I have been talking in earlier blogs about the gathering momentum of our employability strategy with increasing enrolment at the Enterprise Gym and the rapid growth of an internship programme led by Careers which last year saw 600 students gaining employment experience. In support of this I have now put my ‘title’ behind a new prize in recognition of student entrepreneurs. The first Principal’s Prize for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship was duly awarded last month to Mhairi Towler who has established a company that uses computer graphics to communicate science more effectively (see June issue of eContact).
A key argument for investment in universities comes from the evidence that graduates don’t just fill available jobs. They are an engine for economic growth because, by and large, they also create many new jobs.
But is it a step too far to place the 3Es at the heart of the curriculum? Many of our graduates are already enterprising and entrepreneurial and I see no reason why we shouldn’t enhance their skills in this regard. This does not mean creating new modules in entrepreneurship, but more explicitly making the connection between graduate skills, whatever the discipline, and the world of work including the creation of jobs and businesses.
The current draft of our strategy which will guide the development of the University over the next five years states that ‘we need to ensure employability and enterprise are threaded into the fabric of academic course work, and that it is taken seriously by all student groups including those which have been less engaged in the past’. The strategy was debated and endorsed at a recent meeting of the University Senate . However a view was expressed arguing that ‘universities should allow the whole responsibility for the curriculum to lie with the academic staff’ and that by specifying requirements the curriculum must fulfil, the strategy statements supporting the 3Es undermined academic freedom.
I believe academic freedom to be a fundamental right for all academic staff, regardless of discipline. However, the interests of society have long influenced curriculum content in our universities because a university system that was insensitive to such needs would soon lose support. I have no doubt, for example, that employability is a chief concern of our students and their families.
The curricula of the majority of disciplines supporting the professions are highly externally regulated and accredited. And with good reason; we wouldn’t want surgeons to be ill-acquainted with anatomy, engineers with the principles of mechanics or accountants with balance sheets. In addition, the Quality Assurance Agency sets out principles we must satisfy in our programmes to meet sector-wide academic standards; and publishes Subject Benchmark Statements that set out what a graduate in a particular discipline might reasonably be expected to know, do and understand at the end of their programme of study.
We need to exercise our academic freedom in a responsible way that creates the best possible experience for our graduates. And that includes the 3 Es.
As the person who raised concerns at the Senate about the Strategy document’s discussion of the ‘three Es’ I would like to respond to the Principal’s arguments.
The sentence which I find particularly objectionable is the requirement that staff, I quote:
” raise awareness of the benefits of employability, enterprise and
entrepreneurship activity”.
As a historian I object to being required to ‘embed in the curriculum’ the ‘benefits of enterprise’ when it seems to me that enterprise can have both positive and negative effects. To cite two obvious examples: the people who established the slave trade were very entrepreneurial and enterprising; am I therefore to teach the benefits of slavery? The bankers who created a vast structure of toxic assets in the years up to 2008 were also extremely entrepreneurial and enterprising–am I to teach the ‘benefits’ of their activity?
The obvious point is that to teach the benefits of entrepreneurship and enterprise without also addressing the potential costs of such activity would be to give a highly misleading account of the past, something I, as a historian, would be unwilling to do.
Of course, universities have to have regard to the ‘interests of society’ as the Principal suggests–but who is to define those interests? The danger of the current proposal is that University activity is subordinated to the particular views of those who currently have the power to frame ‘the interests of society’ to their own advantage. Our responsibility as academics, in my view, is to bring rational scepticism to bear on the views of the powerful.
As often happens in such debates there is more to agree upon than to disagree with. My concern revolved around the assertion that to require staff to include in their teaching an understanding of employability, enterprise and entrepreneurship amounted to a breach of academic freedom. There are many examples where the content of the curriculum is significantly prescribed and which the academic communities responsible for teaching it are expected to pay some attention to and where sanctions might apply if they do not (such as the accreditation of a course or programme of study).However, I do believe that academic staff are entitled both to interpret such a requirement and to apply academic rigour to its study. Therefore I agree that in teaching about enterprise its benefits and pitfalls ought both to be considered. Jim Tomlinson’s examples illustrate this point well, but should also include the more mundane; I’m sure, for example, there are examples of enterprises that simply failed spectacularly without necessarily causing human suffering on a large scale, but where lessons could be learned. If the issue is not academic freedom, but the prejudicial use of the word ‘benefits’ then I concur. We should re-word the proposal.