Mergers & collaborations are in the air, again. A while back City St George’s president Anthony Finkelstein, aka prof serious, recommended consolidating providers to improve the HE sector’s finances. The merger of the universities of Kent and Greenwich into the London & South East Group has been approved by the Dept for Education. They’re one way to achieve much by collaboration. And there is of course the tradition of long-term federations and networks of institutions – the University of London (17 members), Oxford (36 colleges), California (nine campuses), and the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland – over 70 centres of learning. In all these examples centralisation and devolution of powers is a key issue. In the case of the UHI there is enabling legislation – the Post-16 Education (Scotland) Act 2013 – which centralised power and planning in post-16 education in Scotland (a mixed blessing) but the Act’s grouping of colleges into 13 regions was a form of devolution of power, responsibilities and funding based on local priorities.
There’s undoubtedly a dark side to mergers & collaborations of course. Following the publication of OfS’s brief on subcontracted arrangements, the excellent Wonkhe site has been exposing subcontracted partnerships and franchising arrangements and particularly the case of private colleges operating as for-profits, offering Business & Management courses.[1] Quality of OfS data is a problem, but it’s clear from what’s published that these complex relationships are overdue a regulatory rethink. At a time when English universities make a loss on all sectors of undergraduate education, ‘the group in scope posted gross profits of £504m on an income of £815m.[2] So the quality of education was superb, then? Not necessarily: ‘We learned that 74 per cent of subcontracted students completed their course, compared to 87 per cent for the sector as a whole and a regulatory minimum of 75 per cent. This subgroup scored just 70 per cent.’[3]
And yet there are many examples of genuinely fruitful and high-performance collaborations between universities. David Kernohan, again on Wonkhe, commenting on the recent release by HESA of the Estates record, playfully imagined universities in the four nations of our disUK as a separate nation state within the nations. The Thatcherite emphasis on making universities ‘enterprise zones’ was never going to work; but as Kernohan points out there is a strong case for universities to be treated as ‘special economic zones’. It’s true that a university campus is a unique social experience, as I was describing in my post on U of Leeds campus. Merge all universities in the UK and according to Kernohan you have a state the size of Latvia, larger than Iceland in some respects, and with sounder finances than many nation states:
Financially, we are looking at £48bn in income and £39bn in expenditure (these as reported in the Estates dataset, not the Finances dataset, giving us a positive (if weak) balance of trade. Gross national income per FTE (if we use staff only) is £12,192 (that’s 16,518 USD at current prices, a higher equivalent GNI per capita than Russia!)
Other recent fantasy mergers include Anton Muscatelli’s contribution to Paul Greatrix’s podcast series My Imaginary University, where the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow form a joint Scottish Institute for the Enlightenment, ‘a body focused on advancing human reasoning for purpose of improvement’, according to the blurb. Which sounds much too one-sided to be a product of the Scottish enlightenment. There was ever a duality about foundational thought – Hutcheson’s moral sense as well as his more philosophical writings; Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiment as well as his Lectures on Jurisprudence vs The Wealth of Nations; or the duality of Adam Ferguson’s perspective on contemporary society. In that sense the graphic from the podcast has it wrong – the AI-generated image of an distanced, enlightenment foundation doesn’t convey how messy mergers are, both in conception and in delivery. More practical and insightful is Muscatelli’s recent publication on Regional Economic Development in Scotland, which in chapter four gives a thoughtful portrait of the place of HE & FE in innovation and growth in Scottish regional development, and what’s required to improve it.
I was involved with three collaborations in my time, quite different from each other, and described below.
1. Queen’s College + Glasgow North Poly = Glasgow Caledonian
This one was pretty close to the classic institutional merger, between Queen’s College (domestic science, radiography, orthoptics, etc) in the leafy West End of the city with the city-centre Glasgow Polytechnic, located in the industrial remains of Cowcaddens. I’d been appointed to my first full-time post (1992) in the Consumer Studies dept of Queen’s, several months after completing my LLB. I learned later that the only reason I got the post was that the head of law at the Poly, who was on the interview panel and knew the merger was in the offing, wanted me in her law dept because I’d been involved in digital legal education, with Joe Thomson, the new Regius Professor at Glasgow University (an early foray into hypertext, using Guide OWL, pre-internet – more of that in an upcoming post). I couldn’t wait to move. The Consumer Dept, where I was teaching Trading Standards law to TSOs, had little research ambition or culture; and law was very much a subaltern activity.
Later, at Caledonian, I began to think about the sort of research I wanted to do. With a colleague I won funding for a small educational project from the regulatory body for TSOs, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute – the first regulatory body I worked with – on improving their legal education programme, the Diploma in Trading Standards. That consultancy, and the article I published on the work I carried out with with Joe Thomson, set the pattern for the rest of my career as a legal academic. I knew I wanted a life of design work, and to build research cultures based around it: that was where I was happiest. Just where it would lead in the next 30+ years was not at all apparent to me then. But for me personally, the merger of the two institutions made it happen, and quickly.
2. Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL)
The second was a merger of graduate courses in the law schools of Glasgow & Strathclyde to form the Glasgow Graduate School of Law, 1999-2010 (GGSL – the more natural alternative title of Glasgow Graduate Law School, or GGLS was rejected as too close to giggles…) It took place following discussions between the heads of the two law schools, Alan Paterson and Joe Thomson. It combined the two Diplomas in Legal Practice (as it was then called) of the law schools into one, and offered joint masters courses, and there were other initiatives involved, too. When I first heard of it from Alan Paterson I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to be involved in legal educational intiatives that otherwise couldn’t come about. At Caledonian where I then was, I’d done as much as I could do in design work, because of lack of funds. The two Diploma centres similarly were cash-strapped for development, not least because the profits they did make were channelled into law school accounts. But with the joint grad school came the chance to build anew, for much of the income from the joint course would be available for development of the new joint course.
The merger took place within a wider cultural and financial set of initiatives. The joint school was initially underwritten by the then-titled Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) through Synergy, a strategic alliance initiative between Glasgow and Strathclyde that was part of SHEFC’s Strategic Change Initiative.[4] The Synergy alliance, which lasted for three years, was signed by the Principals of both Universities in September 1998. As the Synergy initiative pointed out in the following bullet points on its website, the initiative offered institutions many advantages:
- larger critical mass for research
- facilitating infrastructure that would not otherwise be affordable
- research excellence in new combinations of research areas
- larger presence in internal research networks, increasing influence and research opportunities
- economies of scale in teaching and administration
- improved efficiency of existing programmes
- improved content of existing programmes, increasing attractiveness to students
- possibility of new programmes
- more effective use of space
- higher quality and better recruitment through joint promotion of programmes
- more effective partnership than through other forms of collaboration because mutual commitment is stronger[5]
GGSL was thus very much a local initiative, and grounded in the joint vision of the two law school leaders. However the causal relationship between fusion strategies advocated in key HE reports of the time, namely the Dearing and Anderson Reports, and the creation of the GGSL should not be underestimated. It is clear that without this policy direction, and the implementation of the policy by SHEFC in funding Synergy, for instance, it would have been considerably harder for Glasgow and Strathclyde law schools to have set up the GGSL. High-level policy can be a powerful spur to institutional management and ground-level innovation. One might compare the remarkably swift adoption of ADR by Japanese law schools following recommendations made by the Japanese Diet under the new regulations of 2004 (in force in 2007) whereby, according to Saegusa and Dierkes (2005), institutional isomorphism was thus weakened, and the development of sustainable innovation was made more possible than would otherwise be the case. Legal jurisdictional cultures are very different, of course; but it is fair to say that enlightened policy that offers opportunities and seeks to engage with academic cultures and negotiate change with those cultures is more likely to succeed than the imposition of change by policymakers through more coercive means. The opportunity itself can serve to weaken institutional isomorphism; and this is what happened in the case of the GGSL.
From a personal perspective, when I learned of the initiative being set up, I just knew I had to be part of it. My first disciplines were the Arts (undergrad + doctoral), then Education, and only thereafter Law. Disciplinary isomorphism is what I’ve spent my life disassembling. The Synergy list above meant a genuinely fresh approach to professional education in the Diploma in Legal Practice and elsewhere, the chance to explore and lead in new directions in legal education, to put into practice the foundational approaches of John Dewey, Lawrence Stenhouse, Michael Eraut, Lucy Suchman, Paulo Freire and other educationalists who inspired and attracted me, as well as the opportunity to learn from other disciplines and professions, and built upon that in legal education.
The eleven years at the GGSL were incredibly fruitful, exhilarating. Alan Paterson had built strong links with the profession, including the appointment of four part-time visiting professors from the profession, a committee structure, an annual Tutors Dinner; and we used that to ensure strong professional links. I brought educational expertise into the mix, with appointments in legal education (eg Patricia McKellar, Karen Barton), became director of a Learning Tech Dev Unit, with Scott Walker, David Sams, Michael Hughes, Gavin Maxwell & others in the team.
Like all such ventures, it came to an end. The GFC, local politics, a sense of drift in the project of the joint grad school, changes in strategy among new senior management in Strathclyde U – all that and more pointed to its dissolution. I wasn’t prepared to manage the decline of all we’d achieved in that decade – so it was time to move on to fresh challenges. But what we did in digital education alone (simulation, multimedia, webcasting and much else) was sufficient to give early solutions to many of the issues that would arise in academic & professional legal education in the next few decades, not least the impact of the pandemic when it arrived. Did the two law schools realise the benefits of that? I doubt it; paradoxically universities are never that good at learning from their past educations, possibly because so little of it is conserved and curated. And yet the GGSL remains for me an outstanding example of merger: this is how a collaboration of law schools can achieve aims they could never dream of reaching alone.
3. Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLED)
The third merger, I played the role of a consultant. It was the creation of a course called PREP (Practice Readiness Education Program), the brainchild of a body of regulators from the Law Societies of the three prairie provinces in Canada, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, together with the Barristers’ Society of Nova Scotia, one of the maritime provinces. They came together under the aegis of CPLED. This was unique, not just in Canada but pretty much elsewhere: where else have four independent regulators come together of their own volition to design a new, joint pattern of professional legal education? At a conference in Toronto where I was presenting on the work I was doing at Osgoode I met one of the consultants already working on the project (on the formation of competences), Janet Pierce, who told me about the initiative. As I listened it was a GGSL moment all over – I knew I had to be part of it; and soon after I was one of the team.
The fundamental of the design I put together was already in my head at the start of the GGSL experience, and we adapted it to the Canadian scene. It was a substantial body of work, and one that I’ll write about in a later post.
These three merger experiences are interesting contrasts. The first was a conventional institutional merger (though none of these are ever quite the same) with a dominant partner (Glasgow Poly) leading the merger. Queen’s was folded into a new post-1992 university foundation, losing its identity and a lot more, but gaining also from being part of a larger, richer institution. Seen from the personal perspective of one employee, it enabled me to slip from one institution into a role better suited to me in the other, and enabled the then leader of the Caledonian Law dept, Moira Macmillan, to put me where she knew I could be of use as an educational designer.
The second was a smaller and much more temporary affair than the founding of a new HE institution, but more unique than an institutional merger, in that two law schools were merging their grad & professional schools. The nearest comparator was then the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice (between Oxford U and Oxford Brookes); but it was much more focused on conventional LPC-style education; and there was (as was typical of LPC culture) almost no research carried out on new design & innovations. The GGSL was unique in UK professional legal education in that it forged an open and collaborative culture of research and development in legal educational design – one where I and others had the space to envision legal education as a form of jurisprudential inquiry. Certainly, in Scotland there had been nothing like it in any law school in the modern period. The nearest we might come to it would be the enlightenment fusions of jurisprudence, education, philosophy and practiques. From a disciplinary point of view, in UK terms it was a pathfinder project.
CPLED’s innovative programme stemmed from a unique rapprochement that wasn’t a merger at all, but a combining of interests, motives and common concerns. Compared to the much larger and wealthier jurisdictions of BC and Ontario, the original four partners of CPLED were small in resources and numbers. It made sense to combine. Others have seen the sense in joining the success story of CPLED – the Law Society of Nunavut joined PREP, and this month CPLED announced that the Law Society of British Columbia was retiring its venerable Professional Legal Training Course (PLTC) and also joining CPLED in PREP.
There is a thread running through all three examples. Smallness can embody agility, innovation, more effective and dynamic education, but only insofar as resources stretch. Mergers, federations, collaborations can help innovation grow, make HE dynamic, when carefully planned and executed. In the process, new roles can be created, and new directions of education and research.
- [1]See eg https://wonkhe.com/blogs/outcomes-data-for-subcontracted-provision/↩
- [2]See Jim Dickinson’s article at https://wonkhe.com/blogs/how-higher-education-became-a-get-rich-quick-scheme/↩
- [3]Ibid↩
- [4]SHEFC is now the Scottish Funding Council, http://www.sfc.ac.uk/. Synergy successfully bid for a grant of approximately £1.4M over three years, which was received in January 2000 (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/synergy/shefcreports/, page now deprecated).↩
- [5]See the Synergy website, at http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/synergy/developasynergycollaboration/#d.en.53854 (page since deprecated). Local links were strengthened in a variety of ways – for instance Joe Thomson was appointed by Glasgow as the Unversity’s Representative on the General Convocation of Strathclyde University. The Synergy site is also frank about the difficulties in setting up joint partnerships – for example, the problems of integrating cultures, of enabling staff throughout one department to liaise fully with another, the infrastructural problems, and above all the problems of sustainability – many of which were encountered in the life of the GGSL↩