The wintering of universities

Someone bought me Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times for Christmas. The book, which came out in 2020, explores how the concept of winter needs to be part of our lives. How we need to accept that the fallow moments of retreat are necessary to bring about spring, the moments of renewal and rediscovery. “Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflections and recuperation, for slow replenishment.” 

In these dark winter nights, it’s easy to see why we might want to semi-hibernate.

May writes as she is signed off with stress while working as the programme leader of a university creative writing course. It’s an irony not lost on me. And it sets me thinking that we are not only physically going through the short hours of daylight, the stormy weather of winter, but that universities in the UK and beyond are too undergoing a sort of wintering. 

This was made clear in the statement by the interim chair of the Office for Students (OfS), David Behan, in his review of the OfS when he declared that “the golden age of universities is over”. Behan notes that the global pandemic, the impact of Brexit, political change, the cost-of-living crisis, financial instability, falling numbers of international students, and frozen fee limits for domestic undergraduate students have all led to the crisis now faced by universities. 

If we are wintering as a sector, as indeed are universities in the US, Australia, Canada and beyond, is it a bad thing? It feels like a bad thing. The financial situation is hard. It doesn’t feel good that each month we spend more than we have income. And of the actions we are taking to address this – freezing or eliminating posts, curbing operational budgets, considering how we downsize the campus, running voluntary severance schemes, merging faculties – none of this feels good.  

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But there is something beyond the financial difficulties; the wintering of universities runs deeper than that. It’s also the sense that we aren’t really wanted. Or at least not in the form we are in. Nationally, the participation rates of 18-year-olds in higher education are dropping. Locally, in Leicester, where De Montfort University is located, in the UK’s East Midlands, we see that the debt they will incur puts students off going to university. Instead, they are looking for apprenticeships and for direct employment. Of course, I’m not talking about all students. The three-year degree will, I’m sure, go on being a popular choice for those with wealth and privilege for the reasons it always has been – the luxury of time, space and a like-minded community. 

But here in Leicester, where 43 per cent of under 16s live in the nation’s most deprived 20 per cent of areas, the choice to come to university is beginning to disappear. Winter is cruel and not all survive it; the dream of equal opportunity is fading in the cold.

Harsh though winter is, it is part of a cycle that leads back to rejuvenation. For universities, we must use this winter to think about what we do. To ask ourselves how we are serving the skills needs of our towns, cities and the other communities we serve. If 18-year-olds are less interested in degrees, how do we provide what they want? More apprenticeships? Shorter courses? As May concludes in her book: “It often seems easier to stay in winter, burrowed down into our hibernation nests, away from the glare of the sun. But we are brave, and the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of the wings.” 

During this winter we need to determine what is wanted and needed, and turn ourselves into whatever that is. 

I’m not afraid of change. I’ve led a wholesale change to block teaching, dissolved faculties and created schools. But there are two differences this time. First, it’s not clear what change is needed. We’ve run the financial modelling that the OfS has undertaken for ourselves. Flatlining international students and a 1 per cent increase in home students. It leads to year after year of deficit. What is a sustainable model for a university? It’s not clear. The question may not even be answerable. 

The second difference is that the change needed this time is not even change; it’s a metamorphosis. Our institutions have all transformed over their often more-than-100-year existences: from art schools, mechanics institutes, institutes of technology, colleges of higher education. But the large-scale changes, such as the shift from polytechnics to universities, have usually been through a shift in policy. This time no widespread policy reform is provoking change. In fact, it’s just the opposite; in the absence of policy, as a sector we will have to instigate our own change. 

But this is maybe for the best. How often are the brilliant minds that fill our sector called upon to help make difficult decisions? How deep is this reservoir of wisdom? Why, when we have sent graduates out to lead countries, run space programmes and cure diseases, can we not secure our own future? I am still deeply, truly proud to work at a university, to lead one through these times. But if competition has defined universities’ striving for life in the past few decades, working together is the means to achieve future growth. 

One reassuring thing about winter is that it ends. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Shelley asked in his 1819 Ode to the West Wind, ever hopeful of reform and a new world. We will need to use our wisdom now, together, to determine how we shape ourselves. But no less present, real and substantial is the danger that, in our efforts to emerge again into the sun, we will freeze ourselves, or important parts of ourselves, into a permanent ice age.

Katie Normington is the vice-chancellor of De Montfort University, UK. 

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