What are we good for (not only what are we good at)?

This is (roughly) the transcript of a talk I gave at the PraxisAuril KE Matters conference in December 2020, which was focusing on how KE professionals have responded to the challenge of COVID-19.

When we are thinking about what our universities are for, what comes into our minds most of all?  What words do we use in our university strategies and visions?  Teaching?  Educating students is a prime focus for almost all universities, not just because of the importance of the pipeline into research and employment but frankly because student fees are the thing that is keeping most universities in the UK afloat nowadays.  We’ve seen recently how universities are doing everything they can to keep their student numbers up, simply because it’s the only way we can survive.  So what about research?  Universities, especially those that are research-intensive like Bristol, would also say that conducting world-class research is a major part of our mission and our identity.  It too brings in money (if not necessarily enough to cover costs) and funding for research whether from industry, the charitable sector, or government funders is a significant contributor to a University’s success (and bottom line).  In recent years, we KE professionals might be pleased to have noticed words like research outcomes, impact, and benefits to the economy and society creeping into our universities’ strategies.  We all know how these have been helped by initiatives such as the REF and the KEF which specifically tie university reputation (and money) to success in getting research beyond the university.

But what about the notion of being a civic university? For those of you who may be uncertain as to what being civic might entail, you’re not alone – pretty much everyone I work with has their own definition and understanding of what it might be.  But essentially, a civic university is one that listens to and works collaboratively with people, communities, and organisations in its local area; that behaves responsibly, aligning its interests with those of society; and that co-creates new possibilities and futures for its locality.  Even more succinctly, it’s about how we matter to our locality.  Many universities would claim to be civic in some form or other.  Bristol was actually founded as a university for the city as this cartoon from 1909 demonstrates – the city puts money into the university and expects a return in some form.  Over 100 years later, the civic university concept is becoming increasingly popular, with the rise of Civic University Agreements and its associated network for aspiring civic universities.  But how serious are we in what we do, as opposed to what we might say, in our strategies?  Compared to the combined carrot and stick of the REF and the KEF, these initiatives are barely a sticker and it’s not surprising that we might be promising much but delivering little.  

And then came Covid.  And all at once, despite this being a completely global pandemic, what suddenly became vitally important was what was happening in your locality.  How were people, how were communities, how were local businesses and healthcare providers coping in this strange new world?  And we, as a university, overnight had to critically examine what role we were playing, and wanted to play, in helping our city survive and recover from this global disaster.  Of course, there are many ways in which universities are supporting the global effort, not least on the search for a vaccine and ways to better treat those suffering from Covid.  But for me, it was interesting to see the effort that my university put into the little things that made an impact locally: our chemistry department making thousands of litres of hand sanitiser for distribution to key workers, our final year medical students graduating early and going straight into the front line of the local NHS instead of placements abroad, turning over our car parks and accommodation to the city so that key workers had a safe way to get to work or a place to stay without putting loved ones at risk.  And this effort is also where our KE professionals came in, by taking a lead role in supporting our university’s local response.  

As soon as the first lockdown was declared the University set up a civic response group to collate and coordinate our working with the city.  This group, which was managed by us KE professionals, with members across the entire university, sat alongside the group coordinating our research response and both reported equally to senior management.  Together we managed to create a whole portfolio of activities to help us work with the city on the challenges it was facing.  This included shifting sources of funding that we had access to so that they could focus on our civic response.  My team has a small funding scheme for civic engagement, and we coordinated a call for proposals with a Covid response element.  Thanks to that we have funded projects including #Medicineonthewalls which uses street art to share healthcare messages (something that actually became a collaboration with groups in Kenya, leading to messages across Bristol and Nairobi).  Another project has brought together organisations and people who have lost loved ones due to Covid through an online festival to share experiences and practical knowledge on grieving during these times.  Yet another is working with our City Office to explore how we might use the UN’s sustainable development goals to work with stakeholders across the city on what recovery from Covid can look like and how to advance social inclusion and environmental sustainability.  Beyond this scheme, my team and other KE professionals have been instrumental in delivering a research project to map the needs of our partners in the city and how we might work collaboratively over the next few years.  This research will underpin our relationships going forward with a whole range of partners in the city.

My key message here is how instrumental KE professionals such as ourselves have been in ensuring that we as a university have supported the city in dealing with this crisis.  But why is that?  I’d like to think it’s down to the following factors:

• We have a broad knowledge and understanding of the research that is going on across the university, not just individual researchers but the wider landscape and how things link together;
• We are adept at translating research into real life outcomes, at looking up and seeing the bigger picture.  We can readily take a piece of research and think about what the impact might be in the world beyond academia, and how we might achieve this.
• Having worked with a wide range of external partners, we can understand the needs of our stakeholders, how these might fit with research priorities and how to bridge the gap between the two.
• Many of us have existing relationships with groups in our city, whether it’s major businesses and employers, or SMEs, or charitable organisations, or local community groups and networks.  Many of these relationships have taken years to build and establish trust so they are more likely to want to work with us than if we just swooped in from our ivory tower on the hill.
• Finally, facilitating and bringing people together is what we do – it’s a major skill set for us all.  At a time when we’re all thinking about what we can offer to society, this is where we can make a real difference.  So KE professionals, now and into the future are going to play a key role in how universities respond to this global crisis.

Having told such a positive story, I’m loath to end this on a downer, but I do want to sound a note of caution.  There is every risk that, if and when the pandemic starts to recede and the world turns towards a longer-term future, that universities lose this sense of collective responsibility and involvement in their locality.  This could be because the sector has been thrown into such turmoil that every university has to spend its effort keeping itself financially viable, so everything that doesn’t instantly contribute to that agenda falls by the wayside.  It might be because the metrics by which universities are judged still fail to capture this sometimes unquantifiable vision and so we all resort to the crude figures by which we currently judge ourselves and stake our reputations on.  But perhaps we have planted a seed.  At Bristol we are planning our new strategy and for the first time our civic mission is explicitly referenced; not just that, but it has its own strategic pillar which puts it equal to research and teaching.  The proof of our intent will only come when we actually deliver things but it’s a start.  Would this have happened if there hadn’t been a pandemic?  We will never know, but if there’s one thing we can all take away from this year, it’s that we should make the most of every piece of good that has come out of these terrible times.  And, as KE professionals, we can be part of this drive for change and to help our universities think what are we good for.