On Hull

My first academic position was at Hull. I was appointed to my Band 7 lectureship in 2016, and in my three years there became the leader of the BSc and MChem programmes. The University recently announced its intention to close this Chemistry Department. I wanted to reflect on this situation publicly. It has taken me a little while to sort my thoughts out, and a long while to set them out in a way I am content to publish.

Broadly, I want to ask the question “who is Hull’s Chemistry Department for?” The event of its closure is a chance to see how it has served the interests of various groups over the course of its existence.

This perspective is solely my own, and I am open to factual correction.

Historical Context

Hull was not part of the wave of late-Victorian Universities, nor is it one of the rapid establishment of Universities in the 1960s. Instead it was founded between the wars, principally through donations from the Ferens family; their name became a pun in the University’s motto Lampada Ferens (“carrying the light”).

Thomas Ferens made his money through the consumer chemicals firm Reckitts; students still commonly work at Reckitt-Benckiser in summers and industrial placements. Academic chemists played a central role in the University’s development through the twentieth century, most prominently through the Vice Chancellorship of Brynmor Jones who expanded the campus substantially in the 1960s; Larkin’s librarianship was in a building (eventually) named after this Chemist. Gray’s early work on liquid crystals was published during Jones’ time as VC.

All of this was occurring in a part of the country which was extremely poor. Bombing during WWII completely devastated Hull for decades, and a city made rich from Victorian whaling and shipping was left behind as the British economy swerved away from manufacturing. Despite this, the chemical industries in the Humber estuary remained fairly resilient. The University has always enjoyed strong relations with local firms and training chemists was one way that this relationship renewed itself.

The Chemistry Department is for the City/Region

When I arrived the University’s theme of service to local industry was still going strong. Distance learning programmes and a standalone course in Chemical Health and Safety were rigorous ways of helping companies hire or train people in the skills they needed. The analytical suite in the Department routinely did contract work for local services. Academics were collaborating with local industries and hospitals on research problems. Placement students were spending time locally doing useful, challenging work in useful, challenging fields.

An important dimension of the University’s admissions strategy is how intimately the University related to the city. It isn’t clear to me whether things had been different before, but by 2016 the University seemed to recruit over half its students from around Hull. The shape of the local industrial sector meant that Chemistry was a particularly attractive subject to anyone who wanted a good job which wouldn’t take them too far from their community in the Humber. That ‘stickiness’ of Hull was extraordinary, and I came to believe that if there hadn’t been a University of Hull then many of my local students would have decided not to go to University at all. This pattern often wove through students’ personal circumstances, too: poverty and caring responsibilities and medical regimes can tie someone to a place. Hull’s Chemistry Department served the city.

The Chemistry Department is for the Discipline

I understand that Tina Overton brought the HEA’s Physical Sciences Subject Centre to the University in around 2000. I imagine anyone finding their way to my blog will not need a run-down of Overton’s electrifying contribution to the UK’s teaching of HE Chemistry, but perhaps I can add that the work of the Subject Centre seeped into the bones of the Chemistry degree.

Hull adopted modern teaching practices extraordinarily early, integrating professional skills with disciplinary knowledge in ways which remained thrillingly fresh in 2016. It is hard to overstate how influential this work has been to Chemistry as a discipline; it’s fair to say that we now teach in a post-Overton world. Hull’s Chemistry Department served the Chemistry community particularly well by advancing the case for professional skills, but a strong research programme in Analytical Chemistry also helped students gain the technical skills most sought by industry; the degree was split not into IOP but IOPA.

The Chemistry Department is for the HE Market

The success of innovative teaching was reflected in emerging teaching metrics, and the Department quickly rose high in the early Guardian League Tables. Arguably, this market dynamic served the sector by encouraging other places to compete even in the HEFCE era of the 2000s: Hull’s Chemistry Department served to lead the proto-market into teaching better. It was a difficult time to do this! The unit of resource (~spend per student) was so threatened in the 2000s that Chemistry Departments were closing then, too.

But overall I judge that the University coped poorly with the diversification of the sector after tuition fee models gathered pace and the OfS replaced HEFCE. Squeezed geographically between York’s research agenda and Lincoln’s hunger to compete as a teaching University, Hull made poor decisions about how to focus its energies in the 2010s.

Perhaps a concrete example would help here. Admissions grades were set centrally at the institution level (a blanket approach: Chemistry had the same admission grades as Geography, History etc). This was intended to recruit any student who had the potential to succeed, but it also dramatically damaged the scope for Departments to compete on flawed-but-clear metrics such as entry tariff. It also made large demands on the quality of teaching required to educate a diverse cohort. Serving the region had become seen as a matter of access, but competing in the market was becoming much more closely aligned with the elitist and research-centred agenda embodied in League Tables. I understand that the blanket admissions tariff was set too low for the high League Table performance of Chemistry, and when I arrived in 2016 the entire staff body was fully burned out by a period of over-recruitment (and under-staffing) in the early 2010s. It was possible - even easy - for staff to see this as a punishment for a Department teaching well, and the Department’s equilibration to a lower League Table position was a real relief to staff workloads when it resulted in lower student numbers.

It would be easy to frame this as a simple conflict between Excellence and Civic (or even Research and Teaching) missions, but there were negative pedagogical effects, too, because the too-low blanket tariff eventually meant that Hull became a UCAS second-choice University. It was difficult to see some students turning up at Hull with a day-zero sense of failure because they had missed the grades for their first choice’s offer, which damaged motivation and self-belief. I believe that leadership articulating the purpose of Hull would have been extremely useful in the mid-2010s because different people were operating on different understandings.

The Chemistry Department is for the Faculty

The situation of the Department within a School and the School within a Faculty was an important part of the way the Department related to the University. Around 2016, Departments were shuffled through different iterations of Schools with the speed - but not always the grace - of a card sharp. One effect of the rapid structural churn was to strengthen the more-static positions in Faculties while weakening the communities doing academic work. This was often expressed by weakening the Head of Department role by executing formal management at the School level. Perhaps this was more efficient (especially as the Department is small - it has had no more than around 15 academics in recent years), but the efficiency might also be seen as decentring Departments.

The centralisation of power and finances allowed for big decisions to be made more quickly. I am somewhat sympathetic to this instinct having worked with academics! But as a development it had two drawbacks: local (Departmental, School) leaders had insufficient autonomy to lead in the ways which had been established in times gone by, and central (Faculty-and-higher) leaders were forced to make decisions with far greater consequences. Decisions about the Chemistry Department were increasingly decisions made in Faculty contexts.

I don’t want to criticise the individual managers, but only to point out that the interests of a Faculty are not identical with those of a Department. There is a strong case for standardising administrative procedures when you are thinking at the Faculty level, for example. But standardisation often conflicts dramatically with disciplinary structures. Every assessment must have a resit. Ok, but what if this module has 30 assessments of practical skills in the lab? Every subject should have a similar staff:student ratio. Ok, but what if Chemistry has double the contact hours of Biology? The Personal Tutor system shouldn’t take you too long, and a low workload tariff is appropriate. Ok, but what if Chemistry’s tutoring is incorporated into our module structures so students build a strong relationship with staff?

The churn of structural change also had serious effects on morale; swimming in and out of rapidly-changing iterations of Schools, I personally found it very confusing to work there. There was - hand on heart - a calendar year when I was unaware of who my line manager was. In this context, I found it difficult to lead the BSc programme. If a disgruntled professor simply does not show up to give their lectures, what happens? What do I do as Programme Director? Yet this kind of local dysfunction was oddly hard to communicate when the structures of the institution were changing so much.

I recognise that this is the point I am finding it hardest to make as I draft and redraft this blog, but I think it is completely central to my own experience of Hull that the Faculty did not successfully articulate to me what it was trying to do. I respect that the Faculty’s pressures must have been significant, but I still don’t really understand what those pressures were. Instead, I noticed that my (primarily Civic) understanding of the University often sat in conflict with (primarily financial) Faculty-level decisions. I wonder whether better communication could have solved - or at least softened - some of this.

Because those conflicting visions caused tremendous pain. When I resigned from Hull, my line manager’s verbatim first words were “oh, good!”. Clarifying (apologetically!), they said that they had just been worrying so much about the finances allocated for the School. I was asked to shorten my notice period so I’d be off their books by the next quarter. I’m confident that no-one intended this outcome, but it is sometimes hard to hold onto the pride I took in teaching at Hull when I remember how I was treated as a red line in the ledger.

The Chemistry Department is for the Senior Management Team

I thought Susan Lea - who came into post as the Vice Chancellor in my last year there - recognised most of these communication problems. No VC will ever fully satisfy everyone in an academic institution, but she was effective at telling us what was happening (even if she did this by vaulting over the structures used to manage us, sending direct email/video updates).

Faced with difficult finances, she cut the courses showing the weakest applicant demand: Philosophy and Languages. I guess the rationale was that financially-burdensome subjects could either be lost wholesale or sustained at the cost of everyone (the “salami slice” approach). In retrospect, this student demand reasoning and close-a-whole-department blueprint probably shaped the decision to close Chemistry (rather than cutting a few staff from every Department). It may also have been the right move for the institution, it’s very hard for me to judge.

Her post-Hull HEPI piece remains an interesting read, emphasising how the decisions were taken in the interests of the University’s long-term sustainability. For the purposes of this blog, all I really seek to do is point out that this account arguably frames Departments (or perhaps more accurately Subjects) as being pawns in service to a leader’s judgement of what the institution needs. Again, my central point is that a VC’s interests are not a Department’s interests, though this fact is admittedly dramatic in the context of Departmental closures (sometimes you sacrifice a pawn).

After leaving, I stopped thinking about Hull as the grind of online pandemic teaching took over my life. When I next checked in, the University had a new Vice Chancellor (Dave Petley) and had “paused” recruitment on its Chemistry degrees. This seemed to be because of low recruitment. The pause sounded bad to me, but former colleagues seemed oddly positive. They had been given a brief to redevelop the course with the aim of rebooting the degree. It was certainly not the case that management had communicated the “pause” to be part of an orderly teach-out of the existing students.

But the wider picture was grim as pandemic A Level grade algorithm story catalysed a huge change to English HE: Universities were relieved of the cap on student numbers, and were free to recruit as many students as they wished. Hull - with generally-low entry tariffs and “second choice” status in UCAS applications - suffered as other Universities could suddenly take more people. Shackled to onerous RSC accreditation processes during inflation-driven erosion of the tuition fee, and exploiting energy-intensive technologies as the Russian invasion of the Ukraine jolted energy prices upwards, the Chemistry Department was surely always going to get shortlisted if looking for Departments to close. But if it was also missing student cohorts, it must have floated swiftly to the top of those lists.

The sector-wide context in which Petley’s leadership was operating was important, but it is likely that local decisions - both before and during Petley’s appointment - were also significant. The University’s investment in a solar power scheme seems to have tied up tens of millions of pounds in investments, for example. UCU’s statements about the apparent health University’s reserves suggest that liquidity might be the 2024 University’s central problem.

Closing Chemistry

It isn’t clear to me that the University made substantial efforts to revive Chemistry after pausing recruitment (though to represent their position, it has claimed otherwise). You might even ask “why would they revive Chemistry?” If the way financial squeezes play out is by closing down a whole Department (the Lea blueprint of avoiding salami-slicing) then it would be irrational for leaders at the Faculty or Senior level to try and rescue Chemistry. That would be throwing good money after bad.

Indeed, the panic evident in the University’s decision to close the Department has been so dramatic that the current finances of the University are surely existentially threatening. Perhaps I am missing something, but it seems like the “teach out commitment” of the University to its students - and to the Office for Students in Index 10 of its Student Protection Plan - is being abandoned for Chemistry Students as the University presumably slams through even bigger items in its risk register. As I understand the public reporting, most students currently on Chemistry courses are unable to finish the degree they are enrolled on.

But why on earth would you apply to a University which doesn’t honour a promise as basic as “if you come here we will teach you”? Maybe things look different up close, but it seems to me like these actions seriously threaten the moral and economic viability of the entire institution by shutting down one Department so chaotically. Surely only a fool would apply to Hull for any subject now?

Conclusion: Cui Bono?

So who is served by the closure of the Department? Senior Management might be able able to ease a liquidity crisis. Faculty are able to save non-Chemistry subjects from the axe. The sector loses a competitor. The region loses Chemistry graduates. The discipline loses its reach to a deprived area of the UK. Students lose their ability to finish a degree as it was advertised. Staff lose their jobs. Could the fundamental market dynamics ever have played out differently? I don’t know. But when asking “who is the Chemistry Department for?” it is instructive to see how different parties have been served by its closure.

Wider view for Chemistry

When Exeter closed its Chemistry Department in the 2000s, I remember academic Chemists on BBC News shows. I remember national television broadcasters talking about how important Chemistry was. I have spent a long time thinking about why the outcry about Hull hasn’t been as prominent. Some of it is probably because it isn’t in the Russell Group and isn’t in the South (EDIT 04Nov24: Exeter was not a member of the Russell Group when it closed Chemistry, though it did join around 10 years later). Hull is also a small Department, which means the absolute numbers aren’t as large. But I think a lot of it is because HE is a market now.

Hull’s collapse is the necessary complement to the success of other institutions. The market model of HE is not even zero-sum: as inflation licks away at the spending power of £9k and Chemistry becomes a less popular degree subject, it is negative-sum. Universities are competitors, certainly in practice but increasingly in spirit. On one level, this closure is good news for the market actors of 2024: a Department performing (miraculously) well in the NSS has been knocked out of the race.

Some of the students who would have gone to Hull are going to Lincoln or York. Some students don’t go to other Universities instead, though. The students “sticking” in Hull might do a different science, but they might just not go to University. The country’s total lab space shrinks when a Department closes, and overall there are now fewer Chemistry places nationally. The Humber - still a very deprived area of the UK - will certainly have fewer skilled Chemistry graduates as the twenty-first century gathers pace. Ferens’ company will be unable to recruit chemists from Ferens’ University soon. Schools in the region will find it even harder to recruit good Chemistry teachers. The RSC’s ambition of “Chemistry for All” becomes a little more distant for a child born in the Hull Royal Infirmary in the University's 2027 centenary.

But (to my knowledge) there is no-one on the BBC Breakfast sofa in 2024 saying this is bad. In my opinion as a junior academic, this points to a crisis of professional solidarity. The closure of Hull is a chance to fight for the future of the discipline; it really means something that no-one seems to be stepping up. Not just symbolically, but practically: it becomes riskier to shut down the next Chemistry Department if the anticipated publicity causes substantial reputational damage.

Closing note: The Chemistry Department is for the Chemistry Department

I left Hull in 2019. I do not consider my time there to have been very happy, but I was proud of my development as a scholarly teacher through an excellent PGCAP programme and I was thrilled to have taught such consistently-brilliant students. I also valued my time with colleagues, despite the difficult managerial context. Running a degree whose skeleton was designed by Tina Overton was an experience which transformed my view of what a higher education curriculum can be, both in its goals and execution. I feel very grateful for this privilege; not many people get that kind of opportunity in their first job. Hull gave me a lot, for all its problems. In a small way, for a while, the Department was for me.

So perhaps in closing I can express how desperately wretched I feel for the Chemistry staff and students at Hull. You deserved so much better than this. Even if the closure were completely necessary and completely unavoidable (and it is unclear to me whether either of these things is true), you were owed personal dignity from a University whose first-and-best tradition I know you have always embodied: Lampada Ferens. The Chemistry Department is you; it should have been for you, too.