Government Policy 1979 to the Present

Between 1980 and 2010, the number of students in the UK higher education increased from 800,000 to over 2.5 million and is currently 2.34 million. The likelihood of a young person participating in higher education by the age of 30 (The Higher Education Initial Participation Rate) went up from 41.7% in 2006–2007 to 49.8% in 2016–2017 (Department for Education 2018). By the time the growth in student numbers started in the mid-1980s, initially in the polytechnics and then in the universities, Conservative governments had already used their power over the allocation of resources to exert more control over the operation of the higher education system and to introduce quasi-market mechanisms such as ‘efficiency gains’ (often achieved by cuts in provision and staff redundancies), competition for funding and private sector forms of management. Labour governments from 1997 to 2010 continued this trajectory, as did the Coalition government 2010–2015 and the Conservative government 2015–2019. A change of government in 2019 might have changed prevailing policy directions but that did not happen. New issues may arise, for example on research funding and academic mobility, with the departure of the UK from the European Union but the way they are addressed may not be positive for UK higher education.

As the expansion of the sector was underway, legislation to change the funding arrangements and the shape of the higher education sector began. In 1988, the polytechnics and higher education colleges were taken out of Local Authority control (Education Reform Act 1988). The title of ‘university’ was extended to all the polytechnics and many of the higher education colleges in 1992 (Further and Higher Education Act 1992). The Higher Education and Research Act (2017) set up the Office for Students as a regulatory body, replacing the Higher Education Funding Council for England and made it easier for private providers to be registered as universities. Opening up the higher education sector to private For-profit organisations, coupled with the government lifting the cap on overall student numbers from 2015-16, can be seen as introducing hyper-competition into the system.

The government introduced the selective (i.e. competitive) distribution of research funding in 1986 and Research Assessment Exercises took place in 1989, 1992, 1996, 2001 and 2008. The process was renamed the Research Excellence Framework (REF) for its 2014 iteration and the next one is due in 2021 (UKRI 2020). This time, instead of being able to choose which researchers to submit to the audit, institutions will be obliged to enter all staff with significant responsibility for research. Other forms of audit were developed from 1990 onwards, initially by higher education institutions collectively in the form of the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principal’s Academic Audit Unit that became the Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC) in 1991 and then by bodies set up by the government. The Higher Education Funding Council’s Teaching Quality Assessment was launched in 1993 (Watson 1995), then put under the aegis of the new Quality Assurance Agency in 1997 and renamed Subject Review (Macfarlane and Ottewill 2004). The annual National Student Survey (NSS) began in 2005 (Surridge 2006); higher education institutions were obliged to publish Key Information Sets that include NSS scores by subject from 2012 and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), later renamed the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework, started in 2017 (Bhardwa 2019).

Throughout the period, governments have stressed the need for higher education to serve the needs of the national economy, to emulate the ideas and practices of industry and commerce and to prepare students for their future role as employees. Most of these pronouncements stated or at least suggested that institutions and staff (particularly academic staff) were failing in these respects. From 1997, once it had been decided to charge tuition fees to undergraduates, an emphasis on the career benefits enjoyed by holders of a BA or BSc was included in government discourse. This emphasis has got stronger and stronger since then to the extent that higher education is portrayed as a private and not a public good. The New Labour government of 1997–2001 also linked the idea of students as paying beneficiaries with its criticism of academia in the Green Paper of 1998: ‘Our new funding system gives students the right to demand better quality of teaching and greater attention to their needs’ (DfEE 1998: Chapter 5, Section 6).

The Costs of Expansion for Students and Staff

In 1994, Pritchard summarised government achievements:

Over the last five years, the main expression of government power in British HE has been the promotion of competition and the structuring of a higher education market. Undoubtedly, the most important positive effect of such competition has been to increase the intake of students at relatively modest cost to the Exchequer (1994: 261).

So far, so successful for the government. By the mid-1990s, some of the costs of higher education study had already been transferred directly to students with undergraduate grants being frozen and supplemented by loans as a result of the Education (Student Loans) Act (1990). The process of transfer intensified in the next two decades. Undergraduate grants were completely replaced by maintenance loans in 1999. Undergraduate students had to pay annual tuition fees of £1000 from 1998 to 1999 (Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998), with the level rising to £3000 in 2006–2007 (Higher Education Act 2004) and to £9000 in 2011–2012 (no new legislation required). The last two increases applied only in England since powers over higher education in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales had been devolved. Students from outside the UK comprise a significant part of the increase in student numbers, rising from just under 220,000 in 2000–2001 to almost 460,000 in 2017–2018 (Study in UK 2019). In 1979, the government obliged all higher education institutions to charge full cost tuition fees to international students from the next academic year. Forty years on, non-EU international students are charged tuition fees between 25% and 100% higher than those paid by home and EU students (Save the Student 2019).

Students have most obviously paid a large part of the price for underfunded expansion through impoverishment and indebtedness. There are other linked effects. Many students live at home rather than in residence for financial reasons and a high proportion need to undertake paid work on top of full-time study (Warrell 2015). Larger and more bureaucratic institutions mean that some students feel anonymous. The experience of higher education can be extremely stressful, and widespread concerns about the mental health of students have been raised in recent years. In addition, the higher education system is not equitable in a multitude of ways. For example, Black and minority ethnic students and working-class students are concentrated in lower-status universities and their employment outcomes are worse than those of White and middle-class students (OfS 2019). Women, mature students and disabled students are also at a disadvantage in the labour market when they graduate. Black and minority ethnic students are awarded fewer first-class and upper second-class degrees than White students, and this gap cannot be explained away by social class, educational background or entry qualifications (Broecke and Nicholls 2007; OfS 2018; Universities UK 2018).

Students entering higher education in 1980 found that, on average, there was one member of academic staff for every 9 students. By 2000, the student-staff ratio had doubled to 18.1 and went nearly as high as 21.1 in 2003 (AUT 2005). Operating at increased student-staff ratios will have been partly facilitated by better organisation and innovative teaching methods but it also is an indication of an inferior experience for students and/or of extra work for staff. Higher education staff in general have paid part of the price for the growth of the system through declining salary levels and job insecurity (especially but not exclusively for those on fixed term or hourly-paid contracts), increased workloads and monitoring of performance, greater complexity of roles, outsourcing or the threat of it.

A concise summary of the deterioration of conditions for staff and students is provided by Considine: ‘Scholarly domains are now infused with managerial values and goals, pedagogical actions are now dominated by organizational imperatives, and the life of the student is increasingly intersected by the priorities of work, finance, and future returns’ (2006: 258). For a growing number of academics, in the 1990s and since, the pressures of work have outweighed the pleasures to the detriment of their performance, their health and their enjoyment of life. Each exhortation to continuously improve, to innovate and to aim for excellence has worn them down a little more. The professional commitment of these colleagues often means that their personal suffering does not have an immediate impact on their students or co-workers but before long it does have a negative effect on the productivity and effectiveness of the service.

So, a mixed picture for students and staff. More opportunities for both but under harsher conditions.

Stress, Burnout and Ill health

People have been writing about stress—generally defined as more demands than a person can physically or mentally cope with—in the UK academia since at least the 1990s, and there is a wealth of articles and union-sponsored reports. Work-related stress can cause sleeping, eating and gastrointestinal problems, anxiety and depression. Prolonged stress can make all these symptoms worse and lead to burnout, a state of mental and/or physical exhaustion that may then lead to emotional withdrawal—from colleagues and students in the case of academics—that in its turn produces feelings of personal and professional inadequacy (Kinman 2014; see also Watts and Robertson 2011).

As far back as 1996, Abouserie, in a survey of 414 academics at a single university, found that 74% were moderately stressed and 14% were seriously stressed. There have been union campaigns against stress and bullying. Bullying behaviour and other forms of unfair treatment can be both a cause and an effect of stress. The University and College Union (UCU) undertook a survey of members in 2008 (UCU 2010b). Thirty-four percent of respondents from higher education said they had been bullied at work in the previous 6 months and 54% had experienced such bullying in the last 5 years. Sixty-seven percent had witnessed bullying at work in the 5 years since 2003. Higher education institutions have responded to workplace stress with policies and procedures, by employing occupational health advisors and by using external employee assistance programmes. But during that time, reported stress, including severe stress, among higher education employees in general and academics in particular has risen and is higher than in many other occupations (Kinman and Wray forthcoming). A study of almost 10,000 academics undertaken in 2004 found that 50% were showing signs of mental ill health (Kinman et al. 2006). Ten years later, out of a sample of almost 5000 academics, 62% had similar symptoms (Kinman and Wray 2014).

During the academic year 2018–2019, two important reports were published, the first by the Education Support Partnership (O’Brien and Guiney 2018) and the second by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Morrish 2019). O’Brien and Guiney undertook 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews about workplace well-being. The interviews generated rich material and the most striking aspects of it for me were the sense of isolation at work that many respondents felt, the lack of support that they had received after bereavement and the lack of trust they felt in official procedures to promote well-being. Morrish’s key finding, based on Freedom of Information returns from over 50 universities, was that referrals to counselling rose by an average of 77% and to occupational health by 64% from 2009 to 2015. The total proportion of staff being referred to these services rose from 7% to 8%. The major reasons identified for these levels of suffering are workload allocations that underestimate the time that tasks take, the pressures of audit and metrics, precarious contracts and performance management systems.

Work-related stress can have negative consequences for the individuals concerned, for their colleagues and for the institution. Bradley and Eachus (1995) point out that ‘At an organizational level, stress can lead to increased levels of absenteeism, turnover, low morale, and reduced effectiveness, and thus is of direct concern to employers as well as to individual employees’ (146). Their point is reinforced by Edwards et al. (2009): ‘Strong associations have been found between work-related stress and a number of other negative outcomes that are costly to organisations, such as under-performance, early retirement, employee turnover, accidents and substance abuse….There is, therefore, a clear incentive for organisations to manage work-related stress effectively’ (207–208).

Most of the reported causes of stress among academics fall into three categories: job insecurity; increased and more complex workloads and reduced professional autonomy, respect and trust. Job insecurity was built into the system with the 1988 removal of the polytechnics and higher education colleges from control by locally-elected councillors and the abolition of academic tenure in the universities for new appointees (Education Reform Act 1988). The market disciplines introduced by governments have led in many cases to cut in funding, course closures, departmental mergers and institution-wide restructurings accompanied by waves of redundancies, often more or less voluntary but sometimes compulsory. As McWilliam observed:

The problem of academic stress and burnout is commonly depicted as having a twofold cause: the inadequate funding of universities in a ‘more-for-less’ government policy environment; and, the unwillingness or inability of university managers to protect shrinking departments from the chill winds (economic, technological, administrative) that are disfiguring academics’ work and identity (2004: 160).

Institutions have responded to fluctuations in funding by appointing an increasing proportion of staff on fixed term or part time, hourly paid contracts. Workloads have increased with underfunded expansion and become more pressured as a result of audit and other forms of performance management. Additional types of activity—for example, outreach to schools and colleges, bidding for external funding and partnerships with business organisations—have been added to the already heavy workloads of lecturers.

It might be assumed that the time to undertake these additional responsibilities has been made available as a result of the extensive use of digital technologies that make many tasks undertaken by lecturers quicker and easier than they were 25 years ago. But a by-product of the deployment of digital technologies has been the raising of expected standards. For example, a course leader or module leader dealing with half a dozen handwritten notes from students most mornings in 1995 can now be faced every day with ten times as many emails sent at any hour of the day or night, to which students, used to the immediacy of social media, expect an answer within minutes. Tutors’ putting materials for face-to-face classes online is helpful to students and they appreciated it when I started doing it 20 years ago. But inserting lecture notes, seminar questions, hyperlinks to readings and suggestions for self-study activities into a virtual learning environment (VLE) adds to class preparation time, even more so when tutor-generated slide shows, videos, podcasts and automated tests are also expected.

Audit, additional responsibilities and expectations associated with educational technologies make it unsurprising that unpaid overtime is common among educational professionals. In 2005, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that school teachers, further education lecturers and higher education academics did the most unpaid overtime of any occupational group. Over 56% put in an average of 11 h and 36 min a week of unpaid overtime (TUC 2005). By 2010, school, college and university teachers were still at the top of the TUC list. Nearly 54% of teaching professionals were doing an average of 11 h and 12 min a week of unpaid overtime (UCU 2010a). The TUC’s 2013 analysis reveals that teaching professionals were still one of the groups most likely to clock up unpaid overtime as over half (52.4%) do extra hours each week and, on average, put in an extra 11.1 h (UCU 2013).

It is just possible to envisage job insecurity and heavy workloads being the norm without academic staff feeling they have lost some of their professional autonomy and are no long treated with the respect and trust they deserve. But that is to reckon without the adoption of new forms of management in higher education institutions and the responses of these managements to an increasingly competitive climate. Increased stratification of the academic profession, with more power for academic managers and less autonomy and influence for non-managers, was a logical response to increased government regulation from 1979 onwards. Labelled ‘managerialism’ by its critics, it can be seen as a form of New Public Management, similar to that introduced into the NHS and local councils by the conservative government of that period. Deem explains that:

The techniques highlighted by ‘new managerialist’ theorists include the use of internal cost centres, the fostering of competition between employees, the marketisation of public sector services and the monitoring of efficiency and effectiveness through measurement of outcomes and individual staff performances (1998: 49–50).

The implications for academic staff were set out 2 years later by Morrish:

the project of most academic institutions has been reformulated as one of creating endless bureaucracy, commonly dignified as management. Under this regime academic staff now find themselves thoroughly deprofessionalized and frequently disempowered from making decisions about how to teach their own subjects effectively (2000: 230).

A few years later, some commentators were identifying a competitive, target-driven performance culture in universities around the world. Ball, for example, uses the term ‘performativity’ to describe this culture and defines it as ‘a new mode of state regulation … [that] … requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation’ (Ball 2003: 215). It is hard to opt out of this culture: ‘One of the most difficult issues for academics to address is that it is not possible for anyone to sit outside the performance culture and still be a valued player in a particular area of university activity’ (McWilliam 2004: 161).

Management processes in higher education in the first decade of the twenty-first century did not seem to be informed by insights from management research or the scholarship of teaching, leading to significant contradictions. For example, academics were encouraged by institutional learning and teaching policies to show care for students and to encourage them to become independent learners. But at the same time, many institutions were failing in their duty of care to staff and restricting the professional autonomy of academics more and more. As Hussey and Smith put it:

It is one of the ironies of the current context of higher education that monitoring and assurance systems should be generating veritable bureaucracies within institutions at the same time as policy has discovered, and is celebrating learner autonomy, independence and lifelong learning (2002: 358).

Another contradiction is that a lot of tutors found it rewarding and effective to use teaching strategies aimed at reducing inequalities in the classroom (critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy) by encouraging more egalitarian relationships and shared responsibility between tutors and students. If relations of domination and subordination can be challenged in the classroom, there seems no intrinsic reason why relations of domination and subordination should be standard in the institution itself.

All the techniques of new managerialism have been deployed more extensively and intensely since their introduction into higher education. The consequent undermining of academic professionalism and reduction of academic influence on institutional policies and decisions have increased in parallel. Senates and Academic Boards used to be the structures through which academics participated in institutional decision-making. As hierarchical management structures grew up alongside them and the language, values and practices of private business infiltrated the academy they became less meaningful vehicles for academics to challenge the decisions of institutional leaders. So, the reduced professional autonomy, respect and trust that causes stress can be seen as a product of hierarchical management structures and the ideology of managerialism.

Hyper-Competition, Performance Management and Relations of Domination and Subordination

Again, it is possible to imagine quite complex organisations like universities that have functional divisions of labour with some people in each sub-division getting paid more because they have more responsibilities, including leadership and oversight. If the differences in power, esteem and reward remain modest and proportionate, they will generally be seen as legitimate. If these differences of power, esteem and reward become much wider and, in the view of many in the organisation, disproportionate to the responsibilities, then major problems can arise. As Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) point out, social inequality is damaging to everyone, not just those at the bottom of hierarchies and competition between people for status and respect can be toxic, especially in the workplace.

Government control over institutions has been mirrored by institutional leaderships having more control over staff in general and academic staff in particular. Maybe this was an implicit deal made by governments with vice-chancellors, and there are strong hints of that in some of the documents. For example, when the Labour government was planning to increase private sources of higher education funding by tripling undergraduate tuition fees, it claimed towards the end of the White Paper that this would have ‘the benefit of enhancing the independence of universities by making them less reliant on government funding’ (DfES 2003: Chapter 7: 83).

Actions by governments since 2010 have been directed at further marketisation of higher education provision—in 2010 tripling undergraduate tuition fees again, lifting the overall cap on undergraduate numbers with effect from 2015 to 2016 and devising the Higher Education and Research Act (2017)—creating a climate of hyper-competition within institutions, between institutions and between national higher education systems. In these conditions, the pressure on institutional leaders is intense. Their careers depend on their institutions being more successful that their rivals in attracting students, research stars and external funding, being judged ‘world-leading’, ‘cutting edge’ or offering ‘the best student experience’, scoring highly in the NSS, the REF and the TEF. In one sense, it is not surprising that they then use their power to maximise the performance of employees. Unfortunately, too many of their strategies end up being oppressive to individual employees and contrary to the values and identities of academics. As Lynch expresses it:

Focusing on measurable outputs has the ultimate impact of defining human relationships in the university in transactional terms, as the means to an end – the end being high performance and productivity that can be coded and marketed. This reduces first order social and moral values to second-order principles; trust, integrity, care and solidarity are subordinated to regulation, control and competition (2015: 195).

The subordination of social and moral values to instrumental concerns is damaging to all concerned, can fundamentally change the nature of a university education and ultimately destroy the fabric of academic life. Comparisons between universities and factories crop up in the literature from time to time and Gombrich’s 2000 assertion was probably overblown at the time he made it:

The model for the university is now the factory. The factory mass-produces qualified students, thus adding value to the raw material. The academics, the workers on the shop floor, are there merely to operate the mechanical procedures which have been approved by the management and checked by the inspectorate. Since they are mere operatives, they can of course be paid accordingly (28).

But perhaps the danger of universities becoming dehumanised credential factories appears less unlikely now?

More than 20 years ago, David Noble said North American universities were in danger of turning into ‘digital diploma mills’. He made the link between educational technologies and the commercialisation of universities, the surveillance of staff and students, the deskilling of academics and the casualisation of academic careers (1998). In recent years, there has been a growing awareness in the UK higher education about the scope for digital systems such as VLEs to be used by managers to monitor teachers’ preparation of and students’ ‘engagement’ with class materials and, in the absence of proper protocols, the resultant data to be mined by private companies (see, for example, Jutting 2016). The metrics that feed into institutional league tables and performance management of individuals are also facilitated by digital technologies. For these reasons, the advice offered by Knox (2019) to use the concept of the postdigital condition ‘to highlight the need for educational practice and research to pay more attention to the ways digital technologies are shaping the core of education’ (358) is a valuable one.

Outspoken critics of university policies and management actions can find that disciplinary action is taken against them or their post is designated for redundancy. There have been a number of UCU and Unison branch officers who have been victimised in this way in recent years. There is still coverage on the internet of the campaigns against this victimisation, but it is hard to find out what happened in the end, presumably because some confidential settlement took place. However, there is plenty of information about the case of Thomas Docherty, a professor at Warwick University who was suspended and barred from campus for almost 9 months in 2014 accused of insubordination towards his head of department. He had allegedly made ironic comments and used negative body language towards her during a session of job interviews. He was eventually cleared of all charges by a university tribunal in 2015 (Morgan 2015). The university hired corporate lawyers costing at least £43,000 to put its case. It is thought that it cost Thomas Docherty £50,000 to defend himself.

Outcomes-based performance management has been used more widely in the last decade even though appraisal systems for academic staff are contractually meant to be developmental. To those who introduce and operate such systems, they can appear to be both practical and fair. But to those who are subject to them, they can be immensely upsetting and threatening. Stefan Grimm, a professor at Imperial College, took his own life in 2014 after he was told that he was ‘struggling to fulfil the metrics’ of his post by not achieving enough money in external grants. He is described by Colquhoun (2015) as ‘a man whose needless death was attributable to the very worst of the UK university system. He was killed by mindless and cruel “performance management”, imposed by Imperial College London’. Another tragic death that was directly linked to unreasonable work pressures was that of Malcolm Anderson, a business school lecturer at Cardiff University, who took his own life in 2018 after he was obliged to mark 418 exam papers in 20 days.

The commitment of academics to the research they undertake and the students they teach is routinely recognised by university managers and appealed to when extra work needs to be done. But what may not be sufficiently appreciated is the strength of the emotional investment that many academics have in their professional role and identity. Chubb, Watermeyer and Wakeling explain the implications of this: [We] ‘observe a community heavily emotionally invested in what they do, such that threats to academic identity and research are consequently threats to the self’ (2017: 555). Such insights really should be taught on training courses for university managers. And an argument worth making to institutional leaders planning to introduce performance management is made by Taylor:

PM [performance management] practices are not merely unjustifiable on grounds of welfare, decency, dignity and well-being, but that they may also be counterproductive from a managerial perspective. They require enormous commitment of resource by middle and front-line management and serve merely to create a deep well of discontent among a highly pressurised workforce (2013: 12).

What Can Be Done?

Resistance is hard and most academics do not have the time, energy or confidence in their own job security to engage in it in a sustained way. However, the recent strikes by UCU members against threats to their pensions and for improvements in salaries and conditions show that collective mobilisation is possible. The extensive academic literature on hyper-competition and managerial domination in higher education indicates that many academics see the problems clearly. My short account above reveals how the demands on institutions from governments have intensified over the decades. The research into stress demonstrates that the demands on staff from institutional leaderships have reached a critical point, and the ability of institutions to mitigate stress is compromised by their role in causing it.

Resistance was identified as a professional duty by Tasker and Packham 30 years ago:

Such is the bankruptcy of university leadership and the loss of faith and confidence among lecturers that we find resistance difficult and now, with some exceptions, we pay lip service to the primacy of the market. Resistance is nevertheless legitimate. We have an obligation to society to state publicly that governmental policy is destroying the proper environment for research and teaching in universities and that ‘selling out’ to industry is not in the interest of universities or of society (1990: 193).

But compliance was more common than resistance and can be explained in this way:

I do not know why we university teachers never said – ‘that is not what we do’ when all this started. I suspect it was insecurity about our own professionalism and a (rather childish) wish to be given a gold star as validation from outside authorities and a bigger gold star than our rivals. Well, we have certainly reaped the whirlwind and had the vestiges of independent professionalism stripped from us (Parker 2003: 530) [original emphasis].

If stress among higher education employees is getting worse and actions to date have not stopped this happening, then those who are concerned about the problem need to do more and maybe do it differently. The suggestions here are addressed to academics and based on the use of academic and personal skills to shift institutional practices and cultures towards less damaging forms of operation and a more humane ethos. I have not seen my first suggestion—academic analysis and advocacy—anywhere in the sources I have read. But it seems to me that citing some of the academic theories that appear in the literature on work-related stress could strengthen the arguments put forward by local activists taking part in national campaigns. The latter are vital for protecting the rights of employees and reminding employers of their duty of care. But because the responses of many institutional managements to government pressures on them are part of the problems faced by higher education staff and because the solutions offered by employers tend to focus on individuals who are already heading for burnout, additional forms of action are necessary. Consciously building mutually-supportive relationships and actively challenging unfair treatment are strategies that have the potential to combat isolation and restore agency. In the following sections, I give some examples of what approaches could be taken to academic analysis and advocacy, national campaigns, building mutually-supportive relationship and challenging unfair treatment.

Academic Analysis and Advocacy

Academics who undertake research into workplace stress deserve much gratitude, and there is scope for more academics to become familiar with their work and feed their insights into academic life, for example at departmental discussions or union meetings. One perspective that could be usefully aired is the stewardship/agency model. Franco-Santos and Doherty (2017) provide a very clear account of this model. According to the agency theory, employees are self-interested and lazy. If they are not controlled, they will prioritise their own interests above those of the organisation that employs them. Stewardship theory on the other hand is based on the recognition that employees can and do have a commitment to the organisation and value collaboration with other employees. The authors explain that management systems based on the assumptions of agency theory can be highly counter-productive in public sector organisations, like universities, where stewardship values are the norm. That is why directive performance management approaches cause stress for academics but an ‘enabling performance management approach, based on the learnings of stewardship theory, emphasising staff involvement, communication and development’ (2319) has a more positive effect on their performance and well-being. Another model worth talking about is the sense of coherence model. It originated with the work of Antonovsky (1987). As explained by Kinman (2008) and Darabi et al. (2017), an employee’s sense of coherence relates to the comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness of their work tasks. If these generate a strong sense of coherence, then the person is able to cope more effectively with stress and maintain their well-being.

National Campaigns

UCU represents academic and academic-related employees in UK higher education. A key campaign at present is the workload campaign (UCU 2020). The website states that ‘UCU is committed to campaigning to control workloads and tackle performance management strategies and occupational stress and bullying in the sector’, and a range of useful information and materials is provided. Unison, Unite and GMB represent other groups of staff in higher education and often run similar campaigns.

Raising the Bar was a 2015 performance management initiative by the Newcastle University intended to improve their ratings in the next Research Excellence Framework (Grove 2015). It involved managers setting individual targets for obtaining external funding and for producing high-quality publications. Academics who did not meet their targets were threatened with dismissal. The successful campaign against these punitive proposals extended more widely than the local UCU membership and involved the mobilisation of opposition from academics across the UK and beyond.

Building Mutually-Supportive Relationships

The literature indicates that mutually-supportive relationships can ameliorate stress. In my experience, they can also help prevent minor stress turning into major stress and offer some protection from microaggressions, unfair treatment and bullying. Mutually-supportive relationships do not preclude robust disagreement or fair competition but solidarity between departmental colleagues, between staff representatives on Academic Board or Senate or between union members can make managers think twice before picking on individuals or behaving in a dictatorial way. Nearly a decade ago, I made the argument that: ‘Co-operation and solidarity need cultivating even more in the current context to counter the individualistic and competitive climate already found in many universities, to offer undergraduates and postgraduates an alternative model of professional behaviour and to strengthen the ability of academic groups to achieve their legitimate aims’ (Welch 2012:18). Now the work conditions that require the practice of support and solidarity—job insecurity, work overload and managerial power—also make it harder to do.

My presentation at the Higher Education Institutional Research conference in September 2019 outlined how the mechanisms used to create a mass higher education system in England had in many ways impacted negatively on higher education employees. I asked whether as academics we had to accept high levels of stress, burnout and ill health or whether we could do something about it. The first (and firmest) response was that managerialism as both ideology and practice has so enveloped the higher education system that there is no alternative. The second focused on dissonance between academics and students, a view that I interpreted to mean a mismatch between the concern shown by institutional leaderships for student well-being and the lack of concern for staff well-being. If staff feel disempowered, as another participant observed, then how can they nurture students and their learning? Just before the session finished, we considered the feelings of institutional leaders and wondered, slightly tongue-in-cheek, whether ‘Hug a VC week’ would be a good innovation.

Since that conference session, I have considered more deeply what constitutes a mutually-supportive work relationship and come to the conclusion that it is one in which people trust each other enough to share professional worries and to be more cooperative than competitive. The basis for building such relationships between colleagues has to be a recognition of their humanity, for example, through looking at issues from their point of view and understanding their concerns. It may involve really listening to what they say, curbing one’s irritation with some of their ideas or behaviours, inviting them to coffee or lunch and doing them small acts of kindness. Kindness is a seriously underrated virtue in a marketised higher education sector. It is not SMART; Footnote 1 it is not thrusting or dynamic or penetrating or ahead of the curve, but making kindness a key principle could really improve the texture of academics’ daily lives.

It is fairly straightforward to see how mutually-supportive relationships could be built with one’s peers, and the investment of a few minutes a day could show positive results within weeks. It is harder to envisage how to do this with one’s line manager, particularly if they are distant, difficult or dictatorial, but maybe recognising the pressures they are under could improve relationships. It may seem impossible, even for senior staff, to relate to their institutional leadership in this way. But there is really no reason why anyone who comes into contact with top management cannot smile and say good morning, ask them how they are and compliment them on a particular event they led or a policy they initiated. For example, I know of one VC who attends every graduation and shakes hands with every graduating student and I always congratulate him on his commitment. The only drawback that I can think of is that some people may interpret politeness and friendliness as sycophancy but if lots of staff act in this way towards everyone they encounter at work, small shifts in the institutional culture take place.

Challenging Unfair Treatment

Unfair treatment needs to be challenged whenever it is experienced or witnessed. The techniques that used to be taught on assertiveness training courses can be helpful here, for example, preparing a set of responses in advance so one is not lost for words when an incident occurs. Here are some examples:

  • ‘I wonder if we could start my appraisal with what I have achieved before we move on to anything else?’

  • ‘Maybe we could discuss my colleague’s point a little more before reaching a conclusion?’

  • ‘Perhaps we could consider the impact of this policy on students with caring responsibilities before we make a decision?’

  • ‘It would be useful for us to take into account the research that shows there can be bias in students’ evaluations of international and ethnic minority teachers’.

Even these sorts of tentative interventions can arouse negative feelings in the appraiser or meeting chair, but they can also be learning points for them, particularly if the person making intervention remains calm and unflustered. I know of one staff representative who began her contribution at Academic Board by saying ‘I think’. The VC in the Chair cut in and said ‘We are not here to hear what you think’. The staff representative said ‘Oh, that’s a bit of hostile chairing’ and carried on with her point. The VC never interrupted her in this way again.

Here are some examples of more assertive interventions that are still very polite.

  • ‘I need more time on my workload allocation to do that task effectively’.

  • ‘I think my colleague has a valid point that shouldn’t be dismissed in that way’.

  • ‘That remark could be interpreted as discriminatory’.

It is also useful if people who are prepared to challenge unfair treatment in public do it in such a way as to encourage others to do the same when the situation arises. If a significant minority of academics become willing to take a stand against unfair treatment, the departmental or institutional culture shifts in the right direction. Readers may be worried that even mild interventions against the unfair treatment of others may make them a target for retaliation. The risk is real but so is the risk of the regret one might feel for failing to stand up for oneself or a colleague.

Conclusion

The subordination of human values to market values within the higher education system today detracts enormously from its success in extending opportunities to students, providing jobs for staff and contributing to local economies. Any claims made for excellence are hollow when the achievements of institutions come at the expense of the well-being of students and staff. Academic analysis, collective campaigns and individual actions that promote human values have never been more necessary. As Morrish (2016) puts it:

So, let’s indeed raise the bar. Let’s raise the bar for decency, humanity, respect and trust. Let’s realise that academic staff do not have either the resources or the capacity to keep expanding their workloads and output every year, and please let’s keep in mind the human consequences of systems that push people above, over and beyond’.