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This Year's
Module
Peter Suchin
Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson,
The New Idea of a University,
Haven Books, 2001
ISBN 1-903660-00-9
hb: £18.50
"Education is an important key...but the good life's never won
by degrees..." - so sang Bryan Ferry in 1973, himself the holder
of a Fine Art degree from the University of Newcastle.1
This provocative theme of what may or may not be achieved by university
graduates is one of the issues taken up in Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson's
The New Idea of the University, a timely critique of the Labour Party's
reinscription of the role, meaning and ideological framework of the British
university. In chapters focusing upon "The Economic Case for Higher
Education", "The Old Idea of the University", "The
New University for Life", and "Levering Up Standards or Top-Down
Drivel", Maskell and Robinson systematically consider recent changes
within higher education, providing what is clearly a polemic against what
they see as the government's out-and-out attack on the universities
and their long-held moral and intellectual place within British culture.
"The word "university"", write Maskell and Robinson,
"has a history which makes some things almost impossible to say,
for example that the university should be for all, or for job-training,
or to make us rich." (P. 65). Later in their book they observe:
"Scholars are traditionally poor; which is not ideal, but it is positively
a bad thing for them to become fat cats, or to expect to be courted by
company boards looking for rising entrepreneurs. The educated ought to
have a reasonable chance of a comfortable life in the clerisy, but not
to expect a direct link between a degree and the creation of wealth."
(P. 183)
But that which it is "almost impossible to say" about the university
has today become not merely "possible" but a new orthodoxy,
one spouted at every turn, both by apologists for the transformation of
the universities into profit-driven businesses, and for those who demand
an allegedly democratic increase in student numbers, a matter linked to
the widening of university access to those who have been excluded in the
past. The university's substantial history as a place in which critical
and individual thought has been encouraged and protected from the whims
of the marketplace has been, as the authors of this book make clear, pulverised
into invisibility, obscured by the smoke-screens of profit and mock democratic
access for all. In the "New University" emphasis is placed for
the most part upon the supposedly profitable, utilitarian features of
taking up a degree course place. For the Labour Party and its supporters,
suggest Maskell and Robinson, "...education is an investment. Education
is the same as training; education is useful; education will make us rich."
(P. 4)
Quite aside from their abhorrence at the way university managers and "the
modern career academic" (p. 41) have taken to this new model of what
it is that universities should be about, the authors of this book rightly
attend to the absurdity of such claims, mapping out in their opening chapter
just how pathetically untrue, and indeed just how scientifically unsound
is the argument, proposed by government-sponsored economists, that "profitability"
and a university education automatically correspond. "How can we
know", they ask, "whether education makes people more productive
or not? We can't. We just don't know in any such way as economists
understand knowledge. But we invest billions every year on the assumption
that we can and do know, all the same." (P. 16)
Maskell and Robinson take issue with the very notion that the universities
need to be expanded at all, irrespective of any arguments revolving around
ideas of access for those who have been hitherto excluded:
"The entire state-subsidized expansion of higher education, maintained
by so many governments over so many years, with no semblance of justification
offered for it that isn't economic, has been, it seems, a tremendous
error, economically. And if the subsidies were withdrawn, the grotesquely
bloated system they have created would shrink back to something that made
economic (and educational) sense. The so-called customers would be found
simply not to exist and the so-called need for this so-called education
would vanish with them. In its present shape and size the whole thing
is simply a creation of wastefulness." (P. 13)
In the closing pages of the book it is suggested that what should in part
replace university expansion is a return to some form of technical training,
a reinstating of the polytechnics, funded in large measure by those businesses
who would wish their future employees be "trained" - which
is not to be confused with "educated" - in specific job-related
skills and abilities. This distinction between education and training
is markedly present throughout the volume. Maskell and Robinson do not
sneer at the notion of employment-related training, rather they emphasise
that education is a very different thing to the learning of skills necessary
to the carrying out of specific technical tasks.
The question of the relationship between the university and truth surfaces
at several points. Presenting the university as a place in which critical
thought is to be assiduously encouraged, Maskell and Robinson emphasise
that education should connect with life in general rather than just to
one's career, and teaching should take place in a way that extends
discussion well beyond the narrow confines of a given academic subject.
They go so far as to state that "teaching" is in fact too problematic
a term for this exchange, linking this word to the new situation in which
students are expected to regurgitate, in exams or essays, particular facts
transmitted in "courses" or "modules", a means of
information transmission that can be easily policed by government examining
boards. Citing at length the works of J. H. Newman and of Jane Austen,
Maskell and Robinson propose that these writers' ideas on education
offer an important, desirable model of how education should take place
and of what it means to be educated, as opposed to trained. "Jane
Austen", they point out, "consistently, systematically, presents
the instructed mentality as the opposite of the educated, and the reception
of instruction as one way of not being educated at all." (P. 39).
Whilst citing such figures fits perfectly well with the general critical
thrust of The New Idea of the University, Maskell and Robinson's
respect for "English Literature" is sometimes a little too intense,
as though close attention to this subject were the sole means of saving
the university from itself. The expression "common sense" is
also used throughout the book as though it were an unloaded term, though
it might easily be used by government ministers to defend their radical
restructuring of higher education. After all, in our increasingly commodified
culture it can too easily appear "right and proper" that one
should pay for one's education.
This idea is, however, another government-speak cliché that is
held up to scrutiny by Maskell and Robinson, as is the whole apparatus
of the New University: the extracting of huge fees from students and their
parents, the interminable quality inspections, the churning out of more
and more pieces of so-called "research" designed solely with
money-generation in mind, the proliferation of managers with their ugly,
insensitive, self-serving ideas about turning universities into profitable
business ventures. These and other pernicious features of the university
as it presently stands or is trying to become are all spelt out in The
New Idea of the University and taken to task with much pertinent and constructive
argument.
This book should be taken seriously by those who determine the fate of
the university, including staff, students and potential students, as well
as those ministers and administrators who have been influential in carrying
out the immense restructuring of recent years. To reverse the process
that has ruined what were once, whatever their problems and contradictions,
important centres of intellect and invention will not be easy. As Maskell
and Robinson all too convincingly indicate, "The real crisis in British
education is not at the bottom, amongst an underclass, but at the top,
amongst those in charge." (P.144)
Notes
1. Bryan Ferry, "Street Life", included on the Roxy Music LP/CD
Stranded, EG Records, 1973.
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