Powell, J. and Dayson, K.[1] (publication due 2012) Engagement and the idea of the Civic University in University Engagement with Socially Excluded Communities: towards the idea of ‘the Engaged University’ ed by Benneworth, P. London: Springer

 

Abstract

Civic universities, at least in the United Kingdom, were originally instituted as Higher Education colleges to serve a particular city or city region. This chapter discusses how such universities have achieved the community engagement and empowerment they sought to engender. It firstly argues that most modern universities are grounded in at least some notions of public service or societal contribution; this may take different forms, but at the very least it implies public lectures of general value to local business and the community.  Some more progressive civic universities, like Salford, have gone for higher levels of engagement, to the degree of developing enterprising co-creations between academics and their external partners, through partnerships that lead to real implementations of real impact. Understanding how such external engagements actually work, and be made to work more effectively, requires understanding what kinds of drivers play to the ‘institutional grain’ of the university; contextual issues are key in this respect as is recognizing that some universities are globally oriented, while others are more locally focused. The chapter starts by exploring the notion of a civic university, its origins and how it could become more progressive for the benefit of society. It then turns to present one best practice example of a highly engaged and locally-oriented higher education institutes in the United Kingdom, the University of Salford, and how it has developed over the last decade in its attempt to become a leader of its kind - entrepreneurially engaged.  To put this in the right context, the Chapter traces the long-term routes of Salford’s engagement from its own inception, its particular brand of civic heritage, the different environments in which it found itself over the years and particularly highlights how activities have subsequently emerged that ‘fit’ within its existing profile; this has helped drive the university forward, to reinvent and reposition its institutional mission, making it ‘fit for purpose’ in the global knowledge economy. Its engagement profile, developed through what is now known a ‘third strand activity’, now stand equally alongside teaching & learning, and research. Known as Academic Enterprise[2], this new major thrust of its academic work emerged into a fully integrated overarching mission and vision, where Salford now sees itself as ‘enterprising university’, fully engaged with its locality, and helping transform the lives of its citizens, communities, industry, business and the civil and voluntary services. Its developing strategy enables its external partners, and itself, to grow and flourish in sustainable and mutually beneficial ways. An example of good practice is highlighted to bring the theory alive and to show practical deliverables for real impact. The chapter also explores general lessons learned from this successful attempt at university change and, in particular, the way senior managers, academics, and other staff, have learned to interact within a single institution, developing powerful and lasting relationships with strategic external stakeholders through a portfolio of Academic Enterprise projects. These projects have institutional significance, as well as improving the University’s status in the local community. Good senior leadership, governance and management have been shown to be critical, in this respect. The chapter finishes by pointing the way forward for those universities who wish closer and more creative collaborations with their local cities and city-regions.

 

Current Context for Progressive Civic Universities

In an increasingly challenging environment, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) across the world find themselves under threat from increased global competition for students, while governments expect more intense excellence in research resulting improved national economic growth. Yet, at the same time funding models are being transformed and politicians seek to reduce the sector’s reliance on public funding. Meanwhile universities are under pressure to collaborate with industry and become more enterprising. Consequently universities are formulating new ways to address ‘real world’ issues with academic staff adjusting to an environment where knowledge is diffused across many actors and groups, in which innovation through co-creation with strategic partners is perceived as an essential element of university activity.

Developing academic enterprise beyond means currently employed has become a real endeavour for a group of progressive civic universities, of which Salford is part. Such ‘academic enterprises’ can maintain the enthusiasm of academics through thoughtful team design and support that reflects the requirements of both the individual academics and the teams around them. Thus HEI  activity can now look very different from what it once did; it remains rich in values, yet relevant to end users, adding real value to society and providing major contributions to a university’s strategic partners. Today, such enterprising developments can be heightened, both positively and negatively, through the global outreach afforded by the informational society (Castells 1996).

In exploring the notion of an enterprising university it is necessary to place it within a philosophical and historical context. Essentially there is a dialectical between those who argue higher learning is an end in of itself, a selfish activity to develop one’s own knowledge. This is often connected with pure research and is associated with Lao-Tzu, Aristotle and Newman. By contrast Confucius and Plato argue that learning is about integration of the individual within society, and by extension is linked to applied research. The centrality of research to a university’s identity was originally theorised by Jasper’s (1965) and it’s not until Kerr (1973) that the view that a university should be useful to society is forwarded, though even he accepted that a modern university had multiple purposes, what he described as the multiversity, could be become over-loaded with meaning. Therefore, the concept that a university should face outwards and engage, rather than focus on training the individual to be a better citizen or for assimilation into society, is under-theorised and thus has not developed a clear discourse that has attracted a sufficient number of supporters. Consequently, the dialectic of liberal v vocational, individual v socio-economic or elite v mass have continued dominated any conversation about the future of higher education. Given this how do creatively engaged universities emerge and develop this further and can academics being persuaded that this is a beneficial activity? (Allen 1988)

 

The Origin of ‘Civic’ Universities  

The advent of the civic university paralleled the industrialisation of the nineteenth century. While the medieval universities were predominantly based in agrarian locations and concentrated on theology matters, the civics were built in the emerging manufacturing cities and initially explored science and technology. Both types of institution reflected and served the prevailing social and economic powers of their respective days; and to this extent can be described as ‘enterprising’.

The original civics were Manchester Victoria, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool. These were followed Bristol, Newcastle, Nottingham, Southampton and Reading in the early twentieth century. Although different in many ways the civic universities had two shared characteristics: they had their origins in pre-existing vocationally based educational establishments; and they were symbols of civic pride, most obviously at Birmingham where Joe Chamberlain was constructing municipal politics. The move to university status was a stamp of regional authority and, in Chamberlain’s case, autonomy from existing award granting institutions. But this project went beyond powerful political actors to include entire local elites in financially supporting and promoting their universities. This embeddedness in their locality was part of their ontology and although there was some attempt to ape elements of Oxford and Cambridge this was not an exercise in duplication. Neither was the state involved in their formation; indeed, the primary focus was to support the local economy and society through research, training and the pursuit of excellence. In effect the civics wanted to take the finest parts of Oxbridge but replace hidebound tradition with a commitment to economic and social progress. The civics were modern universities and institutions of modernity (Holmes 2001).

But this noble sentiment contained an unresolved, and possibly unresolvable, dialectic. Being products of the Enlightenment the civics had commitment to science, knowledge and truth, but these things were not dependent on place but universal. This universality contributed to stretching the connections between the universities and their place until they sometimes appeared as aliens in their own community. This is not to say that civic pride diminished rather mutuality of the institutions formative period was superseded by a sense of admiring the prosperity of a favoured child. In this environment the notion of an embedded university identifiable through its activity with a physically located place was replaced in popular imagination as a location for tensions between ‘town and gown’, something Oxford and Cambridge had long experienced.

Compounding this process was the relatively small pool of academics, most of which were increasingly drawn from Oxbridge or the other civics. This professionalization increased conformity about the role of the academic and the concept of the disinterested observer, beloved of Enlightenment culture, become the dominant identity. In such unpropitious environment it was unsurprising that academics, and by extension universities, left aside the everyday concerns of their city unless they contributed to universal knowledge. Thus there was no English equivalent of Chicago’s University’s urban sociology research.

Today the civics are seen as the ‘benchmark’ of the higher education system, with an emphasis on maintaining standards. As the sector has fragmented following the conversion of the former polytechnics to universities after 1992 the maintenance of universal quality is harder to sustain. Moreover, funding cuts in the late 1980s onwards have forced the civics to alter their management styles and re-discover their connections with their cities. At one level this has been about being a large employer, sometimes the largest after the local authority, and their contribution to the local economy through students’ expenditure. To achieve this universities have realised that a prosperous and attractive city helps student recruitment and thus a virtuous circle of university-civic relations emerged with students being the catalyst. 

The university as the local economic driver fits within the narrative of the knowledge economy that most of the large urban cities in England saw as their exit from a declining manufacturing heritage. In this way the university emerge as the mills of the twenty-first century, exporting their product (knowledge) globally but reinvesting locally. Unlike transnational corporations a city’s political leaders can be confident that the university, bearing the city’s name, will not relocate to a place with cheaper labour; although the concept of the hollowed out university with support functions outsourced internationally may begin to appear. In England the civics with their roots in municipality are the embodiment of this place bound ‘stickiness’ and their very existence serves to heighten the image of the city in which they are located.

Complementing the civics were the ‘plate glass universities’ of the 1960s (East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Lancaster, Warwick and York, later joined by 13 others including Salford). In contrast to the civics these were driven by national policy although they soon adopted their own identity. From the beginning there was an acknowledgment that they would be detached from their location. Indeed, their precise locations were a matter of debate (Rich 2001). This detachment from the community along with a greater concentration on liberal arts and the disinterested academic culture meant the ‘plate glass’ institutions were in many respects less local than the civics. However, these incipient institutions resisted this impulse and some of them ensured they had engineering and physical science departments (though some of these were later closed), as well as serving their regional economy and industry. This view was questioned by the Polytechnics saw themselves as the ‘modern’ institutions with their longstanding engagement with industry, the local political state and their immediate neighbourhood (Gledhill 2001). Thus the commitment to applied research and broadening the access to higher education was not a pragmatic response but part of their philosophy and identity (Pratt 1997).

Identity also connects with the other main strand of criticism, that of ideology and the purpose of a university (Maskell & Robinson 2001,Barnett 2003) The essence of Barnett’s argument is that there is a need to syncretise the various ideologies present in universities within a ‘super complex university’. Entrepreneurialism is but one ideology but, according to Barnett, it is pernicious and needs to be controlled and restricted. Using a hypothetical entrepreneurial university Barnett details the dangers associated with placing enterprise at the core of an institutions mission. The requirement to serve the market, and by extension the needs of the client, gradually undermine the capacity of a university to undertake critical discourse and replace it with ‘non-dialogical’ communication. Ultimately, this alters the epistemology by changing its purpose towards Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001), which creates a recursive quality. In such a case the pursuit of truth is given a ‘pragmatic tinge’ and academic identities are, at least partially, constructed by the market and the entrepreneurial university ultimately dissolves ‘into the wider world, with its activities, identities and values indistinguishable from the wider world’ (p70). The university ‘surrenders its integrity’ (p71) and follows the call of others. For Barnett the entrepreneurial university it transformed by and becomes part of the market. Whatever is left after the process begins it cannot be described as a university.

Ironically given all this Barnett feels entrepreneurialism can be beneficial because it challenges the status quo within universities and forces academics to communicate beyond academe. How a university can take this poison without suffering the consequences detailed by Barnett he seems reluctant to explain beyond saying that it can be contained within a super-complex university.

There is little doubt that an entrepreneurial university is an ideological construct, that challenges existing practices within the sector, but strains of this type of activity have been present since the formation of the civic universities. It is also apparent that Newmanesque intellectually pure universities have a more ambiguous history than some of its champions are willing to accede, while Barnett recognises that entrepreneurship is already embraced in many of the physical sciences. Implicitly, Barnett, along with Maskell and Robinson, present the concept of an entrepreneurial university with two challenges:

• can an independent and critically discursive space be maintained while working with and for market actors?
• can entrepreneurship be managed, is it too powerful an ideology to contain?

It is these questions that the University of Salford has wrestled with as works within a context where the state has not always been a consistent partner, and the institution’s history and culture is suffused with engagement with industry.

Salford as an Example of Progressive Civic University Practice

Salford’s early heritage

The University of Salford’s heritage goes back to the high point of Industrial Revolution in the Victorian era and the government of the day introduction of grants for the teaching of science. Pendleton Mechanics Institute, a mutual improvement society, founded in 1850 and Salford Working Men's College, founded in 1858, originated to help transform the local industrial world and in particular educating young artisans, and others, in the scientific and artistic branches of their trades (Gordon, 1975). As noted above this differed from the existing universities and the new institutions in Pendleton and Salford began the process towards a engaged university within the city serving common good, both in terms of industry and for the citizens.

By 1896 these two originating colleges merged into a single entity, known as the Salford Technical Institute. This combined their deep manufacturing knowledge, enabling a sound and thorough engagement with Britain’s leading industrial manufacturing base in the North West. The zeal for good technical capabilities was such that industrialists, like Sir William Mather, set up a committee for the new Institution to provide ‘special knowledge and advice’ from its industrial partners. This recognition of the necessity for close links between industry and technical institutions may now seem obvious to us all; as Gordon (1975) points out ‘that it was a far-sighted decision… that even as late as 1956, out of 195 such Technical Institutions, 131 still had no advisory Industrial Committee’. This close and continuing engagement between Salford Technical Education and its industrial/business community undoubtedly contributed to an extraordinary local and regional transformation, helping Salford become internationally renowned with respect to its engineering, science, technologies and its skilled workforce. In 1921, this resulted in the institute receiving Royal Letters  and became known as ‘Royal Technical Institute, Salford’ and was ready:

to provide for the County Borough of Salford systematic instruction in those branches of knowledge which have a direct bearing upon the leading industries of the district’. RTI (1896)

The insistence on practical work and workshop practice, which continues today in the present university, was notable. Also relevant was the fact that some 83% of all students came from within the Salford borough.

The Royal Technical College, Salford, went further, receiving College of Advanced Technology status, in 1960, and then full university status, in 1967. While its academic status increased, the University of Salford never lost its roots in the local community and its deep working practices with local business and industry. As Salford University’s first chancellor, HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, often recalled, “Salford is a university with ‘its feet firmly on the ground’, willing to help local people do better for themselves, in ‘work, rest and play’”.

Nevertheless, despite contributing to the science and engaging developments during the 1970s, in 1981 the university’s future was threatened by extensive (43%) cuts in State funding. Mrs. Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the day, had seemingly begun to question the role of engaged universities like Salford; highlighting the precarious intellectual support. Salford survived then through considerable entrepreneurial spirit, which enhanced its engagement in its local community and especially with local business/industry. Professor John Ashworth, its new Vice Chancellor at this crisis time, lead Salford academics towards financial viability by reaching out further into local business and the community with caring, relevance, and commercial astuteness; words and phrases like ‘capability’, ‘relevance’ and ‘coincidence of purpose with industry’ characterized the developing university of the time and provided it with a rich ‘vision to the wider market, which then beckoned’ (Brandon, 2001). Furthermore Ashworth drove its ‘real world’ research and development with a clear focus towards the society it sought to serve.

Ashworth’s vision was to break down the traditional barriers between academe, and business and the community, engage all partners in a two way flow of knowledge and ‘know how’, and get them collaborating through trans-disciplinary working. Not only was Salford to be a progressive civic university, focused towards its city-region, it was also to be friendly, approachable and able to solve real world problems in a cost effective way. It strove to develop the best facilities, knowledge and skills, for the real world, especially locally ensuring sustainable and effective implementation.

 

CAMPUS – An Example of Building Engagement Relationships

The CAMpaign to Promote the University of Salford (CAMPUS) was formed by its many community, industrial and business friends in 1981, when they recognized the University’s need for particular support at a time of crisis. Some 200 firms of all sizes, and public sector organizations of different kinds, set up CAMPUS as the first business club of its kind in higher education to tell the government how important Salford university was to local business and local communities. Each firm paid a subscription ‑ in return for which they could draw upon seminars, technical support, social events, advice and updating on issues, or work with specialists in the university to best help with problems, research and training. Some of this work, for example training, was customised to meet the needs of a particular company. CAMPUS was borne, not only to help save the university, but also to help its own members grow and prosper. Records at the time indicate CAMPUS members felt it was one of the few friendly and capable, ‘real world’ universities able to use its academic skills to creatively engage with these businesses and industries to help them survive and flourish.

Undoubtedly one major benefit of CAMPUS membership derived from the opportunities it provides for companies to network informally with professors and decision‑makers; provide student placements and benefit from graduate recruitment; and the ability to influence local developments. It operated largely in a responsive, rather that proactive, mode and was not there to sell the business services of the university, but to build long‑term relationships between CAMPUS members and the university. Such an organisation creates strong social relationships that build bonds and lead to more worthy ‘real world’ explorations by any university and furthermore new opportunities for development beyond the obvious.

Salford also developed its own company, known as Salford University Business Services Ltd (SUBS), which engaged academics from Salford, and elsewhere, on business planning and problem solving. By the end of the 1980s its turnover had reached around £10 million per annum; the university had also developed one of Britain’s first business parks and a venture capital company. For about a decade this company was again ahead of its time, producing extra income for the university and the staff involved, making these academics ‘street-wise’ and ‘business aware’ so they could add practical value to university teaching and research.

 

Another Engagement Challenge

Yet another recession in the 1990s, together with further changes in government research funding policy caused the university to rethink its overall strategy. This involved an overhaul of its research structure to encourage greater cross-disciplinary work, more coordinated and central leadership, and the creation of a graduate school. As a result, Salford’s high level ‘applications-relevant’ research sustained its Research Council grant income, while achieving complementary funding from other public and private sources, enabling it to remain at the leading edge and maintaining its role as an agent of innovative implementation.

 

Contemporary History of the Institution

In 1996 the University of Salford merged with another HE college to produce a much larger and more broadly based Higher Education Institution. This gave it critical mass in terms of student and staff numbers, and broadened its range of disciplines. This important merger was essential in helping the university through a difficult period when the commercial arm started to lose money. In an attempt to maintain SUBS resources were diverted from research activity causing some dissonance in academics view of enterprise activities. One of the present authors (Powell) was charged with leading an innovative and radically different, integration of the relevant ‘high academic values, skills, knowledge and know-how’ of its staff, with a ‘new dynamic enterprising and entrepreneurship partnerships with business and the community’. In Professor Richard Duggan’s terms, the university was striving to ‘look where everyone else was looking, see what not one else could see’ and more particularly, “do what no one else was doing’ in ways which rewarded itself and its partners. This thrust was to become a third major strand of all university activities, standing alongside teaching & learning and research, developing activities in ways not generally seen elsewhere; it was initiated long before the Higher Education Funding Council of England proposed its own Third Mission. Academic Enterprise (Æ), the name given to this strand, was born in 1998 recognising the need for the sort of cultural change that is now being reinforced by government’s demands for universities across the UK in an effort to create real impact for society. Salford’s desire was for its academics to enhance their enterprising skill and entrepreneurship, which would thus become respected activities in their own right. In ‘The Noble Art of Academic Enterprise’ Powell outlined the strategy (Powell, 1999).

In order to bring about the necessary change processes of embedding Æ into the university it was first necessary to develop an internal vision that could be shared by everybody in the institution. This was simply to ‘develop academic opportunities beyond means currently employed, to high academic values, but of relevance to local business and the community’. Again, the University of Salford was returning to its roots, but now with a 21^st Century awareness and aspiration, where studies relating to business and the community were seen to be worthy of reasoned and powerful academic endeavour.  This vision was represented by a logo showing the strong linkage between the words ‘Academic’ and ‘Enterprise’ – the basis for all its future activities in this strand - indicating an inseparable dipole for this new mode of university working. The team also wanted colleagues to undertake bold new academic pursuits reflecting their clear academic values, knowledge and capabilities. The Greek ligature Æ was chosen as a short and simple means of naturally representing this strong bond, with key words around the logo showing what was needed to bind Æ together.

 

 

Academic Enterprise became the University of Salford’s unique attempt to form meaningful, wealth creating and socially inclusive partnerships with industry, business, the civil and voluntary services and the community at large. The hallmark of the Æ approach lay in opening up the formidable skills and imagination of its staff, developed through rigorous evaluation, on the basis of the highest academic values, to form reasoned specifications for actions in the real world. Academic Enterprise recognised the need to ‘tap into’ the daring of its creative enterprise partnerships to stage-manage novel, yet robust, ideas, innovations, approaches and technologies into actual improvements for all our nation, and beyond. The remainder of this paper reviews the success of Æ and the challenges faced when embedding it into a conventional university setting.

 

Measuring and Driving Success in Æ

The strategy, developed in the light of a further changing environment, focused in particular on its development of Academic Enterprise (Æ) as a means of promoting, not only better work with industry and commerce, but also with other stakeholders, such as those in civil and voluntary organizations, in the community at large, and, not least, those within the university itself – a truly progress civic university deeply engaged with its city region. The development of Academic Enterprise was not to be at the expense of its other activities – teaching & learning and research – so a key driver for this new activity was income growth, in the development of innovative projects that enabled socially inclusive wealth creation for its partners, and itself.

The institution therefore sought, through Æ, new sources of funding to add to its traditional public resourcing; this in turn would enable the university to initiate novel projects, as pilots of a change process, while appropriately redistributing scarce existing resources to developments more relevant for an ‘enterprising university’.  Given the inheritance of failing conventional enterprise company Æ recognised the need to integrate its activities into its normal practices in engaging with business and the community. The effectiveness of transforming the activity and performance are detailed in Tables 1 and 2 representing income/contribution and the extent of engagement:

 

Table 1: Contribution and Income of Æ over the last decade 

Year	1998-99	99-2000	2000-01	2001-02	2002-03	2003-04	2004-05	2005-06	2006-07	2007–08	Total
Contribution (million £)	Reinvestment			1	2	1.4	1.3	1.2	6	2	14
Income (nearest million £)	3	5	6	9	16	18	17	17	21	17	129

  

Table 2: Other Interesting Æ Metrics showing the breadth of its reach out (2007/8)

Number of Major New Academically Enterprising Projects	100
Number of New Spin Out/Start-up Companies/Graduate Star-ups Initiated and Supported	200
Number of Students supported for Enterprise type projects/programmes: Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Local People supported Enterprise Learning Modules	32 250 over 4,000
Patents Disclosed	31
Business & Software Licenses Granted	30
CPD Course Value for SMEs	£100,000
CPD Course Value for other Commercial	£137,000
CPD Course Value for Non Commercial	£545,000
CPD Course Value for Individuals	£474,000
New E-Learning Developments (Courses)	50
Value of Enterprise led Research Activities	£3.626 million
Contract Research	£1.511 million
SMEs Advised	893
Other Businesses Advised	1,283
ERDF Income	£906,000
ESF Income	£427,000
UK Regeneration Funds	£151,000
RDA Programmes	£739,000
Other Regeneration Grants	£208,000
Public Lectures	1,482 Attendees
Exhibitions	46,600 Attendees
Chargeable Performance Arts	5,294 Attendees
Knowledge Transfer Partnership	38

 

In a latter main section of this chapter the major lessons learned from achieving this success are spelled out in some detail and while the statistical evidence demonstrates the extent of Æ activity the case study below will give a better qualitative understanding of Æs activity, thereby helping the readers anticipate possible futures for an enterprising university.

 

Case Study: Building a New Triple Helix

Etkowitz and Leydsdorff (1997) describe the evolution of universities beyond bilateral relations with the state and industry towards a series of interlocking tripartite intersections. Their fear is that the university is marketised through this process and transformed into economic actors. Although we recognise the risks associated with such a course of action, if universities are to fulfil Delanty’s (2001) vision of a communicative actor with a key role in the public sphere, they must interact and blur the lines with other partners. Possibly, one way to moderate the pressure of the market is to engage with a boarder set of partners and work at the edges of technological and cultural citizenship. Such an approach is by definition complex and requires a willingness by all those involved to work outside their hermeneutic and institutional discourses. At Salford an example of this is the on-going work between a not-for-profit loan company, a mathematician and a sociologist.

In 1999 the authors co-wrote, with another colleague, a policy paper recommending a new type of non-profit company to address the problem of affordable credit. It was argued that such a service was required because the only providers of small loans (less that £1,000) in deprived communities were firms charging interest rates in excess of 200 per cent. In partnership with banks, government departments, local authorities and community activists Dayson helped establish 12 of these type of organisations throughout England. Almost decade on the most successful of these loan companies, East Lancs Moneyline (elm), asked the university if it could create a risk assessment process to inform the decisions made about loan applicants. Conventionally, this would have involved either purchasing a standard loan application assessment software or entering into a contract to design a specified system. However, elm wanted a system that allowed for individual discretion by the loan officer and was transparent and fair for the client. They were not interested increasing profit, rather protecting potential clients from over-indebtedness. This notion of ‘preventative credit’ was unusual in a sector where the emphasis is on a combination of improving efficiency and reducing risk to the lender. Consequently, we have a proliferation of automated internet loan application processes that are unable to counsel clients, support those that get declined, or introduce any transparency. As a result citizens, especially those with limited educational attainment, are alienated from the financial services industry that seems remote and depersonalised. By contrast elm were explicit in seeking a system that could be integrated into their face-to-face client interaction and would help guide both the loan officer and the potential client towards the most appropriate financial decision. Clearly, this both a social and technological problem and therefore elm wanted to work with sociologists as well as computer mathematicians.

A coalition of academics from different disciplines is not unusually but, working with the AE team within the university, they sought funding under the government’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) in which a post-doctoral researcher would be placed within elm for two years. It was soon apparent that it was unusual for mathematicians and sociologists to work together, as no previous application had such a combination. As a result there were numerous questions about how the academics would co-operate and whether the sociologist actually had a role. If this caused some disquiet within the state funder the suggestion that the non-university partner was a NGO was greeted with astonishment. While the rules permitted applicants from the voluntary and charitable sector no one had actually tried. Moreover, the rules demanded that the partner had a profitable business, thus effectively excluding those that operate on a not-for-profit basis. After an intervention by the University highlighting this contradiction and demonstrating that ‘non-profit’ was different from ‘no profit’ the funder relented.

What this example highlights is how the university was involved in creating a different type of triple helix, and sometimes a quadruple helix, can lead to social benefit and not necessarily the marketisation of the university. Of course having a nexus with NGOs does shift the discourse away from purely capitalist concerns and allows for other voices and claims to be heard. But it was also about social embedding of technology and using cultural knowledge, of the sociologist and elm, to ensure the technology’s design was compatible with the users. While the sociologist had to have a greater understanding of the limits of the technology and its demands on the organisation if he was to fulfil his role. But the example also shows that the university can also be involved beyond communicative and mediating functions. As shown the essential activity of Salford was in creating the space for the NGO to engage in the public sphere. It is this objective that encapsulates Salford’s approach to Æ, as it extends social justice through opening up the field for a wider range of discourses to be heard.

 

Salford emerging as an Enterprising University with strong Engagement

Academic Enterprise, and its engagement with business and the community, have become embedded in its mainstream university life. As a result, this initially third strand of Salford’s academic activity has now become a primary mission in its own right:

Salford is an enterprising University which transforms individuals and communities through excellent teaching, research, innovation and engagement.(Hall 2010) 

Salford is establishing its own distinctive identity in an emerging higher education system, focusing its attention on the task of becoming a leading enterprising university. To achieve this it recognises that its strategies will have to adapt to respond to continuously changing external environments. It will successful when staff and the world outside can increasingly attach significant content and value to the label of an enterprising university fully engaged in its surrounding, and often excluded, communities. 

 

Reflections on embedding enterprising external engagement into university life

The previous section showed the critical importance of creating an easily understandable vision, which drives cultural change and follows through with relevant implementation strategies to ensure necessary cultural change becomes embedded. This section, explores the way senior managers creatively lead their academics, and other staff, supporting constructive interaction within the institution; using governance processes to consolidate good practices and remove poor ones; rewarding success. evaluating the quality and level community engagement; and concentrating resources by setting realistic objectives.

 

Leadership and Management are Key

Universities are often very conservative places, with traditional ways of providing their teaching and learning, or indeed undertaking research; often they adopt ‘private frames of reference’ which help them reach their individual academic goals, but unfortunately these often prevent more innovative and collaborative ways of thinking. At Salford, such tensions were present at the inception of Academic Enterprise, as senior academic managers strove to introduce greater community/business engagement. Often this required academics to work in new ways which tried to combine conflicting ideas and positions, and situations arose which looked radically different from that which any one of the partners understood for themselves. Therefore, compromise was needed to achieve sound systemic solution. Such change is not easy to achieve and requires strong leadership to ensure the new approach was adopted, but this leadership came from across the institution: the ‘body of the kirk’, middle managers, and senior staff. Indeed, the diagram below shows how one senior manager depicted Salford’s hierarchy, its leadership and management and relationship to the outside world:

She put ‘community’ at the top of the leadership hierarchy, as a focusing element, and also recognised good leadership had to come from all parts of the university. Furthermore, the agreed vision for Salford’s Academic Enterprise had to be powerfully portrayed and continuously reinforced to ensure it succeeded. All senior managers and members of the governing body never ceased in their efforts to let their academic colleagues understand the importance of Æ. This was necessary to counteract critics who wanted to maintain the status quo.

 

 

To support this Salford created Assistant Deans and Assistant Heads of Schools with specific responsibility for Æ tasked with sharing, refining and locally embedding the vision; promoting key ideas by spreading knowledge and good practice; working closely with the core Æ team to deliver the right encouragement and support; and giving the necessary feedback to the centre to ensure problems were captured and sorted out quickly. These champions acted as visionaries able to spot the unexplored connections in the university between ideas and practice that can develop into new initiatives. Early on it was recognized that ideas for sustainable change would come from all levels in the university: the key to success was to harness the potential for the good of all. Two factors sustained this effort: i) the belief that staff had a huge potential for Æ; and ii) their ability to work in interdisciplinary teams ‑ the creative driver for the future in which Salford has a very special capability.

These Faculty and School champions helped embed Æ within their home areas, improved communications and deal sympathetically with local 'disablers' and 'blockers'. They became the projects main creative and effective leaders, working with colleagues to enable them to see 'patterns which connect' Æ and industrial need, constraints as opportunities for new action, and helped provide the space to promote growth. Along with the Æ core team they fostered creativity in all members of their team and sought to inspire staff. They were always ‘hands-ready’, neither ‘hands-on’ nor ‘hands off’.

Powell (2010), following Clarke (1996), has described such good leadership and how willing academics can be coached to become such leaders. Interestingly, the early findings of this study show that while such academics are ‘reluctant leaders’, they are much better at leadership than they are at management; so Salford supported them with suitably qualified project managers to ensure projects were delivered. The key word here is ‘support’, Salford found that academics will not be instructed as this contradicted their notion of professional autonomy, however; they were willing to be challenged provided it exerted a positive influence on their work. Project managers also gained credibility if they worked to remove ‘unhelpful’ bureaucratic, administrative and disciplinary silos.

 

Governance for Improved Academic Enterprise

The Æ core team also developed a simple, but highly effective self evaluatory approach to help academic leaders understand and improve the development of their own academic enterprise teams. This governance process was essential since externally focused and trans-disciplinary teams were unusual at Salford. This evaluatory Æ approach was validated in a joint project with twenty-five British and ten other European universities, in a project known as the University Partnership for Benchmarking Enterprise and Associated Technologies (UPBEAT). The tool comprised of a matrix of four skill themes for academic enterprise:

Solution enabling, talent improving, intelligent partnering
 and new business enabling skill (figure 2).

 

These themes would be assessed against the degree of their development, thus it was possible to have world-class solution enabling with local level new business acumen. This recognised the complexity of AE activity and that different aspects would develop at differing stages depending on the project, the partnership and a range of external factors.

From over 200 case studies of best practice, it appears that it is the development of “qualities and levels of academic engagement’ with respect to these skills that is the most generally relevant and important to the progress of almost all forms of successful academic enterprise; in particular those which fully engages with its locality, and helping transform communities, business and civil society. UPBEAT enabled academics to learn how better to interact within their own institution and develop powerful and lasting relationships with strategic external stakeholders which make a real difference (www.upbeat.eu.com [1], Powell (2010)).

This tool has been used to drive efficiency and higher levels and qualities of engagement with external partners, leading to continuous improvement in all university outreach. The use of this governance process, monitoring and project management tool was found centrally important to Salford’s success in engagement with excluded communities.

 

Rewarding Success

A third main lesson learned from the Salford case relates to how success is understood, promoted and rewarded by a university. Initially this involved coaching of academics, by using an earlier template of UPBEAT, to maximise their performance and that of their project and partnership. But as Benneworth (2009) points out creative ‘engagement needs entrepreneurial academics, who may do many things at once, and these are precisely the kinds of people who you can’t tell what to do…. If one de-skills and Taylorises one employment practices in the university, then entrepreneurial academics leave. It ends up with people focused on one task, and so engagement ends up being done by engagement professionals, rather than by people with the subject knowledge’.

This is precisely what Academic Enterprise and empowering engagement sought to avoid by creating a framework to mobilise sustainable enterprise partnering by providing an opportunity management structure that helped:

• the creation of new Æ initiatives including the discovery and capture of the possible;
• marshal resources from a pluralism of funding streams to ‘buy-out’ staff to deliver any opportunity well;
• ensure better dissemination and technology transfer through appropriate knowledge management;
• provide better marketing of the academic potential and opportunities for collaboration
• ensure a high utilisation of scarce staff resources; so colleagues now recognise the importance of sharing ideas and the complementarity of interdisciplinary working.

So, success was publicised as much as resources allowed, with those delivering innovative and engaged projects highlighted. Salford also presented its best projects for external consideration and won: a Queen’s Award for Higher and Further Education, A Times Higher Award for Community Enterprise and an Award for the most Innovative Project in the North West of England. A series of national and international conference were also developed on a regular basis to show local, region, national and international audiences what had been achieved.

However, it was the rewards available to academics through participation that probably ensured their commitment. Clearly, these were partially financial, but mainly the rewards were in terms of status, especially promotion and particularly to professor. Over a dozen academics have now been promoted to professor because of their proven skills and prowess with respect to enterprise, engagement and knowledge transfer, with many more being promoted to Senior Lecturer. Promotion through this route is just as onerous as any other promotion to professor through more traditional routes, but its inclusion indicates the importance Salford places on academic enterprise. However, a recent survey reveals Salford remains one of the few HEIs with promotion criteria which allow this to happen; readers must not underestimate this effect on academe, for it shows the true significance and status given to this sort of working by the university.

 

Realistic Targets

At its inception the Æ team set itself some clear targets for growth – two major projects per Faculty and two cross-university projects in its first full eighteen months in operation – leading to ten in all. In fact over twenty-five were initiated, many of which have been extremely successful for nearly a decade. Doing just enough projects to make for real change and improvement are essential, as is stretching those with greater capacity. However, trying to do too much can be counterproductive given the existing workloads imposed on academics. Rigorous research and scholarship take time to do well and there is no point in developing Academic Enterprise on weak data of inappropriate understandings of the world. By setting realistic and achievable, but stretching, targets Salford was able to concentrate its limited resources on ensuring the selected initiatives were successful. There is no absolute benchmark of what can be eventually achieved. It depends on capabilities of staff and the university, but also whether senior managers are willing to invest time in getting to know their enterprising academics and when to offer support and when to stretch them.

  

Conclusion

There is no right recipe for developing successful engagements with companies and excluded communities for the good of local cities and city regions. The chapter has sought to present is how the University of Salford developed its approach and hope this helps those wishing to have a more engaged enterprising universities. Salford recognises that, in the knowledge economy, success will only arise from the right collaborations of those who truly grasp the triple (and quadruple) helix of interactions between industry, civil society, the state and university. But Salford’s story has shown that engagement can, and should, include a stronger relationship with a university’s local community. For most universities, despite their moves into distance learning and internationalisation, are ultimately placed within a specific location. Oxford and Cambridge would be lesser institutions if they moved away from their home towns and it is this that the founders of civic universities also understood. They accepted that the pursuit of knowledge would seek universal truths, a process that could not be bound by a specific place. This does not mean the university would remain detached for its locale and have minimal sense of community responsibility. Neither should responsibility be limited to the economic benefit to an area. This, though welcome, is a by-product of a university’s core activity: the pursuit and transmission of knowledge. Surely this can be usefully employed to lessen the exclusion endured within its city, along with improving the social weal.

Salford’s Æ approach has been seen by governments and funding agencies, across the world, as both pioneering and exemplary. But this arose because the university was attempting to define itself as something beyond a research or teaching institution; drawing on its history and converting an existential threat into an innovative interpretation of a university. Once this was embedded Salford was able to explore a means to systemise its engagement to produce increased local benefit through supporting firms and drawing on its knowledge capital to assist the local community. While this story is unique to Salford many of the processes involved could be replicated for any institution that wants a different kind of identity. After a vision has been operationalised a rich form of ‘empowering democratic leadership’, by people passionate in community engagement was essential. This needs to be accompanied a cadre of enthusiastic academics willing to work in different ways within different constellations. Alongside these is the need for a form of coaching that understands academic cultures, it was also necessary to have a group of professional project managers dedicated to ensuring academics’ visions were realised. As this work is unusual a template, such as UPBEAT, will be required both to create informative governance oversight and used as self-reflective tool for the project team. If governance is to be supportive and not merely surveillance it needs to be connected with a status reward structure for the academics, as for many monetary motivation conflicts with their notion of professionalism. Finally, appropriate ‘stretch targets’ to ensure increasing and higher quality engagement will help manage expectations and allow the concentration of resources.

The present authors are both now working together, and independently, to ensure their own community engagement develops more deeply, smartly and effectively. Their further studies, building on the work described in this chapter, reveal the enhanced roles universities, and their academics, should now play in co-identifying real problems worthy of collective solution with our excluded community partners, co-creating of sensible solutions with them which are systemically fit-for-purpose in the global knowledge economy, helping them co-produce those solutions and their stage management into the real world, and further ensuring the continuous improvement of all such solutions so they reach more people with more constructive effect’.

 

 

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