The COVID pandemic accelerated disruptive changes that were already underway in universities. COVID put great stresses on universities because not only did they have to move operations online in a very short timeframe (including teaching, assessing, student support, research, and administration), but they also faced significant loss of revenue from foreign students. Nevertheless, universities showed great capacity to respond and, to a large extent, kept their core business going. What society at large saw, at least in wealthy countries with good ICT access, was students studying online from home or in isolated accommodation. What those working in universities saw was an incredible and creative response by all involved to a challenging situation.

It is unlikely that the way universities function will go back to pre-COVID models, especially as it looks like the impacts of the pandemic will last longer than first expected. So the dramatic upheavals of the past two years provide an opportunity to choose to change things for the better as universities move away from simply reacting to circumstances and towards consciously planning for a different future.

This chapter explores reset options for universities, informed by the themes that emerged from the COVID stories. It doesn’t seek to be comprehensive but provides suggestions for directions of travel when making critical decisions about change.

Who Can Lead the Resetting?

There is no single entity that determines what a university does and therefore no single body that can reset their activities as a whole. Rather, it is a complex system where the outcome is determined by the interacting actions of many players, including not only the universities themselves, their faculties and departments, but also the governments that establish, audit and provide a lot of their funding. Individual academics can explore new offerings, as can transnational groups of academics from the same discipline or across several disciplines. A lot of influence can also be brought to bear by stakeholder groups whose opinions are important to universities, if they express those opinions clearly and forcefully. Students can articulate what helps their learning and what doesn’t work well. Alumni and the community at large can describe what they would like universities to offer and in what format—not least since universities should serve society. Employer groups and bodies representing the professions can exert their own influence, the latter especially through professional accreditation processes. Individuals and organisations offering funding for projects to be carried out in partnership with universities also have significant influence through the conditions they put on releasing their funding.

The important thing is to use the opportunity. Which begs the question of where leadership on resetting might come from. The most likely players are universities that are seen as trendsetters, university national bodies and/or policy-activist. But other reset leaders are possible, for example strong global coalitions of academic leaders in particular disciplines providing world-leading resources, or high-impact international research groups of such eminence that their members can influence conditions and support arrangements in their employing universities.

Education

COVID hastened the inevitable move to more university education being provided online. Despite rapid deployment with little or no extra resources, the transition worked remarkably well. Having shown that online education is a real possibility, can we now find ways to do it better and more efficiently?

Expanding the Global Classroom

Many disciplines have a fundamental core of knowledge that needs to be mastered no matter where in the world the student lives. Teaching the fundamentals of a discipline on a one-to-many basis has been possible by video for decades and, more recently and more interactively, by videoconferencing. And yet, in most universities it is taught from scratch on campus in large lecture theatres. A fundamental question is whether it is better to learn remotely from the best teachers in the world, supported by superbly produced material, or to be taught in person by someone more local, possibly in the local language with a familiar accent?

Attempts to teach collectively between universities and across country borders using video have been tried over the last quarter century but largely haven’t caught on. Is now the time to re-examine this phenomenon in the interests of better-quality learning opportunities and economic efficiencies?

This is not just about having the material taught globally, but ideally it would be backed up with high-quality tutorial and possibly laboratory experience locally. As the COVID stories demonstrated, universities are about people. So such a reset means examining what material is best taught online (e.g. some group work and banks of multiple-choice questions) and what is better taught face to face.

More importantly, it means investigating the incentive structures for university organisational units (faculties, departments, etc.) and for academics in charge of courses. Will the academics get the full credit in terms of contact hours when the core of a course is downloaded from elsewhere? And, at the university level, where does the budget for the online material come from? How is the online material charged? Is it a licence arrangement paid for by the university a student is enrolled in? A license negotiated with a fee per university? Or a fee for every student participating?

Some Disciplines Take the Lead

Sharing online material can take many forms, including formal lectures, tutorial material, interviews with leading practitioners and assessment tools. One example is Core-econ (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) (https://www.core-econ.org/) which develops teaching resources for university economics courses, delivered through high-quality, peer-managed processes. While this is a relatively recent example, computing disciplines established global curricula through processes dating from the 1960s and organised by the Association for Computing Machinery. At present, there are full undergraduate and associate degree curricula for five computing disciplines: Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology and Software Engineering. There are also subspecialisations in data science and cybersecurity, and standards for Kindergarten to Grade 12 ICT courses (see https://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations). Doing this made considerable sense as the world became increasingly dependent on computers and the professionals that ran them. For over 40 years, with some minor exceptions, there have been shortages of ICT professionals, including ICT academics. All too often people who knew remarkably little about computers were pressed into service to teach computing (notably academics from cognate disciplines such as mathematics, physics and logic). Having a detailed and fully specified curriculum, updated frequently as needed in this fast-moving field, made this possible and cut down the risk.

There are other advantages to having a pre-set curriculum. It makes professional accreditation processes more straightforward, and having the topics specified in the curriculum and organised into subjects provides detailed guidance for those producing textbooks and online courseware.

These are just a couple of examples out of many that provide inspiration and ideas for moving education online. The challenge will be to move on from an analogue form of online education (which for understandable reasons was the predominant model in response to COVID) to a new digital pedagogy that enhances the educational experience.

Specialist Courseware Firms

If universities are looking to buy courseware, who might they buy it from? Other universities are the obvious choice, but another possibility could be firms that specialise in courseware production or in offering complete university majors in particular disciplines. This makes considerable sense in highly specialised topics such as classical languages, or advanced topics in many fields, for which there is low demand at any given university but reasonable demand across several.

Offering advanced topics remotely is probably best done in many disciplines as a trade between universities and, indeed, has become increasingly common in graduate courseware offerings for PhD students. In subject areas where universities struggle to maintain an academic unit due to low student demand, we might see the emergence of firms of specialists who offer high-quality courseware simultaneously to many different universities, or directly to students. These firms could also conduct assessments, with the university where the student is enrolled granting pre-agreed credits. As well as ensuring that these subjects remain available to students, the specialist firms would possibly offer more secure employment for specialists in these fields than universities can. These firms might be owned subsidiaries of universities.

Incorporating Whole Courses from Elsewhere Within a Degree Structure. Are We Possibly Moving to Universities as Examining and Certifying Bodies?

But does the global classroom and its many variations challenge the very idea of a university? The logical conclusion of a major education reset towards buying in education material available online is that students can choose what courseware they want, perhaps with local guidance, and then present themselves to a university for examinations and, if successful, certification.

There are potentially pedagogic issues with this. Is this the best way to learn? Should students be doing more in groups? Are the benefits of informal contact between students and academics a vital part of university education?

But a mix-and-match approach appears to make sense. After all, universities already provide credit for courses taken at other universities. The COVID stories illustrate that universities are incredibly flexible and innovative. Can enough education be offered locally (tutorials, laboratories, project work, thesis work) for the social and pedagogic benefits of learning in a scholarly community to be retained, while sourcing higher-quality learning and teaching material from elsewhere at lower cost?

Incentives and Costs

All the various options described above offer possibilities of higher-quality education with potentially greater choice and lower costs for students, and economic efficiencies for universities.

Making full use of these options, however, will only work if the workplace incentives are right for those doing the teaching and assessing, and the quality, choice and prices are right for students. Resetting education to an increased emphasis on online education as an approach of last resort to financial constraints is unlikely to be popular or supported but investing in the change and paying close attention to the incentives for all involved could lead to revolutionary and ultimately positive changes to how university education is provided.

Research

COVID disrupted university research, especially for those who are highly dependent on laboratories. But on the positive side, it highlighted the importance of researchers having a strong online presence. While videoconferencing and online collaboration had not seen much uptake in university education prior to COVID, leading university researchers had been using remote connections extensively for collaborative research for some years, with many universities and governments providing explicit incentives for scientific papers co-authored by researchers from different countries.

Thus, even during the most stringent lockdowns, with laboratories often inaccessible, a great deal of international collaborative research continued. Many of those whose research was primarily experimental could carry on with at least some of their work if they had already invested in a digital twin of their experiment(s) or were able to construct one. Now that sensors have become cheaper and more widely available, field work in disciplines where they can be deployed (e.g. ecology and many branches of engineering and the geosciences) could also continue.

Remote monitoring processes produce great amounts of data. This in turn highlights the importance of sensor and monitoring equipment that combines local processing and fast transmission capacity so that data can be collated and downloaded in near real time. It also highlights the importance of ensuring the data is well curated and made available, particularly through open access means, in order to understand the evolution of phenomena over time and to provide the ability to replicate findings.

Research resets would seem to be particularly about making sure we invest more in the (relatively inexpensive) infrastructure that enables research at a distance, especially when done collaboratively, to be maximally productive in the face of severe or possibly prolonged disruptions to on-campus and laboratory-based research.

Conferences

One significant feature of a researcher’s life is sharing results, developing ideas and meeting colleagues at conferences. With COVID disrupting travel, the conference world imploded, at least temporarily. One important aspect of reset is to understand what it is about research conferences we particularly value (the informal meetings are probably as important as the formal sessions) and work out how to reproduce these by other means. Critical to this discussion are the environmental impacts of academic travel. In other words, COVID has opened up solutions that will impact on the other existential crisis of our time, climate change.

Research Training

One group that was particularly hard hit by COVID was PhD students. Typically, at this stage, much learning is done somewhat informally in discussions (with supervisors, other senior researchers, or fellow graduate students) and/or working in laboratories alongside supervisors and other more experienced colleagues. The very informality of the learning arrangements for graduate students, which in normal times provided the flexibility to tailor a student’s workplan to their needs and stage, combined with lockdowns and campus closures, means that many graduate students were suddenly bereft of their support systems, often exacerbating a difficult situation, since being a PhD student can be a lonely business, particularly in the long process of writing up a thesis. Resetting in this domain is particularly about ensuring sufficient and agreed support structures around students.

Funding the Full Economic Costs of Research

One of the lessons from COVID was how unsustainable research funding is, especially in the context of the UK and Australia. The current system where research is effectively subsidised by premium international student fees was put in the spotlight with the ban on international travel. Even if it means funding less research, a move to a more sustainable funding regime will benefit universities, governments and society at large in the long run.

Amplifying the Social Responsibilities of Universities

The COVID stories in Part Three of this book illustrated how universities leaned into the crisis in multiple ways. For education, adaptation involved moving at speed to online and other novel ways of delivering education; for research, developing tests, vaccines and treatments at record-breaking speeds was key. But that was only part of the response. All our COVID stories describe the extraordinary engagement of students, staff and academics in supporting local communities—whether that was through being part of emergency response teams, setting up foodbanks or fund raising to keep a theatre open. The point is that, in a time of crisis, the broader role of the university in serving its local community was amply illustrated.

As universities look to the future and make choices about what and how to reset, it is important that they embrace their community agenda and integrate their broader social responsibilities into their missions. Just as the Land Grant Universities were born out of the adversity of the US Civil War, a new socially focused, locally delivered mission for universities could be part of the reset. And whilst there is a strong moral argument for such a mission, there is also a matter of politics—not least in Australia and the UK—with the social contract between society and universities (mitigated it should be stressed through politicians) under strain. There is a real opportunity to reset this strained political narrative by building on the amazing responses of the universities and their communities to COVID.

Governance and Management

Resetting major aspects of the core business of universities—education, research and social responsibility—raises questions as to whether the administration, management and governance that support these core activities should be reset as well.

Governance

Traditionally, university governance has been through a board combining internal and external stakeholders, with marked variations across countries depending on their overarching governance ideals. Over recent decades, this model has been increasingly overlaid with methods from private sector corporate governance, with the more traditional structure emphasising the university’s links to its stakeholders and community and the corporate governance approach emphasising accountability, quality control, efficiency and specialist oversight in finance and risk. This dual purpose (which is rarely discussed explicitly) may sound logical, but in practice often leads to tensions within the governing board and between it and senior management, tensions that are typically exacerbated at times of challenge, stress and change.

Understanding what the community values in universities and how the community might react to changes may be improved by establishing more formal consultation mechanisms involving a broader base than is typically available through a university council. Concomitantly, formal governance might benefit from a smaller board firmly focused on the corporate governance process, providing assurance to government (generally the entity which bears ultimate responsibility for a university) that the university is functioning appropriately.

However, for some universities, the current arrangements might be best left as they are, possibly with a few tweaks. For example, universities with a distinct local or regional profile may be better served with governance models that include strong community involvement, especially if the university is one of the largest employers in the locality.

On the other hand, for large complex metropolitan universities, a small focused governing board complemented by effective consultation mechanisms that feed into the governance process might lead to better and more efficient governance and consultation, consultation that draws richer input than available at present by consciously engaging a more representative set of stakeholders. These stakeholders would include all categories of students, with their diverse backgrounds and needs; staff (academic and general); alumni; the communities in which the university’s campuses are physically situated; the professions the university serves; major partners in research, education or commercial ventures both local and international; and local, regional and national governments.

For too long, many countries have typically used a one-size-fits-all university governance model, which has allowed only some marginal tweaks. It is time to consider a reset in which we encourage our universities to choose the most appropriate governance model for them, providing it is effectively accountable to their commissioning stakeholders (generally a government).

Management and Administration

Modern universities are big and increasingly diverse businesses with a central core of public good activities, but they increasingly also carry out commercial activities such as engaging in collaborative research with industry and contributing to global trade through educating foreign students. Not surprisingly, their operations require large administration and management structures. From the point of view of many academics, this large administration is a sign that universities have sold out to managerialism and the true nature of universities as places of scholarly pursuit is being lost.

Attempting to reset university management and administration should be partly about seeking to reduce internal red tape and urging governments to cut needless external red tape (see next section), but also about holding public conversations about the characteristics of a successful contemporary university.

Government Policy

In most countries, universities are part of the public sector and, as such, their activities should reflect what the community wants.

The issue of community expectations is strained during exceptional situations like COVID, as is the governments’ role in articulating those expectations and providing support and direction for universities. From most governments’ perspectives, universities handled COVID reasonably well. They kept providing education and they contributed vital research and medical input to the pandemic crisis. Probably the greatest government concern about universities occurred in countries such as the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, where the significant trade benefits associated with educating foreign students fell sharply and are unlikely to return to previous levels.

Nevertheless, the jolt provided by COVID is a great opportunity to reaffirm or reset the role of universities, both by the governments that legislate the sector, and the governments that provide a significant amount of their funding (not always the same, for instance Australia).

The advantage of spelling out the role of universities afresh is that it allows us to reset funding and reporting mechanisms with a view to making them more aligned with purpose, and also to reduce the red tape burden on both universities and governments.

The common mantra over the last quarter century or so is that universities have three purposes: teaching, research and external engagement (including community service). The very format of that interaction varies between countries and contexts, depending on how universities are funded, the political-economic context, and the specificities of individual universities—their history, location and organisational trajectories. For instance, the role of a big city university is probably more accurately described as doing the following:

  • providing higher education so the workforce is able to deliver well in an advanced economy;

  • being a significant research performer, anchoring fundamental research tuned to national needs while building top-level connections to researchers in related disciplines around the world so that these connections in turn provide global connections for industry and community innovations;

  • being a significant intellectual powerhouse and problem solver for other parts of society, notably industry, governments, and communities, by bringing their knowledge to bear on wicked problems. In this regard, research commercialisation can be an important contribution;

  • providing lifelong learning opportunities and certification that enable workers to move between fields and roles with appropriate skills; and

  • as a commercial venture, providing education to students from outside the country either by having them travel to the university or by learning through distance education.

The categories might be the same, but the emphasis might be different for a small rural university which might, for example, offer an education programme aimed specifically at the workforce of its region and might specialise in bio-agricultural research or other adjacent industries.

It is important for governments to be clear about what other characteristics they want universities to have in addition to their main purpose. For example, is it time to reset the administrative burden in universities which in staff terms alone (those directly employed in the administrative side of universities but also through the reporting that all academics must now do) is inordinately expensive? This reporting burden has come about as part of the contemporary governance trend towards increased accountability, but it is exacerbated by university funding becoming increasingly piecemeal over the same period. Reporting has become a major chore, leaving universities in an analogous position to less-developed countries that need to report on aid to multiple international donors in order to attract continuing funding but at a high administrative cost when considered as a percentage of their GDP.

So, in talking about the role of the university, should we say that a university should have high performance in its core business areas but also minimal red tape in its administrative operations? The UK is taking a lead in this with the Tickell Review, tasked with making recommendations to reduce unnecessary red tape in the UK research system (see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/review-launched-to-reduce-red-tape-for-uk-researchers).

Maybe it is time for governments to work with universities to gain a deeper understanding of what would lead to a higher education system characterised by satisfied stakeholders and customers (students, graduates, community, and research and commercial partners), a motivated and incentivised workforce, high-quality control and low red tape. This could be a vital step in resetting some universities.

Funding

As noted above, university funding in many countries has become piecemeal, with complex funding structures often comprising a government contribution towards costs per student, sometimes categorised by discipline and level, supplemented by a range of funding for special initiatives in education or for meeting certain quality standards (diversity, student progression, graduate satisfaction, etc.). Research funding is typically even more complex, with multiple government research funding bodies providing funding on a competitive basis against varying criteria and with differing contributions up to full funding of selected research projects. Hopefully governments are contributing to capital and infrastructure as well. Then, for some countries, there will be funds from student fees, research partnerships with industry, consulting, and, if lucky, income from licences, patents and philanthropy.

Within universities, funding is characterised typically by allocations to academic and major administrative units against a budget formula for education and by a passthrough mechanism for research grants. In some countries, this buries what are often considerable cross-subsidies when research is not fully funded. In Sweden and in many European countries, education and research have separate funding streams which allows for better accountability but also compartmentalises, and often drive a wedge between, activities.

There are several possible resets for university funding. Government contributions to education could be pulled together into a block grant calculated against a basket of deliverables with unders and overs added or subtracted to send signals on special initiatives.

Research funding, too, could be increasingly pulled into a block grant which could work reasonably for research training and research infrastructure, although it makes less sense for research projects, as much research project funding is multi-institutional. And research quality seems to benefit from competition and peer review. So, the most useful reset in that area would almost certainly be full funding of research projects in countries where this doesn’t occur, as it would pull some of the biggest cross-subsidies out of the system at university and national levels while introducing more transparency into the system and making it easier to estimate the true cost of proposed new activities. For other countries, a more flexible deployment of resources where education and research are conjoined rather than compartmentalised might be a better way of governing activities.

National Accreditation and Quality Control

Several countries have introduced national systems of university accreditation and quality control, often managed by a national oversight body running formal accreditation on a multi-year cycle. This process, along with agreed data collection and input from bodies such as the professions carrying out accreditations of academic units and undergraduate courses in their specialty areas, could make the need to nudge behaviour through marginal funding schemes largely redundant and thereby reduce externally imposed red tape. Currently, too many different and not always aligned accountability regimes operate in parallel, which makes little collective sense.

Place

Universities have a significant physical presence. While some universities, particularly in Europe, are spread throughout what is often a university city, in other countries they are more likely to be contained on campuses that are often interesting architecturally with a variety of sometimes beautiful buildings and spaces between them.

How do universities use the space going forward, especially if their core business is increasingly online? Rethinking the space and the opportunities around it is another reset possibility. Should outdoors be used more for pedagogical purposes at a time when social distancing is the norm? Should community use of the space be encouraged as a way of tightening the links between communities and their universities? The building boom of the last few decades was a testimony of its time, but in the more resilient and resource-efficient era that is now evolving, universities must search for smarter ways of locating and organising their physical presence.

People

Universities are large employers, and are sometimes the largest employer in town. The university’s role as an employer of choice is another point for a possible reset.

Is it time to think more about the role of the academic of the future? Should more flexible working structures be encouraged? We could possibly reset to situations where academics might choose if they are going to do research, and then contribute to their salary through research funds, while others may choose only to teach. Of course, to a considerable extent this is the system in the USA—and in Sweden among our countries under study—where it works well. Can it be tried elsewhere? Or should universities introduce more flexible ways of organising academic work—not in the form of a gig economy labour market of hourly contracts, but rather as a flexible way of combining engagement in different settings, possibly some parts in academia, others in civil society or public or private organisations. The current system is both too rigid and expensive to carry its own costs, and the conditions for insiders and outsiders too different to be legitimate in the future.

Above, we raised the possibility of specialist education companies offering specific subjects. People who are currently academics might prefer to work for these firms. Might there be research analogues of the same?

Image Reset—COVID Highlighted the Contribution of Universities

One of the few good things about COVID was that it improved the perception of universities among the general public. There were many high-profile examples of governments turning to specialist units in universities for help with understanding the virus and developing tests and vaccines. Iconic in this regard was the standing ovation the Centre Court crowd at Wimbledon gave for Oxford University’s Dame Sarah Gilbert, who was instrumental in developing the AstraZeneca vaccine. But there were many more examples of university institutes providing virological, epidemiological and public health advice. A lot of this came from medical faculties, which underlined the long-term, close symbiotic links between universities and local and national health systems.

But COVID also highlighted how international research links between universities are an important component of a modern economy, often proving the fastest and cheapest reference point for firms and governments seeking to make connections with pockets of specialist expertise worldwide. This is particularly illustrated in books describing the emergence of the COVID pandemic and the role leading infectious diseases researchers played in working out the scale and seriousness of what was happening (e.g. Spike by Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja, Profile, 2021).

Incentives Are a Must

No attempts at major resets of university operations are going to be successful without paying attention to the incentives for those who must create and sustain the change, mainly universities and their staff, particularly academic staff. In order to achieve new ways of working that produce higher-quality student and research outcomes but at lower and hopefully reducing costs over time, the resets must work for all. As is often pointed out, those who work in universities are very smart and arguably could be earning more in other jobs, but choose university work because they like the environment.

The creativity and efficiency with which universities as institutions and academic staff as individuals responded to the COVID challenge shows that the talent needed to bring about major change quickly in the system is available. Removing perverse incentives could be a way to make that change happen.