Universities and uncertainty

Universities are engines of culture.

The term culture sums the activities of the sciences, arts and humanities, as well as industry, business and commerce.  It is our diverse way of making a living in the world, and our way of reflecting upon those methods in order to learn, improve and buffer the vicissitudes of life.

We might construct a history of humankind that takes us from the hand-to-mouth existence of hunter-gatherers, through to the future facing investments of agriculture, and then the rise of science, medicine, industry &c.  The golden thread running through this narrative might be that of sharing experience, developing historic knowledge, and moving to prediction.  As time passes, populations become more robust in the face of uncertainty.  One key transition is the emergence of organizations designed to reduce uncertainty.

At some point in the timeline universities are created specifically to model, explore and understand.    Those in universities will learn from the past, but also predict possible futures; their work will look at contemporary problems and try to resolve them, but universities will also simply accrue knowledge about the world that could prove useful on much more distant time horizons.  Universities are an investment made by a society, an investment for an uncertain future of varying length.

Universities also teach and train, enabling upcoming generations to continue this work, but also to take the skills acquired and developed by universities into other areas of life, into other organizations.  At the very least, those who have been taught at a university will be able to consume the knowledge produced by universities; knowledge that is increasingly available to the whole population through open access initiatives.  But just as the time horizons and types of problems tackled by universities are diverse, then so are the students emerging from those institutions.

For the university mission to succeed those working within them must work hard to train their students well, to expose them to enriching material and experience, and to intelligently quiz and assess.  But those colleagues must also challenge themselves through research and scholarship.  Students can undoubtedly cooperate in such activities, and their curiosity as well as labour is invaluable; but noviciates are not experts and experts need resource to think, experiment, write &c.

Thinking is central to the university mission.  Without it nothing will happen. The problem spaces inhabited by academics are complex; problem spaces often need to be realized in the first instance before solutions can be designed, answers found.  Thinking is the work of creative imagination, using a variety of tools as appropriate; and thinking is impossible to audit.  There is no linear relationship between the amount of time spent thinking and the number of problems solved, the number of papers published, the number of patents pending &c.  As all good university managers know, the Research Excellence Framework delivers an index of activity; not a measure of action nor a measure of productivity.

When a student pays a tuition fee that student is making an investment.  It is a complex investment.  In part the student is investing in herself, paying for exposure to enriching material and experience, paying for the right to be a noviciate.  But she is also investing in the university mission.  Her own trajectory, her final qualification and skill set, will be a part of that mission as she goes forward into the world.  But she will also expect the academics she encounters, and those that she does not, to continue their work.  She is paying for the infrastructure that enables noviciates, including herself, both at the time she attends university and into the future when new generations attend.  She is paying for knowledge creation. She is paying to buffer an uncertain future.

It has been argued that tuition fees should not be invested in research and scholarship; that all such monies should be converted into direct teaching of students.  Some go as far as to say that anything else would be immoral, would be to cheat students; research and scholarship should be funded from other sources.

Other sources of funding are useful, enabling significant investment in projects at various scales of ambition.  If other sources were sufficient to fund all research and scholarship, then there would be some merit in reducing tuition fees to very low amounts and only spending them upon chalk, lecture theatres and staff time.  But they are not sufficient, and never have been.  The university mission was always built upon students being very clear about the complex investment they are making in themselves and in society.  To openly declare some other model, to claim that the university mission has been exploiting students, is to directly undermine that mission in an indefensible way.

Much of the modern discussion about university policies within the government and within senior executives of universities is about engineering just such a disingenuous view.  New models create new administrations and new opportunities for short term gain for those involved; but new models that ignore the crucial role of universities in an uncertain world will cost society.  Vice Chancellors and ministers now will not notice; but their children and grandchildren may well.