What are Universities For? by Collini Stefan

Author:Collini, Stefan [Collini, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141970370
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-02-22T20:00:00+00:00

III

One of the recurring difficulties with nearly all writing about universities, this book included, is the apparent discrepancy or lack of proportion between, on the one hand, the elevated, high-toned rhetoric of the general characterization of their purposes, and, on the other, the necessarily limited and pragmatic accommodation to contemporary circumstances that makes up daily experience in any actual university. This involves more than the familiar, perhaps universal, slippage between ideal and reality. As I suggested earlier, there is something about the uncontainable life of the mind which naturally provokes a kind of verbal excess, a straining beyond the limits of measured or concrete description. But this soaring vocabulary has somehow to be tethered to one set of historically determined institutional arrangements rather than another, and it can then become hard to see how that necessarily partial, flawed, and instrumental set of doings can ever yield outcomes that merit such elevated language. In addition, scholarship and teaching have to be about something in particular – about polymers or Dante or social-survey design or quarks or speech-acts or the Bolivian economy or a thousand and one other particular topics – and initially it is not obvious how such radically diverse activities could all be subject to the same canons of intellectual enquiry or issue in anything like comparable educational outcomes.

This general difficulty is only intensified by reflection on the everyday experience of teaching or studying in most British universities in the early twenty-first century. Even if it were granted that in principle some continuity could be found between the bafflingly diverse range of activities now carried on in these institutions and the large claims made for their purpose and value, it might still seem that only the arts of satire or parody could do justice to the conditions under which these activities are often pursued in practice. As I suggested earlier, the sheer scale of the transformation of British higher education in the past twenty years has created a new institutional world, beyond even the altered political and cultural attitudes of which this expansion is the partial expression. Different observers of this new world will, each with some plausibility, select different features of it for praise or criticism. Universities may be seen as more relevant, more inclusive, and more accountable than their predecessors of a generation or two ago; they may equally be seen as less distinctive, less attractive, and less rewarding. They are undeniably more diverse in both types of institution and fields of study, and they are arguably more varied in quality and viability. The declarations of purpose which might, in 1850, have seemed adequate to the existence of Oxford and Cambridge and a handful of Scottish and London colleges, or which might, in 1950, have embraced the broadly homogeneous twenty-three British universities of that time, may seem to be put under more strain by the diversity embraced in the (roughly) 130 universities of today.

However, this apparent diversity actually masks a good deal of continuity in fundamentals. Many new

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