A university lecturer discusses the importance of good decision-making and a holistic education
“I’m the head of an engineering department in a Russell Group university; I’ve been with the university for nearly 20 years. My job involves both teaching – from undergraduate to PhD – and research.
One issue which particularly worries me about the future of my sector is the question of what higher education is for, and how that chimes with what central government thinks about the sector. It’s an issue of what contribution universities can make to the development of our future leaders and decision-makers. What we can teach them is not about learning equations but about how to think; how to reach a conclusion when the data is incomplete; how to make responsible, evidence-based decisions that benefit society. Those skills are what we teach in a university. They are independent of the subject being taught, so you can learn them just as well in art history as in engineering – it is just that the material being used to help the student learn these thinking skills is different.
What worries me is that there seems to be a message which comes through, certainly from the political side of government, that you should only do ‘serious’ subjects. That somehow maths and chemistry are worthy; history and English are not. They seem to be prioritising vocational degrees and they are circumscribing the ability of the UK to play in the global market by doing that.
I do a lot of work in China, and one of the things that the Chinese look to the UK for is innovation and creativity that they can feed into their own projects. Part of the reason we have these skills is that our students don’t simply do the vocational subjects; the Chinese have plenty of people with vocational skills! Here, even people who do a straight engineering subject are being exposed to other people doing other subjects. That mixing of disciplinary thinking and disciplinary skills is such a valuable aspect of the higher education process; it would be a great pity to lose it.
These decision-making skills are going to be particularly important around infrastructure investments. We’re in a period of huge amounts of rapid change, which makes the future extremely difficult to predict. When we built infrastructure in the 1900s, it was a question of making sure it wouldn’t wear out, not one of whether it was the right kind and scale of infrastructure to meet future needs.
Now, it’s much harder to say what our future needs will be. So if infrastructure is not going to match demand in 100 years’ time, maybe we shouldn’t build it to last 100 years unaltered; maybe we need to build it to be much more adaptive so it can respond easily, cheaply and successfully to changes in need. That raises some really tough questions about the sort of infrastructure investment that we need to be thinking about now.
It’s not clear to me that we are really thinking in the right way about these things. It is an extremely difficult area, and one in which the strength of the civil service – giving neutral, evidence-based advice to political decision-makers – is phenomenally valuable
One way I think the public sector can improve the way it thinks about infrastructure is to take a much more holistic view of it. We can take High Speed 2 (HS2) as an example – though I see this all across the piece. Like it or not, the jury is still out on whether HS2 is good for society, and the answer depends on what society wants to prioritise. It might suit transport and city regeneration, but be terrible for energy and communications systems. It might provide an opportunity to construct other associated infrastructure – a north-south water distribution system, for example – but how do we evaluate the benefits of such a scheme? Somebody has to make the decision about that, and I’m not seeing much of that cross-sectoral objectivity, balancing different societal needs.
If I could say one thing to civil servants generally, it would be that I think they don’t make enough use of universities. Part of a university’s role as an institution in the public sector in the UK is to help the civil service, but we are not necessarily the civil servant’s first port of call for advice. Partly that is because universities are not particularly good at giving advice in the way civil servants need to receive it, so there needs to be movement on both sides if we are to make the best use of this valuable resource. I’m not really sure how to do so, but if we could find a better way of working together, it would be really productive.”