How Britain's Salford U. Rose From The Dead Like Lazarus

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND—In 1981, two years after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher first attacked Britain’s slack management and bloated work forces, a powerful government committee decided to apply her doctrines to the nation’s universities. Out came the budget knife, and every university suffered cuts. A few of the cuts were so severe that they stunned even supporters of austerity measures. And the worst hit university, everyone agreed, was Salford, an establishment in a depressed area of Manchester that thrived on science, technology and engineering. The government slashed Salford’s grant by 44%, forcing it to cut enrollment by one-third. Few scientists and university adminstrators in Britain held out any hope that the university would survive, and morale among its all sank to rock bottom. Then, two months after the budget cuts, onto the scene burst John Ashworth, a biologist fresh from a high-profile job as chief scientific adviser to the cabinet. In one of the great success stories of British academia, Ashworth pulled Salford up by its bootstraps, replacing the university’s government grants with money earned by doing research for companies. Total income for the university grew from £21.5 million, 84% of which was from govern ment sources, in 1980-81 to £31 million by 1987, of which only 56% came from government. And not surprisingly, Salford built itself an enviable reputation as the British university that has tackled best the diflicult issue of collaboration with industry. But Salford’s story turns out to be more dramatic than a simple recovery from financial ruin. While some educators originally worried Ashworth’s deals with industry might turn out to be Faustian bargains—keeping the university alive at the expense of its academic soul—the effect appears to have been quite the opposite. Recent figures show that Salford is breaking new records for academic excellence. The quality of its incoming students has soared, and the percentage of students winning first-class honors degrees has tripled since 1984-85. In fact, some observers believe that, academically, Salford sits head and shoulders above most other U.K. universities. “Salford has made remarkable progress,showing that by imaginative and radical leadership, a university can break into new areas, thereby raising its academic reputation,” says Sir David Phillips, chairman of the U.K.’s Advisory Board for Research Councils. “The spare money that we’ve earned and the process of earning it has clearly done something to our educational program,” says Ashworth. “In trying to cope with a withdrawal of government funds, we’ve created a different institutional ethos, with all sorts of conse- quences that were not intended. I wouldn’t pretend that I know how it has happened, but I observe it with some amazement.” Ashworth may claim not to know exactly why Salford’s academic reputation is on the rise, but the university’s success clearly stems from the vice chancellor’s innovative approach to both funding and education. The 49-year-old Ashworth originally took up the challenge of saving Salford because his stint in government had convinced him that universities needed to work more closely with industry, and because he thought that Salford, despite its problems, had the potential to do that well. But after the budget cuts, how was he to start? He wanted to increase funding by selling research services to industry. Before that was possible, however, there had to be something to sell. “When I came here in 1981, the place was demoralized in a way that is very difficult to convey to outsiders,” Ashworth recalls. “I asked a very simple question, ‘Why is there a University of Salford?’ and I did not get any very clear answer. So step number one was to undertake a long debate about our aims and objectives. In the course of that debate we came to accept a slogan, ‘Educate for Capability,’ which should underpin all our educational activities.” The plan called for students to leave the university with not just academic qualifications but also professional training. “Over the past decade, we’ve evolved a philosophy of what the Americans would call community service,” explains Ashworth. Now more than half of Salford’s students spend significant parts of their time working on projects for companies like GEC, an electronics giant, and computer manufacturer ICL, learning management skills along with textbook knowledge. “All that led back into a much clearer image of what the university had to offer,” Ashworth continues. “So instead of being just one of 50 institutions in the country that are called universities, one that is located in a not very fashionable or sexy place, Salford suddenly was seen in quite different terms. And that has really driven up the quality of the students who want to come.” In addition, Ashworth started an aggressive publicity campaign to attract better students—and industry attention. Soon after he took over, he created a unit called CAMPUS (Campaign for the Promotion of the University of Salford) that conveyed the picture of an institution fighting back. “That image was projected in a very forceful, not to say brash and hard-edged way,” he says. it attracted a specific kind of student.” Armed with the new image for beleaguered Salford, Ashworth began to court industry. He convinced companies like British Aerospace, GEC, and Plessey to fund research on developments in aeronautical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. His argument was simple: Fund Salford, and we will turn around and give you what you want, he told industry. The message was well received. Neville Chamberlain, chief executive of British Nuclear Fuels, says that his company now puts a “significant fraction” of its support for universities into Salford, because “Salford listens. It takes note of what industry wants, and tries to produce the right kind of people.” The research contracts negotiated by Salford provide plenty of “profit” for the university And this money has helped fuel the university’s academic efforts. ‘The competitive edge that we felt we needed led us to behave like a private sector organization rather than one in the public sector,” Ashworth explains. “We said to ourselves: ‘Education is our core activity and we better innovate in it.’ But how do you do that? The ability to distribute genuinely free money—and last year it was about a third of a million pounds—to the improvement of teaching quality meant that the activities of our teaching committee have suddenly become extremely important.” But the extra money alone can’t explain Salford’s climb to rarefied academic levels. Perhaps more important is Ashworth’s innovative “Educate for Capability” scheme, the likes of which staid British universities had never seen before. “The normal way in Britain of educating undergraduates is to do it on an individual basis, as with Oxbridge’s single tutorials,” Ashworth explains. “If people collaborate, you call it cheating and plagiarism. But we encourage people to cheat and be plagiarists. We teach through groups, because this is what our industrial friends tell us is weakest in British industrial management.” In fact, much of the learning at Salford is acquired through projects rather than traditional tutorials or lectures. Witness the case of undergraduate David Henshaw, who picked Salford from among all other U.K. universities because it would prepare him for a job. “The course I applied for is unique because it has very close ties with industry,” he says. Sponsored by Barclays Bank, Henshaw spends summers and a large percentage of his time during the academic year at the bank. Such a scheme is typical at Salford. “Third-year students are project leaders, second years do the work, and the first years are the gofers,” Ashworth says. It’s a return to what the Victorians understood, he adds—that the best way of learning something is to teach it. Ashworth also shook up the university’s administrators by forcing them to take more responsibility. In the early 1980s, he regularly returned requests from department heads asking for him to sign off on decisions with notes saying that it was their job. “I more than quadru pled the allowances to pro-vice chancellors and chairmen of departments, from a few hundred pounds to thousands of pounds, and I expect them to do a job,” Ashworth says. “Take the chemistry department. The chairman of that department is effectively running a business with a turnover of about £5 million a year, and expect him todoit. If he wants to hire technicians or part-time lecturers or go to Hawaii, that’s his business.” Overall, Ashworth’s troops are positive about the change, says Michael Hampshire, chairman of the department of electrical and electronic engineering. The results of these innovations didn’t show up immediately. In fact, says Ashworth, only in the past year have there been “enough points on the graph” to prove that the apparent rise in academic achievement was real. But now, the improvement is beginning to be acknowledged by Britain’s university community. For its part, industry couldn’t be more pleased. “Business wants university research that is useful to us and graduates that are useful to us,” says British Nuclear Fuels’ Chamberlain. “And that’s what Salford offers.” John Stansell is an editor at London’s Sunday Times.

How Britain's Salford U. Rose From The Dead Like Lazarus

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John Stanstell

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October 1988

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