The age of the influencer?

Social media has, over the past week, been awash with excitable posts from freshly minted members of Parliament making their inaugural trips to Westminster.

Amid the dross that is served up on platforms such as X these days, it has been rather touching – even inspiring – to see such enthusiasm, as the intake of 2024 rally behind a crusader’s cry of public service.

A reminder of what government is supposed to be after many years of something else – long may it last.

This changing of the guard, insiders suggest, ushers in an era that will be less tied to ideology or to thinktanks, opening a door for others to influence.

Talking to Times Higher Education, several in a position to know have urged academics to seize the moment.

“Labour will need to do a lot of thinking about funding, regulation and most crucially of all, how universities help to drive economic growth. So, it’s likely to be a period where those with good ideas will be welcome, and that has to be a real opportunity for the sector,” said Andy Westwood, professor of government practice at the University of Manchester.

It would be overstating it to say that those overseeing universities and science in the new Labour administration come as entirely blank slates.

Jacqui Smith, who returns to government as minister for higher education, served in the Department for Education before her stint as home secretary, so has pedigree as a heavyweight of the Blair/Brown years.

Patrick Vallance’s stint as chief scientific adviser in the last government needs no introduction, following his very public role during the pandemic, and he now returns as science minister. Both are left-field appointments given Keir Starmer had more than 400 sitting MPs to choose from, but both have been widely praised – and writing for us this week, David Willetts, the former universities minister, is adamant that serving from the Lords – as both Smith and Vallance will – should be no barrier to success.

Another former higher education minister within the new government is David Lammy, the foreign secretary, who championed fair access during his time overseeing universities.

At a THE summit in 2019, Lammy told me that he wanted UK universities to be “elite without being elitist”, and chastised certain Oxbridge colleges for failing to do more on access, particularly for black students.

But he was perhaps most interesting, in light of his internationally focused role in the Starmer administration, on the bigger picture of inequality, economic change, and the rise of populism.

“The real issues [causing social unrest] are the fourth and fifth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence, the loss of jobs and the need for skills,” he said.

“The real issues are rampant inequality stretching societies, and in the developed world often creating an underclass. Universities have to be present in those debates because there are a group of charlatans out there who say the real issues are that there are immigrants arriving and taking your jobs.”

It would be a mistake to over-interpret these remarks from five years ago. While they still feel very relevant in 2024, it would surely be a stretch too far to assume that this means universities no longer have to worry about the part international students play in net migration, for example.

Indeed, in an intervention last week, no less a Labour figure than Tony Blair warned Starmer not to play into the hands of the new populist party Reform, led by the same old populist Nigel Farage, by being anything other than robust on immigration.

So it is clear that there is plenty of experience/baggage (take your pick) within the Starmer administration to temper the idea that this is a government entirely there for the moulding.

Handled correctly, that mix should be a good rather than a bad thing.

The changing of the guard at Westminster coincides with a flood of departures and arrivals among vice-chancellors – as we reported in the last issue of THE, one in five UK universities is set to have changed their leader during the course of this year.

Among the most respected of those departing is Nancy Rothwell, who retires after 14 years leading Manchester, and who we speak to about her time in the role this week.

Read the interview, and you will find a vice-chancellor who has been ambitious but principled; public-spirited but imbued with an equal enthusiasm for excelling in and learning from other arenas including the cut-throat world of the boardroom of a top FTSE company.

So here’s an idea for both the new MPs flooding into Parliament, and the new vice-chancellors flooding into university leadership positions across the UK: be more Nancy.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com