Can a culture of openness help us to deliver on the duties we owe to our local communities?
In a previous incarnation I was a budding Philosopher, a career path I willingly deviated from almost a decade ago and to which I thought I would never return. But some recent encounters have made me re-engage that dusty area of my brain, and reconsider some of the questions I had then about equality but framed through a new filter of higher education broadly, and more recently via the lens of the debate around openness, open access, open knowledge, open data, social responsibility and the impact agenda.
This awakening began in 2013 with my involvement in a project on the dynamics of ethnicity (CoDE), and within it an attempt to map the inequalities faced by individuals in four local case studies in the context of their ethnicity. One of my roles on the project was to look at the communications strategy, specifically how we engage with non-academic audiences. We held seminars, community meetings and policy workshops, but the most exciting idea was that of a summer school for GCSE students from a local Manchester school in a significantly disadvantaged area largely populated by BME communities. The school had limited access to OER’s , in large part due to the time commitments of staff and students when the emphasis and energy had to be directed toward GCSE attainment to have any chance of a University place, even with the help of the Manchester Access Programme (MAP) post-16. So some talented students were invited to the University for a few days of workshops with academics and PhD students interested in ethnicity and inequality. They engaged in debate around issues that directly affect them in their communities, and through which they developed a tool-kit for starting to understand those issues from an academic perspective, the aim of which was to demonstrate to them that the kind of issues that are researched and discussed in Higher Education are directly relevant to their lived experiences and to which they can contribute significantly, thus breaking down the barriers to HE.
The CoDE (Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity) summer school is just one example of the programmes that the University of Manchester engages in — in part through research and impact, and in part through its strategic commitment to social responsibility — to open up its doors to the local community on which it geographically infringes. MAP and the Primary School Mentor programme aim to increase confidence, awareness and aspirations of school children (and parents in the case of Primary School Mentors) about the opportunities that HE qualifications can offer and how to access them in spite of entrenched inequalities and disadvantage.
Four experiences then collided in early 2017 to make me reconsider issues around inequality and, more particularly, the duties we owe to our local communities. First, I had to write a piece for my PGCert on the ‘Changing Landscape of Higher Education’, within which I chose to ask a question about a set of special duties that might exist, owed to the local community that is geographically located around the University, as a consequence of conceptualising HE as a public good. Second, I was asked to talk to some local 6th formers about what it is like to study social sciences at university, third I attended the Katherine Perera lecture on Women in Leadership and fourth, I wrote my first OKHE1 blog about community engagement and openness in research. At the Katherine Perera lecture, Lorna Fitzsimons asked the audience to consider what equality looked like in an organisation — a board or group of partners from diverse ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, regions, genders and sexualities perhaps — and drove home to us the importance of seeing ‘people like me’ in those lofty and powerful positions to encourage people to strive for what is possible regardless of their start in life and the inequalities they may face. This, coupled with the response of the 6th formers to my introducing them to a colleague, who at 25 is already a local councillor and well on her way to both professional and academic success despite coming from a socio-economically deprived background, made me think that openness in research and the impact agenda is another way, along with MAP and other social responsibility initiatives, to demonstrate that the University is full of ‘people like me’, so I have no reason not to strive to participate in it, or fear that I won’t belong. Breaking down the walls of the ivory towers to engage communities in the research conducted at universities shows that most academics are ‘people like me’, just as drawing back the curtain to reveal that the wizard of oz is just an ordinary man with no more power than any other citizen, so too might engaging communities in research imbue them with the power to influence policy and debate that directly affects their wellbeing.
However, there are significant barriers to engaging communities in research. In her OKHE1 blog, Carly Chadwick persuasively argues that “whilst progress is being made in making scholarly articles freely available, we must also recognise the value of other forms of open communication if academic research is to really make a difference”, an activity within which she is directly involved as she helps academics develop ‘pathways to impact’ to “to reach and communicate with non-academic stakeholders”. Chadwick develops this idea in her OKHE2 blog, in considering how Manchester University will deliver on its strategy for public engagement, rightly worrying about how they will deliver their commitment to “inspiring, informing and educating the public, involving users in research and working in partnership with the public to solve problems together” and the “ implications for academics’ time and University resources” this will entail. Further, Paul Shore’s blog on academic prestige succinctly delivers the blow that academics care about prestige and will put significant time and effort into securing a publication in a highly regarded journal because their “success is judged on the perceived quality of such research journal(s)”. This highlights a broader issue of status in Higher Education, and how it can derail the best laid plans for public engagement in research. Simon Marginson argues that “global rankings have caught all universities, all over the world, in the … status-incentive trap. Status competition plays out not only between universities but between national systems. It ranks them vertically on the world scale and confirms the dominance of the comprehensive Anglo-American science university”. This status trap, determined largely by REF scores and reputation and spurred on by individual drive for prestige, vastly reduces the time available to commit to public engagement activities and the value in doing so.
The push, then, from external forces in RCUK and internal forces at Manchester University, for academics to commit to public engagement in their research, making it more open and accessible, is a grand endeavour required to traverse a rocky landscape. Fiona Lynch found that “the barriers which apply to education, such as funding, opportunity, location and background also exist for Open Access Resources”. This solidifies the concern I raised in my first OKHE1 blog, that public engagement events are expensive and time consuming, so we have both provision and accessibility barriers to face. Overcoming these is one hurdle — making events free and committing the time and resources to put them on –but there is a further hurdle in engaging participants in research. The problem is particularly acute in relation to the inequality identified by Weller where these activities only engage those who are already engaged as “the ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy only applies to people for whom the route is already easy.” In this context it is no surprise that MAP is a success, given the financial backing it has by the university and the fact that, in the main, the programme is run by dedicated academic-related administrators. This enables MAP to reach out and provide resources that directly benefit their target audience — they built the infrastructure and created the pathway to access through schools that circumvents the problem that those who participate are those that would have participated anyway.
The Manchester Access Programme is a prime example of delivering on the special duty that exists between a University and its local community. While this special duty may be contested by some, it is clear that Manchester University acknowledges its existence and takes the ensuing responsibility seriously. Here we recognise that an institution owes a special duty to the local community with whom it shares geographical space; a space that it has likely altered in both positive and negative ways. This duty is founded on a relationship that is based on more than close proximity. Here we can argue that “two members of a socially recognized group [in our case a geographical space] … have a relationship in … [a] … relevant sense … if they value their membership in that group … [and] to value [such a] relationship … is to see it as a source of reasons for action of a distinctive kind. It is, in effect, to see oneself as having special responsibilities to the person with whom one has the relationship.” (Scheffler, 1997, pp. 198–200). At the individual level, this would mean that each person in the relationship would owe a special duty in terms of being reciprocal towards the other. However, in the case of the university, this duty can only be held on the part of the institution because they have the power and resources to deliver on the duty. MAP fulfils this duty for the University in that it is targeted specifically at disadvantaged groups within the Greater Manchester city region.
However, the barriers to public engagement in research are not so easily overcome. With financial and time constraints, it is more likely that we will only be able to engage those who are already engaged, and thus we would find it difficult to meet a special duty we might owe to our local community. But, as was felt with the CoDE summer schools, there is an appetite to engage those communities on whose space we encroach, and Manchester University encroaches on some of the poorest wards in the country.
The picture above is a snapshot taken from a map of the UK categorised by deprivation. Dark red indicates the most deprived areas of the country, and a quick search on the University postcode shows that we are in the top 30% of the most deprived wards in the country, while we are flanked to the east and west by the most deprived, those in the top 10%. This being the case, it seems that the duty we owe as a University to our local communities must in some significant way aim to relieve them of some of the inequalities they face in light of their socio-economic deprivation.
In the last three years there have been two general elections, local elections and two referendums. Campaigns for these events were necessarily partisan and some of the stories that abounded, particularly after the EU referendum, showed that some constituencies voted against their best interest and statistics from this referendum show that the greatest indicator of the way a person voted, either leave or remain, is the level of education in a ward — more graduates equal more remain voters. Initiatives like MAP and the Primary School Mentor Programme are doing work necessary to ensure that the deprived neighbourhoods around the University are given the best opportunities to access higher education and to ensure that residents are equipped to answer the difficult questions they are asked, as they were in the EU referendum. However, there are residents who will never be able to benefit from these initiatives because they were not available when their educational development was the relevant stage. They must rely on freely available resources to help them to make the decisions they are asked to make in a participatory democracy.
Openly available and reliable educational resources derived from high quality academic research are a good start to ensuring that residents can access non-partisan information on a topic they find pertinent to their decision making when casting their vote. Informed decision making is essential to overcoming inequalities, and breaking down the barriers to HE research can be meaningful in this endeavour. But wading through blogs without knowing what sources are reliable is a tricky task. It is in this light that open data resources, presenting interactive and independent data, come to the fore. One such resource is the British Election Study (BES) and its Data Playground. The BES has been running for over 50 years as an academic research project and the academics involved are those psephologists we all see on the television on election nights. The data playground is an amazing resource, allowing open access to real world data taken from an in-depth panel survey or real time election data. It meets its openness criteria with room to spare — delivering an interactive open data resource where users can plot variables against each other on four different kinds of graphs to see how one variable influences another — like level of education against leave/remain vote in the EU referendum. There are no criteria for use, apart from acknowledging the source if you publish the results, and it allows the public to directly access academic research that they have funded, that can also shed light on issues that directly affect them — like attitudes toward the issue of gender inequality plotted against the age at which one left school or the possibility that one would vote for the labour party at the next election.
However, there are problems with the data playground and these problems highlight some of my concerns in assuming that openness necessarily breaks down barriers to HE and, in doing so, helps us to deliver the special duties we owe to our local communities. Interaction the BES data playground requires the user to know it is there — it is not advertised as a resource and cannot be found unless one knows the BES exists. When you do find it, it assumes you know the difference between four kinds of charts, and what sort of data is best presented in each; how to select between panel data of 6 kinds or real time electoral data; and what variables can be meaningfully plotted against others — and this is before generate a graph that must be interpreted with no obvious supporting materials to assist in any of these tasks save for a few FAQ’s that also require prior knowledge of the language and concepts at work (that can produce the unreadable mess of a graph below). This rich resource is therefore really only for those who are already engaged with this kind of work — non-academic practitioners, college and university students or graduates of the social sciences — and not the local community for whom they could be crucial in understanding the broader context of their vote.
The problems with the BES data playground are an example that making something open does not necessarily make it accessible to all, and as such may serve to strengthen the barriers between the public and the academy rather than engage local communities and deliver the special duties we owe to them as a publicly funded institution. This does not mean that we shouldn’t produce these rich academic resources, but it does mean that we need to go further in drawing in and providing resources for public use, and that making something open is not sufficient to derive impact or count as social responsibility in this regard. More access to free training so that communities can develop the skills they need to engage is required, which is why MAP is so successful and other initiatives are found wanting.
