What a difference a few years make to an organisation! When I first joined the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) in 1990 it was a smallish group representing only what we now call the ‘old’ or ‘pre-1992’ universities. The gloom of the Senate Chamber at the University of London, where we met, made it difficult to see who was speaking and since the chairman identified speakers only by the names of their universities newcomers took a while to get their bearings. Furthermore in those days it was hard for the Vice-Chancellor of the OU not to feel pretty marginal to the proceedings. Discussions of funding for teaching focused entirely on full-time students and most of the CVCP’s policy pronouncements were irrelevant, when not actually unhelpful, to OU students.
1993 saw a major change. The CVCP was reconstituted to include vice-chancellors from both ‘old’ and ‘new’ universities. The expanded group took a while to bed down because of residual animosities from the quarrels over the names adopted by the ‘new’ universities in cities where there was already an ‘old’ university. However, the style of the debates changed immediately and it was nice no longer to be a lone voice raising issues about part-time students. Inevitably the unwieldiness of a committee of a hundred members led us to give a greater role to the CVCP council and to reduce the frequency of meetings of the full committee.
Gradually, as the years went by, it became increasingly difficult to decide with certainty from the nature of an intervention, whether the vice-chancellor speaking was from an old or a new university. When the CVCP met for its annual residential meeting in Telford last month it seemed that the process of merger had finally run its course - just in time for a partial de-merger into the country groups now formed to reflect the devolution of responsibilities for higher education within the UK.
The CVCP has made huge progress in addressing itself to the totality of academic enterprise. The speech to the committee by the Minister, Baroness Blackstone, had more to say about mature and part-time students than about the young full-timers. Even among the vice-chancellors only the odd references to higher education being for ‘young’ people and the duty of universities being to give value to ‘students and their parents’ recalled an earlier era.
The most interesting discussions were about quality assurance. The big question was whether the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, in changing its approach, should continue to publish the kinds of comparative gradings that make it easy for journalists to construct league tables of universities. I was surprised by my fellow vice-chancellors’ visceral dislike of such tables but this is a classic case of ‘where you stand depends on where you sit’. Human beings and institutions all like to think of themselves as above average and surveys suggest that 80% think of themselves as in the top 20%. That means most will be unhappy with their ranking.
But league tables are here to stay. Ordinary people like them and buy newspapers that publish them. When I worked in Canada sales of the weekly newsmagazine Maclean’s soared for its annual guide to universities. Its first league tables were constructed simply by phoning the president of each Canadian university and asking for a ranking of the others. The outcry this caused led to more sophisticated measures. As the president of Laurentian University, which had a 750 acre campus of forest and lakes in northern Ontario, I particularly liked measures such as the number of trees per student (to represent quality of life), or the number of bears and beavers per student (as a surrogate for ecological richness).
Similar measures for the Open University are harder to develop because we either come top of the list (e.g. weight of learning materials provided per student) or bottom (e.g. square metres of campus library space per student). This is not helpful. A good league table should discriminate in meaningful ways.
That’s why I appreciate the usefulness of the gradings that we get from the academics from other universities who assess the quality of our teaching by subject. They also happen to rate most OU teaching as excellent. I doubt that journalists would be as discerning without their help!