What’s been learnt? A summary…
This project has been about trying to better understand students’ experiences of university by continuing to ask some of the older questions – like how social background is important – and adding new ones around the university’s culture and campus. Both research and common sense tell us that where you study matters, in that your time as a student will be very or slightly different depending on who you are and things like the location, type, and size of your university.
In short, the findings can be broken down into three areas: organisational culture, social composition, and geography. These overlap, and what binds them together is the profile of Russell as a particular kind of university, in (and as) a particular place, at a particular time. Its identity as a British ‘red brick’ university in 2020 – large, relatively old, of high national and international status, research-oriented, and disciplinarily diverse – has ramifications throughout the three dimensions.
Organisation
Culture is always a difficult thing to define, but organizational culture is seen to be a combination of formal elements such as history, mission, and values, as well as the collective personal principles of the people who are engaged there. Leaders can change some of this through strategy, rules, regulations, and procedures etc., but they have relatively little control over how people feel and think. If members disagree with the leadership, for example, this can create tensions.
When it comes to universities, they differ depending on the emphasis they place on teaching and/or research, their status, age, facilities, who they recruit, and how they treat their staff and students. A small, ‘young’ university which attracts local, working class students and focuses heavily on teaching will feel very different to somewhere like Russell University which is large, has over a century of history, enrolls (usually middle class) students from all over the world, and is research-intensive.
Russell’s strong research focus does not mean that pedagogy is neglected per se, but it was clear to the participants in this study that teaching was not academics’/the university’s primary focus. Its broad disciplinary base also ensures a variety of educational and philosophical (as well as political) orientations. The university’s status attracts staff and students from all over the world, and the scale of the institution involves a cast of tens of thousands. In combination, this creates – as we’d expect – an enormous diversity of interests and identities, which essentially constitutes sets of intersecting subcultures. Alongside the research-intensity, we can also see the hallmarks of the UK’s highly marketized university system in the heavy (over-) recruitment of lucrative international students and the cost-effective, labour-efficient reliance on lecture-based teaching. The late 2019/early 2020 strikes, too, are symptomatic of this side of UK higher education and indicated to the students a sense that the university management cared little for staff – or students.
Social
For a range of reasons, different kinds of people are more or less likely to go to university, and for those that do, there are patterns as to the types of universities they choose – or can choose. For domestic students, if you’re white and affluent, you have better chances of doing well in school and you’re more likely to go to a high status university, which also attracts/markets itself to more international staff and students. This means that universities can have quite contrasting student bodies.
Who you are in relation to that student body is important, too. Minority groups are more likely to feel out of place, which means that university populations dominated by particular demographics can be very uncomfortable places for others. This diversity (or lack of it) also relates to staff; academics are, for the same reasons that we see inequalities in education and elsewhere, largely from white and affluent backgrounds. This can create further issues for minority students who don’t see themselves reflected and recognised in or by the staff, curriculum, or broader culture.
Socially, as a prestigious, selective institution, Russell attracts high attaining domestic students, as well as a significant proportion of international ones. This, with the broad disciplinary profile of the university and its size, ensures the maintenance of a pronounced social diversity. Things such as fashion, tastes, extra-curricular interests, accent, gender, and sexual orientation, were seen as unproblematic and a welcome reflection of social variety. At the same time, though, the student population was perceived to be diverse in limited ways, with Black and working class students largely absent. There were also evident divides and sometimes strained relations across dimensions such as social class and/or wealth, age, personal politics, race, and language. Academics were seen as mostly white British or European, and politically left-leaning – teaching assistants who led smaller group teaching were more diverse – but the content was described as inclusive and varied rather than Eurocentric. Some aspects of university life, usually small group activities (e.g. student societies, accommodation, sports, and seminars) could, but didn’t always, allow students to cross social divides and enable closer interaction between staff and students.
Geographical
It is curious, when campuses are often such a central part of the university experience, although obviously not during the Covid pandemic, that there is little research on this. Work in other areas such as architecture, geography, and urban studies, though, tells us that the location, physical appearance, and layout, of any kind of building or space has implications for how people feel, act and move within them. Many of the tools and concepts for exploring this are there, but they have rarely been applied on/to universities.
There is, though, scholarship which explores how universities grow and change shape, how particularly older universities can be read as architectural stories in their own right, and that their properties serve more than functional purposes, projecting an image as well as being potentially political statements. It is also important to recognize that universities are unusual in that they contain a much wider range of activities than most other organisations: teaching, studying, research, living, socialising, eating, shopping, sports, social activism, mental health support, and entertainment.
Russell’s campus is very large; it needs to be to host the sheer volume of people and pursuits. The university’s development and history, too, to some extent can be read through the steady addition of ever more modern buildings over more than a century. What came through in the students’ accounts was that the size and shape of the campus, along with disciplinary groupings, corrals students together as well as keeps them apart. Some students’ ‘footprint’ was very small, being restricted to a narrow range of buildings, while others had reason to – sometimes had to – use facilities all over the campus. The perception that money was spent in/on some disciplines and facilities and not others featured in a number of the focus groups, and this connects back to the broader context of UK higher education as marketized and commodified. Alongside this, Russell’s location in an affordable, diverse, and accessible, English city, attracts students, as does its positioning in the UK as a as a popular destination for overseas visitors.
Conclusions
The three elements – organization, social composition, and geography – all influence each other. The organisational culture revolves around maintaining the university’s high status, and this attracts a mix of people who in part constitute, and contribute to, that culture. There are dynamics within that social composition which enable and hinder relationships, and sometimes create friction, between different subject and/or social constituencies. The campus acts as a container for this, controlling the flows of people towards and away from one another while also projecting something of the university’s culture as both old and new, caring and neglectful, traditional and forward-facing.
As a sociologist of education, the social dynamics have been of particular interest, and the divisions between groups represents a problem. While it is not to say that we should expect universities to be entirely harmonious and integrated, if diversity and cross-group interaction are seen to be an essential part of the student experience – and if they are what some staff and students want – then universities do need to facilitate it. This project has shown that simply putting a variety of people on the same campus, in the same building, or even in the same room, is not enough.
Many of the findings from this study will be familiar elsewhere, and perhaps particularly at universities with similar profiles. However, it must be underscored that how they feature and relate cannot be the same elsewhere because every university’s organisational culture, social composition, and geography, are different. In short, if we change any of the university’s profile characteristics – research/teaching orientation or disciplinary spread, location or layout, status or size, and so on – this will have immediate implications elsewhere.
What’s New?
There are a number of things in this study which add to what we know about students’ experiences. Overall, combining the organizational, social, and geographical provides a richer way of understanding the ways in which universities differ that public ‘measures’ such as rankings cannot possibly capture. The findings also offer a rare insight into the ways in which a university’s physical characteristics feature in, and shape, its students’ lives.
Furthermore, there is relatively little scholarship exploring students’ views of the wider university body as the majority of work examines the experiences of particular – usually marginalised – groups in relation to others. It should be noted, too, that the unforeseen timing of this study around two periods of industrial action highlighted how this impacted students’ learning experience and their loss of value for money, particularly for international students. What was also clear, though, was that the strikes contributed to participants’ sense of starkly divergent orientations towards higher education between academic and management staff.
For a (slightly) shorter pdf summary of these findings, please click on the link below.
The project research report – published in May 2020 – can be accessed through this link.
the 3dHEI? 