University summer schools are an antidote to the marketisation of HE

In the dog days of summer, many universities are still busy, teaching an unusually eclectic cohort of learners across a gloriously wide range of subjects.

Although it is easy to dismiss summer schools as havens for privileged students, or cash cows and brand extensions for high-profile universities, this characterisation misses the mark by some distance. Across UK campuses, summer classes will house everyone from university-bound teenagers to retirees seeking a new intellectual challenge. Classes cover everything from classical studies to coding, English-language instruction to training in generative AI. Many classrooms will be international and intergenerational. In some cases, a university might decant its own students and faculty to another campus: same people, new learning substrate, different time zone.

Done well, university-led summer learning can be a truly distinctive form of higher education, furthering knowledge, fostering cross-cultural understanding and sparking meaningful friendships. On quieter campuses, at a less pressurised time of year, education can be exploratory, discursive and reflective. Arguably, it’s a purer form – a throwback to a time when expansive and personalised intellectual enquiry prevailed over imperatives to demonstrate learning outcomes or teach skills valued by graduate employers.

Many prominent universities – Berkeley and Harvard, LMU Munich and Utrecht, Oxford and Edinburgh, to name but a few – have long offered open programmes, providing world-class higher education through their summer sessions for domestic and international students. Cambridge, where I have been director of continuing education since 2016, has assembled various forms of summer programmes since the 1890s, attracting both home and overseas learners. Our first programme specifically targeted at international scholars (“A Summer Course for Foreign Students”) took place in 1923, and welcomed 122 students from 19 countries. The Cambridge Daily News reported that the university was “giving, unconsciously, an excellent practical demonstration of a miniature League of Nations at work”.

Today, Cambridge’s official international summer programme typically attracts up to 1,000 learners from 60 nations, 15 per cent from the UK. Involving residence for between one and four weeks, our courses are open to any motivated adult with a strong proficiency in English; in practice, attendees are evenly split between those currently enrolled at another university and adult lifelong learners. Cambridge colleges and private providers bring thousands more summer students to the city through separate programmes.

Designing summer schools always presented interesting opportunities and quandaries for educators. Some of the early sessions, particularly before the Second World War, perhaps sought in some ways to leverage soft power – and exert cultural influence – as the beginning of the end of the British Empire drew into view and the UK’s military and economic power waned. That said, curricula were often surprisingly progressive, with the staging of “grand debates” around themes such as gender equality, the dangers of nationalism and the merits of pacifism.

More recently, there has been an argument that taught provision has been lopsided, leaning towards the preservation of the so-called great tradition of continuing education, which favours highbrow intellectual enquiry across the arts and humanities to the detriment of more applied fields. Some have suggested that these studies of obscure literature or ancient languages fostered elitism within summer schools and limited their broad appeal.

At Cambridge, we now aspire towards a “T-shaped” type of summer programme design, with the breadth of the “T” being provided by plenary lectures open to all participants. An array of academic minds – prised away from their closely protected sunny season recess for thinking, writing and experiments – open a window on the state of the art in topics ranging from quantum computing to international law and from the ethics of AI to the misfolding of proteins in disease. In return, learners from China, the US and all points between lob back thought-provoking questions and comments, occasionally stopping the field-leading presenters in their tracks. It is refreshing to see a prominent biochemist put on the back foot by a theology undergraduate from Argentina or an academic lawyer skilfully cross-examined by a retired social worker from Zimbabwe. It is a genuine demonstration of learning driven by the intersection of disciplines, cultures and generations.

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The scholarly depth is delivered through subject-based morning and afternoon classes. Teaching is largely set at the level of a first-year undergraduate course, and while fields such as history, art and architectural history, literature, creative writing and evolutionary biology often remain at the beating heart of programmes, classes are increasingly exploring more applied fields, such as entrepreneurship and biomedicine. Experiential learning involving local spin-outs and lab practicals is now more common, too.

Dialogue is favoured, rather than didactic teaching. Learners often tell their stories and provide their cultural contexts. And a typical age range of more than half a century produces fascinating discussions. Youthful learners who are pondering a topic such as “Reaganomics” via case studies and video clips can hear “as it happened” recollections from their elders on the merits and demerits of the trickle-down free-market capitalism.

That said, intergenerational classrooms are not without their challenges. Cliques can form, and stereotypical “boomer versus zoomer” skirmishes occasionally break out, before being gently extinguished. Disagreements are normally resolved respectfully, often managed within the group rather than by the tutor.

More challenging are the inevitable spillovers from the complex world we inhabit. Learners are drawn from those on all sides of active conflicts, cold wars and longstanding societal divides. Fortunately, the desire for mutual understanding among summer students overrides visceral disagreements and the rawness of ongoing humanitarian crises. Sometimes classes understandably overrun to enable arguments to be given space and all voices to be heard. An encouraging by-product of summer learning is to observe students separated by two or three generations, by Brexit and Remain, or by hardwired intercultural divides later partaking in measured conversation at a nearby buttery, punctuated by smiles and nods.

It is possibly unfashionable to confess, but summer teaching is not always a hotbed of technology-enhanced learning. A very occasional, anachronistic “thunk-click” of a 35mm carousel slide projector might be heard from a distant, darkened classroom, but human-led analogue teaching broadly persists. Almost every class will have established a WhatsApp group before the first coffee break, but interactions between classmates are cemented on physical visits to cultural sites, music concerts or garden parties (which invariably continue through light summer drizzle).

Alongside international undergraduates, an interesting and significant cohort among summer students are high school teachers, college lecturers and retired academics – who never quite give up teaching to community groups and third-age classes. They seek to refresh their own knowledge, unlearn what has now been debunked by contemporary research and reposition their own teaching.

Other participants might be collating research for a book they are quietly penning or may just want to help their children or grandchildren with their homework. Most, however, are motivated by a long-held desire to explore a topic of interest, as part of a scholarly excursion guided by a charismatic academic pilot and surrounded by fellow travellers in learning. For so many of these summer learners, it is a chance to try out a new discipline, to escape the scholarly comfort zone: the engineer taking their first steps in Romantic poetry, the nurse exploring Plato’s Republic.

Of course, successful summer endeavours depend on their teaching faculty. In a period when academic life is often characterised by heavy workloads and regulatory burden, the intention must be to create a stage on which tutors are freed and supported to deliver truly excellent learning experiences.

The ideal course tutor is a somewhat elusive hybrid of the broad-spectrum subject expert and the consummate adult educator. The former can be tricky to source because contemporary academia tends to celebrate the specialist over the generalist. The latter is arguably in even more scarce supply as higher education has become ever more focused around younger students studying full time. But offering fair pay for summer work helps us to mine Cambridge’s rich seam of talented multinational educators. Our summer tutors often include early-career academics who are keen to earn additional income to pay off student loans and help bear the fierce cost of renting here, as well as test their scholarly mettle in global classrooms of adults who venture alternative views and return intellectual fire with vocal challenges and queries.

There are also seasoned practitioners in their fields who take up the challenge. These have included publishers, tech entrepreneurs, surgeons and architects. And then there are the semi-retired and retired academics, who can offer unrivalled, wide-angle views of their disciplines, frequently providing exquisitely thoughtful perspectives around the ebbs and flows of the subject over the four or more decades of their academic careers.

The academics are facilitated by a skilled group of course administrators, who shape the programme planning and student experience. A paid group of summer assistants, drawn from current Cambridge students, provide on-course support and, vitally, can help visiting students with guidance on how to access hidden museums, discover fellows’ gardens and receive discount codes for the rental of river punts.

While there is much to celebrate and cherish about summertime learning, it perhaps remains tempting to label these classes, delivered in gloriously beautiful ancient university cities, as pretty tributaries, adding little to the faster-paced and more vocationally focused modern form of mainstream higher education, aimed at a broader demographic of students.

Summer schools must continue – and are continuing – to evolve and provide greater access to learners from all backgrounds, with affordability becoming a central pillar. At Cambridge, we’ve been in the fortunate position of being able to extend bursaries to students from low- and middle-income countries and those affected by conflict and persecution. In recent summers, for example, students from Ukraine have enriched classes and found a short period of respite from the ongoing war. Widening access further will be one focus for our fundraising endeavours. Cambridge is England’s most socio-economically unequal city, and we must find ways to bring more local citizens into this global scholarly network, as well as to engage more with the university’s own student population.

Curriculum design and teaching methods must be adapted to respond to modern audiences, and all attendees should be able to communicate their learning, using, for example, digital badges and simplified credit recognition and transfer systems. Academics must be supported with appropriate professional development to enhance the delivery of summer programmes and must be recognised by their university employers for their participation.

Quality must also be monitored across the sector. Regulators should actively disbar sub-prime, fly-by-night summertime providers that do little more than misappropriate logos and hire university buildings in an effort to suggest legitimacy and generate profit, while officially sanctioned university-led programmes must properly set out their credentials and do more to provide useful and clear information, advice and guidance to prospective students.

Importantly, hard evidence is in very limited supply about the impact of summer programmes in terms of learning outcomes and impact on global citizenship and understanding. Well-designed studies into this should be encouraged.

That all being said, we should be mindful that the global cohorts that congregate every summer on many campuses provide the stimulus for a unique form of higher education. These international jamborees of learning must be protected, promoted and enhanced for the benefit of future adult learners.

James Gazzard is director of continuing education at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.