{"id":1433,"date":"2012-03-18T08:37:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-18T08:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=1433"},"modified":"2012-03-18T08:37:12","modified_gmt":"2012-03-18T08:37:12","slug":"so-what-are-universities-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2012\/03\/18\/so-what-are-universities-for\/","title":{"rendered":"So, What are universities for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stefan Collini seems to be wherever you look; well, his book reviews are:\u00a0THE<\/a>, the Observer<\/a>, and the Economist<\/a> \u2013 which goes to show something of my narrow reading these days. \u00a0But for someone like me, who is a part-time student of the idea of the university in practice, a book which asks What are universities<\/em> (now) for<\/em> cannot be wholly ignored.<\/p>\n

Collini, who\u2019s professor of English literature and intellectual history at Cambridge, says that universities provide a home for attempts to extend and deepen human understanding in ways which are, simultaneously, disciplined and illimitable. \u00a0The Economist review quotes Newman<\/a>'s \"silky prose\"<\/p>\n

\u201cA university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society. \u00a0... It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

... because it reckons that Collini understood what Newman was about.<\/p>\n

I listened on-line to Collini's recent RSA<\/a> lecture the other week with great expectation and was rather underwhelmed. \u00a0I expected a liberal tour d'horizon<\/em>, a setting out of the ways in which the modern university can exercise its historic mission to save us from ourselves. \u00a0But all I remember was his plea for a graduate tax to replace the emerging arrangements.<\/p>\n

Stephen Gough and I discussed this \"mission<\/em>\" like this at the start of Chapter 21 of\u00a0our 2007 book<\/a>,\u00a0Higher Education and Sustainable Development: paradox and possibility ...<\/em><\/p>\n

We might summarise the argument so far as follows. \u00a0Universities are open systems.\u00a0 They are discrete entities, capable of planning their actions and coordinating their internal component parts.\u00a0 At the same time, they have fluid and permeable boundaries, across which they interact with a wide range of external agencies and groups.<\/p>\n

Most of these interactions can be classified as teaching, research or administration.\u00a0 A particular tension exists across all three of these domains (in administration because it must service the other two).\u00a0 We might think of this as a tension between stability and change, and between certainty and speculation.\u00a0 It is fuelled by, on the one hand, the imperative to archive, protect, apply and bequeath existing knowledge; and, on the other hand, the imperative to challenge that knowledge, to break through into unexplored territory, to go beyond problem-solving into comprehensive problem-redefinition.\u00a0 The \u2018breakthrough\u2019 has always been the gold standard of research.\u00a0 It is breakthroughs that win Nobel Prizes and shift paradigms.\u00a0 In the present, however, and as we have seen, there is an expectation that everyone <\/em>will face new, presently unimaginable circumstances in their lifetimes with which, in one way or another and for better or worse, they will learn to deal.\u00a0 This means that the tension between the known and the unknown is just as strong in teaching \u2013 particularly university teaching \u2013 as it is in research.\u00a0 We have sought to capture this tension with our rough-and-ready distinction between the Real World and Ivory Tower views of what a university is for.\u00a0 Particular people, at particular times and places, may want the answer to be one or the other: but it is inescapably both.<\/p>\n

The word \u2018inescapable\u2019 is appropriate here because this tension is also characteristic of societies.\u00a0 One might question whether this is necessarily true of all <\/em>societies, but we would suggest that it is certainly true of societies that have universities.\u00a0 In fact, it is to universities that societies delegate a large part of the responsibility for informing their management of the problem of, as Diamond (2005) puts it in the title of his book, \u2018choosing to fail or survive\u2019.\u00a0 As his historical analysis well illustrates, this choice involves, crucially, knowing at any time which knowledge to revere and which to abandon.\u00a0 However, we should note that the importance of ideas has been understood for a very long time, and was apparent even in the modern era long before anyone began a discussion about sustainable development.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That's<\/em> why Collini so disappointed me.<\/p>\n

22nd March Update<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I see that Simon Jenkins has weighed into the argument<\/a>. \u00a0I do wonder how 'Guardian readers' put up with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stefan Collini seems to be wherever you look; well, his book reviews are:\u00a0THE, the Observer, and the Economist \u2013 which goes to show something of my narrow reading these days. \u00a0But for someone like me, who is a part-time student...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications","category-news-and-updates","category-talks-and-presentations"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}