Collegiality is a foundational value of academic life. Its proponents argue it underscores a collective and cohesive approach to higher education and research. However, as collegiality increasingly becomes the focus of research assessment, Ruth Woodfield argues that the looseness of the term creates difficulties for those seeking to measure its value.
The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) has sought to develop effective measures for research environments that support high-quality research and research practices. As part of REF 2029 an enhanced framework is in development to analyse People, Culture and Environment, their intention, to increase focus on assessing ‘the conditions that are an essential feature of research excellence’.
The proposed assessment framework comprises five factors enabling positive research culture: Strategy, Responsibility, Connectivity, Inclusivity, and Development. The ‘Inclusivity’ measure’s stated aim is ‘ensuring the research environment is accessible, inclusive, and collegial. Enabling equity for under-represented and minoritised groups.’ Surely a step in the right direction, but what exactly is a collegial academic environment?
A significant body of evidence suggests that the research excellence agenda forms a key part of the constellation of neoliberal, managerialist pressures on individuals and institutions within higher education. These pressures are felt internationally, but acutely in relation to the UK’s REF. They are also cited as leading causes of dissatisfaction with research careers and diminishing research quality, in good part because they increase competition and damage collegiality. Dean and Forray neatly summarise this introduction of ‘marketplace’ competition and its impact:
“if we are “winning”, then others are not…Competition, by its very nature, changes a dynamic towards scarcity, toward looking over our shoulders, and protecting what we ourselves have.”
How then can the REF operate effectively as a system for identifying collegiality and leveraging it to enhance either inclusion or research culture?
As we found in our research this is a difficult task, particularly due to the complexity at the heart of the concept. Despite its core historic role in academia collegiality defies simple definition. It is typically assumed to comprise a form of social and professional cohesion based on shared values and goals – including autonomy, equality, collective decision-making, and respectful exchanges of ideas – that transcend individual ambition. Collegiality has thus been considered critical for meaningful, reliable knowledge production and transmission.
Despite its core historic role in academia collegiality defies simple definition.
We wanted to explore how collegiality is understood and experienced now. Drawing on results from 670 responses to a survey sent to all those with a direct interest in research at one research-intensive university, we found that collegiality is experienced in a variety of ways, partly because of the dual phenomena of increased neoliberal managerialism and increased staff diversity.
For instance, collegiality is now embedded in academic careers, influencing, for example, recruitment, probation and promotion outcomes. This organisational acknowledgment of collegiality can be well-intentioned, seeking to recognise ‘invisible‘ academic labour, and diverse academic contributions.
Our participants’ comments on collegiality generally confirmed it to be understood abstractly as a constructive set of norms and values, including equal and shared responsibility to uphold academic culture and standards. It was conceptualised as oppositional to competition. They were, however, wary of institutional uptake of the term, describing its use as “rather fuzzy”, “meaningless”, “subject to individual perception”, and felt that institutional use of the term benefitted academia’s traditional incumbents: tenured (often privileged) men.
Although participants generally reported experiencing a good level of collegiality within research culture, men reported this more often and more men felt they had benefitted from such collegiality. Women were more likely to report marginalisation from these benefits. Men were also more likely to favour ‘healthy competition’.
Although participants generally reported experiencing a good level of collegiality within research culture, men reported this more often and more men felt they had benefitted from such collegiality
Two related risk factors contributed to this asymmetrical appreciation of collegiality. The first is precisely the indeterminate nature of the term and its use. It often remains an empty descriptor, a conceptual bucket to fill with preferred personal traits. Much of my own research has explored such empty buckets – ‘flair’, ‘gravitas’, ‘potential’, ‘good communicator’ – and how they can operate to police the boundaries between a occupation’s traditional incumbents and new entrants. They can have a powerful impact on workplace inclusion and exclusion, often reflecting gendered, racialised and classed assumptions about merit, social status and behaviour. In academia, collegiality is often in the eyes of the beholder and preferred understandings of collegiality can solidify around the views of those who are senior, permanent and possess authority to replicate their own academic preferences.
Collegiality, used loosely, was indeed felt by our participants to reflect long-standing modes of working and communication within universities, supporting homophilous talent identification, recruitment, and support. We ignore this at our peril. We cannot understand women’s under-representation in the professoriate, for instance, without recognising the full advantages of being a ‘clubbable academic man‘.
With minimal chance of aligning to the clubbable collegiality criteria and accruing related research benefits (collaborations on grant applications, projects and publications, speaking invitations), marginalised academic staff also felt they risked being burdened with the less prestigious aspects of ‘collegial’ research culture work, ‘the academic housekeeping tasks’ – organising seminars, covering for colleagues’ non-research duties. This presents the second risk factor associated with contemporary deployment of collegiality. I once asked a newly appointed staff member whether they were finding their organisation collegial? They responded that they thought collegiality was sometimes being used ‘as a cosh’, i.e., precisely to extract such (hidden) academic labour and compliance.
This pattern was noted in our study by women, and other marginalised and minoritised groups including ethnic minorities, temporary and unpromoted workers. Some experienced organisational expectations to be collegial as threatening individual (and general) research quality and productivity.
So, should we welcome the proposed increased focus on collegiality in REF’s assessment of research culture? Once again it’s complicated… Clearly, REF will not assess individual levels of collegiality, but rather how units scaffold a collegial research culture, and undoubtedly with good intentions. But is this concept doing more harm than good?
Our findings indicate that, despite its pitfalls, collegiality, if refreshed could positively improve research culture, but only if it was better defined, recognised, and correctly nurtured. We need to clearly establish what is meant by collegiality, how to grow and sustain it, how it can be measured and how it is linked to inclusion in research culture. Personally, I would be pleased to see this tricky concept drawing on its historic values, including equality, mutual respect and knowledge production practices that transcend individual ambition, but only if the academic labour associated with enacting these values is appropriately unpacked, made far more determinate. Collegial work tasks then need to be included within robust, transparent and equitable workload allocation models, that are also carefully monitored to ensure equal distribution of research time and resources. Given the role played by both collegiality and research in academic career progress, it would further seem important to include perhaps the most determinate measures of organisational inclusion: pay gaps (gender, ethnicity etc.), and seniority gaps.
This post draws on the author’s co-authored article, Collegiality in the complex ecosystem of research in academia: an analysis of a research-intensive university in the UK, published in Studies in Higher Education.
The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
Image Credit: Wellcome Collection, Aberdeen University: the Faculty of Medicine and medical class of 1897-1902 (Public Domain).
