Email
Right now, the main campus of Oxford Brookes University looks much the same as many other UK universities. A bit of a building site. The hike in tuition fees to £9,000 per year has concentrated the minds of vice-chancellors, every bit as much as it's had for those students. "The numbers at our open days have doubled in the last two years," says Janet Beer, vice-chancellor at Oxford Brookes. "Previously, many prospective students would list a university on their UCAS forms without necessarily having visited it. They knew of its reputation and were happy enough with that. Now they all want to check that the university is as good as it says it is. And quite rightly so. They are paying a lot of money and they deserve the best facilities."
Oxford Brookes is currently refurbing its schools of architecture and design along with building a new lecture theatre, library and student union centre. But funding the works out of savings, donations and loans is only part of Beer's headache. The university is located on several different sites and Beer has always been aware of the dangers of perceived favouritism. "You don't want to create the impression that students on other campuses will be disadvantaged by the uplift taking place here," she says. "So we make sure that every faculty has an interest on this site."
Beer was appointed in 2007 and is one of only 16 women vice-chancellors in the UK. "You'd have thought higher education would be a progressive environment, but it really isn't. A woman on my governing body recently observed it's more sexist than the construction industry in which she works. Management in higher education tends to be very male, very old school, with people appointing those who look like them. When I travel abroad, people often assume I'm the PA. I once checked into a hotel in India with a male colleague and was told, "We've given the man a double-room." I said, "I know, and I want one too.
"Part of the problem is that senior posts in higher education are often a matter of turn-taking rather than appointment. Promotions to head of department, dean and pro vice-chancellor are made on time-serving and seniority, so women who have taken career breaks to have kids are disadvantaged. It's not quite so bad in the post-92 universities where the appointment process is more open and less tap on the shoulder, but it's clearly still far from perfect. There were 16 women vice-chancellors when I started here at Oxford Brookes and there's still only 16, so there definitely seems to be a one in, one out trend.
"I don't want to be chippy about this. Some parts of the sector are doing well and I've had a great deal of exposure, simply because I'm a woman. When there are few women in positions of power, organisations often want to be seen to be as doing something positive for equality. But there is an element of tokenism about it that needs to be taken on. I once spoke at a function that was almost entirely male and began by saying, 'Here comes diversity.' Cue nervous laughter."
Beer studied English at Reading and Warwick – she is passionate about Edith Wharton and recently co-authored Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman with Avril Horner – but went to work for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) after finishing her postgrad as there were no jobs going in academia. During two maternity leave breaks, she worked up her postgrad thesis into a doctorate and when Margaret Thatcher dismantled the Greater London Council in the late 1980s, she was taken on by Roehampton Institute, later University, as a lecturer in English.
"It was a steep learning curve," she admits. "It took a while to get my teaching and research up to speed and I will always be grateful to Roehampton for giving me a break." Unusually, it was the process and systems of academia that attracted her interest as much as the teaching. "The ILEA had been a wonderful learning ground for innovation in management and I was keen to use the skills I had picked up."
In 1998, she moved to Manchester Metroplitan University where she set up the writing school, working with both Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, going on to become pro vice-chancellor and dean of humanities, law and social sciences. "It was hard to uproot my family and move to Manchester," she says. "My son was 12 and my daughter 10 and they felt as if it was the worst thing in the world moving away from London. I promised them it would be the last move I made until after they had left home." It was a promise Beer kept by a month.
"You didn't waste much time, did you?" was her daughter's succint email when Beer informed her she had been offered the job at Oxford Brookes within four weeks of her leaving home for university. Beer insists the timing was coincidental. "I hadn't had any plans to leave Manchester before the approach from the head hunters came along; most people's eyes had always tended to glaze over when I mentioned the Metropolitan University after Manchester."
It may well have been precisely her role at Manchester Met that made her attractive to Oxford Brookes; if anyone was likely to understand the diplomacy needed to managed an institution that was, in public perception at least, all too often over-shadowed by its noisier neighbours. "When I first got here," Beer says, "the local council made it clear that as far as it was concerned there was only one university: Oxford Brookes. Very few Oxford students stay in the area once they graduate, but a large percentage of ours go on to provide the local workforce. Over 70% of the nurses we train go on to work at the John Radcliffe Infirmary.
"Even so, status has been an issue at Oxford Brookes, despite the fact we are now working more closely with Oxford than before – especially in areas of health, now that medical practitioners have realised that patient care is improved by doctors' and nurses properly communicating with one another. The issue has been mainly one of confidence; curiously, many post-92 universities were more upbeat when they were polytechnics. The staff and management knew what they did and they knew they did it well. Since 1992, that focus has been lost and many universities aren't sure of what sort of institution they are meant to be."
So what did she do to go about instilling that confidence? "Well, obviously I changed departments into faculties," she laughs. "It's what every new vice-chancellor does to get herself noticed, isn't it? If there were faculties you turn them into departments and if there were departments vice versa. No, seriously, to start with I did nothing because I wanted to see for myself how well everything was working. Otherwise you are making change for change's sake, which isn't going to help anyone. But one thing I did do early on, was to take down the slogan 'Leading, modern, best, new' from the website. It was such an impoverished narrative, not least because modern and new are two words that have really bad connotations in British higher education. In other countries, new and modern are highly prized. But not here!"
The essential element of the job for Beer was understanding the particular characteristics of Oxford Brookes itself. "Comparing one university to another is a fairly thankless and pointless task," she says. "What really counts is benchmarking your courses against your competitors. There are a few students who still pick a university because their friends went there and it's got a reputation for being a good place to have a bit of a craic, but for most, the course is all important. That's what defines their student experience. So we've beaten the drum for those courses, such as architecture, real estate management, health and life science, motor sports and history where we are world-class."
Not that it's all been plain sailing. Oxford Brookes is not a research intensive university and frequently finds itself on the wrong end of university poaching wars as other universities try to boost their ratings for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. "On October 1, I have a member of staff who will be leaving to go down the road, taking a large chunk of research money with him. It wouldn't be so bad if the fact that 95% of his work was done here at Oxford Brookes when the REF allocates its next funding round, but it doesn't work like that. Oxford will get the lot. There's no point moaning about it; that's just the way it is."
Student recruitment is another constant headache; Beer describes hitting the university's recruitment targets as landing on a sixpence. "If you're in a position where all your students have two As and a B, then you can do what you like," she says. "But we aren't, and neither do we want to, turn away students with conditional insurance offers. So it's almost impossible to get it right and we are fined if we go over our numbers. Equally, we don't want to expand departments just for the sake of it, because that can risk diluting the student experience."
Still, Beer and Oxford Brookes are both on the up and hope to keep it that way. "Student numbers are up again after a dip last year when the £9K fees were introduced and a lot of people were deterred by the sheer enormity of the rise," Beer says. "But I want to get the message out that it's not like a credit card bill. The worst that can happen is you pay it back in tax when you earn more than £21K. I believe passionately in higher education and I don't want anyone to lose out on the opportunity."
She pauses. "God, that sounds a bit pious, doesn't it? But I do mean it. It's like when I was pregnant and someone asked me what I really fancied eating. I said, 'raspberries' and she replied that I didn't have to be healthily PC just for her. But I meant it. I love raspberries."
So what comes first? Higher education or raspberries? This time there's no pause. "Raspberries."
About Janet
Job: Vice-chancellor Oxford Brookes University; vice-president Universities UK
Before that: Pro vice-chancellor and dean of humanities, law and social studies at Manchester Metropolitan University
Likes: Edith Wharton, raspberries and swimming
Most wanted: Guy Garvey to sing her to sleep each night
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next university role? Browse Guardian jobs for hundreds of the latest academic, administrative and research posts
;