Abstract
The Humboldtian educational ideal of the modern university based around an intellectual-based learning experience cannot be ignored. Indeed, this has been brought into sharp relief by the marketization of higher education: there is a growing awareness in the university sector, particularly in research-intensive universities, that fee-paying students are entitled to a worthwhile learning experience. This awareness has been further reinforced with the growth of consumer scrutiny in the higher education sector, principally through the introduction of the National Student Survey in 2005. The concern of this article is to explore how research-focused institutions have used their supposed research excellence to pursue teaching excellence and whether this really has enhanced the student learning experience in practice.
Keywords
The opening of the British mind?
‘Students these days are, in general, nice’, wrote the philosopher and critic Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. For Bloom, this niceness is a product of a comfortable democratic existence that makes limited moral or political demands. Students are free of social or ethical constraints, their sense of injustice, either applied to themselves or to wider society, is underdeveloped. The feel-good factor really belongs to students for Bloom: ‘The drugs and the sex once thought to be forbidden are available in the quantities required for sensible use’ (1987: 82). And for Bloom higher learning, and not youth, is generally wasted on the young.
But these days, British students have less reason to display such niceness, despite the burgeoning availability of hedonistic outlets for both sensible and reckless recreation. Of the key stakeholders in the British university sector, students have been the subject, or should that be victims, of a Lenin-Maoist-like permanent market revolution. This all started in the 1980s with the expansion of the international post-graduate student market, which was, literally, a license to print (tuition fees generated) money for some university departments. For policy makers, it became apparent that home students were also a potential rich source of fee income, following examples of Australia and the United States. Hence, in 1997 after the Dearing inquiry into higher education funding, undergraduate fees were introduced up to a maximum of £1000. Then the fees were increased further in 2006, initially amongst English institutions, with universities being able to charge variable fees of up to a maximum of £3,000. In the wake of the austerity agenda being pursued by the Lib-Con coalition government, the ceiling on tuition fees was raised to £9,000 a year in 2010. Debts incurred would be repaid once students earn over £21,000; that is assuming there are jobs available in this era of public sector austerity.
Despite the marketization of higher education, the Humboldtian educational ideal of the modern university based around an intellectual-based learning experience cannot be ignored. If anything, this has been brought into sharp relief by the marketization of higher education: there is a growing awareness in the university sector, particularly in research-intensive universities, that fee-paying students are entitled to a worthwhile learning experience. This awareness has been further reinforced with the growth of consumer scrutiny in the higher education sector, principally through the introduction of the National Student Survey (hereafter, NSS) in 2005. The concern of this article is to explore how research-focused institutions have used their supposed research excellence to pursue teaching excellence and whether this really has enhanced the student learning experience.
The student learning experience in the pile ‘em higher education system
The question of what we should do with our students is one university and funding authorities have responded to by championing the student experience. The elite club of research-led Russell Group and 94 Group universities in Britain acknowledge the importance of investing money from tuition fees into the development of student support facilities and campus infrastructure. It is argued that such investment is integral to secure a world-class student experience (Russell Group, 2010: 21). But plush cafeterias serving a range of organic and vegan food options, as well sports facilities kitted out with the latest IT facilities, are not enough to secure a positive student experience. How our university students are taught is an increasingly vexed issue for those seeking to promote the student experience. However, on the surface the teaching and learning garden seems rosy. And for some parts of the sector, this garden is permanently under a warm summer sun.
The elite club of research-intensive institutions are not backwards in coming forward to trumpet their own feats in enhancing the student learning experience. In the 2008 NSS of final year undergraduates, respondents from Russell Group institutions expressed higher satisfaction rates with their teaching experience than the sector average: % of Russell Group students were generally satisfied with the quality of their course, compared to a sector average of 82%. Moreover the elite research institutions also have the highest completion rates within sector, with an average of only 4% of students not completing their studies versus a British average of 7.7%. For the Russell Group, these ratings reflect the efforts made to improve the student experience (The Russell Group, 2010: 26). The 1994 Group of medium-sized research-led universities also have their didactic triumphs to report: ‘Across the Group there is evidence of excellent provision and support for students relating to both academic and non-academic aspects of their university life. There is evidence of very high levels of satisfaction amongst the students themselves’ (1994 Group, 2007: 8). Thus between 2005–2007, the NSS results showed that universities, belonging under the aegis of the 1994 Group, received consistently higher satisfaction rates for their teaching than the university sector as a whole.
Despite all this collective back slapping, the research intensive universities are still aware that the student experience with regard to teaching and learning is not without its ‘issues’. They are not yet in a position to take this increasingly debt-ridden constituency for granted. There is a growing ‘elite club consciousness’ amongst the research intensive universities that greater attention needs to be given to the educational experience. A policy document issued by the 1994 Group observed: ‘It is important for universities to keep ahead of student expectations in regards [sic] to the teaching and learning they provide … Universities should increasingly look to provide innovative and well facilitated learning space to provide an engaging academic experience’ (1994 Group, 2007: 16). The research-focused sector is aware that maintaining teaching excellence requires continued investment (The Russell Group, 2010: 21). Historical precedent suggests there is valid point to be made about funding: in comparative terms Britain has a lower proportion of GDP going into universities than many of its foreign competitors, despite the rapid expansion of student numbers during the 1990s and 2000s (see FSSG, 2008: 18; Hayes, 2003: 128–129). The main strategy adopted in the recent past by universities to cope with the advent of mass higher education, without the requisite investment, has been to pile the staff-student ratios (SSRs) higher. Indeed, the Financial Sustainability Strategy Group (hereafter, FSSG) within Higher Education Funding Council for England (hereafter, HEFCE), the quango responsible for funding English universities, acknowledged that this strategy has resulted in a form of pile ‘em higher education, where SSRs have rocketed in the last 15 years. The FSSG report is aware of evidence which suggests a correlation between high staff student ratios and lower levels of student satisfaction (FSSG, 2008: 22). Higher staff student ratios have resulted in an effective breakdown in pastoral tutoring in certain institutions and the decline of staff intensive forms of teaching, such as seminars and laboratory work, and its replacement with lecturing to ever larger groups of students.
University teaching … like sex for the British
The governmental reforms of the last decade have partly addressed the funding position of British universities. The introduction of both flat rate and variable fees has increased the level of funding going into the sector, to a tune of £1bn in the first two years after the introduction of fees (HEFCE, 2009). The increased funding has enabled research-intensive universities, ‘to invest in all aspects of the student experience’ (The Russell Group, 2010: 8). This includes, inter alia, the employment of new teaching staff and investment in better teaching and library facilities. Despite the injection of new money into the sector through variable fees, there is the tacit concern, especially amongst elite research-led institutions, that teaching requires further attention—or additional injections of cash. A recent policy paper issued by the Russell Group acknowledged:
research-intensive universities in the UK will need continued and increasing investment if they are to maintain their currently high levels of excellence, and compete with leading institutions elsewhere. For Russell Group institutions, further expansion in student numbers without adequate funding to research-led teaching poses an unacceptable threat to the quality of teaching. (2010: 21)
At times, tacit concerns have spilt over into explicit anxieties over the learning experience within research-intensive universities. These exist at the very top of the sector. Manchester University’s former vice-chancellor, Alan Gilbert, admitted on the BBC 4’s Westminster Hour programme in 2009 that, despite the injections of new—fees generated—monies into universities, he was not satisfied with the quality of undergraduate teaching: ‘We think it is too impersonal, it is not sufficiently interactive, that the curriculum … has not been profoundly thought through’ (BBC News, 2009). In the interview, Professor Gilbert admitted that his misgivings about the quality of the learning experience also applied to his own institution, even though efforts were being made to improve standards. At the same time, the vice-chancellor was using the BBC platform to claim that universities were still being under-funded: ‘I just think it is important for us to face up to the fact higher education in the UK is under immense cost pressures, and that we have had decades of being asked to do more with less’ (BBC News, 2009). Prior to the Browne review recommendations on raising student fees, Wendy Piatt, Director of the Russell Group, made the case that the institutions she represents are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a high quality learning experience in the face of the coalition government’s public sector budget cuts. Piatt noted: ‘It is essential that the government enables universities to access more funds by lifting the fee caps … so they can concentrate on providing a world-class learning experience’ (Sellgren, 2010: 2).
The political philosopher Alan Ryan notes, however, in his book Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, that ‘even if colleges and universities were better funded they would not do a better job’ (Ryan, 1999: 126). Ryan may have a point vis-à-vis the question of what we should do with our students’ learning. The seeming neglect of student teaching is not just a funding issue. It is also, crucially, a product of professional culture where pedagogy and research co-exist but in an uneasy relationship, and sometimes antagonistic relationship.
Teaching in the modern British university system has something of a Cinderella status. Arguably, this is particularly true in research-intensive institutions, which provide the model embraced by the university sector. In the Russell Group and 94 Group institutions, teaching remains the poorer relation vis-à-vis research. Or to quote Becher and Kogan: ‘Like sex among the British, teaching has remained in the realm of the private, the unspoken and the amateur’ (Becher and Kogan, 1980: 106). The club of elite research institutions have tacitly, as shown above, acknowledged Becher and Kogan’s observation, albeit less poetically and with less humour.
This is down to the fact that the professional default preference in academia is for research over teaching. This cultural imbalance was advanced by the post-war years of university expansion, forged by the Robbins Committee revolution. In fact, the institutional expansion of universities was inversely proportional to the diminishing status of teaching. Research, following the modus operandi of the natural science disciplines, became the ‘reserve currency’ of the academic labour market. It became the standard by which the growing cadre of professionals entering universities were judged fit for the purpose of being employed as educators; that is, lecturers.
Indeed, the importance attached to research by the academic profession was firmly entrenched by the time Baron Robbins first met his fellow committee members in 1961. Halsey and Trow’s early 1960s survey of British academics, involving some 1400 dons, testifies to the emerging status of research. In response to the question, ‘Do your own interests lie primarily with research or teaching?’, only one-third of respondents admitted to a prime interest in teaching. The remainder sought a balance between research and teaching ‘but leaning towards research’ (Halsey and Trow, 1971: 277). Research, though, is short-hand for the process of being involved in producing published outputs. Interestingly, Halsey found a positive relationship between the most productive academics in terms of publications and a predilection for research over teaching. Academic publishing, since Halsey and Trow’s study, has garnered even greater professional esteem, with the pressures to publish or perish becoming more intense.
The dilemma still remains: what are we to do with our ‘nice students’ now that they are paying all those fees and we still want to get on with our research because that is what helps us get on? Providing an engaging form of learning for students, who are paying £9,000 for the pleasure of being taught in a university, with one estimate calculating that some students will be paying £135 per lecture, is paramount. On paper, and in theory, the university sector, especially the research-focused brotherhood, has come up with an effective, ready-made solution to this dilemma. It is effective as it kills all the key stakeholders in the modern university system with one stone. The academic stakeholders still get to prioritize their research, with all the kudos and rewards it brings, safe in the knowledge that it is contributing to a cutting-edge form of learning. The solution harks back to the classic liberal model of the nascent modern university: it centres on what is termed research-led learning.
The scholastic panacea of research-led learning … (or how to make university teaching more like sex for the French)
To improve the student learning experience, greater priority needs to be given to teaching. Alluding to Becher and Kogan’s metaphor concerning learning in British universities (see above), teaching needs to be less like sex for the British than sex for the French—vital, dynamic, vibrant. 1 How can teaching be given a greater priority when institutional kudos is defined primarily in terms of exploits in the field of research? More to the point what are the incentives for academics to improve teaching when career progression is firmly structured around research outputs?
Since the introduction of variable fees, there has been a recurring Humboldtian-inspired mantra, one which sets out a gambit, a panacea even, to ensure that research and teaching are mutually reinforcing. The panacea offered, especially by elite, research-intensive universities, is that of research-led teaching—or research-led learning. The idea here is of using research scholarship and up-to-date, cutting-edge research to inform the teaching process. The ideal of closely allying research with teaching is a long cherished ideal within the modern university system: those proselytizing for a closer marriage between research and scholarship are pushing at open ideological door. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the eighteenth century Prussian philosopher, who is to the modern university what Lord Reith is to the BBC, founded the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin around an inseparable link between research and teaching (Humboldt, 1970). The Robbins Committee, which came up with the blueprint for the post-war expansion of British higher education, noted that what makes universities distinctive is the link between teaching and research. More recently, government audits show that departments highly rated for their research are also likely to be the best for teaching in their respective disciplines. The implication being that effective teaching is inextricably dependent upon high-end research.
Recent policy documents and reforms, especially emanating from research-led universities have made both an empirical and theoretical case for research-led teaching. A teaching strategy document published by The Russell Group (n.d) maintained that research-led teaching can add real value to the student experience. The document also makes a case for the benefits of research-led learning. These include greater student satisfaction, higher completion rates and better skills preparation for the labour market. The document also outlines three key advantages of using research as the basis of learning based on the work of Blackmore and Fraser (2003): it enhances student motivation, encourages deep and enquiring approaches to learning and develops valuable skills. The medium-sized research-intensive universities also have made claims about their research-led credentials: ‘1994 Group institutions have an ideal balance between excellence in research and teaching, two areas of activity which are mutually supportive and serve to reinforce each other. Importantly, institutions in the 1994 Group offer their students the opportunity to learn in a research-enriched community’ (2007: 11).
Having aspirations to integrate the research-led model into the taught curriculum is one strategy favoured by Russell Groupers. For example Sheffield University’s Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy places an onus on enquiry-based learning as a way of developing students (The Russell Group, n.d.: 5). Another way of achieving research-led teaching is to ensure that leading researchers and professorial stars within institutions expose their talents to students: ‘In Russell Group universities, students have access to leading academics at the forefront of their field internationally’ (The Russell Group, n.d.). The Russell Group universities are also committed ‘to ensuring that their students are taught by the most talented and highly qualified staff’ (The Russell Group, 2010: 23). For instance, the LSE has a commitment to offering students the opportunity to engage with leadings academics. Indeed, the QAA teaching audit found that students were appreciative of their exposure to world renowned scholars in their respective fields, some of which are shaping national policies. The Russell Group (2010) notes how the research-led teaching model is resource intensive, depending on sufficient numbers of high calibre, research-active scholars. This requires investment in the recruitment and retention of such faculty members, which in turn would also help improve staff to student ratios. Thus, the universities of Leeds, Bristol and Southampton have targeted variable fee income to undertake recruitment drives. All three institutions have seen significant reductions in the staff-student ratios. Such investment has improved the student learning experience, not only in terms of greater contact time but also in temrs of greater availability of academic faculty. Such recruitment drives also bring in a wider variety of new modules and programmes, which help to enrich the student experience (The Russell Group, 2010: 22).
Evidence, both of a non-scientific anecdotal kind and the more systematic variety, suggests that the benefits of a research-led teaching model are more apparent than real. The Higher Education Policy Institute found that the average weekly teaching time of British students is significantly lower than in other European countries (FSSG, 2008: 22). In fact, average weekly contact time between student and staff has been on the decline in recent years, from 15 hours in 2008 to 13.4 hours in 2010 (GfK, 2011). Concerns about contact hours have reached the higher echelons of power: universities minister David Willets observing at a recent Higher Education Institute conference that undergraduates have legitimate frustrations about the lack of educational input they receive. In fact, students at various institutions including Bristol and Manchester have launched protests over lack of teaching hours (Paton, 2011). Concerns over teaching also extend to quality as well as quantity. The market encroachment in higher education has meant that in the competition for students universities are making ever more ambitious claims in their undergraduate and postgraduate prospectuses. On the ground, the situation is very different; such that the Office for the Independent Adjudicator for higher education has in recent years been receiving increasing complaints about the delivery of courses (Newman, 2007). It appears that the brave new world promised by proclamations about the value of research-led teaching are hollow. Evidence seems to suggest that the prospect of being taught predominantly by leading academics, as a way of enhancing the student experience, is a bit of a fallacy. Research-led universities, acknowledge that institutions have coped with higher staff-student ratios by relying on large classes. They also employ a range of staff members in their teaching (The Russell Group, 2010: 22). As well as world-class tenured professors, students are being exposed to the teaching talents of postgraduate researchers, graduate teaching assistants and part-time staff. The perceived lack of quality teaching time in universities cannot be explained alone by funding. For the research intensive institutions are caught between an audit induced rock and a hard place. On the one hand, fees will soon be trebled and students are increasingly demanding an educational experience. On the other hand, elite institutions are especially sensitive to the demands of research audits, looking to maintain or improve their position in the research rating queue. But the jostling over research audit ratings has implications for teaching.
To start with, the culture of the professional academy in relation to teaching has been dominated since 1992 by the regular audit cycle of academic research—the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and now the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Just how profound the impact of this research audit has been on the behaviour of both institutions and individual academics was highlighted by a HEFCE-commissioned study in the wake of the 1992 RAE. McNay’s (1999) study employed focus groups with professionals and managers, as well as documents and questionnaires. In a subsequent unofficial report, McNay highlighted how the reward incentives instituted by the RAE brought about a steady transformation in the behaviour and attitude of academics vis-à-vis teaching. His findings point to ‘a gradual separation, structurally, of research from teaching … Department heads reported good researchers spend less time teaching … and more undergraduate teaching is done by part timers and postgraduates’ (McNay, 1999: 199, cited in Jenkins, 2004: 25). Further research into the organizational repercussions of the RAE revealed something of a growing scholastic apartheid amongst departmental faculty: a demarcation between research-active academics and teaching-focused academics (Jenkins, 2004: 25; Sidaway, 1997). The sense of an emerging scholastic apartheid is further reinforced by the fact that institutional rewards and status are generally reserved for those who excel in the research field.
Moreover, the demarcation between research and teaching puts pay to one of the cherished notions of the modern university system. As one consultancy-based study concluded from this emerging scholastic apartheid, the separation between teaching and research roles, ‘clearly undermine any claim that research was a pre-requisite for high-level teaching’ (JM Consulting, 2000: 15). In fact, the limited research that has been done on the relationship between research and teaching would confirm JM Consulting’s conclusions. For instance, Ramsden and Moses in one large-scale Australian study observe: ‘there is no evidence in these results to indicate the existence of a simple functional relationship between high research output and the effectiveness of undergraduate teaching’ (1992: 273). Even the research-intensive universities acknowledge that the relationship between research quality and teaching is questionable. The Russell Group towards the end of its policy statement on research-led teaching made a brief mention of Hattie and Marsh’s (1996) meta-analysis, which ‘found little evidence of a demonstrable positive relationship between teaching and research activity at … departmental levels in universities’ (The Russell Group, n.d.: 20). But what about all those high teaching audit (TQA) scores achieved by a host of Russell Group and 94 Group universities? Work undertaken on the relationship between teaching and research audits is of the view that institutional prestige for research, as well as historical reputation, provide ‘halo effects’ for teaching quality (Jenkins, 2004: 14).
The evidence seems to indicate that the pursuit of research excellence is not the road to teaching excellence. In other words, research-led teaching, contrary to the learning and teaching strategy being promoted by many our leading universities, is far from guaranteeing an enhanced student experience in the lecture hall or seminar room. It may be time to go back to the drawing board—or should that be the white board, with PowerPoints? For are there alternatives to the well-worn, and mindless mantra of research-led teaching? Below some alternative approaches for improving the student learning experience are considered.
Less teaching of students but more engagement with students as a public
With student fees tripling, the contested issue of how research-intensive institutions are to treat their learning experience still remains. Those in positions of authority blame the limited gains from the research-led strategy on resources, or lack of them. To contend this is a resource issue, as many in the sector have done, is to inhabit an ahistorical cocoon. The worlds of research and teaching have been drifting apart like some irreversible continental drift for decades. There are historical forces, which account for the prominence of research over teaching within universities. Peter Scott’s 1984 book The Crisis of the University deftly traces the historical vicissitudes surrounding the emergence of the modern universities. In effect, the redefinition of the modern university as a mass producer of knowledge commodities during the middle of the 20th century meant that teaching and research became two separate continents, drifting ever apart: ‘What were once seen as entirely complementary activities in the age of artisanal research are now increasingly regarded as competitive’ (Scott, 1984: 67). The modus operandi of research audits reinforces this tension between research and teaching, creating a scholastic apartheid. Such is the distance now between teaching and research that there is no clear empirical link that good teaching is dependent upon research. Clearly, the harking back to Humboldtian idyll, where research and teaching operated in a mutually reinforcing harmony, may not create the student experience required in the fee-paying age.
There are alternatives to research-led learning. One institutional strategy for improving teaching, and therefore the student learning experience, is to bolster the professional status of teaching. Here, institutional incentives, which reward more teaching-orientated academic endeavours, are prominent. The idea here is to bring about a shift in the reward and advancement structure within universities from research to teaching. Many universities have instituted career progression for teaching excellence from junior to senior levels. The objective is to introduce professional enticements for teaching activities, which mirror those for research. Nationally, British universities have formed umbrella bodies for promoting teaching: these emerged, as something of a defensive response, in the wake of recent government inquiries into higher education, demanding more regulated training for university teaching. The chief of which is the Higher Education Academy (hereafter, HEA). The HEA was formed in 2004 from a merger of various national teaching organizations, including Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, to advance the status of teaching in universities, ‘Our mission is to support the sector in providing the best possible learning experience for all students’ (HEA, 2011). The HEA overseas national teaching awards, student-led awards, fellowship schemes, conferences, teaching qualifications and discipline specific learning programmes: all this is done in the name of raising the status of learning and teaching in the university sector.
However, critics have rounded on the HEA for not doing enough to champion the professional cause of teaching within the sector. Rather it has been seen to kowtow to the research-focused status quo. A sticking point, historically, is the issue of a regulated form of qualified lecturer training for the sector. In 2005, the HEA’s issued consultation plans for a national framework on professional standards—an opportunity to put teaching on the HE map. However, the HEA’s consultative framework was seen by key teaching advocates within the sector as a missed opportunity. In particular, one recurring concern was that the HEA failed to consider the issue of how to improve the status of teaching and the opportunities for teaching-focused career progress. In the end the HEA, so keen was it not to interfere with established (Russell Group?) interests that it compromised (Lipsett, 2005). It sought to leave institutional and professional autonomy intact: the HEA called instead for the matter of lecturer training to be left to the self-regulation for individual institutions. That said, Craig Mahoney, the newly incumbent Chief Executive of the HEA reignited the debate over the need for regulated training and qualifications for lecturers. In one recent conference keynote address he notes: ‘At present there are very few barriers to teaching in Higher Education. It is almost the only profession in which someone can work without any qualification or licence to practice … But there is as yet no requirement that academics who teach students in Higher Education should hold a teaching qualification or be qualified to teach’ (Mahoney, 2011: 3). The main qualification as we know for entering the academy is one that centres on research.
What the HEA, and any attempt to introduce regulated lecturer-training training for academic staff, offers is an institutional strategy. It is an institutional-based approach for raising the profile of teaching and therefore, by implication, improving the whole standard of the student learning experience. The problem with such institutional reform is that it offers only incremental, strategic change. Yet what an intellectual and policy project to improve the student learning experience, and therefore the quality of teaching, requires is not just practical possibilities. Paradigmatic transformations should be on the agenda. Neary and Winn (2009) suggest a critical, Marxist-inspired, notion of the student producer. The idea is that students actively collaborate with academics in producing knowledge. But this knowledge should not be guided by instrumental ends of career progression or achieving better grades to help get a leg up on the career ladder. Rather it should be set in the context, and connect with, broader struggles beyond the university. The intention here is to ‘democratize the process of knowledge production’ (Neary and Winn, 2009: 132) and produce a deeper learning experience.
These authors offer some notable examples of actual university practices both in Britain and the United States which are promoting the student as producer. There is much to commend these practices and the notion of the student as producer. The only issue I have with this is that the modus operandi and discourse of research is still dominant. My preference is for the notion of the ‘student as a public’. The emphasis is that the creation of a learning environment depends on connecting with the student body not necessarily as learners or as collaborators in research. Rather it depends upon engaging with the student body as a public. What is involved in this potentially idealized notion of engaging with students as a public? To answer this question, we should initially pass a brief comment on the relationship between the academy and the public at large. The distance between teaching and research within universities is only part of a broader disengagement of the professional academy from the public realm; the focus, instead, is on the peer community.
In academia, this process of producing work or literature that is of interest to a public audience has been undermined by professionalization. A process that has revolved around peer control over appointments, promotions and rewards. Jacoby makes withering criticisms of how such developments have reshaped the way academics produce knowledge: ‘professionalization leads to privatization or depoliticization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline’ (Jacoby, 2000: 147). Such developments are supported by empirical content analysis of social science journals. For example, Patricia Wilner (1985) analysed the subjects covered by articles in the highly regarded American Sociological Review between 1936–1982. She found that the Journal, despite its pre-eminence, neglected key events and developments during the first 46 years of its life. For instance, throughout the 1940s and up to the mid-1950s Wilner found only a paucity of articles (around 1%) addressed the Cold War and the McCarthy witch-hunts. This privatized world of the academic scholar, it seems, is a contagion across the Anglo-American social sciences. Dunne et al. (2008) as British-based business school academics, lament the ‘general state of myopia on the part of business and management scholars towards a variety of political issues, even making a virtue out of ignorance’ (Dunne et al., 2008: 271).
This brings us back to teaching. Even though it has had a Cinderella status within the modern university, teaching offers an escape route from the peer-controlled cul-de-sac, which reduces academic activities to the type of myopic irrelevance noted by Dunne et al. above. Some point of contact with an interest group other than the professional peer-group is built into university life through the process of teaching students. The act of teaching within the university milieu for Jacoby provides academics with some form of public: ‘Younger intellectuals if they mainly teach and write for each other, have little immediate impact; but they have students who pass through and on to things’ (2000: 234). In other words, teaching has real possibilities of achieving influence amongst a public audience, albeit one that is selective:
Everyone has had influential teachers, unknown to a wider world, but decisive in one’s own development; these teachers inspired, cajoled, taught. Isn’t it possible that the entire transmission belt of culture has shifted? That it is no longer public in the way it once was but now takes place invisibly in university classroom and reading assignments? (2000: 234)
For students to be part of a public interchange the first principles, upon which academic teaching in universities is based upon, have to change. Firstly, teaching needs to be more than the process of transmission of knowledge or sets of skills. When it comes to teaching, the modern research-led university has much to learn from the brave old world of ancient Greece. Here, education in skills was not befitting a learned citizen. Rather education, for the ancient Greeks, involved the process of paideia; a well-rounded form of cultural instruction, fundamentally concerned with cultivating an appreciation of freedom and aesthetic beauty. Paideia has had its modern advocates (see Adler, 1982), but what about a paideia education manifesto for British universities? For social science disciplines, this may begin by drawing upon a diverse range of intellectual traditions and philosophies, as noted by Thompson and McGivern (1996) in making case for a reflexive form of critical education. But it would also need to involve a move away from technical academic texts and an openness to using non-academic sources in teaching: documentaries, journalistic writings but also films, novels and dramas; these are cultural forms which, according to certain academics, offer insights on social themes which are equal to, or even better than, those offered by the writings of professional academics (see Osborne et al., 2008). Secondly, teaching in universities should move away from the focus and obsession with content and give greater attention to the medium of teaching: that is, the means by which we as academics communicate with students. Here, serious consideration should be given to the role of information and audio-visual technology in delivering as well as shaping what we teach. In addition, serious consideration should also be given to academic language in the teaching context. When a key audience is the student public, it may, according to Graff, help sharpen and add lucidity to academic communication and prose (2003: 134–136). The intellectual benefits of focusing on the students as a public is perfectly summarized by the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker (1999): ‘having to explain an idea … to someone with no stake in the matter is an excellent screen for incoherent or contradictory ideas that somehow have entered themselves in a field’. These first principles are a better starting point than the didactic conjecture informed by the professional culture of the research intensive university. Only then can we begin to think about improving the learning experience of our ‘nice students’. Alan Bloom would surely approve?