A NEW ROLE FOR UNIVERSITIES IN POST-BREXIT BRITAIN?

Maddalaine Ansell

The Brexit vote revealed a deep ambivalence about many aspects of British society. It is hard to disentangle the many threads of unease but they include frustration that the benefits of globalisation are unequally distributed, concern that economic goals too often trump societal wellbeing and a rejection of a world order in which decisions are made by organisations that are remote from the people they serve.

This last point is not new. The devolution agenda in the United Kingdom has been driven by the recognition that people in the different nations of Britain and regions of England believe that power is too concentrated in London. Real change, however, has been very slow. John Prescott's attempt to create regional assemblies in 2004 faltered because he could not get his colleagues in government to let go of enough power. It took the Scottish referendum on independence in 2014 – and the subsequent concern that the devolved nations were getting a better deal than the English regions – to shake loose Whitehall's grip. Brexit has provided a new burning platform. Many cities now have a metro mayor and a growth deal.

This presents an opportunity to address the big questions about how we want to live, work and share wealth.

Universities are well placed to contribute – more than 150 are distributed throughout the UK from the Highlands and Islands of northern Scotland to Falmouth in the English south-west. Many see themselves as 'anchor institutions'. They do not move out of a region when times are tough, but they are not parochial. They recruit most of their staff and students from their region and work mainly with the businesses and communities around them. But they also have the scale to act nationally and internationally and the balance sheet to hold funding for projects involving many partners. Importantly, they have the longevity to look beyond the political priorities of the day and take long-term strategic action.

Last year, University Alliance looked at the role of universities in their cities and regions through four different lenses: health, skills, innovation and opportunity. These reports can be found at www.

Universities are already recognised as significant contributors to the UK economy. Since Harold Wilson's 'white heat' speech at the 1963 Labour party conference, policymakers have recognised that Britain is a small island with limited natural resources but lots of people. It must create a place for itself in the world through building a knowledge economy. This must be driven by the creation and exploitation of knowledge and by skilled and innovative people. Universities are crucial to both.

This vision works when looked at through the lens of opportunity for individuals too. University can help people to find a desirable and fulfilling place in society. By becoming skilled, they have a higher value within the knowledge economy and can compete for jobs that might be interesting, well paid and socially valuable, or some combination of all three.

This telling of the story of the value of universities to the nation has been dominant for some years – but the Brexit vote suggests that it does not work for everyone. There are many people who see universities as part of the elite that benefits from globalisation, cut off from the concerns of those that do not. When Michael Gove said, "people in this country have had enough of experts", it was widely reported because it contained a kernel of truth. Many people do not believe that the nation's expertise is put at their service.

So universities need to create a new narrative in which their role in economic growth (important though this is) is balanced with improved social wellbeing.

The two will, of course, often be closely linked. General Electric Aviation has its global base for engine overhaul in south Wales supported by its partnership with the University of South Wales. The university agreed to integrate the industry standard aircraft maintenance qualification into its honours degree, enabling General Electric Aviation to recruit people with the qualifications it needs. This has created high-quality jobs in the region so that people can stay and bring up families with a good standard of living. There are many examples of universities being the key factor that keeps globally mobile business investment in the UK.

Universities also have the size and scale to work with small and medium-sized businesses, which may not have their own research and development or partnership teams. For example, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and the University of Derby, as part of the D2N2 LEP Growth Hub, are working with more than 2,000 businesses in the Derby and Nottingham areas to boost their innovation. Among other things, they are creating technical hubs in food and drink, materials engineering, computing and data and design innovation. This is underpinned by European Structural and Investment Funds – the universities have the expertise to deal with complex bidding processes and the balance sheet to hold large sums of money for the benefit of multiple partners.

Work is, of course, a core part of social wellbeing. Many of us spend most of our waking lives at work and so we want it to be fulfilling and to align with our values. We want to make a difference. This is a significant challenge but there are cases where universities have used their international connections to explore new ideas about how we work which can inform this discussion. For example, Preston has suffered from the decline of its traditional cotton industries. Cotton jobs have gone and no alternative anchor industry has taken their place. The University of Central Lancashire, working with Preston City Council, has looked overseas to find out how other cities have dealt with the same challenge. They became particularly interested in worker cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio in America's rust belt and in Mondragon in the Spanish Basque region. They are now thinking about how these models might work in the context of the English north-west.

The identity of a place is important. People want to be proud of where they live. They support their sports teams and boast about anything that makes them special. I used to have a friend from Colchester who would tell me every time I visited that their station platform was the longest in Britain (she was very disappointed to learn that this is disputed). Universities can play a key role in cementing and promoting this identity. The symbol of the city of Coventry, which was reborn from the ashes of the Blitz, is a phoenix.

The university was inspired by the city's pride in its history to set up a Centre for Peace, Trust and Social Relations. This draws on expertise from across the social sciences to tackle challenges such as re-establishing peaceful societies following conflict, tackling piracy and exploring positive social relations in communities suffering from economic depression. In so doing, it gives the city's experience new meaning.

The Brexit referendum result made it impossible to pretend that Britain is working for everyone. The problem is complex and resolution is likely to take time. Universities have the potential to make a tremendous contribution.

TOWARDS THE VERY MODEL OF A MODERN UNIVERSITY

Mike Thomas

The University of Central Lancashire is nearly 200 years old and can trace its roots and heritage back to its establishment as the Institution for the Diffusion of Knowledge which was first proposed in the Preston Chronicle newspaper on 23 August 1828 by local activist Joseph Livesey. In Preston the population had grown to three times its size in 30 years thanks to the huge growth of the cotton industry. Its population was only 12,000 in 1801 but had risen to 33,000 by 1831 and the need for an apprenticeship institute was clear.

Preston had always had an important social role to play in the north-west. In the 18th century it was the centre where many of the county legal cases were heard, a meeting place for the upper classes with large estates and much of the commercial elite had started to settle in the town as industrialisation grew in speed and size. That mixture of the landed gentry with the manufacturing class ensured that Preston retained a dominant place in the social, religious and cultural life of the region. One aspect of the rapid industrialisation in England and Scotland was the growth of the Mechanics Institute which had been established in the areas of most dense industrialisation. Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh all had Mechanics and Apprentice Libraries in place by the first third of the 19th century. These all attempted to provide free education for children alongside those usually provided for by religious organisations, plus education for those in work from the age of 12 onwards. Funding came from subscriptions from local middle-class, mainly, men. Livesey, a cheesemonger in Preston, had been working with Sunday school projects and newspaper rooms since around 1815 and eventually proposed the Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge in 1828. Pope and Phillips suggest that the exclusion of the word 'mechanics' was an attempt by Livesey and a local surgeon John Gilbertson, (who provided books and equipment), to broaden support from local gentlemen and to bring different elements of society together. Livesey issued a circular in the town and the first meeting, on 11 September 1828, was held above Mr Templeton's school at 11 Cannon Street where a provisional committee was formed and chaired by Gilbertson.

The inaugural meeting of the Preston Institute for the Diffusion of Knowledge was held on 7 October 1828 at the Corn Exchange. Twenty-four people were there (11 gentlemen and 13 operatives), and they formed the first council of the institution. Shortly afterwards on, 15 November, at its first open meeting, Thomas Addison was elected its first president, Robert Ashcroft as secretary and Livesey as the treasurer. Looking back in time it is interesting to see the ambition and scale of thinking of that first group. The president had suggested that the new London University that had recently been formed might be something that could be done in Preston, and later strong links were established. The initial annual subscription costs to be a member of the institute was between 10s and 6d and £1,1s a year (equivalent to 52p and £1 in modern currency) and members were allowed extra tickets for admission to lectures. The minimum subscription was 1s 71/2d (approximately 8p) a quarter or 6s,6d (32p) a year. One has to remember that male cotton workers in the factories earned under £1 a week, women much less and yet despite this between 1828 and 1829 the institute had between 600 and 800 subscribers, was open most afternoons and evenings Monday to Saturday and paid for a full-time librarian. By the end of the 1830s the institute had 3,000 volumes and by the turn of the 1870s over 11,000 and was reputed to be one of the best provincial libraries in England. People in Preston liked to read and the chance of a free library which also provided daily newspapers, taxed at the time and therefore out of the reach of those on low salaries, made it an extremely popular venue for the locals. In the 1870s when Preston opened its first free public library the membership and attendance of the institution's library virtually disappeared overnight as people flocked to the free access for books and newspapers. However, that first 40 years of subscription payments helped establish the institute and without the library and the reading facilities it is doubtful whether the institute would have survived. Certainly attendance at lectures and public events was generally much poorer and this may be related to the fact that it was only those who paid the higher subscriptions who could access tickets or that the price at the door was too high. By the 1840s lectures were mainly offered free and subjects included chemical sciences, electricity, human anatomy and physiology, and what would now been seen as plant biology, mechanics and astronomy. Teaching, however, was an extremely small aspect of the institute's work. It was not possible to get regular teachers at that time, but much more difficult was arranging time off for apprentices time off from the cotton mills and their subcontractors. In addition, reading, writing and mathematics were mainly provided by local church groups, many of which did not take kindly to the teaching aspirations of the institute. By the early 1850s much of the working classes and apprentices had actually developed their own teaching and reading groups and were instructing each other on how to read and write and also using the gatherings for the awareness of social issues and collective rights. The institute was therefore seen by many from the working classes of Preston as one that belonged to professional gentlemen and local commercial owners. This lack of working-class participation, despite being the obvious aims of many of the mechanics institutes, was not confined to Preston but was beginning to be widespread across England.

By the 1850s the Institute had moved into its Avenham Building in Preston but was beginning to face problems in membership and the delivery of education to the working classes. This can be seen by the fact that by the 1850s the population of Preston had grown to 80,000 but the membership of the institute remained as it had for the past 30 years, at approximately 600. In the late 1850s the committee took the radical decision to make classes free and this appeared to have some success. A teacher was brought in on a fixed salary of £20 a year in the early 1860s and separate classes for girls and young women were established in 1865. For the younger age group the institute provided reading, writing, dictation, arithmetic, grammar and composition, English and history, but attendance was still low. Despite the fact that by now a law had been passed (the 1847 Factory Act) to restrict the working day to 10 hours it was still difficult for workers to attend classes during the day and the institution decided to move to both day and evening classes. The institute was once again facing some difficulties in the area of teaching by the 1870s. No male teacher was available for the whole of 1872 and from 1874 there were no female classes available. One way of addressing this was for wider links and in the latter half of the 19th century the Institute began links with the School of Design in Manchester which then became the Preston School of Art. In the 1870s the institute also had links with the science school and, despite the mass recession in the cotton industry at the time, (due to the American Wars and the blockade in the Americas to prevent cotton reaching England), both the arts school and the science school began to achieve some success, though as the century began to draw to a close both were always under threat of closure. The art and the science schools' impact on the town should not be underestimated. It was seen by many as rivalling those in large cities such as Manchester and London and many national prizes were won through those years. Over 800 young people were submitted for science and art department examination by the mid 1870s and many of the teaching classes were once again offered in the evenings only. In the final year of its teaching, 1880 and 1881, 328 students were studying at the institute.

The need for income meant that the institute was constantly appealing to the town's Harris Trustees for money. It was expensive, sometimes for up to £25,000. In 1881 the Harris Institute allocated £40,000 for the promotion of arts, literature and the advancement of technical education in the town and had its ambition to rival Manchester's Owens College and Sheffield's Firth College, both of which went on to become the University of Manchester and Sheffield respectively. This new injection of funding plus the established work of the institute alongside the arts and science Schools gave some impetus. 520 students were enrolled into the first year and a staff of 12 was established. One evening course enrolled 101 students in science studying magnetism and electricity and in mathematics more than 50 students were enrolled. By 1883/1884 1300 students were in the Harris Institute in Preston. The Avenham Building was given £5,000 to upgrade its accommodation, particularly to ensure that there were larger classrooms. As the century came to a close over 2,000 students were enrolled and more students were passing technical subjects at honours level than did students from similar institutions in London, Birmingham, Glasgow or Edinburgh. In 1889 only the Birkbeck Institute, London and the Liverpool Institute had more students passing its exams in the whole of England and it was not just elementary arts or science subjects that were now being taught; brickwork, masonry and plumbing came in as the building trades advanced. Agriculture was also now being provided and the first classes in nursing were organised with the St John Ambulance Association with the institute having its own Ambulance Corps. As the century turned more than 4,000 individual students enrolled at the institute and more than 60 staff were on its books, many employed full time.