Book Review: The New Power University by Jonathan Grant

What’s the Book About?

In broad terms, this book explored what a university which embodied ‘New Power’ might look like.

What is new power? I found it slightly hard to get a sense of this from the book itself, but have found a review of Timms and Heimans useful as well as a podcast which had a long interview with Timms. Timms and Heimans set up a distinction between ‘Old Power’ and ‘New Power’. Old Power is centralised and elite: the CEO of a firm, the bishop of a diocese, and the VC of a University would all be Old Power figures. New Power is distributed and participatory: a BLM protester, a MAGA voter, and a citizen writing an Amnesty International letter to their MP would all be agents of New Power. The cute hook Timms and Heimans pitch is “New Power is like current and Old Power is like currency”.

It’s important to emphasise that this is more about power than purpose. Mobilising NRA members to vote Republican is a New Power action, but so was the Obama election campaign. Similarly, Old Power needn’t be party-political: a prime minister could be left- or right-wing.

Specific Features and Discussion

Grant’s core argument is that the University could be a central part of a New Power society if it defines itself by a clear public purpose. This public purpose should be a hallmark of its teaching, research, and operations.

The argument was most stimulating for me in the way it discussed operations. It is important to interrogate how the presence of a University alters property prices and the seasonality of work. It is good to consider how an institution’s money might deliberately be spent locally to support businesses in the city rather than corporations in London. It is good, too, to challenge a model of The Civic University which perpetuates the social exclusions in wider society. The case studies here were excellent, and these chapters make the book worth reading by themselves.

The governance structures necessary to centre public purpose in The University are also an interesting discussion. The corporate model of HE - with power centralised with senior management - seems hard to reconcile with the participatory flavour of New Power. An indicative menu of options for organising differently based on a university’s purpose is interesting, but perhaps dodges the central problem to a proposed restructure: who decides what the public purpose of a New Power University is?

Finally, there is a considered analysis of how UK HE related to Brexit debates. Grant argues that the perception of HE during the run-up to the referendum was not of an impartial forum for open discussion, and argues that this would be an important thing to consider in constructing the New Power University. It might be possible to frame this discussion as the shape of things to come if Old Power institutions do not adapt to a New Power world, though some discussion of how New Power relates to outright populism might have been useful.

Criticism

I found the purpose of this book slightly hard to judge. Is it a criticism of specific features of the current HE system? Is it a speculative vision for what HE might look like if things were different? Is it a road map to get from here to there? This remains unclear to me, and this complicates any review.

If the book is a criticism, then a review might discuss the models and examples used in constructing the criticism (is it sensible?). If it’s in the genre of a utopia, then a review might discuss the attractiveness of the alternative reality (is it desirable?). If it’s a road map, a review might discuss the pragmatic issues of route selection (will it get us there?). 

I think the book’s successes were in the focus and new perspective they brought to well-recognised problems. It was interesting to see ideas like precarious contracts and the civic university approached from a new angle. Some of this was very sensible, and it provided a useful pragmatic tool to give urgency to some of the problems I recognise: low student agency, archetypally esoteric research programmes, the town-gown tension.

I think the book’s weaknesses derived from two mostly-unanswered questions: what is New Power? And What is the Public Purpose of the New Power University?

These criticisms reflect my position as someone principally concerned with undergraduate education.

What is New Power?

I was left thinking that different organisations respond differently in the context of New Power, including responding by ignoring it: Apple make iPhones successfully, while TikTok exploits iPhone ownership successfully. Is a degree a piece of old-power capital (like having an iPhone) or a piece of new-power habitus (like using one)? The answer to this question really matters, but it wasn’t answered.

If the New Power University is like Uber, then the top-down logics of extraction will characterise its decisions. If the New Power University is like the Living Wage campaign, then the bottom-up logics of fairness will be central. And if it’s more like Etsy then there will be some sense of horizontal negotiation and transparency. Which is it?

What is the Public Purpose of the New Power University?

I think the book was too timid about presenting any kind of moral case for universities, which particularly weakened its ability to function as a utopia: I did not find the New Power University straightforwardly desirable compared to the status quo. From my own perspective, I think there is a real risk of further diluting the already-weak focus on undergraduate education if limited resources are directed towards starting Public Purpose research projects and building stronger Town-Gown links.

That said, the social mission of universities is the Cinderella of institutional prestige: I have myself published on how University League Tables can penalise WP activity. I agree that there needs to be a wider vision of The University if we want to make these missions viable. I found it strange that there was so little recognition that sustaining such missions is at odds with much of the current HE market. It might also have been interesting to look at the specific case of the Open University more closely - it seems like the OU has a distinctive and strong New Power ethos ‘ready to go’ in some ways, but also that it has found the marketised model of HE to be difficult in ways which might help us chart an easier course.

While Grant took a clear position on there being a lot of scope to have different purposes in different New Power Universities, I feel that New Power could be a dangerous roadmap if a vague ‘public purpose’ used by people with particular agendas. There is a careful and imaginative approach to embracing the ‘gig academic’ model of working, but the subtleties of the argument would be lost if senior management use this book to justify exploiting early-career staff. There is a balanced discussion of how social volunteering might be incorporated into a students’ experience of HE, but no consideration that an institutional celebration of volunteering might jar with academic staff routinely working 60h weeks to satisfy the expectations placed upon them by miscalibrated 37.5h contracts.

The Uber-or-Etsy logics are inseparable from the purpose of a University. If a university is committed to strengthening the weave of a democratic society, then its structure and decisions should reflect this. If it is committed to surviving the financial pressures of deflating fee income and increasing competition for student applications, its structure and decisions will reflect this instead.

Without an extremely clear moral sense of what universities are for, I worry that these logics will be deployed to serve the ends of senior management teams (understandably) exercised by institutional survival. I feel that the purpose of a university was hinted at, danced around, but ultimately undefined. It’s really important - from a ‘road map’ perspective on criticising this book - to think about who makes decisions.

I worry that this criticism is particularly important when we are in such a state of flux, because the book is absolutely correct about its core point: something has got to change if Universities want to occupy a central part of public life in the decades to come. For all my criticism, I was glad to have read a thoughtful contribution to such a pressing issue.