“You have been recognised as an expert in your field.” Compliments like that are always welcome. But I’m always slightly suspicious of what follows, particularly when the email comes from a university. Sure enough, when someone wrote that to me this week, what followed was a request for me to contribute to their research without any form of remuneration.If this was a PhD candidate asking for input to their paper, that would be one thing. In fact, I have contributed to just such a project in the last week. But this was a university doing research to inform its own strategy. And when I asked about being paid for the hours of work they had requested? Well, so far, silence.This was not my first negative encounter with a university. I have worked successfully alongside clients like the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester (teaching foresight tools to people working for Audi), and happily guest lectured here and there. I was absolutely delighted to receive the Alumni Award for outstanding achievement from my alma mater, Lancaster University last year. But frankly, the majority of my interactions over the last decade have been deeply negative. Some examples:

• The business school that took six weeks to respond to a new business enquiry about partnering on a project for a FTSE100 construction company. The person who eventually (and half-heartedly) emailed back told me that they wouldn’t consider less than £10,000 per day for one of their academics. For comparison, at the time the consulting fee for a director-level person in a big four consultancy was £1200-2000/day.

• The department head that invited me in to talk about partnering on some research, only for me to find that all they really wanted was for me to speak, unpaid, to prospective corporate partners, and that they were offering no academic engagement at all.

• The business school that after four or five meetings, offered me a meaningless job title in return for unpaid guest lecturing, rather than the research collaboration originally discussed.

• The very famous business school that asked me to run two full-day workshops on its (very expensive) MBA programme, at the other end of the country, in return for the ‘prestige’.

• The university that attended an event about innovation and engaging with the business community, boasting about the hundreds of post-grads and phDs on its computer science courses, yet I had never seen a single student or academic participate in the city’s thriving start-up community

I could go on. And on. About how even when you do work with them, they are awful at paying you and have no mechanism to just pay an invoice for your time but instead force you through convoluted expenses processes. You’d think I would have learned sooner. But honestly, right now I think I am done with universities. Certainly ones that don’t value my time or that of people outside the academy. Or ones that have the arrogance to believe that association with their name alone somehow justifies the investment of my time.

A pattern?

This latest email got me thinking, not just cross. Maybe I am over-extrapolating from my own negative experiences. But it certainly feels like there is a pattern here. Because I’m not the only person in business that I know has had experiences like these. You have to ask, why do they place so little value on the time of people beyond the walls of the institution?The desire to engage with the business community is a constant refrain from many inside universities. But what it really seems to mean is ‘can we extract cash from big companies to fund projects’. There’s rarely any sense that there might be other valuable exchanges. Of ideas for example. No, those are the province of the academy.It feels bad to be knocking universities right now in the middle of strikes (which I wholeheartedly support) and the ongoing debate about freedom of speech on campus (a whole separate and highly polarised debate). But I’m concerned because I am an enthusiast for the idea of the university. 

The value of an education

It may not feel like it, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, but in general we are getting more comfortable as a species. Less of our time is spent just surviving and more of our time is spent on fun and self-improvement. There will likely be some disruptions to this trend, as a result of climate, economic, and population change across the rest of this century. Maybe war and further pandemics too (sorry). But as I’ve always said, I’m a long term optimist, short term pessimist. Ultimately, human beings are climbing Abraham Maslow’s pyramid, and will be spending more of our time at the top, studying and self-actualising (whatever that is). Temples to the acquisition of knowledge without any necessary commercial driver should be thriving institutions in the future. But they have to survive that long first. And right now, it all feels a bit precarious.There are major questions about the economic value of an undergraduate education in the workforce. Yes, right now, a degree remains a requirement for many roles and gives a boost to your earning potential. But I hear two things from large employers constantly. First, that they are disappointed in the work-readiness of graduates. And second, that they are relaxing their previous entry requirements to increase the diversity of their workforce.A degree isn’t just about making you ready for the workforce. But when getting one might put you tens of thousands of pounds in debt, it’s hard to decouple study from your future earning potential. What happens when it becomes clear that a degree is no longer the obvious route to career success?This wouldn’t be such an issue if we had a more rounded culture of life-long study. We could be undergraduates at thirty, forty or seventy. But that will take time to develop.

Research opportunities

It’s not just in teaching that universities are under threat. We have to ask whether they are the right place for research now as well. Academic publishing has been a scandal for years. It’s increasingly clear that the quality of scientific papers is not what it was thought to be. And with wages under pressure and the reduced availability of grant funding, smart people have hard choices to make about where to conduct their research.This has been true in STEM subjects for some time. Why struggle along at a university when you can raise venture capital or inhabit the well-equipped lab of a major corporation? I met a woman a few years ago who had left behind an incredible academic career at one of the UK’s most prestigious universities because she got tired of filling out grant applications when her - clearly commercially valuable research - could be completed so much more quickly in the private sector. At the same time, the open source movement has created a vehicle for the collaborative creations and dissemination of a whole range of technologies that might historically only have sprung from the febrile atmosphere - and funded time and equipment - of a university campus. In the humanities, researchers are also finding new ways to fund their passions. Publishing, podcasts, Substack, Patreon, YouTube, online courses, live events series. These are all things that an individual can do with a laptop now to generate an income from their ideas. From history to feminist theory, there are people in the wild now, acting like academics but existing beyond the academy.

The university society

Here’s the optimistic picture: it’s not that the university is dying but that it is being subsumed into society. That our increasing wealth is already driving us up Maslow's hierarchy to the point where we are consuming knowledge out of preference, beyond the old formal strictures. This carries risks, the universities might argue. Flawed as they may be, the modern academy has functions for quality control. Routes to fund research that is important, even if it is not popular or profitable. But can we really not do these things outside of a university? It seems there’s a profitable niche in just about everything, in a global digital marketplace. And the open source community is (generally) pretty good at quality control. I don’t want to see the end of universities. Though looking at the collapse of some departments, like modern languages, it feels like some are already well on their way. As well as being a wonderful place to soft-launch yourself into adult life, the very concept of a university, a space devoted to higher learning, is something a society should be proud of. But it feels like the academy’s sense of itself, of its own value, is out of sync with reality. Without that recognition, it is at real risk. And not just of continuing to piss off people like me with its arrogance.