Alice Wilby is a Higher Education professional, incoming Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education and Student Experience) at the University of Northampton and the Vice-Chair of the Student Hubs Trustee Board.
At our closure event, Alice shared a provocation reflecting on the impact and importance of Student Hubs, and student social action more broadly, for universities. You can also read our CEO Sim’s speech from this event and our student alumni Oana’s speech here.
I want to reflect a little on the value to universities of the work Student Hubs has been doing.
There is obviously the value to individual students of this work, but there’s also value to their institutions, and this value is on multiple levels:
- Firstly, there’s the metrics that we know are positively impacted by participation in volunteering, extra- and co-curricular activities. Students who do these things are more likely to feel they belong at university, more likely to persist with study in the face of adversity, and more likely to get a graduate job at the end. These are all metrics universities care about, and are measured on.
- There’s also a benefit of this activity to university staff of all kinds. Working with Student Hubs brings action, ideas and perhaps a revitalised sense of purpose to varied institutional teams, providing a model as an organisation of how to work with students in a genuinely participatory and ethical way.
- And there’s a huge value to the communities and groups outside of universities that they often want to engage. Civic and regional engagement is increasingly important, because of the Knowledge Exchange Framework, increasing political power in regional bodies, and emerging government priorities.
Whilst all of these elements of value are important, there is something bigger than all of these individual elements that I think connects them. The thread that runs through all of Student Hubs’ work is social action.
I would argue that fostering and developing social action should be essential to our conception of universities. We usually think of social action as being about volunteering, and that can be an important part of it, but really it’s about people and organisations giving their time for the common good, as active citizens. Fundamentally, there is an assumption underlying every university strategy I’ve ever read that we want to create change in the world, through our research, our teaching, and the actions of our staff, students and graduates.
No doubt everyone here has heard news stories recently of universities in crisis, and whilst that’s partly financial, it’s also a crisis of public belief in how universities add value to their lives. Meaningful teaching and research doesn’t take place in a vacuum. If we use the lens of social action to engage with our communities, taking the role of a co-participant, rather than a leader, doing with, rather than doing to, seeing the university itself as an active citizen in the world, that’s where we have the opportunity to make positive change happen.
If we can enthuse more institutions to adopt our model of co-created social action with students, not simply for the good of the individuals involved, but as the best way to fulfil their wider strategic goals and purpose, it would be a fitting legacy to Student Hubs’ excellent work.