University challenged

E-learning, globalisation, growing competition from business ... just some of the pressures being piled on the hallowed halls of academia. Sara Parkin sets out how higher education must adapt to survive – and how sustainable development might help it do so, with merit. Worth a punt: the Forum’s Higher Education Partnership is helping students propel themselves into a more sustainable future. Virtually every major sector of our economy is being pummelled by the winds of change, and higher education is no exception. Globalising markets, the e-revolution and the pressures of environmentalism are offering the same challenges to our academies of learning as they are to governments and businesses.

One of the most obvious impacts on universities is the loss of their near-monopoly status in what is now called the ‘knowledge industry’. Like any other sector, universities are working in a climate of intensifying competition. In its March survey of business education, the Financial Times found that there are some 2,000 corporate universities, a number estimated to rise to over 3,700 by the end of the decade. And the competition is global. Each year more and more students use the internet to shop the world for courses.

The wealth of information (if not wisdom) available via the net is stupendous, and nowadays students choosing a university are as likely to ask about the student:PC ratio as they are about the male-female mix – or the nightlife. Yet the role of new technologies in enabling learning is proving a somewhat mixed blessing. Steve Molyneux, who holds the Microsoft chair of advanced learning technology at Wolverhampton University, is unsurprisingly bullish about the future of e-learning. He claims the fear that IT will simply automate the learning process is unfounded. "Cognitive processes can’t be automated, and good lecturers can’t be replaced." But the clearly attractive vision of delivering IT-supported learning to a vastly increased student body (more income), especially those in remote locations (broadening access) will have to be carefully managed. There are some surprising advantages. A trial with lecturer-mediated

e-conferencing in Sheffield Hallam University has found that students inhibited from asking questions in the lecture hall (for example, some young Muslim women) are engaging enthusiastically with their peers by email.

On the other hand, as sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the celebrated Bowling Alone, has pointed out, there has to be a danger in people engaging less in collective experiences and more in solitary activities; the social and economic resilience of our communities depends on a huge web of human interconnections. And there are powerful arguments to suggest that working with a computer screen does not mobilise enough of the different human intelligences (body-physical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal), thereby mitigating against what is called deep learning – that is, learning that is reflective and leads to true understanding. Aficionados of experiential or work-based learning claim that this provides the best method of garnering wisdom from others, because it encourages reflection on ‘knowledge-in-action’ rather than on theory alone, and that this is what deep learning is about.

So what does all this have to do with sustainable development? Just about everything. Because at its heart, the pursuit of sustainability means bringing together the way we manage our environment, our economy, and our relations with each other. It’s real ‘hands-on’ work – not just hands-on keyboard. You can’t bowl your way to sustainable development alone.

It is with this in mind that the Forum’s Higher Education Partnership [see GF27, p14] is exploring the role of e-learning in delivering sustainability learning packages which take into consideration social impacts as well as environmental ones. The ‘DEMI’ multi-media learning resource, due for launch in June, is just one example of how practical learning and e-learning might be combined happily.

Meanwhile, the need to contribute to their own fees is already making students more discerning ‘consumers’ of university courses. Hard on the heels of the push towards more ‘joined-up government’, and environmentally and socially aware business, is the growing demand for graduates who have had equally joined-up learning experiences. And the relationship between environmental, social and economic policy means that keeping students of different disciplines chastely apart no longer makes sense. All the Forum’s Higher Education Partners are keen to explore how some sort of sustainability learning might be integrated into the experience of all their students. The idea is to equip them with sufficient understanding to be able to make choices and decisions that help rather than hinder progress towards sustainability – both personally and professionally – wherever they end up living and working. The reasoning has nothing to do with altruism, either. Like a growing number of companies, universities are finding it makes good business sense. Reputations can be enhanced or safeguarded, and customers (students!) attracted.

At the same time, however, social issues such as equality of access to universities have become a headline matter. Universities are expected actively to increase recruitment from state schools, especially in rural and deprived areas, as well as open up to more mature students and make proper provision for disabled people. Liverpool John Moores University, for example, works in partnership with other universities and further education colleges in deprived areas of Merseyside through the Aim Higher Project. Making the books balance financially while at the same time fulfilling social and environmental obligations is, of course, what sustainable development is all about.

For a very long time (at least since the first ‘Earth Summit’ in Stockholm in 1972), education has been promoted as the key to unlocking sustainable behaviour in everyone from households to corporate masters of the universe. Yet education will not be one of the major topics for next year’s UN World Summit on Sustainable Development. As we engage with an epochal transformation in both our natural and our technological world, it is very hard to find a good explanation for this. One that has been put forward is that the education lobby is less organised than that of NGOs campaigning on environmental or human rights issues. Here in the UK, the government has set up a Sustainable Development Education Panel, chaired by the vice chancellor of Exeter University, Sir Geoffrey Holland, but sustainability remains too far from the heart of education policy to have the necessary wider influence.

There are some policy initiatives in place (including the Climate Change Levy and local transport plans) that will make a positive impact on university environmental performance. In order to help support and track that performance, a pilot project completed last year by the Forum in association with the Higher Education Funding Council’s Estates Statistics Management Project established some sector-specific measures: waste arisings, recycling, energy consumption and carbon emissions, freshwater consumption, transport, CFC consumption, and purchasing. Queen’s University Belfast, for example, is testing a Whole Life Costing approach to larger purchases, considering running and disposal costs as well as capital costs. Cambridge University is installing photovoltaic lighting to a cycle path to its West Cambridge site. And both the Universities Superannuation Scheme [see GF21, p7] and the National Union of Students now take an ethical approach to their respective investment and purchasing choices. Among other initiatives being developed and piloted as part of the Forum’s Higher Education Partnership programme are projects on performance in areas of human resources learning and teaching, community relations, and research, as well as the environment. And we’re not alone. Other schemes include Going for Green’s EcoCampus (see page 49) and an active network of university environmental co-ordinators. For many universities, research and innovation play an increasingly important role - both academically and economically – and recently there has been a long overdue increase in the research funds being channelled specifically to sustainability. This includes a £20 million Sustainable Technologies Initiative launched in November, while the Natural Environment Research Council has also been asked to develop a multi-disciplinary research agenda in the area of sustainability.

Whether driven by the new competitive climate or by the intellectual curiosity that is their most precious resource, these are some really welcome signs of a more systematic, positive engagement by universities with the sustainable development agenda. The question only remains: how much can they do, and how quickly? After all, it is the ‘product’ of our universities – their graduates, and the ideas and insights of their researchers – that will provide our intellectual and practical leadership over the next three crucial decades.

www.demi.org.uk
www.forumforthefuture.org.uk www.environment.detr.gov.uk/sustainable/ educpanel
Sara Parkin is programme director of Forum for the Future.

17 May 2001

Sara Parkin