What does the university of the 21st Century look like? Virtual perhaps, with virtual tutors, video conferencing, and ‘distance learning’ students, all working harmoniously via broadband connections? Well, no actually!

That despite many proclaiming that it would be on the back of the IT revolution. But this forgets a crucial element, that for most of us this virtual interaction is not very rewarding when compared to ‘meat space’.

When one of Harvard universities senior administrators, J Summers, talks about constructing a truly 21st century university, his emphasis is not on the virtual, far from it. Rather it is to provide the most nuanced and direct education to their students, and this means increasing the faculty and changing the culture within those faculties to encourage interaction with students - this is what will provide a cuting edge education, the coming together of these two in real space, where the pedigree of an idea, in all its nuanced forms, can be explored, wrestled over and debated. This cut and thrust of debate, reasoning, reflecting and thinking, all in real time, is at the heart of a quality education.

What it is not is some new ‘distance learning’ course, with a reading list and a so called ‘on-line tutor’ to email whilst awaiting your essay grade. Harvard University know this, and whilst many of our new universities resolutely don’t, in the very least prospective students need to.

It may well be the fact that my new local secondary school has got a better ratio of teaching staff to students than does my local new university. I wonder how many students actually realise this?

This is principally because UK universities have seen big increases in productivity from staff, over the past 10 years full time staff totals have fallen from 111,000 to 107,000 when at the same time annual numbers of graduates climbed from 286,000 to 444,000, an increase of almost 50%! Resulting staff student ratios soared from 1:9 up to 1:20/1:25 (depending on who you read) all of which puts some new universities behind some secondary schools in the all important teachers to students stakes.

Pretty impressive eh? But what gets me is why does nobody start complaining … any students out there care to comment … or is everything really totally fine down there on campus?

Yes, Oxbridge and the Ivy League do keep an eye on each other, and Harvard says it can learn from Oxbridge .. and the lesson is ‘face time’.

The international university league table puts Cambridge - the English one - ahead of Harvard for teaching quality, and Harvard is listening up. Their recommending smaller classes and providing more, and substantially greater, inducement for faculty and students to spend time together.

But this should be no surprise, after all people pay hansomely for face time. A seat at dinner with someone like Blair will cost £1000 or more, a seat at his table, a hundred times that. But the rewards can be great, your there with the main man, the big cheese, the big whahoobah, and you can have your moment to influence and to learn. So why isn’t face time a bigger deal at univeristies? How come people aren’t demanding more of it? And why don’t the government start measuring it (they measure everything else!).

Oxbridge and Harvard aren’t wrong - face time with your professor/tutor is an excellent educational quality indicator, and only political expediency prevents its adoption. After all, how many British Universities would look bad if even Harvard are improving their act?

The hard sciences have been going through a bit of a hard time of late, departments have been closing in physics, chemistry and engineering up and down the country like nobodies buisness. Why you ask? Well science subjects are just plain expensive to teach (around £8000 per student) and added to that, demand from students just keeps dropping - a double whamy! Nevertheless, the underlying problem is that the hard sciences just aren’t sexy enough to get the right number of bums on seats.

In response, increasing numbers of universities have been saying they just can’t afford to keep departments open, and in what is now a market system, where money relentlessly follows the student, they seem to have a point.

It doesen’t take a genuis to work out that this trend has dire consequences for the intellectual landscape of the country, after all, we only need so many media and criminology students.

HESA to the rescue, with an extra £1000 per sicence student in 2007. Although this is welcomed by the universities it only addresses one element of the problem, you still need to attract people to hard science. My own university achieves this through a cunning deception, chemistry becomes ‘forensic science’ .. and the students follow in droves. Of course, its still mostly all chemistry, but with a makeover al la CSI .. well you gotta start where students are at right!

You might think that the univerisity is a paragon of truth, after all don’t they live in ivory towers?

The reality is nothing could be further from the truth! For instance I noted the other day that the University of Huddersfield announces that it is ‘top’ for teaching quality among all the ‘new’ universities in the north of England and what’s more, is also the ‘top’ new university for customer satisfaction among its students .. wow! that sounds impressive, until that is you start thinking about it a little. Then it dawns on you that in actual fact this is a far more modest claim than it first appears.

Why pray tell? Well, the first is dispensed with by the relatively small number of new universities in the north, notwithstanding that it is a bit of a contrived category. The second ‘customer satisfaction rating’ is even more dubious. This because it suffeers from what researchers call the ‘inter-rater reliability problem’ - although this is no mere problem, its more of a show stopper!

The issue is you cannot be sure your comparing like with like. If a student at Cambridge rates say his ‘academic support’ as ‘fair’ and a student at Huddersfield feels his is ‘good’ what does that tell us? Well, not much actually. Not unless we know what they mean by ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because we would need to know their using the same measurable scales (like on a ruler for instance) if our goal is to compare institutions. Can we really assume that ‘fair’ at Cambridge is worse than ‘good’ at Huddersfield?

Of course all of these type of claims and the eagerness to make them is just a marketing exercise, and like all marketing, it is a half truth masquerading as a whole truth. One thing for sure is that the days are long gone when universities were ivory towers .. and this bodes ill for the under researched and niavee prospective student.

You have been warned!

There’s a debate raging at the moment, and its one sparked by the pre-eminence of the American Ivy league in the international university stakes. MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those who don’t know) in Cambridge, Boston, is a renowned world leader in science and technology research and teaching. So much so that over here in Europe we are apparently feeling the pinch.

In an attempt to keep up with such lofty institutions there is a proposal by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission to create a ‘European MIT’ in an effort to “act as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world”.

All this sounds very nice, although the Vice-Chancellors aren’t too impressed by the idea (no surprise there then) citing duplication of existing partnerships in an effort to stave off this latest challenge to their own best interests.

However, the real subtext here is the spending gap between Europe and the US, and Japan (and increasingly China and India) on research and development, namely, you guessed it, were falling behind and the European MIT is one proposed attempt to close the gap.

You see we really do now live in a globalsied world and the competition between nations for those prized foriegn students is ever more keen. Furthermore, if we continue on the present course of reducing the student spend per head here in blightie, we can only ever fall further behind the likes of the Ivy League.

Like it or not but they set the bar regards academic excellence and research endeavour, and we in Europe are trying to keep up!

I was watching the telly the other night and on came this ad for Edge Hill University, very professional, very slick (I even fancied going there myself it looked so good). But I also think its a bit surprising to suddenly be confronted by an advert for a university .. aren’t universities, well, kind of above that sort of thing?

Its also a bit paradoxical, because if you are a successful institution then surely you would not need to advertise in the first place. After all, there are only so many places to be filled, and this is dependent upon numbers of applicants wanting to go to your institution. If your popular you don’t need expensive TV adverts (you may well have more applicants than places).

As with all advertising, marketing is about turning a whole truth into a half truth and a half truth into a whole one; its what they don’t tell you at Edge Hill that you really should want to know about! And that is about resources available to the new intake, the staff-student ratio for instance is not mentioned .. now that would make an interesting ad!

Simon Jenkins recent article in Timesonline http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3223-2320577.html argues that there is no good reason for universities not to be charging the full fees to all students. Jenkins highlights the numerous virtues of this, namely weeding out the time wasters, increasing the funding to halt university decline, and ending what is in effect a middle class subsidy.

Whilst all this has its merits and indeed imposing full fees may alert the less studious to value their education more than hitherto, there are other down-sides, namely, accelerating the commodification of university education. Anyone faced with repaying between £27,000 - £45,000 on graduation will perhaps be forgiven for single mindedly pursuing those subject areas which provide the greatest advantage and renumeration in the labour market at the expense (and perhaps decline) of other worthy subjects.
Anyone who has spent any time in Aisa for instance can not help but notice that there are few philosophy graduates, or literature, history or arts graduates, rather there are inordinate numbers of buisness and management schools along with the expected focus on hard sciences. Do not the arts, literature and philosophical thinking also benefit society, no more when we leave the office and working routine behind, and allow ourselves to contemplate, think and imagine beyond the constraints of narrow instrumental reason and economic rationality?

I think that universities charging full fees would discourage the malingerers and party people surviving on the bare minimum educational effort, but there would also be some hefty downsides and ultimately one which risked impoverishing not only the HE sector but wider society.

Its that time of year again, and my teaching duties have begun for the new academic term. I must confess this always makes me a bit nervous, although I can’t complain too much, I only have some occassional teaching, its not like I’m doing 20 hours a week or more.

Nevertheless, delivering the first lecture of the year is tense, even though I tell myself there is no reason to be. I guess its becasue its a ‘performance’ that you do - I don’t mean that I sing and dance type of thing - but you do walk in and there is an expectant audience, and as with any performance, it can go wrong and you can look really, really stupid! This is what we teachers all really fear, if were honest.

You may not know this if you have never taught, but the great fear is that whilst standing there doing your stuff, you suddenly dry up .. eeekk! Mind goes blank .. what do i say next???

But its an irrational fear - I find the answer is to simply go onto something else and come back to that point at a later stage (and tell the class your doing this without explaining its becasue you can’t remember a bloody thing!) this is what I think of as one of my ‘teaching skills’. Still .. the fear still haunts you in the back of your mind .. what if ..

Touch wood, no disasters this time .. everything went reasonably smoothly, I even got a decent classroom discussion going, and people were volunteering to say things, hands aloft… always a sign that your doing something right.

And what about the all important class size, well there were about 21, a few more than I had expected, but about an average ratio per staff member for a UK university.

What would be interesting to know is the cut off point at which students feel reluctant to stick their hand up and say something - I know this will vary depending upon the inidividual concerned, but reason dictates that there is an optimal size for an engaged discussion to take place. Even though the class went quite well (I have had sessions where resolutely they just sit there, petrified - nobody says anything despite endless promptings from me).

I reckon the number is about 6-10, that way everyone will have the opportunity to not just say something, but develop an argument, be heard, take questions and objections, and this process be passed around, to and fro. I think anymore than double figures this tends to go into free fall and you move from something which resembles a seminar group to a full blown class. There just seems to be a group dynamic that only holds up to a certian number, then it dissolves.

Of course, the contary is also true. I once rememeber teaching a seminar where only 1 lone student turned up! He was petrified, but having said who he was on entering the room he couldn’t just turn heels and flee, as much as he wanted to I’m sure. None of this was helped by the topic that week - a discussion of ‘post-modernism’!

Freshers week has arrived and both campus and town is alive and abuzz .. uni has come out of its a long summer slumber - at last. No more quiet corridors and resturants, now replaced by hordes of young excited faces milling around everywhere, its like a lifeforce and its infectious.

God, campus is so depressing in the summer. Its like the night after the party, everyone interesting has gone home long ago but your to wake to the mess and the odd billy-no-mates who has nowhere else to go .. and yet, the sun shines, but only to console you that there are better places to be, and your not there ..

At least now there is a sense of normalacy, i now feel that when I get in my car in the morning i am at least going to the right place. If you have to work like me, summer on campus just makes you feel so out of wack, its like a resturant without food!

Mind you - can’t get in the bloody lift now, full of students! (lazy bastards ;0)