Gathering or distributing the university?
Here’s a topic, perhaps, to distract you as you recover from your Christmas dinner.
This last week the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) issued a recommendation to the Privy Council (to whom the task of deciding the matter is entrusted) that the UHI Millennium Institute should be awarded university status. In many ways UHI (which stands for ‘University of the Highlands and Island’) is a project rather than an institution, consisting of a partnership of a significant number of colleges and institutes spread around the West and North of Scotland. The extent of the distribution of its elements is visible in this map on UHI’s website. If the traditional model of a university is a single self-contained campus in one location, this is completely the opposite. If you thought that the existing model of the Dublin Institute of Technology was excessively distributed, think again.
Of course, in the case of DIT the Grangegorman project is based precisely on the assumption that a single location creates a more cohesive and vibrant educational institution. Elsewhere also, multi-campus universities (for example, De Montfort in England) have been consolidating their locations in order to have a single campus.
So what, if anything, should be the principle underlying all this? Is there a desirable model? The answer to that depends of course on how we view the future of higher education, and how we see university programmes developing. It is also connected with questions of economic development and regeneration, as towns and communities often argue that a university in their midst is necessary to attract investment and skills.
There doesn’t of course have to be ‘an answer’ to this – there can be several models and diversity may be desirable. But if there isn’t an answer, there needs to be an idea or a basis for assessment of what is right in each case. We need to have a sense of the economics of distributed universities, and of their capacity to connect subject areas with each other across distances. And we also need to have a proper view on what is reasonable in terms of a higher education presence in regional communities, and whether people from these communities can be offered programmes that don’t force them to leave (with the risk that they won’t return). We need to have a proper view of the geography of higher education.
Explore posts in the same categories: higher education, universityTags: Dublin Institute of Technology, QAA, UHI, UHI Millennium Institute
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University Blog 
December 26, 2010 at 8:54 am
Might it not depend on the willingness of each place to give up some power to the collective. On the distance issue the NUI survived precisely because it had geographically different campus. UCG would have been closed in the 20’s had it been nearer to Dublin.
Further I cannot help but feel that there is an aspect of keeping a level of activity in those individual areas that having that demographic will produce. Again if you take Galway. Where up to the recent past there was a distinct and depressing gap except in the very center of town. The Highlands are after all Connemara on some very serious steroids.
December 26, 2010 at 9:44 am
¨We need to have a proper view of the geography of higher education. ¨ This kind of cultural geography is bound to be increasingly connected to the development of digital technologies, i.e. a virtual geography of higher education which, especially in remote areas could help to preserve regional communities. I vaguely remember some interesting examples of this already in Nording countries, such as Finland, Norway etc.
December 26, 2010 at 3:58 pm
The desirability of a more or less centralized physical structure depends largely on the organizational culture of the institution.
December 26, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Surely, in the 21st century, the issue of ‘geographical location’ and ‘physical structure’ is becoming increasingly irrelevent?
December 27, 2010 at 12:12 am
Educational institutions are coming under pressure to be all things to all people in all places.
What the implications of this will be in the long run are unknown, but probably predictable?
December 27, 2010 at 9:44 am
Good point, Al. I do think universities are increasingly viewed as the panacea to all of life’s problems. What’s that saying? Jack of all trades …
December 27, 2010 at 9:50 am
I am not very sure for this but I think that University of Stirling has some remote campuses in Highlands…
While in better days the idea of a University like UHI might be good I am afraid that there are some financial risks for it now that even worse may cause additional problems to existing Universities in Scotland.