WORKING LUNCH: ALAN GILBERT
Can business and academia really be best of friends? The new vice-chancellor of the biggest university in the country thinks so. Erikka Askeland has lunch with Alan Gilbert
Alan Gilbert has a thing about precision. The thoughtful and well-spoken Aussie, chosen to lead the newly merged institutions of Manchester University and UMIST, points out early into our lunch that the two universities will not actually merge.
The professor explains that, unlike corporate mergers where two entities become in a sense married, the corporate identities of the two universities will be wholly dissolved. Then a new one - officially the University of Manchester - will be created on the stroke of midnight, 3 September.
"Merger is still a good word to describe that, but it is rather different to a merger in the corporate sector," explains Gilbert, to whom, like many academics, precise language is obviously important.
"It is more than a difference of words, it does have considerable psychological significance. It allows us to emphasise what we've got here is a once-in-an-institutional-lifetime chance to reinvent the idea of the university, to re-engineer the way the university is organised."
Reinventing and re-engineering are far bolder steps than merely merging, he makes clear. Although consolidation in the higher education sector is becoming more common, integrating two institutions the size and scope of Manchester and UMIST is rare. The two comparable propositions in the UK - mergers between University College London and Imperial, and Birmingham and Aston - both unravelled in early discussion stages.
And Gilbert is under no illusions about what is at stake when the two institutions come together.
"The failure of the merger or even a disappointing success would be a really destructive outcome for the North West," says Gilbert. "It will mean that excellence in higher education in Britain is concentrated in the golden triangle of the South East, Oxford and Cambridge.
"This is the best chance the sector has in developing a major institution that can punch at this sort of weight. If this fails or if this is disappointing, the strategic implications are very serious."
For Gilbert, a successfully merged university is more powerful than the sum of its parts. He is realistic about the success of mergers generally, corporate or academic - admitting that they tend to fail more often than they succeed. However, taking up what he describes as "one of the most exciting higher education jobs in the world," he's bullish about the prospect of the new University of Manchester bringing real benefits not only to the region's academic base but to business too.
According to Gilbert, the new university has a number of factors going for it that others have lacked. The close proximity of both campuses is one. Also, the two institutions have a long history of working together, with shared departments and a shared emphasis on research and development.
Gilbert also cites the co-operation of his two predecessors, Professor John Garside at UMIST and Professor Sir Martin Harris at Manchester, as being a "potent" aspect of the success of the new venture.
"Mergers often fail because, at the level of the vice-chancellors, a set of issues emerge about who is going to be chief executive. What we have got here is two vice-chancellors who really do deserve to go down in the history of the university as its real founding fathers."
The structure of the new university has been simplified, organising the various schools under four faculties: engineering and physical sciences, life sciences, medicine, and the humanities, which incorporates the business school, law and criminology. Heads of faculty will also be vice-presidents, creating a relatively flat structure.
"The faculties are represented in the highest echelons of decision making. The faculties operate as highly devolved units. Because there are only four of them, they really have the opportunities, not just for economies of scale but for concentrated excellence."
As it turns out, Gilbert understands the dynamics well, having overseen the merger of the Tasmanian State Institute of Technology and the University of Tasmania.
But he says it is not his experience at Tasmania that will inform his leadership in Manchester. Instead it's his tenure as vice-chancellor of Australia's largest, research-intensive university, Melbourne, which is larger than the new Manchester University while sharing a similar profile. It was at Melbourne that Gilbert made his mark, garnering himself a reputation for radical, progressive policies and initiatives that succeeded in changing the face of Australian higher education.
His first - and perhaps most controversial - initiative was launching the country's first private university to be set up by a public institution. Melbourne University Private Limited was designed to provide tailored corporate learning packages, leveraging the brand of the University of Melbourne but able to operate outside of the strict regulatory framework of the public sector.
The inspiration behind the private university was simple, and something that UK universities will be able to relate to - lack of funding. Once installed at Melbourne, he sat down with other university leaders and asked what the university would look like if it was one of the best universities in the world - like Harvard, Yale or MIT - and what it would have to do to get there.
"You'd look at Harvard and you'd see that 30 per cent of its funding had come from public sources, 30 per cent came from endowments and 40 per cent came from selling educational services to students and student fees," says Gilbert. "If you analyse these top universities and ask how do we differ from them, it became apparent that we were much more dependent on public funding and there was very little chance that that proportion of funding would increase anything like enough to close the gap."
Gilbert's "Melbourne Agenda" was widely accepted, but it still ruffled the feathers of some who preferred an ivory tower, operating far away from the exigencies of the commercial world. In fact, Gilbert's departure for the old world coincided with the publication of a book, entitled Off Course: From Public Place to Marketplace at Melbourne University, that lambasted Gilbert and his efforts to increase revenues.
Gilbert is dismissive of the impact of the book, written by John Cain, a former premier of the province of Victoria, and fellow University of Melbourne political scientist John Hewitt, calling it a "minority view".
"One of the major criticisms in the book was that the university had spent AUS$350,000 setting up a company it had sold for AUS$110m, and this was regarded as a terrible example of the university being subordinate to commercial enterprise. In fact, of that money AUS$50m went into rural medical programmes and setting up a wonderful science research institute.
"What we had was two people writing the book who believed that any university that took any non-public dollar was corrupted. The critique would have been a critique of Harvard, Singapore, Hong Kong or British universities."
Gilbert has no plans to open a private university here, although he sees in Manchester a unique opportunity to develop a university that embodies academic excellence and yet contributes actively to the economy.
"The situations are different. The imperatives remain the same," says Gilbert. "World-class universities have to have diverse funding bases, they have to have resource capabilities that are much stronger than is currently available to the University of Manchester to undertake fundamental as well as applied research, to be committed to superb undergraduate teaching but also postgraduate education and training. Building those characteristics will be in some ways easier here than in Australia."
Gilbert synthesises what for many are two irreconcilable viewpoints. He is a passionate and eloquent defender of academic freedom and excellence - conscious perhaps of the accusations of "corruption" that his business-friendly policies have attracted - while maintaining the argument that universities can and should be more open to working with business. Gilbert wants Manchester to do both.
"We've got to produce highly skilled, highly relevant professionals better than we have done in the past. We've got to mobilise our research, based on our expertise to work more closely with industry. But if that is all universities are going to do they will be degraded. At the same time the new university - whatever the government tells it to do, whatever industry tells it - has got to have an agenda of saying: we're going to be committed to fundamental research and teaching in the basic arts, humanities and sciences.
"We are going to nurture people who can be curiosity-driven, not just driven by vocational and applied imperatives, and who have the freedom in the university to be critical of what is happening in the wider society. One of the things the universities have done as civilising institutions is stand up for values, to advocate positions, to do critiques of conventional wisdom. That really is a powerful part of how society works."
His outlook is international and his aim world class. He points out that the Fortune 500 list of companies increased spending on training 700 per cent in the last decade, but that this coincided with the staggering rise of private corporate universities that provide tailored education packages. To him the solution is simple - if universities are underfunded then they should muscle in on this demand-driven education.
"If universities were good enough at demand-driven education to say we've got a wonderful engineering faculty here, we can upgrade the skills of your people in relation to what's happening with computing, software, what the human genome project is likely to mean for your type of business, these are immensely important things universities can do. The grave irony is, because your universities don't see it as part of their business, corporations are taking over responsibilities and they will never be interested in broad liberal education.
"It's important that universities survive, that they get involved with this sort of interface because some things universities do are precious and will not be replicated in another sort of environment," he says.
Gilbert is clear about his agenda. He's both precise and persuasive. He knows how to get things done and there are certainly going to be academic noses put out of joint by both his style and his philosophy.
In addition to all the meeting and greeting around campus, Gilbert has already wired into the network of "the people who really run Manchester", according to his most recent dining companion, Manchester City Council chief executive Howard Bernstein, currently number two in the Insider Power 100. Gilbert has also recently dined with Manchester Airport chief executive Geoff Muirhead, a well-known power-broker in the city. One of his first stops on landing in the UK was at 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Tony Blair to establish Gilbert's "primary agenda" for Manchester's new university.
"One of the tests for the new university is going to be whether it can create a scholarly and research culture which adds to the economic development of the North West without subverting the absolutely necessary commitment of scholars to fundamental research, and which doesn't corrupt that process in any way. It is not asking the university to choose one or the other, we just have a responsibility to do both.
