Common Sense and the Future Proofed University

Abstract

A common mood among academics throughout the first world is nostalgia for the golden age of elite education (Trowler 1997, Holm-Nielsen 2018). Forty years ago, classes were small, heads and deans were friendly and collegial team leaders support staff supported academic activity, research was undertaken for its own sake and also for its social utility; but never just to get a publication to help keep one's job. It was usually safe to hold tutorials with members of the opposite gender without the need of a chaperone or surveillance. Tests, quizzes, essays and examinations were marked solely with reference to the academic performance of the candidate. It was assumed students enrolled onto a course in order to acquire a body of knowledge and a set of cognitive skills that would serve them well with whatever they chose to do after graduation. It was widely accepted that universities prepared tomorrow's leaders, tomorrow's citizens and tomorrow's professional for a life of service to the public good (Stoer 2006, Holford 2016). It was obvious then that university education was an utterly different process from job apprenticeships and technical training. Training was, by definition, about learning to do properly tasks intrinsic to a particular job, trade or business. To the educational idealists of the fifties and sixties, this fine academic life did not need to remain the possession of the aristocracy, the affluent bourgeoisie and the unusually gifted proletarian. The idealist saw universities as potentially making society less class ridden and more egalitarian. The assumption was that if more teenagers were admitted to universities, class barriers would be more permeable, the nation would be wiser hence richer and that society itself would reflect the leavening and levelling that university expansion would entail (Altbach 1999). Oxford, Cambridge and the top Redbrick universities in the UK in the period from the mid-sixties to the early eighties were places of great diversity of regional accent and worldwide ethnic diversity. It seemed as if the move from elite higher education to mass higher education was a great success for all involved.