With negative stories appearing about universities appearing in the news on an almost daily basis, there’s a sense from some that universities are helpless to avoid the storm - and that all they can do is weather it. As this article has it, “the biggest probability for universities is they are part of the election campaign in a way they do not want,” - crystallising concerns from many in the HE sector that they will be used as punching bags in the ‘culture wars’.
It’s certainly true that there are some concerns about the sector that will not go away: whether that’s increasing concern over whether university is ‘worth it’, or the perennial focus on fees and interest rates. Industrial action, such as last year’s Marking and Assessment Boycott will also thrust universities to the front-pages - and rightly so, given the number of students negatively affected.
And universities are, at times, treated unfairly. Is it really national news if a student society at Oxbridge1 does something stupid? Yet it will often be reported as such. And sometimes universities do seem to be unfairly used as punching bags. If a Government announced an ambitious target to recruit more international students, created a new graduate route to make study in the UK more attractive and appointed an International Education Champion to promote UK study one might expect - just perhaps - that universities would be praised, rather than pilloried, when they hit that target almost a decade early2. So it’s fair enough that sometimes those working in universities feel a little bruised.
But when it comes to individual universities facing controversy3, too many adopt a fatalistic attitude that assumes there is nothing that universities can do.
To quote one respected individual on X:
Most campus controversies are caused by something individual staff or students have done, often within the law, but politically unpalatable. Institutions are powerless to prevent this but are then attacked.
Others who I speak to can sometimes appear to take the view that universities have almost arbitrarily drawn into cultural disputes; that right-wing politicians or newspapers just one day randomly decided to take pops at universities, perhaps for electoral reasons4.
Both of these perspectives omit the major role that university authorities themselves play in courting controversy. It was not individual staff and students, nor was it Conservative politicians and the Daily Mail, who caused almost every university to set up programmes to ‘decolonise their curriculum’, to associate with Stonewall or to rename halls of residence and lecture theatres. It was university authorities. It was similarly the relevant university authorities who chose to fight the court case against Jo Phoenix, or to dismiss Noah Carl.
Wait, but these are good things universities are doing!
Maybe they are. Certainly some people think so. Others might disagree.
To be clear, I am absolutely not arguing that universities should make ‘avoiding controversy’ their only, or even their primary aim. The first aim of any university should be its core purpose, which in my view is outstanding teaching and research. But even outside of those lofty principles, universities might still decide to accept controversy in certain circumstances.
They may believe that maintaining, or improving, relationships with their student body - or with their academic staff - is more than worth a bit of negative national media. That’s a completely legitimate view to take. They may accept some short-term criticism to implement a long-term strategy. Or they may genuinely believe that speaking out on an issue, or removing a statue, is the right and moral thing to do.
Those are all entirely reasonable positions. But to the extent that avoiding controversy is an objective - and it frequently is - it’s helpful that universities understand what they can do to avoid it: and if they do choose to court controversy, they do so with open eyes.
People believe what they want to believe - or what they fear is true.
It is very tempting to believe that universities are helpless to avoid controversy. It’s always nice for something to be someone else’s fault. And there is almost certainly a fear that perhaps they are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Perhaps more seductively, this perspective serves those who are champions of these programmes - ‘decolonisation’ and the like - by deflecting internal scrutiny of them. If universities are simply victims in the ‘culture wars’, then what can they do? But if, through their own policies, they are an active participant, then those programmes might face more pressure to justify their existence from governors, vice-chancellors and others. What are the reputational risks and costs of such policies?
But both sides are controversial…
This is sometimes true. In the case of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, this had achieved such national prominence that Oriel College would have been the centre of controversy regardless of its decision.
But this argument also has its limits. Firstly, sins of omission are far less likely to be reported on than sins of commission. In most cases - where they have not already achieved national prominence - renaming a hall is more newsworthy than not doing so. Similarly, as set out above, many of the more controversial campaigns are actively instigated by the university, and it is the university’s actions, not any prior campaign that come to national media attention.
A university also has a choice about how it responds. To take one specific example: the Open University could not have avoided controversy over the Jo Phoenix affair, but by choosing to fight the court case through to defeat it undoubtedly increased it. Why did it choose to do that? Who did it take advice from? Did it think it was on ‘the right side of history’? It has subsequently ‘apologised unreservedly’ to Professor Phoenix, saying ‘we have learned from the judgement’ and that it ‘will be initiating a major independent review of our internal working environment’, all of which suggests that it rightly recognises there were alternative options open to it, that would have allowed it to handle the situation better.
Most importantly though, are two more fundamental factors:
A university usually does not have to pick only one clear side. It can take actions which are cognisant and genuinely appreciative of both factions concerns, even if they lean more towards one or the other.
A university has a high ability to shape how many of these ‘difficult choices’ come forward.
We’ll discuss both of these below.
Can you really reduce your risk of controversy?
The answer to this is clearly yes. We see this in our everyday lives, in the actions of businesses and celebrities - and in universities.
We all know that someone who posts on social media about their family, holidays and what they ate for dinner last night is far less likely to get involved in flame wars than someone who posts their latest hot takes on trans or Israel/Gaza. A celebrity who speaks out on controversial societal matters will face more controversy than one who focuses on their films or music. These aren’t guaranteed to be true in all circumstances5 - but they usually are.
In the corporate world, any company can be drawn into controversy. But some are more prone to it than others. Those who choose to walk the fine line on regulations - whether on pollution, or treatment of workers, or tax - are more likely to be in the firing line. And those who, for marketing or other reasons, deliberately take political stances - whether that’s Ben and Jerry’s on the left, or Elon Musk on the right - must accept6 that they will be in the news more frequently.
And so also with universities. Oxbridge can never entirely stay out of the news7, but Cambridge was the centre of controversies under Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope far more frequently than under either his predecessor or successor. I can think of one Russell Group university that was involved in 3-4 national controversies in quick succession during an approximately six-month interregnum, and very few in the years since the current vice-chancellor took over. Leadership matters - and a university can choose how it charts the choppy waters.
How to reduce the threat surface of controversy?
There are obviously some basics here, same as for any organisation. Act ethically, treat your students and staff well, live by the spirit as well as the letter of the law. Doubling either the number of firsts or the salary of the vice-chancellor is unlikely to go down well.
It matters also who a university is taking advice from. Who is carrying out training, influencing HR policies and shaping corporate direction. In some cases, universities may have allowed external lobby groups to have undue influence over such matters - perhaps to the detriment of their own understanding of law, or the university’s own best interests. The Reindorf Review8 for the University of Essex found that some of the university’s HR policies were ‘founded on an erroneous understanding of the law’ and that ‘In my [Reindorf’s] view the policy states the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is.’
There is a place for activism. But if a university’s policies are shaped by activists; if the training of their legal officers and HR staff has been carried out by activists, then one’s ability to count on these staff to give the best possible, most legally accurate, advice will have been compromised - potentially in ways that may not only create national controversy, but cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. Is that spot on the diversity league table really worth it?
More broadly, universities simply don’t have to always pick a side. Take the thorny issue of the curriculum. Almost everyone would agree that curricula should be regularly reviewed to ensure that the most relevant and important materials are being studied. And many people are open to the idea that this might include more materials from a wider variety of places and authors than were the case fifty years ago: the rise of China, India, some African nations and many other countries around the world mean that there are plenty of non-’woke’ reasons to want to include a greater focus on these countries and regions - something which will only be effectively done if one studies material produced in these countries. It is really not impossible to build a broad consensus in this area.
So why do so many universities appear to not even be trying? If one goes to most university websites on ‘decolonising the curriculum’ they appear to have simply been handed over to activists to develop as they see fit, full of progressive jargon and tirades against ‘eurocentricism’, ‘colonial structures’, ‘privilege’ and other motifs from critical theory. One hopes that within the towers of the academy, this fervent rage is met by a cooler consideration of scholarship and academic relevance - though one fears that is not always the case.
Taking this approach would not guarantee success at avoiding controversy. I’m not saying it’s impossible that a tabloid would search through a revised curriculum and brew up a confected rage over a much-loved text that has been swapped out. But it would probably have more success than the current approach, which sometimes appears to have been designed by Millwall fans.
I don’t think most vice-chancellors, registrars and others deliberately set out to provoke. But do they sometimes hand over these areas to the people most passionate about them and forget that what is written on the website, or in university strategies, can have a much wider audience than internal students and staff? The people most passionate about a subject are not always those one wants running it - or, at least, not by themselves.
Breed ye not a nest of serpents
It is now well documented on the left how in-fighting and staff unrest massively disrupted the effectiveness of many progressive charitable organisations in the United States following the tragic death of George Floyd and the surge of the Black Lives Matter and the identitarian left. There was a disconnect between the - usually older - leaders of these organisations, who felt their primary goal was to promote abortion rights, or criminal justice reform, or whatever their organisation’s goal was, and younger staff who were focused on overturning hierarchies and demanding social justice within the organisation. Progressive author and journalist Ryan Grim extensively described this in a widely read article in 2022, ‘Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History’, where he said:
In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice…
That [a particular charity] has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.
In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.
He goes on to say:
Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.
“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about…
..“So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”
…
The environment has pushed expectations far beyond what workplaces previously offered to employees. “A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” said one executive director. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can’t say that, they would crucify me.”
…
The reckoning was in many ways long overdue, forcing organizations to deal with persistent problems of inclusion, equity, and poor management. “Progressive organizations are run like shit,” acknowledged one executive director, arguing that the movement puts emphasis on leadership — more often called “servant leadership” now — but not enough on basic management. “I have all the degrees, but I don’t have a management degree.”
In the long term, the organizations may become better versions of themselves while finally living the values they’ve long fought for. In the short term, the battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions at a critical moment in U.S. and world history. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” said one leader of a progressive organization. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.”
As Grim acknowledges, it is not that none of the complaints were valid. But the degree of infighting and activism resulted in serious damage to the ability of these organisations - dedicated to progressive goals - in being able to achieve their objectives.
It is not as if there was nothing else going on at the time. Biden had just won the Presidency - and the Democrats had control of both Congress and the Senate, giving these groups a major opportunity to achieve major, nation-wide progress on precisely the things that their staff activists claimed to care about, whether that was women’s rights, social justice or racial equity. And in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, upping the stakes for abortion rights across the United States. This was not a time for progressive charities to sit on the sidelines.
Why have you spent so long talking about factionalism in US charities?
Because there is much that UK universities can learn from what happened here - and how to avoid this failure mode.
Let’s take as read9 that most leaders and staff in universities are broadly progressive and are going to want their organisation to pursue some progressive goals in terms of how it operates: minimising the gender pay gap, for example, caring about representation or ensuring their curriculum is diverse.
We’re also going to take as read that universities, being full of academics, are naturally - and rightly going to be full of people who are widely read, committed, passionate about causes and won’t hesitate to speak up for them. That’s one of the strengths of academia - but like any strength, it can become a weakness.
Finally, within any large organisation - and universities are very large organisation - there are going to be different types of people. There will be many who are primarily committed to that organisation’s core purpose - for a university, that is teaching and research - but who want it to carry these out in a way that supports other goals. But there will be a smaller number of activists for whom those other causes - whether that’s racial justice, stopping sexual harassment or women’s equality comes first - it is what drives and motivates them, with the job they are nominally paid for being just a means to an end. And there is likely to be an even smaller number - I’l refer to them here as griefers - who actively dislike the organisation they work for, and who find their meaning in struggle or opposition to it10.
The griefers are a bane to any organisation. The middle group - the activists - can be channelled effectively to address genuine issues, but this must be done carefully, for ultimately their goals and the institutions may not align. Griefers may also piggy-back on genuine activist causes in a way that harms both the cause and the institution.
Too many universities have empowered activists and griefers in a way that means they have lost control of the agenda and sown the seed for future unproductive controversies.
To give a simple example: if you set up a ‘Slavery Reparations Task Force’ and stuff it full of activists, you can expect it to come back in a year’s time with a range of radical demands for reparations, renaming buildings, curriculum reform and removal of statues. Unless you know at the outset you’re going to be happy to accept these demands - and the odds are you’re not - you’re setting yourself up for a fall.
Of course, one can manage such approaches, typically by ensuring that the terms of reference are appropriate and that a balanced group of people, with a range of views, sit on the commission. Cats can be herded, with care and skill. But too often they have been let loose in a barn and told to go wild, a recipe for ending up like the Two Cats of Kilkenny.
And this has happened again and again across UK universities. Powerful new roles committed to activism (‘Equity Diversity and Inclusion’, ‘Social Purpose’) have been established - often at pro-vice-chancellor level and allowed to build empires11. In some cases it almost seems to have been a hope that this would cause the problem to go away, and let the rest of the leadership focus on their global league table position, or winning research grants. But of course it never quite works that way.
Committees in highly sensitive and political areas - racial justice, ‘decolonisation’, EDI - are established and staffed not by cool heads or a balanced range of views, but by the most passionate activists. ‘Staff network groups’ are given prominence, special access and patronage. Universities partner with activist schemes, such as the Race Equality Charter, Athena Swan or Stonewall’s Diversity Champion Schemes, perhaps unaware of the vast influence this gives the charities who run such schemes over every element of the university (the University of Oxford’s submission for the Race Equality Charter runs to a staggering 257 pages). This is literally handing over the keys of the kingdom.
I may be sounding harsh on activists here. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with being an activist. Much progress over the years has only come about because of activists. Activist voices will always exist in universities - and so they should. But if you are a leader of a publicly funded institution dedicated to teaching and research - and if you’d quite like a bit more public money than you’re currently getting - it may be advisable to think about how to channel and manage those voices, rather than allowing them to determine how your university is perceived.
I think people who care about progressive issues should be doubly concerned by the meltdowns. Not only do they consume resources and paralyze organizations directly, but to the extent that leaders avert paralysis by adopting generic across-the-board left politics, they will fail.
That means it’s important to offer a diagnosis that goes beyond the basic points of tactical management failures (though those exist) and the peculiar dynamics of Zoom and Twitter (though those are real) to understand the basic ideological vulnerability that created this problem.
I think that far too many institutional leaders have, with the encouragement of their funders, accepted unrealistic diversity goals (whether implicit or explicit) along with the premise that failing to meet those goals is prima facie evidence of a racist internal culture. When organizations stand presumptively guilty according to criteria that they and their donors have accepted, it makes them extremely vulnerable to wreckers and opportunists and makes effective management impossible.
The truth is that diversity and representation do matter, but progressive leaders need to be clearer and more rigorous about how and when they matter and what realistic goal-setting looks like.
In conclusion
Nothing in this piece should be taken to suggest that universities can make themselves immune from controversy. A university could act as carefully and ethically as possible and still find themselves in the news for as diverse reasons as a senior staff member acting unethically, a student deciding to streak at a major sporting event - or a ‘renaming’ campaign that blows up out of nowhere.
But universities are not helpless before the storm. Too many universities12 have spent the last few years systematically empowering the most radical and destructive members of their communities - and then wondering why the fires rage. Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
There is good evidence that the most successful organisations are those that are able to unite their members around a core purpose and a common goal. For organisations that wish to continue to command broad-based public support, this is even more important. Every controversy has a cost, not just on that institution, but on the higher education sector as a whole. The United States, as so often is the case, offers a salutory warning:
For UK universities, that core purpose must surely be upon the teaching of students, the pursuit of outstanding research and the engagement and support of their communities. The more that universities can remain focused upon this core purpose, the smaller their threat surface of controversy. Where they wish to pursue this purpose in a progressive manner, leaders should remain in control of the agenda, rather than handing it over to the loudest, most passionate and most radical voices, who may all too often see the interests of the institution as entirely secondary to their cause. And to the extent that universities decide that they do wish to court controversy - may they do so with their eyes open.
The press has a strange fascinating with Oxbridge.
For my own part, I believe the sharp - and unanticipated - spike in dependents, from under 10,000 to over 100,000 in just five years, was a reasonable thing for Government to be concerned about and want to address. But that other than this, international students are generally a Good Thing.
By ‘controversy’ I am referring to something that ends up in the national newspapers or broadcast, not simply local or sector press. ‘Major controversy’ is poorly defined, but I will use it to mean something that runs for multiple days, in multiple organs.
The truth is that matters such as tuition fees, not critical race theory, are far more likely to sway votes at the election: this is not Brexit; and far too few people care about the latter. The chief executive of UUK is quoted here as saying, “ministers must believe that attacking universities “is electorally popular. I think they are wrong about that.” She’s right about the last part - but wrong about the assumptions of why people do this: it’s usually because they are, rightly or wrongly, genuinely outraged.
If you’re a progressive and think this is ridiculous, and how could anyone care about these sort of matters, consider the recent week of news articles about the male-only membership of the Garrick club, an issue of similar triviality to the fate of the nation as a Russell Group university’s history curriculum. Do you think the people criticising the Garrick are just ‘doing it for votes’ - or do you think that they genuinely care about it? If it’s the latter, extend your empathy to assume the same is true for many of those who criticise cancel culture or the removal of statues.
I like to feel I’m relatively well informed about US politics, but sometimes I am left baffled. The obsession with ‘feral hogs’ a few years ago was one of those moments; more recently, the peculiar fringe-Republican anger at Taylor Swift for…something?…has left me similarly perplexed.
Or perhaps welcome.
See footnote 1.
All polling supports this.
At the time of the UCU strikes last year, a vice-chancellor of a large university told me that he thought he had about 100 staff for whom the struggle was everything; that they realised their purpose by being in an oppositional struggle to the university. For these, nothing would ever be satisfactory - and, for obvious reasons, they tended to be particularly active in the unions. Resolving the strikes meant reaching over their heads to address the majority’s concerns, and finda deal that was affordable for them and worked for the university.
A few years ago, a prominent gender critical feminist at an elite university told me that the vice-chancellor was committed to free speech, and would not condone what was happening, but that the PVC for Equality and Diversity (exact title blurred to prevent identification) were actively supporting the staff and students who were harassing them.
Of course, not all universities have done this. Some leaders have navigated the minefields with tact, sensitivity and skill.