New generation of educationalist vice-chancellors urges change

Earlier this year Shân Wareing had a social media post go viral among academics and researchers, receiving unexpected support and praise alike.

The post? “Two years ago, there were no vice-chancellors with a career route via educational development in England, as far as I know,” Professor Wareing wrote. “Now there’s three of us.”

Professor Wareing, vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, is joined by Julie Hall at London Metropolitan University and Claire Taylor at Plymouth Marjon University – plus a fourth in Northern Ireland, Ulster University’s Paul Bartholomew. What they have in common is a background in academic learning and student experience. 

The support came flooding in. One social media user wrote: “Universities would be so much stronger if this was much more commonplace. Impact and prestige [are] all too often only referred to in relation to research and the numbers of citations an individual or institution gets.” Another commented: “[This is] a testament to the importance of educational development.”

However, views towards educational backgrounds haven’t always been so positive. Professor Wareing began her career as a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Roehampton, but quickly became fascinated by both the lack of support for new lecturers and lack of focus on pedagogical issues.

She described the act of teaching as “the invisible thing” taken for granted at universities when she first began her career. “I became really interested in how teaching could be more effective, and I realised I found that more intellectually engaging than the discipline in which I was researching. I became very curious about why we didn’t see teaching as a discipline in its own right,” Professor Wareing told Times Higher Education.

Professor Hall, who worked as an academic training coordinator, agreed, adding that when she entered the higher education sector, “The lecture was king; you stood up at the front and you just talked and students listened.”

But, she continued, “We can’t take for granted that just because we tell students things, that they are learning.”

This lack of recognition of the importance of academic development was a barrier to career progression and limited opportunities for practitioners to be promoted into senior management positions, she added.

“Ten years ago, there was definitely a sense that you needed to be a four-star research professor to lead an academic institution,” Professor Hall said. 

“I possibly wouldn’t have had the chance [to become a vice-chancellor] in the past, because I have never been submitted to the Research Excellence Framework, for example.”

While this attitude might still make sense at a research-intensive university, at a teaching-focused institution, “it makes absolute sense that you would go for somebody with a deep interest and expertise in learning and teaching”.

The pandemic, hybrid working and the rise of artificial intelligence in academia may have changed minds about the importance of conversations around pedagogy, reviving the need for universities to take seriously how they think about teaching, and students’ relationships with their university and lecturers, according to Professor Hall.

“We’re in a liminal space between what you might call the kind of traditional university education of lectures and seminars, and hybrid learning online,” she reflected. “We’re entering a new era of higher education, but I’m not sure we know what that is.”

Professor Bartholomew, whose previous roles include three years as head of curriculum design and academic staff development at Birmingham City University, said he believed that educational backgrounds set vice-chancellors up for approaching the current challenges in a unique, people-focused way.

“Because I spent a lot of time as an academic staff developer, I think about conceptions of the university both as a business entity, because it has to be sustainable in that sense, but also as a collection of people, and as such you have to continue to invest in and develop people,” he explained.

Professor Bartholomew said there “probably was a little bit of scepticism about my appetite for research” when he began as vice-chancellor due to his background, but he said that he did not view the relationship between research and teaching as a “dichotomy”. “I don’t see it as an ‘either or’; universities are places that do both.”

To break down these dichotomies between research and teaching, Professor Hall argued that universities needed to take a more holistic approach to promotions and career progression, and think more creatively about how they can provide opportunities to develop courses in ways that aren’t research focused. 

“I’m looking in the coming years to have sabbaticals on offer [for learning and teaching]. In the past, you would only have a sabbatical to do research. We want sabbaticals for ideas generation and to give people time away from the classroom to consider new approaches and courses, so it’s about generating ideas from the bottom up.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com