Higher education’s social licence

If you follow Australian higher education, the last year or more will have seen you drowning under a raft of op-eds saying that the sector has lost its social licence and needs to get it back – witness Deakin vice chancellor Iain Martin calling the issue “absolutely pivotally important”, or University of Tasmania’s Rufus Black highlighting the “vexing paradox” that universities believe they are facing:

They are making huge contributions but are seeing their social license eroded. The reason this is not actually a paradox is that their contributions aren’t doing enough to solve the problems driving the erosion of their social licence.

It may be Australian HE’s hottest topic, but what actually is it? Here’s a bit of background, but essentially we’re talking about organisations and even whole sectors maintaining public trust in their continued operation. It comes out of environmental activism (and indeed, a quick google suggests that’s the context you will generally see it applied to UK universities), but has now been adopted in all kinds of areas – here’s the Australian Institute of Company Directors emphasising its importance.

This grew to a head in the run-up to an election in which neither side had too much positive to say about higher education, but still shows no sign of receding as a concern. Probably the point to note is that the Australian sector was being attacked from both, or all, sides of the political spectrum – culminating in this Senate inquiry into governance, senior management pay, employment practices and transparency, allied with attacks from the right over diversity, free speech, campus protests, and international student numbers.

The feeling seems to be that thinking about “social licence” helps foreground the danger of a broader malaise – across the public and the political spectrum – about the role of universities and their contribution to society. It’s a catchy public affairs term: one that stresses a difficult-to-metricise blend of broad public opinion – with some qual chucked in to build a richer understanding – plus an eye on recent headlines, all mixed up with one’s relationships to local stakeholders as well as what the national media and political class are saying (and secretly thinking).

Writing this week on his Substack, City St George’s president Anthony Finkelstein has brought the question of social licence to bear on the UK sector, arguing that the future of universities at root depends on whether it’s possible to renew this licence to operate by way of (re-)establishing broad community support. There are some pointed words too for those who argue it’s just a question of “telling better stories”:

I wish to be clear that renewing the social license for universities does not simply mean ‘making our argument better’, though ‘speaking human’ would be a good start!

His argument is for a greater institutional and sectoral pride in serving the country and making clear the national contribution of HE – a third way between the well-established civic and international pillars which feature in practically every institution’s strategy.

Anyway, if this all sounds like something worth keeping an eye on, you might be interested in signing up to our new HE Influence newsletter (assuming your organisation subscribes to Wonkhe).

It’s for people who care about higher education’s influence and reputation in UK politics, media and society – in the pilot run we did earlier this year, the topic of social licence ended up being a bit of a recurring theme, and in fact quite of lot of this article is a recap of things I first wrote about there.