Stuart Reeves on 'what are universities for' and management complexities (Part 1)

Changing Academic Life

Dr. Stuart Reeves is an Associate Professor in the Mixed Reality Lab in the School of Computer Science and Horizon Research Institute both at Nottingham University in the UK. This conversation is in two parts. In Part 1 here, he reflects on the conflict in defining one’s own research brand vs the importance of the collective and collegiality in academia, and the structural issues that contribute to this. He raises the question of ‘what are universities for’ and highlights the complexities of university management and the structures around this. In Part 2 we will go on to discuss his response to these challenges by becoming actively involved in governance at his university.

‘The idea of creating one's own research brands…collegiality creates a bit of friction with that. And it's a big kind of mess of things which we're all caught up in …there's a big struggle between defining yourself as part of a group, but also defining yourself as an individual’

‘I struggle with that kind of Big [research] Vision element’

‘Describing what universities are for socially, culturally, and their value beyond … just producing valuable economic units, economic actors, ie graduate students’

‘This is a crisis that's been emerging…it's been visible for years ever since the fees are introduced, you could argue, if you extrapolate,…it was going to happen, at some point, it became more and more significant’

Overview (times approximate):

2:25 My preamble to Part 1

3:01 Stuart introduces himself

5:17 His reasoning coming back to Nottingham where he did his PhD

6:41 The conflict in defining own research brand vs the importance of the collective and collegiality

9:46 The structures that help reinforce those tensions e.g., how funding is allocated, how universities value certain aspects

11:45 Different research styles that don’t work so well with massive grants – a skill to be able to talk about individual pieces of research as part of some grand vision

15:05 About rankings and how governments engage with universities – they can’t articulate what universities are for – and managerialist ways

18:55 Balancing this with accountability against the public purse and critiques ways of valuing degrees

21:42 What Stuart would argue universities are for – value on different dimensions and impact of degrees on society

24:50 The pressure on student numbers, and capped student fees – ‘this is a crisis that has been visible for years’ – the funding pressures for universities and the disparity between institutions and how much they rely on fees

31:32 The day to day impact of all this depends on where you are and internal balancing of finances; also impacts in casualization of workforce; and the management decisions of universities

35:32 The backgrounds of university management and management tracks for academics that can lead them to be detached from academic staff

38:39 My final comments.

39:58 End

Download a full transcript of the conversation here.

Related Links

Stuart Reeves web page & Stuart’s Medium page

Steve Benford & MRL

Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute

UKRI Digital Economy Programme

EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy