WEEKEND READING: Transforming universities towards equity: a response to the Blackman HEPI Report
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This blog was kindly authored by Richard Heller, Emeritus Professor, Universities of Manchester UK, and Newcastle Australia
In his 2025 HEPI Report A Call for Radical Reform: Higher Education for a Sustainable Economy Professor Tim Blackman states ‘[…] one of the most significant divides in our society is between those with and without higher education […]’. He calls for reducing this divide through an expansion of higher education to universal participation – but notes that this will require a transformation in the way this education is delivered. Such transformation would include a more flexible and lifelong learning model as well as new and more efficient routes to qualification. Central to the reform would be an accounting for the carbon footprint of all of the activities of the university and a ‘national curriculum system with subjects grouped according to their expected carbon footprint, from carbon negative to positive, and prioritised accordingly.’
In the short time since Professor Blackman wrote his Report, the problems facing universities have grown, making the reforms he suggests even more urgent. My recent book seeks to take the Report’s call for radical reform forward by describing a new framework for higher education. This goes beyond Blackman’s illustrative examples to set out a whole new model. In doing this, I differ from Blackman’s top-down model, which includes regulating academic knowledge, to a new bottom-up paradigm based on distributing knowledge for equity.
Although the term equity is not used by Blackman, the call for universal participation (building on his previous 2017 HEPI Report The Comprehensive University) offers a clear focus on equity as a way of approaching the societal divides which drive much of his reasoning. Thomas Piketty complains about the lack of attention by universities to equity in his book with Michael Sandel, Equality – What It Means and Why It Matters:‘I think the fact that we’ve sort of given up on an ambitious egalitarian objective for higher education is at the source of many of our problems today – economic, and even more so democratic’.
As well as inequity in access to a university education (geographic and demographic), there is inequity in the creation of knowledge, as populations and groups are under-represented in research. This is carried through to inequity in the publication of research and further into educational resources. Within universities, there is inequity between high-paid executives at the centre and academic staff – many of whom are on precarious contracts as universities have become business enterprises and education a commodity. University resources have become highly dependent on fees from overseas students – but the pattern of enrolments even exacerbates global inequity as it bears no relation to the educational needs of the country from which the students come.
My new open access book Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity, and Higher Education Transformation, offers a mechanism for transformation of the sector built around a framework for distributing knowledge for equity. The framework identifies societal needs, facilitates equitable research creation and publication, and utilises Open Educational Resources and their repositories through a distributed model. Central campuses are largely replaced by physical or virtual local hubs, supported by a decentralised digital infrastructure. Education is largely online, reflecting the way information is transmitted today, and uses best practice. Collaboration underpins each part of the framework.
If we take each of the chapters of the Blackman Report, we can explore how this distributed model responds:
The climate imperative
Blackman puts attention to climate change, the most pressing existential threat facing humanity, as central to university reform . The distributed model is responsive to this imperative. Buildings and the travel required to reach them by staff and students (particularly international students), as well as university practices such as student field trips and conference attendance, all leave a carbon footprint. Online learning – a core aspect of the distributed model – has been estimated to reduce the carbon footprint by 80 per cent.
Rethinking the higher education model
In this chapter, Blackman makes the point that the standard three-year honours degree is no longer fit for purpose and should be replaced by flexible, shorter offerings relevant for learners at different stages of their lives. He also makes the point that education based on digital technologies can reduce costs, leading to increased productivity. It’s also scalable, allowing increased participation and access from those who currently miss out. The distributed model has the potential to meet each of these suggestions, adding access to meet global needs. While online learning has these advantages, we should note the importance of ensuring best practice – which is not met by just making recordings of lectures available online. The advent of decentralised federated digital infrastructures allows the reduction in inequitable central control from BigTech while providing essential infrastructure for the distributed model.
Countering disinformation and building a knowledge commons
This chapter proposes that increasing participation in higher education – hence increasing the ‘knowledge commons’ – is important for the population’s ability to respect evidence and reduce the impact of disinformation. The distributed model will have the effect of increasing access to higher education and will, in its design, increase the knowledge commons since a key aspect of the model is ‘openness’. This is where educational resources and research publications are no longer behind paywalls.
Diamond Open Access publishing is a community-driven, academic-led and academic-owned model allowing open access to journals and textbooks. Collaborative development of Open Educational Resources and open repositories of educational resources and their curation are also part of the model. Within universities, another idea is to give academic credit for the development, review and curation of open resources in a similar way that research activity is rewarded. The distributed model I describe does not include Blackman’s requirement for regulation of the academic knowledge that adds to the knowledge commons, as it envisages a distributed and less regulated form of knowledge development and sharing. However, both approaches emphasise the importance of evidence both in how and what academics teach – in the age of AI, information is everywhere and education should go beyond the acquisition of knowledge to reasoning and critical appraisal.
A tertiary vision for an integrated and inclusive education system
Blackman suggests the need for both increased flexibility for students to mix and match between institutions over time and that a new national curriculum system, focused on national priorities, be developed . The distributed model allows flexibility – even an extension to student-led options where students pick and choose smaller course components and make up their own awards, perhaps through micro-credits. The model does not go into the detail of curriculum design, but the framework for distributing knowledge for equity does propose a structure which starts with making sure that societal priorities are met. The adoption of a distributed model would encourage distributed leadership and increase academic autonomy. New locally driven academic environments and research initiatives responsive to societal needs would evolve to increase knowledge equity. This distributed approach differs from the ‘top down’ regulated approach, which Blackman proposes.
Conclusion
The Blackman Report concludes with the observation that the higher education sector is well placed to produce the knowledge and skills required for a sustainable economy and to tackle mis- and disinformation, its contribution being essential for societal sustainability. I agree with this – universities are full of excellent, committed and innovative people with considerable capacity. I also agree with Blackman’s plea for urgent action and system change – this urgency is replicated in my book, as well as in a previous HEPI blog Calling for a bold new vision for higher education. We share the desired end-point of increased equity and attention to societal priorities, especially climate change, but differ in the methods of getting there – increased centralised regulation or distributed autonomy. Nevertheless, public engagement, government action and political leadership will be required to create the environment for a transition. How about starting some experiments to obtain evidence for the transition to a new model of higher education based on equity?
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
Yes, everyone should have the possibility to access higher education. We have had expansion in student numbers since the 1960s, but it has not translated into sustained economic growth as the State has failed to face the consequences of inadequate investment by our own sources of capital.
Telecommunications and computerization can continue to enable more distributed learning.
The Great Vacation is a legacy of our agricultural past and degrees can be shortened to two years and there are innumerable short courses.
The cost of Open Access publications can fall further.
The State can fund more societal needs directly.
All of these proposals are continuations of decade long trends, beginning with Keele University, and then the Plate Glass Universities and the Open University, but the level of equity has fallen since the 1960s. Ownership of a degree and the distribution of knowledge has not caused more distribution in wealth, for example, in home ownership, which was caused by the lack of housebuilding (the rented sector is one of the largest economic sectors and source of businesses). Academics often can not afford the accommodation and commuting costs on their own puny salaries funded by UKRI and tuition fees, as Imperial College discovered some years ago when developing its White City Campus and the problem has exacerbated there and elsewhere.
We have been experimenting with egalitarian projects, even before A D. Lindsay and Keele. Why did we not build houses and ignore deindustrialization?
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Dr John Milliken says:
Richard Heller offers an important and timely extension of Tim Blackman’s argument. His emphasis on distributing knowledge through local hubs, open resources, flexible learning and decentralised infrastructures provides a persuasive alternative to the assumption that higher education must remain concentrated within large, campus-based institutions.
However, distribution alone may not deliver equity. Educational resources can be widely available while learners remain isolated, qualifications fragmented and progression routes unclear. Equity must therefore be considered not only in terms of access to knowledge, but also through the complete developmental journey: the recognition of potential, entry into learning, the formation of capability, successful progression, occupational application and opportunities for later renewal.
This suggests that a distributed model requires an accompanying architecture of connection. Micro-credentials must accumulate into intelligible and portable awards. Local hubs must link effectively with schools, further education, universities, employers and professional bodies. Online provision must incorporate sustained teaching, pastoral support, formative dialogue and opportunities for belonging rather than merely transmitting content digitally.
The apparent choice between Blackman’s central coordination and Heller’s distributed autonomy may also be less absolute than it first appears. A viable tertiary ecology will require local initiative and academic autonomy, but also national arrangements for funding, credit transfer, quality, recognition and movement between institutions. The challenge is not to choose between centralisation and distribution, but to create sufficient integration without recreating excessive institutional control.
There is also an opportunity to widen the knowledge commons beyond formally employed university academics. Independent scholars, retired academics and experienced practitioners represent a substantial but neglected intellectual resource. A genuinely distributed system could reconnect these “academic orphans” with learners, communities and research networks.
The next step may indeed be experimentation—but the experiments should test not simply whether knowledge can be distributed, but whether distributed provision can create coherent, supported and socially valued pathways through which people develop and apply capability across the life course.
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Kevin J Brazant says:
A thought-provoking piece. I particularly welcome the emphasis on equity as the organising purpose of higher education rather than simply widening participation. I’d add one further dimension to the discussion. Distributing knowledge is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We also need to consider how knowledge is “created”, “mediated” and “experienced” through teaching, partnership and dialogue.
The risk is that we redesign systems without transforming the learning relationships within them. Openness, digital infrastructure and distributed models all create opportunity, but equity ultimately depends on whether students have genuine agency to contribute, question, co-create and see their lived experiences recognised as legitimate forms of knowledge. In that sense, transforming universities is as much a pedagogical and relational challenge as it is an organisational one.
Perhaps the next phase of reform is not only distributing knowledge more equitably, but redistributing the power to create it.
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