The University of Cambridge published the results of its early independent research on how it engaged with ‘the wider Cambridge community’ (see here). What improvements do the colleges and university institutions need to make to ensure their words result demonstrable positive changes?
Image – from the quickly-forgotten Civil Society Strategy from Theresa May’s Government in 2018 – noting the challenge of making such things stick around for the long term.
“What is the Papua to Pampisford thing?”
“When renowned archaeologist Sir Cyril Fox officially opened the Cambridge & County Folk Museum in November 1936 he noted in his opening address, “I am inclined to think that in the University of Cambridge there is more exact knowledge of the social anthropology of, let us say, Papua, than of Pampisford.””
Museum of Cambridge appeal 2022
Pampisford is a village to the south east of Cambridge. If you’ve not heard of Pampisford before, but have heard of Papua – then an Australian-administered territory incorporated into the British Empire, today part of Papua New Guinea), then Sir Cyril’s point still applies to today. Thus underlining the point that most students and academics at the University of Cambridge are more familiar with places geographically far away than with those much closer to their institution.
“The purpose of this research was to understand how the Public Engagement Team at the University of Cambridge can develop their practice engaging with the people who live and / or work in Cambridge, whilst also considering what best practice looks like across the country and what a small section of the community actually need from the University.”
Adler (2023) p2
The paragraph I’d like to see in the Connecting Communities landing page is a statement from the Vice Chancellor that this is an important pillar of how the University intends to grow as an institution – one that inevitably is a major, but not the only part of our city. Why? Not only because it sets an expectation from the top of the institution, but one of the Vice Chancellor’s predecessors made the same point just over sixth years ago:
“The Vice-Chancellor said that the two basic aims of the University plan were to maintain and enhance the character of Cambridge as a University City and to provide the needs of Cambridge as a regional centre.
Sir Ivor Jennings QC, quoted in the Cambridge Daily News 01 June 1962
One of the reasons why Sir Ivor was red-hot on town-gown relations in the future of our city was that he was an academic authority on constitutional law and government. (See a list of his published books on his wiki-page here). For someone who had researched and written extensively about central and local government, you can see why he was interested in the future of Cambridge beyond the ivory towers of the University of which he was Vice Chancellor. Sadly it was a role he only held for a couple of years, passing away just before Christmas in 1965 aged only 62.
“Why has Sir Ivor’s legacy been forgotten?”
I reminded Pro Vice Chancellor Andy Neely of Sir Ivor’s commitment to the people of our city at the Academy of Urbanism’s Annual Conference in Cambridge earlier this year.
I found his response to be ‘inconsistent’ with the press releases on the amount of money the University and its member colleges receive through alumni and philanthropic donations.
My point was that the University of Cambridge cannot choose when its colleges are part of, and not part of it just when it suits them.
Given the prominence of the chapels of the older, wealthier colleges, there is a moral, if not religious duty on those colleges to demonstrate they responding to the needs of the poorest in our city by their actions, not simply by the words from the pulpits and lecterns. As one visitor from a previous age reminded a guildhall full of male undergraduates, ‘deeds not words’.
Community engagement is not new for Cambridge University – but how far has it come since David Watson’s book of 2007?
Above – Managing Civic and Community Engagement (2007) Watson by the OU.
One for Cambridge University members and alumni to take up with their colleges and the University?
The recommendations of Claire Adler’s independent report for the University of Cambridge
It’s the questions that Ms Adler puts to the University that are particularly interesting – many of which should be put out to consultation.
“Does the University of Cambridge only want to deliver Public Engagement or does it also want to work with the local community to deliver civic engagement and community engagement?”
Adler (2023) p3
This for me is the big one. Go back a few decades and you could find academics who didn’t even want to do public engagement – rather they saw us town people as about as welcome as the bubonic plague and thus be kept at a safe distance from the hallowed grounds of the colleges.
I remember visiting a school friend who had secured a place at St John’s in the late 1990s – around the time I was working in a back-office bank between my A-levels and going to university myself. It felt like a completely different world – one that I’d not seen or experienced. Such was the contrast between the inside and outside that it felt like far more than being in another city – even in another country. But because the divide between town and gown even in the late 1990s was still so great, and the outreach and advertising to young town people at state schools so minimal, it never occurred to us or our families living in residential areas to go to anything. We were neither invited nor welcomed – and don’t even think about a sense of belonging either. That is the legacy and inertia of centuries of polarisation that the University of Cambridge and its member colleges have got to overcome – if they want to overcome it at all.
Again, let’s not be complacent: there will be individuals and groups within the University of Cambridge who will not want to do anything more than the bare minimum that ministers of the Crown expect of them. Persuading them of the merits of changing that culture will not happen overnight. Some of those changes will involve the re-writing of job descriptions, society constitutions, and even institutional royal charters. What would be the impact on the city of Cambridge (and even the county or economic sub-region) if the charters of the colleges were amended (something that would need Privy Council approval) requiring them to account for the needs of the wider city and district when considering financial and investment decisions? For example de-prioritising the University’s long-delayed new swimming pool?
Governance structures of both local government and of university institutions
One of the biggest barriers to radical improvement are governance structures. If you cannot explain the rationale of your existing governance structure to your average local teenager then your structures are way too complicated.
My point being that if institutional structures are too difficult for people outside of the institutions to make sense of, they are less likely to engage. Especially in a world where people are time-poor and have multiple competing demands for their time and attention. Who has the time to familiarise themselves with the lines of power and responsibility for both local government in and around Cambridge, *and* the University of Cambridge with all of its constitutionally separate colleges? I’ve lost count of who sits on what partnerships within and beyond the University. I’d hazard a guess that no one in the University has any idea of how many different partnerships, boards, committees or other structures it has representatives on.
The list of recommendations from Ms Adler reflects the scale of the task, and also the frustrations faced by previous generations of people wanting to bridge the town-gown divide.
Almost half of the report (from p4 onwards) is a list of bullet-pointed recommendations broken up into themes:
- Policy/strategy
- Breaking down barriers
- Principles for events
- Community and public engagement projects
- Staff
- Funding
- Communications
- Research and support
Imagine you are a Minister of the Crown and you want to make a big impact on civic and community working between university and town communities. (Note – I used to work for a Secretary of State who had huge ambitions for community action across England).
If I was that Minister and had just received an independent report with that many recommendations included in it, I would be mortified.
And furious as to how the Government was failing so badly on my favourite policy area.
This is sort of where the new Education Secretary David Blunkett found himself in the late 1990s when he wanted to make citizenship education much more prominent in schools. The story of how the now enobled Lord Blunkett bulldozed Citizenship Studies onto the National Curriculum and into the suite of GCSE examinations is told by Ben Kisby.
The question then is: where do you start?
As I mentioned: at the top. The Vice Chancellor has to make town-gown relations a core theme of her tenure. Hence my disappointment that this hardly got a mention in her annual start-of-the-year speech. I also got some negative pushback on social media from some saying that ‘town’ is not her responsibility and that the speech was to a University audience. Which for me simply reflects the centuries-long divide that some of us (myself included) want to be bridged – not for ourselves but for future generations. (I’m of the view that I’m too old and too ill to benefit from the big things that I want to see – concert halls and all that – and that I’ll be plant food by the time any of them are complete!)
Quick wins in an era of rapid turnover of students and researchers
What are the things that existing students and researchers can get cracking on? What are the things that need to be put in place to ensure a swift handover as/when students graduate and researchers move on, ensuring successors can get up to speed as quick as possible? Cambridge’s history is littered with wonderful things that came to a quick end because the driving forces behind them either retired, moved away, or passed away. The old Cambridge Festivals from the 1970s & 1980s are one example.
Above – a snapshot of the Cambridge Festival 1986 – once a massive part of the civic calendar that covered town and gown.
Note also, don’t underestimate the impact that 18 years of austerity had on the ability of local councils to support such festivals – something that the Institute for Government has picked on with the present Government in their report published recently (30 Oct 2023)
Political support?
It’s up to general election candidates and voters (whether town or gown) to make the University of Cambridge’s involvement in civic and community action an issue. I recall the case of Laura Spence in 2000 who was rejected by Oxford but accepted by Harvard with a scholarship, which resulted in Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and senior Labour ministers turning their political guns on Oxford (and to a lesser extent Cambridge) which provided a much-needed kick to both institutions to open up their doors far more than they had done before. (Note the party-political context of an almost non-existent opposition and the prospect of the top two dominating politics for the next decade – as they went onto to do).
In order to generation meaningful cross-party support, the University of Cambridge will need to come up with something substantial and long-term – something that all political parties represented on the city and county councils can support. That also means taking some time to work through the issues and barriers – and accepting that some of those barriers will be for the politicians to resolve. For example governance structures of local government in and around Cambridge. This is something the University of Cambridge could help with – for example funding research on how to improve local government locally – for example linking up with the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham. I have tried to persuade a few Cambridge academics in public policy circles to do this but have gotten nowhere.
Not everything needs to be directed from the centre – although co-ordination would be useful
One of the things I’ve pondered is the idea of long-term ‘twinning’ between individual Cambridge colleges and academic institutes with individual council wards in Cambridge, or parishes and towns within Cambridgeshire or the Cambridge economic sub-region. In my view, this should have started ***ages ago*** with Homerton College and the wards of Queen Edith’s and Coleridge, but hasn’t. The Cambridge Imaginarium was another attempt to bring town and gown together at a smaller scale in 2022 as part of the 21st Century version of the Cambridge Festival.
Yet looking at their emerging programme for 2024, I’ve spotted another barrier that Ms Adler mentioned in her report.
“The 2024 Cambridge Festival will feature two days of exciting and FREE talks for local school students (KS2 and KS3) at the Cambridge Sports Centre in West Cambridge.”
Cambridge Festival Schools Programming 2024
- Who is paying for the transport costs to the site? (It’s at least five miles for the larger state secondary schools eg Coleridge here)
- Who is ensuring that the content co-ordinates with the schemes of work that the teachers at KS2 and KS3 in schools are working on?
- Who is ensuring that children and teenagers can follow up on things that inspire them?
In the mid-1990s at secondary school I recall going on site visits to the University’s chemistry and physics labs – and being struck by some of the things that we were shown. Things that had absolutely nothing to do with the topics we were studying at the time and also that were not on the GCSE syllabuses that we were working towards. But the money for the schools was simply not provided for by ministers for any meaningful follow-ups, as a quick browse through the British Newspaper Archive shows.
That in itself is possibly the biggest challenge the University of Cambridge has to overcome if it wants to improve radically how it gets involved with civic and community action in and around our city for the benefit of everyone: local government, local charities and local community groups are unlikely to have the resources to meet the University half-way. This is where the University of Cambridge needs to use its institutional influence on central government to change this. Is it willing to do so? Time will tell.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 