Universities, Education and the National Economy

Michael D. Stephens

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138310735
• eBook ISBN: 9780429860188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1989, Universities, Education and the National Economy looks at changes in the structure of British industry, which have brought into question the traditional role of universities in the economy. The emphasis on high technology in many emerging industries has prompted a closer relationship between science-based industries and the science departments of many leading universities. However, such co-operation is not always so apparent, and the emphasis in many universities on the wider aspects of education at the expense of a straightforward vocationalism remains a stumbling block. This book makes it clear however that it is not just a case of academic idealism vying with industrial philistinism. These essays, each of them by a leading figure in the world of higher education, emphasize the complexity of the relationship between the universities and economy. The authors discuss how difficult it has been to establish and effective dialogue between the educational and economic spheres and to decide what exactly it is that the latter requires of the former. The successes that have been achieved to date are highlighted and the problems that remain are analysed.

Part One

Setting the Scene

1

Whose University?

Christine Shinn

The thirst for knowledge is one of the ‘primal appetites of man’.¹ That thirst was slaked for thousands of years before society formalized learning and enquiry into the studium generale which heralded the birth of the medieval university. The Platonic and Aristotelian concept of learning was the predisposition of the self to what was good and by that means to the service of the State. The Christian overlay modified that concept in order to organize educational resources ‘to ensure the maintenance of a literate priesthood’.²

The Church needed clergy as much as the middle and lower classes needed an outlet for their spirit of enquiry, and by 1300 guilds of masters and students were well established in cities such as Paris and Bologna. Such guilds attracted recruits from a wide geographical area using Latin as the lingua franca. These were cosmopolitan associations, semi-autonomous in that they regulated their own affairs and, by doing so, frequently came into conflict with the locality which housed them. The ‘battles’ in Oxford in the early thirteenth century, resulting in the injury and death of scholars and townspeople, were an indication of such frictions. The acquisition of authority by the protection of Pope or Emperor and the conferring of privileges on the studia guaranteed their existence but threatened their essential identity. If the twelfth-century student had been as a pilgrim travelling unencumbered in quest of the Holy Grail of knowledge, then his fourteenth-century successor at Naples, or Treviso, Toulouse, Avignon, Grenoble, or Cambridge, was in danger of losing that apostolic poverty to become part of an institution with statutes and bills and codified privileges and the ambiguous advantages of patronage.

While the embryonic universities had remained outside society their poverty had afforded a kind of strength. Without physical possessions they could migrate if the environment in which scholars and masters settled became uncongenial or demanding. They were not accountable to the communities among whom they lived and indeed tended at best to ignore those communities and at worst to antagonize them. As the universities expanded in numbers and in their organization they became more noticeable and society gradually developed an interest in them. In Bologna the citizens endowed two permanent chairs, as a result of which they had some rights in the selection of the chairholders, although the students had previously held this responsibility. Both Church and Empire understood that they were dependent on education to provide men of learning to form ‘an aristocracy of labour in medieval society. They were the opinion makers [who] influenced the political argument and shaped ecclesiastical policy’.³

As the medieval world emerged from the thrall of Pope and Emperor and recognized the power of nationalism the universities responded by seeking the protection and munificence of the monarch and his court, and their international nature diminished. The emergent universities were not narrowly vocational in what they studied, in spite of their concentration on theology, but it was through their education that Church and State were provided with office-holders. Their graduates were able to use the Church in pursuance of a civil career, and in fact ecclesiastics held every high office in the State until 1340, when Edward III appointed a layman as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Graduates with a foundation in the seven liberal arts and trained in dialectic and disputation could find careers administering the affairs of the large lay and ecclesiastical households and in the expanding diplomatic service. The Church continued to produce some of the foremost intellectuals of the period as well as some of the most prejudiced bigots, and the presence of the powerful Dominican and Franciscan orders both enriched academic life and impaired academic freedom. They professed the value of knowledge but could not sanction discovery that led away from dogma. John Wyclif was expelled from Oxford by a union of bishops and monarch in the mid-fourteenth century, and there followed a period of limited intellectual achievement at the two English universities before the new wave of humanism followed about a century later.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century Oxford and Cambridge Universities had acquired approximately twenty-five endowed colleges and were, by patronage and benefaction, established as part of society. They had produced pre-eminent theologians, and civil lawyers, as well as men of culture and inventiveness. They had engendered a heady intellectual ardour. Oxford and Cambridge in the 1500s had been adopted by society and had begun to enjoy the stability and material advantage which that ensured. Rashdall wrote the epitaph of the medieval university:

The power of embodying its ideals in institutions was the particular genius of the medieval mind, as its most conspicuous defect lay in the corresponding tendency to materialise them.⁴

A new era was beginning in which for several hundred years Church and State were so divided that citizens in England could not bear allegiance simultaneously to Pope and monarch. The universities as producers of the trained intellect were seen by both sides as necessary supporters or dangerous enemies and were consequently bribed and threatened alternatively. The universities prepared men for the pulpit, and the pulpit in the sixteenth century was as powerful as the twentieth-century mass media. Between 1509 and 1603 the universities were required to adapt to the beliefs and doctrines of the Crown while it attacked and then sought to reform the Church, created a new Church, returned to the old Church and finally attempted to weld Church and State together in the Crown. However much they professed their delight in learning and however great their bounty to the universities, neither monarch nor statesman would grant the universities the most cherished gift of independence and unfettered development. All of them and their chief Ministers ‘sought to bind the Universities in Statutes, to exclude all save those who held the views on religion approved at the time, and often only for the time’.⁵

The universities lost freedom over the selection of students, curricular matters and, most important, the appointment and dismissal of staff and the promulgation of ideas. These have always been the areas regarded as quintessential in the existence of the true university and identified as such in the twentieth-century debates on university autonomy joined by such commentators as Ashby and Hetherington. The pressure on the universities, then, was not to meet a particular demand for manpower but to buttress the existing system by overtly proclaiming loyalty to the hierarchy and by ceasing to teach and study those areas which might create dissent. The monarch’s anxiety, implemented by injunction and visitation, that the universities should conform, indicated the power that was believed to be invested in the universities. The State could not afford to allow them to deviate. They were no longer outside society but an integral part of it. The patron who had assisted their development was claiming his dues.

The situation was not confined to England, for it had also affected the universities on the Continent:

under the territorial confessional states, the last remnants of corporate autonomy disappeared, and the long process by which the secular state had been encroaching upon the university reached its climax. The same formula which had been used to bring peace at Augsburg was the effective formula governing intellectual life — cuius regio, euius universitas.⁶

When relative peace had been restored and the chronicles of burning, intimidation and destruction had ended, the universities could not return to their previous position ‘outside’ society. Monarch and statesman had learned how universities could be handled. Queen Elizabeth instigated constitutional changes which transferred authority from the body of resident teachers to the heads of the colleges because ‘the monarch found the colleges more easy to manage than the university as a whole’.⁷

As the danger to the stability of the State became less acute the restrictions on the universities were reduced but the ultimate sanction of the Test Acts remained until 1871, barring an English university education and an academic career to all those who were not prepared to swear allegiance to the State Church. For over 350 years the universities were first battered by political and religious pressures and then smothered by the complacency of monopoly. Their obedience was required in a period of turmoil when free speech was dangerous but, later, their silence and inertia were secured by comfort. As a generalization — and of course there were examples of men of integrity and brilliance and developments of value — the two universities in the eighteenth century expressed a lack of concern for and a lack of interest in society which set them apart from it. A university experience became a selfish indulgence which men of money could procure for pleasure and which could seldom be regarded as education, since it little changed their perspective on life. The curricula did not reflect the needs of society, not as the result of a conscious decision to contribute better to society by disinterest but rather as a consequence of an apathy and arrogance which reflected uninterest.

This withdrawal from the community in which they were based was the more obvious as the intellectual energy of that community expanded and diversified. The Royal Society was founded in 1662, and flourished, as did numerous other societies which sprang up for the encouragement of the arts and sciences. The spontaneous popular movement which had given birth to the medieval studia was now regenerated in the middle-class interest in learning. Bacon and Boyle edited their works; Lord Lonsdale gave public lectures, as did Demainbray, Martin, Ferguson, and Higgins. All these were dedicated to the growing interest in and knowledge of the sciences. Henry Cavendish opened his houses and facilities to fellow researchers. The Society of Civil Engineers was established in the 1770s and within eight years of its foundation the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in Great Britain had attracted over 2,500 members. The plastic arts were not forgotten, with the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. Doctors were trained either at non-English universities or by apothecaries, and this latter group was also responsible for the support of much scientific research. If the universities would not contribute to society, then other institutions would take the initiative. The Dissenting academies were established to provide not only for the Nonconformist but also for those who saw the need of a more appropriate and realistic education than could be offered at that time by either Oxford or Cambridge. The leading citizens of the modern industrial society were being educated either out of the country or in those young academies which, to the shame of the two ancient universities, provided a better studium generale than either of them.⁸ Peace, prosperity and power were the hallmarks of England at this period, reflected in free trade, free enterprise and free markets. This laissez-faire doctrine was extended to the universities and little was sought of them, as little was given by them.

In the nineteenth century society had to demand the education it needed. With the rise in the dignity of the citizen and the importance of the working class, with increased awareness of social liberalism, which came to be seen as ‘liberal socialism’,⁹ with the recognition of the rights of the individual, first to vote and then to develop his potential through education, came the interest in the reform of the condition of Oxford and Cambridge, the establishment of London and Durham Universities, and finally the civic university movement which created the shape of higher education provision in England until the Robbins expansion of the mid-1960s.

The aspirant universities and university colleges were not the creation of the State. They were instead a response to the needs of a successful commercial and manufacturing society and of communities hungry for enlightenment and intellectual progress. Their objectives were facilitated by individual benefactions or local patriotism. Building upon the extended franchise, improved school provision and the efforts of, inter alia, the Chartists, the Christian Scientists, the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Fabians, the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Artisans’ Libraries, the People’s Colleges, the Co-operative Societies, the Workers’ Educational Association, and the University Extension Movement, centres of learning evolved at eleven locations between 1850 and 1892. Southampton, Manchester, Exeter, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Liverpool, and Reading all possessed a university college by the end of the century.¹⁰ They were, in part, to respond to the demand for trained and educated manpower for industries based locally, such as metallurgy, textile technology, marine and electric power engineering, pharmacy, and agriculture.

This movement was not an example of centralized national planning. It was not State-initiated. The freedom from political or religious oppression of these institutions reflected their accommodation within society yet isolation from the State. Their lack of ability to develop to meet their potential, their ad hoc growth, resulting in duplication or omission, and, above all, their uncertainty of survival and financial vulnerability were consequences of this isolation. Reluctantly and hesitantly the State, by its first tiny grant to universities and university colleges in 1889, took up these institutions whose birth it had not planned, and committed itself to rearing them. University education was thus proclaimed as, in part, the responsibility of the State. The history of the century from 1889 to the report of the Croham Committee is the history of the State and the universities identifying, agreeing, and reshaping their roles vis-à-vis one another. Since the function of neither the State nor the universities is static, and since the perception of citizens, taxpayers and scholars is dynamic, the relationship between...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part One: Setting the Scene
• Part Two: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Index