‘Covid only makes it more interesting’: UCL’s new provost Michael Spence on steering the university through a pandemic
Pi Media’s editor-in-chief speaks to UCL’s newly appointed President & Provost Dr Michael Spence.
Source: UCL Imagestore
In August 2019, Dr Michael Spence, who was at the time vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney, received an email from a headhunter. On a different hemisphere, Professor Michael Arthur handed in his resignation notice, setting off a year-long search for his replacement as the provost of University College London (UCL). For 59-year-old Spence, applying for this position did not only imply exchanging the Australian sun for foggy Britain, but also splitting from the oldest four of his eight children, ending a 12-year tenure at Sydney, and having his pay cheque shrink to £365,000 from £910,000 per year.
He took the leap, and in February 2020, having surpassed all other applicants for the role, Spence was announcing his appointment as the university’s new chief executive. “UCL has a proud history and an exciting future,” he said in his first address, “It is an institution which has an important role in a time of great change for the UK and wider world.” Of course, it was around the same time that newspapers were gingerly beginning to mention the appearance of a novel coronavirus in China, and Spence had little idea just how seismic the “change” he referred to was going to be. By the time he would officially step into office in January 2021, it is not the bustle of student life that would greet him, but the echo of empty corridors and a long list of grievances brought by the pandemic.
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Fast forward one year, I appear in a sequence of back-to-back Zoom calls Spence has to attend as part of his induction. He wears a suit when working from home, but his air of officiality withers soon after we begin talking. “It’s a tremendous opportunity and, in a sense, Covid only makes it more interesting,” he replies when I ask if knowing about the crisis would have made him reconsider taking on the role. “Covid is a problem of an international city – how do you remain open to the world in an environment where there are health risks associated with doing that?”
While this is a pressing issue for UCL, where 53 per cent of students come from outside the UK, the challenge is likely to be even greater for the colleagues Spence left behind at the University of Sydney. When he was vice-chancellor, Spence led the efforts to bring “students to Sydney from around the globe in order to enrich [the university’s] classrooms.” I’m not sure whether “enrich” here refers to talent or the ballooning overseas tuition revenues, but the fact remains that by 2018, lucrative international students made up 36 per cent of enrolments at the university, with about half of them coming from China.
As Australia rushed to close borders, the country’s international student body halved compared to its pre-pandemic size, straining university budgets, and contributing to a loss of at least 17,300 jobs across Australian campuses. Granted, the University of Sydney fared much better than other institutions in the country, as many of its locked-out students opted to continue learning online. Yet, the university has warned of more job cuts to come this year, while its new vice-chancellor, Mark Scott, is to take a 40 per cent pay cut compared to the rock star salary of his predecessor.
For Spence, however, extending the university’s international reach is not just a matter of balancing the books. It is a strategy for staying relevant as an institution – one which he is determined to pursue at UCL, despite the growing insularity of a post-pandemic and post-Brexit Britain. “Research,” he once said, “is a global sport, and like the teams of the English Premier Football league, the very best teams involve the best players, wherever they may be found.”
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He concedes that there is one factor which would have made him more hesitant to come to the UK during a pandemic: “We are a very close family, and I’ve left half of our oldest children in Australia.” The prospect of frequent family reunions became unlikely due to Australia’s travel restrictions, which mean that his children “are no longer 21-hours-in-a-plane away, but 21 hours plus two weeks of enforced quarantine in a policed hotel […] we won’t see them for a couple of years.”
Spence and his wife, Jenny Ihn, moved to London with their four youngest, aged between 2 and 16, so the two are no strangers to home-schooling and having toddlers make cameos in the background of important Zoom meetings. Spence, who is also an ordained Anglican priest, met Ihn at the church where she was assistant minister. At the time, he was a widowed father of five, having lost his first wife Beth to cancer in 2012. Ihn was a PhD student at the University of Sydney, which meant that Spence – already vice-chancellor – had to first confess his feelings to the university’s human resources committee, and only then to Jenny herself. They have since had three children, and while the family settles in their new environment, Jenny will be taking time off work to look after them.
If I had heard this story before 2020, I would have been appalled by the sacrifices the Spences had to make to come to UCL, but the truth is that Covid made prolonged family separation and temporary career setbacks (for women, especially) the new normal. If anything, Spence suggests that many university students have it worse: “Dealing with the consequences of the pandemic when you have your immediate support network is one thing, dealing with the pandemic when you are in student residence and your family is all overseas - that’s tough.”
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The word “tough” echoes as I ask Spence what job hunting will be like for university graduates in the coming years: “I do think that the labour market is going to be a bit tough post the pandemic,” he concedes. But his track record is impressive when it comes to boosting graduate employment. Under Spence’s leadership, the University of Sydney climbed to first place in Australia and fourth globally in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings. As of 2020, UCL lags far behind, ranking 22nd in the world.
Spence’s take is that “going forward, one of the things that universities will need to do is leverage their social capital much better,” which implies strengthening alumni networks and forging connections with major employers. That being said, “UCL is one of the institutions in the UK from which if I were graduating, I’d have tremendous confidence that I would be able to find a job, even in the most difficult of labour markets.”
What about Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s recent call to prioritise Stem degrees, which he claims deliver stronger employment outcomes? Spence doesn’t look convinced: “There is a kind of popular mantra about doing something ‘useful’ […] Well, it turns out that a degree in philosophy may be the most useful thing that you can do,” he replies. “We know that students are going to have several different careers, many of them not invented yet,” which is why universities have to “make sure that students have skills that make them very adaptable and flexible in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” He proceeds to swamp me with a concoction of LinkedIn buzzwords: critical thinking, effective communication, a multidisciplinary capacity, problem solving… These are the skills his research team back at Sydney has found to be among those most desired by employers across the world. “Hey, guess what, a good Arts degree gives you that in spades.”
Spence is very much a man of the humanities himself. In 1987, he graduated from the University of Sydney with First Class Honours in English, Italian and Law. He did a PhD in intellectual property law at the University of Oxford before becoming the head of its Social Sciences faculty. All the while, he insatiably learned new languages. When already in his fifties, Spence completed a diploma of languages in Korean – attending lectures alongside undergraduates at the University of Sydney – so that he could speak to Jenny’s side of the family in their native tongue. When news of Covid had just arrived from Wuhan, Spence recorded an emergency address to Sydney’s Chinese students, in fluent Mandarin. In an interview with broadcaster Vivienne Parry, he mused: “I love learning languages, I love the capacity that that gives you to begin to see the world through other eyes.”
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So, to Spence, all degrees are equal... But some are more equal than others. After all, he cut back the number of degree programmes at Sydney from 122 to just 25. “We had all of these ridunculously specific postgraduate courses, like a Master’s in pipes bigger than 3 mm in diameter, but less than 5 mm in diameter,” he jokes, “and it actually wasn’t giving students a structured set of choices.” Spence and his team approached the issue with scientific precision. They came out with a diagram, mapping all degrees and majors offered at the university, and drew lines to mark all possible combinations between the two: “In the end, the page was just black, because there were so many lines going from so many places.”
“We didn’t stop teaching anything,” he explains, “but what we did was reorganise our degrees so that they were bigger, with clearer pathways, and a less bewildering array of choice.”
A “bewildering array of choice” is also a great way to describe UCL’s course directory, which currently lists 427 programmes. Two-thirds of the university’s undergraduates are on a unique pathway to their degree, which means that there is no other student on campus that takes the same combination of modules. Spence thinks that this is “terrific, because people can tailor their education. But on another level that means that they don’t have a cohort, a group of people with whom they are moving through the degree, and they don’t have structured choices.” When I ask if UCL should expect a degree rearrangement similar to that at Sydney, he brushes the question off by saying that “the last thing you would do is bring a script from a former institution and plug-and-play.” I’m left feeling like there is a “but” itching to follow that sentence.
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Back in 2012, Spence told the Herald that there are two types of vice-chancellors in Australia: the “academic’s academic” and the “managerialist bastard.” To this day, it is hard to put a finger on which description he fitted better back at Sydney, and which one he will embody as the provost of UCL. But as he steps into the shoes of Michael Arthur, who has been heavily criticised for his corporate style of running the institution, Spence will be entering a community that is yearning for an “academic’s academic.”
As he walks me through his tentative agenda, one of the issues he points out is that “UCL has grown very significantly over the last 10 years and I think that there are strategic questions around whether we want UCL to grow any bigger, or stay about the same size, or even just shrink a little.” The total number of students has doubled since 2010, reaching 48,000 last year, and with that came an increase in the numbers of professors and non-academic staff the university employs.
I remember these words when I speak to Carol Paige, a Sabbatical Officer from the Students’ Union who has been closely involved in Spence’s appointment. “Anyone who comes to UCL and sees how big it is, how departments are relying on increasing student numbers to stay afloat and to keep funding research […] anyone would try to come up with solutions. I’m not saying that reducing the number of staff is the solution, but it might be the one that Spence tries to push,” she supposes.
“Managerialist bastard,” I think to myself. But perhaps one has to be, when facing the trade-offs that he does.
Spence has just established the University Management Committee as part of his wider plans to restructure the upper levels of decision-making at UCL. What it comes down to is whether the university’s academics and students will eventually be allowed in the rooms where the big decisions are made, which seems to be a prospect that Spence favours. “He is making a lot of effort to connect with the academic community at UCL,” Carol tells me, “Michael Arthur had a bit of distance, but Michael Spence seems to be trying to build bridges and makes sure that when decisions are made in the future it is with the community rather than by blocking them out from the discussion.”
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Through the course of our conversation with Spence, I am beginning to suspect that there is a third dimension to his leadership that hasn’t been mentioned. I choose to call it “the student.” An issue which he repeatedly brings to the fore is that UCL has not invested enough in student experience, taking the excitement of its central London location for granted. “I think a strategic question for us, and one that Covid has made clear is even more important, is that students are keen to get back to university not just for teaching, but for all the other things that it entails,” he says. “I think that is even more important now, in job application, where an excellent degree is a sine qua non and then everybody wants to know what you have done on top of that.”
I wonder why, out of all the challenges that the education sector is currently facing, Spence chooses to focus on student satisfaction – an issue that other public figures in the UK have seemingly brushed aside for the time being. I catch Spence’s tone turn ever-so-slightly regretful, and the answer becomes painfully clear: “When I was at Sydney as an undergraduate, I had up to five part-time jobs at any given time, I commuted into university, I commuted to the jobs, I saw my friends and that was basically it.”
Spence did “virtually anything that would pay the bills,” from teaching Italian and collecting data for a polling company, to working as a wine waiter and even a table chef. “One summer, I wanted to go overseas and worked five waiting jobs; one starting with breakfast room service in a hotel and one finishing at 5:00 a.m. in a 24-hour restaurant!”
“Then I spent time at Oxford as a PhD student and did the kind of get-involved-in-university-life thing that, quite frankly, I just didn’t have the opportunity to do at Sydney. And I really valued it,” he reminisces. Spence picked up rowing and became increasingly involved with the Church of England.
For Spence, the challenge is in finding ways to democratise student life: “How do you make it available to the ordinary students like me, who were commuting in and had to earn money and get their way through their degree?”
It is easy to forget that every provost was once an “ordinary student.” Maybe it is because of the suits that Spence wears in his own living room, or because there will always be a group of dissatisfied students willing to chant his name on campus, regardless of the decisions he makes. “But you want that, right? A place where ideas are taken seriously ought to be the place where protest happens,” he doesn’t mind. He was himself once chanting someone else’s name.