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Something has gone deeply wrong with the university - too deeply wrong to be put right by any merely bureaucratic means. What's wrong is, simply, that our official idea of education, the idea that inspires all government policies and 'initiatives', is itself uneducated. With the growing emphasis in higher education on training in supposedly useful skills, has the very ethos of the university been subverted? And does this more utilitarian university succeed in adding to the national wealth, the basis on which politicians justify the large public expenditure on the higher education system? Should we get our idea of a university from politicians and bureaucrats or from J.H. Newman, Jane Austen and Socrates?The New Idea of a University is an entertaining and highly readable defence of the philosophy of liberal arts education and an attack on the sham that has been substituted for it. It is sure to scandalize all the friends of the present establishment and be cheered elsewhere.

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University

Ideology

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	06 mars 2012
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781845403720
Langue	English

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Title Page
The New Idea of a University
Duke Maskell & Ian Robinson
Lost was the Nation’s Sense, nor could be found,
While the long solemn Unison went round.

Copyright Page
First published in 2001 by Haven Books
Paperback published in 2002 by Imprint Academic
PO Box 1
Thorverton
EX 5 5 YX
UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147
Charlottesville, VA
22906-7147
Digital version converted and published in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2001 Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson
The right of Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Preface: Anecdotes and Judgement
Thirty years ago, snootiness about American secondary and higher education was widespread in Britain. The USA was frequently used in British academic circles as a cautionary example. Mass-market culture and television-addiction were thought to have reduced the number of potential American students at the same time as their universities were being swamped by too many students. There, we thought, was the blackboard jungle: the schools had no safeguards like the nationwide standards enforced by our excellent HMIs and visible in our O- and A-level. In the richest nation on earth, students were not properly supported by the state and many had to spend time that should have been given to reading working their way through college. The USA had far too many degree-granting bodies, with the results that there were no common standards and an American first degree often meant nothing: real university work was not started until the postgraduate level, where it could be delayed even longer by things called ‘taught masters degrees’. Even research work was probably vitiated by over-specialization and subordination to the department programme of some high-powered professor; but a PhD was necessary because without one work in a university was not obtainable. American academics were often without any security in their posts and were constantly pressured to publish. Our own thorns being different, these were all things we thought we had to be on guard against.
How has it happened then that we have firmly established in Britain exactly the situation we used to attribute (rightly or wrongly) to the USA? Liberal education in England may survive in the twenty-first century, not very conspicuously, at two universities. In Wales (which we know) liberal education has no prospects, and we are not optimistic about its chances in Scotland or Ireland. We think this matters.
* * *
Much of this book is what the social scientists sometimes call ‘anecdotal’: if we can suggest why this is a proper mode of argument part of our work is already done. History is always anecdotal. Statistics, maps, charts come in, but a genuine history is the story of the public experiences of some representative individuals. We think our anecdotes are representative. We write straight out of first-hand experience of a very few institutions and of one subject, the one that used just to be called English. Literature itself consists of anecdotes raised to the level of art. Novelists do not write about life in general, or when they do their readers lose interest, but we are certainly not going to admit that literature is not thinking; our leading example of thought about education is a novel. Literary criticism normally works by comment on well-chosen quotation which by its nature is selective. A critical book rightly practises criticism.
It is also because we are offering criticism that we sometimes write in the first person singular, sometimes in the first person plural. The book is ours, a joint effort for which we are jointly responsible, but different parts arise from different individual experiences, about which we can only speak individually.
I nevertheless had some embarrassment at making detailed public criticisms of colleagues with whom I have worked for many years in reasonable harmony and sometimes friendship, for judgements they made in the reasonable expectation of confidentiality. When, however, they agreed to award high classes for theorizings of a kind I demonstrate below to be intellectually disreputable, the primary university obligation to the pursuit of true judgement had to override ordinary professional reticence. I am grateful, nevertheless, for my participation in university work, and I could not have survived so long had it not been possible for most of my time.
I stuck it out, doing what I could (I say with a clear conscience), but in the end I took ‘voluntary redundancy’ as the alternative to ‘constructive dismissal’, a device that would have enabled me to argue to an ‘industrial tribunal’ that I had been appointed as a lecturer in English Language and Literature, but was now required to acquiesce in the awarding of degrees in nonsense.
Our next step, as people still believing in liberal education, had to be to write this book.
Our hope must be that there are enough survivors of the educated class who have kept their heads down, or joined us in redundancy, to recognize the truth of what we say. We even hope that they can be persuaded to raise their heads, and make a difference. Barefaced power is important, but the educated do have great advantages in forming opinion.
I.R.
October 2000
General Note
Newsletter and Newyddion refer to the in-house journal of the University of Wales, Swansea, formerly the University College of Swansea.

Acknowledgements
A version of Chapter 3 appeared in The Journal of the Philosophy of Education , July 1999; the article used in Chapter 7 appeared in The Independent , 25 October 1990; part of Chapter 9 appeared in The Spectator , 6 August 2000. The quotation on the title page is from Pope’s The Dunciad , Book IV.

I: The Economic Case for Higher Education
1 Education as Investment
In general economic success tomorrow will depend on investing in our schools today.
Gordon Brown [1]
Society benefits from higher education to the extent that a graduate pays higher taxes, as well as earning a greater amount post-tax. ... Thirdly, graduates may enhance the productivity of other people in ways not captured in their own incomes (one aspect of so-called externalities).
Dearing Report [2]
Liberal education is not only not mentioned in either The Charter for Higher Education , 1993 [3] or the Dearing Report of 1997; both documents are saved from being explicitly enemies of liberal education only by their ‘completeness of unconsciousness’ [4] that there has ever been any such thing in the world.
Universities are supposed by the Charter to ‘deliver’ a ‘service’, namely higher education, to ‘customers’, in two divisions, firstly students, and secondly business, which ‘buys’ both education and the results of commissioned research. The ‘delivery’ to students is by way of ‘teaching’ or ‘effective management of ... learning’, in ‘courses’, all of which have ‘aims and structures’ clearly described in advance, and any of which includes ‘transferable skills like problem-solving and effective communication’. The standards of these providers of teaching are guaranteed by ‘quality assurance systems’ which will be ‘regularly audited’ and will enable applicants to discover ‘how well different universities and colleges are performing’.
Each of the phrases within quotation marks, and all of them cumulatively, betray a conception of higher education which is not only not that of the university, but is actively hostile to the university. They will be considered in the necessary detail below.
Education can be thought of in the modernized manner of the Charter because of a great discovery, made (like so much of our present civilization) during the 1960s, which has been transforming the whole ‘education service’ ever since: education is an investment. Education is the same as training; education is useful; education will make us rich.
Historically it has been the other way round: a nation gets rich then uses some of the wealth to endow more universities not as engines of economic growth but as centres of piety, learning and thought. The ‘red-brick’, ‘provincial’ universities were founded, as outposts of the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge, after the brass had been made out of the muck, and not to make more brass, but because, for instance, ‘The rise of modern Universities has accredited an ambassador of poetry to every important capital of industrialism in the country.’ [5]
To give just one reminder of the dawn of the new idea in the 1960s, from a source that is a kind of anti-classic:
First, a simple statement about [education]. There is too little of it. ... Let us be crude. I am not imagining the extreme slowness of our growth in national production. The figures are these: for 1938 let us take the national product as 100 for each case. In the United States it has since gone up to 225; in West Germany to 228; in the OEEC countries on average to 164, and here to under 150 ... [five more lines of figures about GDP]. There is something wrong with us. A good deal of what is wrong, though of course not all, should be put down to our educational deficiencies. [6]
So we needed more education to get our GDP increasing as fast as Germany’s. A quarter of a century