large extent by the work of student volunteers.  

Universities are thus very different places than they were even 10 years ago, and their focus is much more outward-looking.  As the value of knowledge transfer has become increasingly recognised, there has been an important shift from the notion of research dissemination and knowledge transfer as one-way communication to a growing sense of the importance of dialogue and the collective creation and development of knowledge.  This focus on exchange rather than simple transfer, which is the heart of true Public Engagement, is one of the greatest challenges for the modern university. It is also a significant opportunity for universities to reinvent themselves as a public good for the 21st Century.  

The public within our walls

One of the major lessons we have learnt at UCL as a Beacon for Public Engagement is that the public is not only "elsewhere", but also within our own walls.  We are a community of nearly 22,000 students and 8,500 staff, just over half of whom are non-academics.  All of them have great loyalty to UCL as a community, but many of them are unaware of what exactly is going on in terms of research and even teaching. So, we now realise that we need to engage pro-actively with our accountants and security guards, our finance and human resource professionals, our cleaners and our administrators, listening to them as well as talking with them about research findings.  We need also to define which external audiences we particularly want to address, and then target them in specific and differently appropriate ways.

The biggest lesson we have had to learn is how to listen and how to allow non-specialists not only to challenge our ideas and question the significance of our discoveries, but also to contribute to the knowledge with which we are working.

Object Retrieval

A striking example from recent activities at UCL is Object Retrieval, a mass participation art project which took place in mid October: a single museum object was exhibited in a converted Routemaster bus and explored by hundreds of people from their own personal or professional perspectives. The chosen exhibit was an American toy car which once belonged to a four-year-old boy whose blood lead had risen to a worrying level. This highly inclusive interdisciplinary project, a partnership between the artist Joshua Sofaer and UCL Museums and Collections, sought to include everyone who visited the bus in the process of creating knowledge about the object through their responses, knowledge and questions. The contributions ranged from the highly scientific and medical to the historical, from the legal to the Gospels, from the technical to the intimately personal and so on, thereby creating a vast "online biography" of the exhibited toy car - which must already in effect be the biggest museum label in the world! (See http://www.objectretrieval.com/)  

A reciprocal model of engagement

This project reminded us of one of the key lessons we are learning from our Public Engagement activities: that is, we can never predict exactly why and when people are interested in certain things. As scholars and scientists, we are increasingly keen to communicate our research findings to audiences with whom we have not traditionally had much contact, yet who will be affected in many ways by our discoveries. And we now recognise explicitly that through our various processes of communicating, we gain new perspectives and are offered new pathways forward in thinking about our discoveries.  Crucially, we are learning gradually to undo decades, even centuries of assumptions about how and where knowledge is created and by whom.  We are also learning to interrogate notions of ownership of knowledge and, indeed, assumptions about who is interested in knowledge and why.

As cultural hierarchies slowly dissolve through the complex dialogic process that is effective public engagement, the nature of knowledge itself will be subject to some revision as the potentially ever-shifting contexts of all knowledge are admitted as constituent of that knowledge.

Public Engagement encounters, therefore, contribute to the way we think about our research and, crucially and excitingly, they can also often lead us to think again about how we are teaching our subjects in our university.  In this way, Public Engagement serves not only to bind universities much more closely (and in creatively complex ways) with the communities with which they work; it also helps us to bring our research and teaching together in closer and more productive ways.