Utopian Universities

A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s

Miles Taylor, Jill Pellew, Miles Taylor, Jill Pellew

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350227385
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350138650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education, some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between 1961 and 1970. This volume offers a comparative and connective global history of these institutions, illustrating how their establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation sheds light on the social and cultural topography of the long 1960s.

With an impressive geographic coverage - using case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia - the book explores how these universities have influenced academic disciplines and pioneered new types of teaching, architectural design and student experience. From educational reform in West Germany to the establishment of new institutions with progressive, interdisciplinary curricula in the Commonwealth, the illuminating case studies of this volume demonstrate how these universities shared in a common cause: the embodiment of 'utopian' ideals of living, learning and governance.

At a time when the role of higher education is fiercely debated, Utopian Universities is a timely and considered intervention that offers a wide-ranging, historical dimension to contemporary predicaments.

Part One

1

Learning from Redbrick: Utopianism and architectural legacy of the civic universities

by William Whyte

The new universities of the ‘60s created breathing space amidst the dusty, churchy culture of Oxbridge, Durham and the like. The Victorian red bricks had their own imposing buildings and values – I’d already had a bewildering false start in one of those. But the new universities sat geographically and culturally apart – a fresh start.

Julia Condon, ‘Warwick in 1970’.

It is an encouraging thought, especially for a volume devoted to the new universities of the 1960s. Recalling her student days at Warwick, Julia Condon pictured the place as distinctively different: ‘a fresh start’.¹ For her, at any rate, the feel, the culture, even the location of the university marked it out as new and different, neither as reactionary as ‘dusty, churchy’ Oxbridge nor as daunting as the old and ‘imposing’ civics. As a leading figure in Warwick’s student politics, she is someone whose experience is worth attending to. It matters that she found Warwick freeing, fresh and new. It matters, too, that she campaigned – with many other students there – to preserve and enhance this sense of freedom; that she was willing to join in with the occupations and to contribute to the publications which made Warwick such a cause célèbre, such an icon of the new universities more generally. That such a first-hand, first-rate witness identified Warwick as a fresh start and also associated this feeling with the physical environment of the university is likewise very telling.

The architecture of the new universities was indeed intended to speak of this ‘fresh start’. It was understood as such by visitors, commentators and many of those living and working in Warwick and elsewhere. For contemporaries, these were the ‘plateglass’ universities: distinct not only from Oxbridge and redbrick, but also from the smaller ‘whitetiles’ – Exeter, Reading, Nottingham, Southampton, Leicester and Hull – which had been created and chartered in the first half of the twentieth century.² For subsequent historians, too, the architecture of the new universities still speaks of a ‘utopianist’ moment: a radical break with older patterns of British higher education, a caesura which was embodied and expressed in assertive, distinctively different buildings and plans.³ In that sense, our witness from Warwick does not just speak for herself, she voices a view which is widely held.

It is, however, worth pausing to consider whether these claims of uniqueness and utopianism – this sense of a ‘fresh start’ both architectural and educational – actually stack up. In the most minimal sense, after all, every university is utopian. Their foundation, their construction and their operation all rest on the assumption that these academic communities will somehow transform their inhabitants and the world around them.

Nor were the new universities the only institutions which built – and often built big – both to express this idealism and to help foster the utopian communities which universities were intended to be. Examples of this can be found all across the globe. Bold, demonstrative architecture has proved especially attractive to British universities in the last 200 years, with reforming Oxbridge and the ambitious, insecure civics each embracing distinctive styles and modes of building.⁴ Small wonder, for as Sir Walter Moberly, the chairman of the University Grants Committee (UGC), observed in 1946, ‘From Plato downwards, educators have recognized the powerful indirect influence of physical surroundings.’⁵

As this suggests, the new universities of the 1960s had a pre-history – a pre-history which is architectural as well as educational. Indeed, the chief burden of this chapter is precisely to stress the extent to which these institutions shared a similar debt to the older universities. And by this, I don’t mean, as some historians have suggested and some contemporaries implied, that the plateglass universities were little more than an updating of Oxbridge. Keele was no more Balliol in the Potteries than Sussex was, as its detractors put it, ‘Balliol-on-sea’.⁶ Rather, what I want to insist on is the importance of the other, civic, redbrick tradition in shaping these universities and the architecture they embraced. The ‘utopian universities’ represent, I shall argue, not a radical departure from English precedent, but rather a series of responses to an ongoing debate about the nature of the university and the architectural expression and planning that this implied.

This is not, of course, to downplay the excitement that the new universities engendered. Nor do I wish to dismiss their remarkable architecture, which has recently and rightly become the focus for serious research. We are not wrong to see them as a series of experiments. We are also right to think that of these campuses as aspects of a broader movement, places which share a similar ethos and achieve similar effects on those who visit them. That Keith Joseph, the cabinet minister responsible for universities, marred his visit to UEA in the early 1980s by speaking throughout as though he was visiting Essex does not just speak of his eccentricity.⁷ It also reveals the way in which all these plateglass universities participated in a joint architectural enterprise.

Yet this utopianist moment was absolutely not confined to the new universities. Indeed, it is worth noting that in a more global sense, the seven new universities and their forerunner Keele made very little difference to the educational landscape of Britain. Real expansion and far more profound experimentation – both educational and architectural – went on elsewhere. It was the civic universities – Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and the rest – which took the largest share of student numbers. Leeds grew from just over 3,000 to just under 10,000 students in the decade from 1963 to 1973.⁸ Manchester went from around 5,000 to almost 15,000 at exactly the same time.⁹ And, of course, the sixties witnessed the foundation of a bewildering range of new institutions of higher education – from teacher-training colleges (many of them future universities) to technological universities like Loughborough or Aston. Most important – in conception if not, ultimately, in realization – were the polytechnics, who pioneered not just a new map of learning, but wholly new ideas about the nature of higher education. And they were big. Put it this way, of the 400,000 members of the National Union of Students in 1969, only 42 per cent were at university.¹⁰ And of these, only about one in ten attended the universities this book is about.

Architecturally, what this means is that the great projects of Essex, Sussex and elsewhere were more than matched by developments in other British universities. Manchester, indeed, became known as ‘an empire on which the concrete never set’, whilst Leeds found itself with a mega-structure that may very well have possessed the longest corridor in Europe.¹¹ Little wonder that the vice-chancellor of Nottingham should observe in 1964 that his life was now ‘largely made up of bricks, mortar and money’.¹² Little wonder too that Malcolm Bradbury should diagnose the mental illness suffered by universities in this period in The History Man, published in 1975. It was, he said, ‘building mania’. Nothing less than ‘an Edifice Complex’.¹³ It was true; and the architecture of both the new universities and their older, civic rivals – though not, significantly, as we shall see, that of the polytechnics – bore witness to this general truth.

That the seven new universities of the 1960s should have been so successful in asserting their distinctiveness and unique importance owes much to a persistent problem in the analysis of British higher education. To this day, journalists, educationalists, even novelists have focused overwhelming attention on the two ancient English universities.¹⁴ Their history, their wealth and their social – though not necessarily their educational – prestige have made Oxford and Cambridge the datum against which all other universities have been judged. This was a problem in 1910, when the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham, Oliver Lodge, complained that ‘British people when they think of a University always think of those two’. It remains a significant obstacle to a proper understanding of university history. And it has been especially problematic when assessing the new universities of the 1960s. Our Oxbridge obsession has meant that the implicit – and, indeed, often the explicit – point of comparison has almost always been two institutions, which as Lodge pointed out over a century ago ‘are quite exceptional in the world. As universities they are unique’.¹⁵

This preoccupation with Oxbridge has meant that the very real structural and functional similarities between plateglass and redbrick have tended to be ignored or downplayed. Even at the time, there tended to be a lazy assumption – especially amongst journalists – that Oxford and Cambridge were the models on which the new universities were based. Yet, in fact, their development echoed and was strongly shaped by earlier foundations.

The civic universities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been founded by urban elites and by local government.¹⁶ Business leaders, local aristocrats and often the bishop took a commanding role in overseeing the institution: a relationship which could produce conflict, but which also yielded financial dividends. The civic universities were thus, in origin, literally civic: local foundations, funded by local people, and overwhelmingly – at least until the 1960s – educating local students.¹⁷ This did not mean, however, that they were insular or narrowly parochial. The fact that, until it became a university in its own right, each institution prepared students for University of London degrees ensured that, from earliest days onwards, it was undeniably part of a larger, national system.

Moreover – and more significantly still – it would be a very real mistake to assume that redbrick grew up isolated or insulated from the state. All universities owed their existence to a charter granted by the crown and were often underwritten by an act of parliament.¹⁸ Just as importantly, from the 1880s onwards, government funding became an ever-increasing source of support. Research (especially scientific research); student scholarships (especially the bursaries paid to prospective teachers, which funded most arts undergraduates until the 1960s); capital grants to erect new buildings or supply new equipment: all this meant that by the mid-twentieth century, the civic universities had become dependent on central government.¹⁹ Their students, too, were now increasingly in receipt of grants – a situation that was finally codified in the 1962 Education Act and its provision of universal financial support.

This more generous student support eroded the link between civic universities and their locality. In 1953, it was noted that fewer than half of students now came from within thirty miles of their university.²⁰ Ten years later, the statistics were stark: at Leicester 97 per cent of students came from more than thirty miles away; at Liverpool, fewer than one in ten came from within the city.²¹ At Leeds, too, the trend was undeniable, with two-thirds of students coming from within a thirty-mile radius in 1938 and two-thirds coming from outside it twenty years later.²² Small wonder that, in 1963, the well-placed commentator Noel Annan felt able to declare that ‘civic universities are no longer provincial’.²³

In almost every respect, the evolution of the new plateglass universities can be seen as a version – albeit a speeded-up version – of this redbrick story. True enough, these were institutions which, from the very first, depended almost wholly on the state. Founded away – often a very...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Afterword: The utopian universities in historical perspective
• Index
• Imprint