‘League tables come with structural limitations’

With increasing pressure on disciplines to add practical coursework, applied social sciences allows traditional research methods to come together with new age innovation. Tim Blackman, vice Chancellor, Middlesex University, shares his views on challenges faced by university leadership in general and the social science discipline in particular in the wake of growing unemployability globally. Edited excerpts: enough. However, critical thinking is important too. Businesses and societies need innovation and new thinking and critical thinking can be a source for new ideas.

We also focus on professional doctorates which include practice-based study, where curriculum is designed around a senior professional’ or manager’s area of practice. Thus, the discipline is linked to one’s occupation. The doctorate will help the professional take forward their thinking in an area where they have substantial experience. archy among subjects that may prevent academics from borrowing from each other. This is one of the reasons we are moving to larger faculties and smaller schools so that larger units can allow for greater interpretation among colleagues from diverse disciplines. While identifying with your discipline is important, it is also important to know a discipline’s limitation and be open to the best possible way of solving a problem. As university leaders, it is upon us to create a conducive environment for multidisciplinary research. For instance, internal funding is a good incentive where you make it necessary to involve more than two departments. Funding depends on your ability to get more people to engage with each other. For instance, several science and engineering grants are looking at not just discipline specific but scientific proposal as a lot of big changes in the world today cannot be explained without understanding social processes and individual behavior. Newer programmes with a broader range of modules are another means of multi disciplinarity. Most problems today lie at the intersection of understanding human behavior and technology which require teams source from multiple disciplines. An example we are working on is assistive technologies for the care of older people – using tech at home that enables an old person to live independently longer such as an assistive alarm, smart tech- nology to operate taps, lights or even cooking or care robots who could help with domestic chores. This team w ill require people from sociology and psychology among others to decide whether these technologies will be acceptable to societies. League tables certainly come with their owns tructural limitations as none of them, for instance, talk about quality of teaching in an institution. They give an idea of the kind of grade you need to get in, how satisfied students are, how much does the institutuion spend. However these may not directly correlate with quality of research. The teaching excellence framework (TEF) and research excellence framework in the UK are complimentary assessments of the teaching process holistically. TEF results in UK have been different from league tables as they focused on student outcomes. League tables are about academics setting the rules of the game of their own assessment. At this point, universities need to rise to the challenge of inclusive economic growth and are required to make societies better and increase productivity. Details from league tables can answer questions on academic parameters but not help with the pragmatic concerns.