Why universities have taken on some of the activities that are now associated with them is sometimes close to anyone’s guess. I am not writing here about the 19th century sporting add-ons in the shape of Walter Camp and college football or the two Charles’s–Merivale and Wordsworth–and the boat race. Nor am I talking about events like the great expansion of research after the Second World War.
Rather, I want to consider the great raft of responsibilities that have been sheeted home to universities since the 1970s. It is something of a cliché that universities have taken on more and more responsibilities, but it is also true. For those academics and students who are campaigning for a back-to-basics approach to universities, it is no doubt exactly the kind of thing that they would like to see reeled back in. I cannot see how this is going to happen. On the other hand, I am also very skeptical of those who want to retain an “it’s all going to change” argument, which seems in its essentials to be a 1990s dot.com vision of where higher education is going and which could end up by taking the craft aspects of disciplines out of academe and with it the ability to learn how to learn well through learning by doing.
Let’s review the new responsibilities in roughly the order that they have presented themselves. First off, there is the move to understanding universities as forces for economic growth. This responsibility initially took off in the 1970s–I still have a battered copy of the infamous Warwick University Ltd which was a critique of my own university’s closeness to industry, a critique which now looks tame–and it has continued to grow in scale ever since, resulting in all of those activities which have come to be seen as business as usual: training for the labor market, licenses and spin-offs, applied research, and so on. (More recently, in the last 15 years or so, universities have come to be seen as economic assets in their own right. National governments routinely comment on their contribution to GDP and the number of universities that they have at the top of league tables.)
Then, there is the responsibility for urban and regional prosperity. What was a civic relationship, founded in situations as different as the establishment of land-grant institutions or simply local civic pride, has become something close to a formal obligation. Then again, there is the issue of widening participation, as it is known in the U.K., the responsibility that universities have to avoid becoming havens simply for the scions of the rich and powerful but instead to act as engines of mobility, an issue which, in the U.K. at least, became a major point of contention in 2000 when the then Chancellor Gordon Brown criticized Oxford for not taking in a particular student from a less privileged background.
One more responsibility has become the dissemination of university research, the need to make sure that it has greater and greater “impact” through the media and all kinds of other channels. Finally, there is the need to address world problems in a concerted fashion, a responsibility which has become more and more pressing. Many universities are now integrating their research in order to enable this to happen but universities were never set up to be intellectual lifeboats so it is proving a problematic move.
Of course, it is possible to see each of these responsibilities (and other nascent ones: some governments are starting to treat internationalization in this way) as simply additional burdens, each of them taking universities farther and farther away from their core responsibilities for teaching and curiosity-based research. But two responses are in order, one negative and one positive. The negative response is that universities cannot be expected to be all things to all people and that, as industrial economics shows, conglomerates have mixed records, to put it but mildly. More positively, and looking dispassionately at each of these responsibilities, they do not have to be seen as extra burdens. They could instead be seen, singly or in concert, as opportunities to reinvent what the university is about: there may be at least some degree of salvation to be gained from thinking about the extra responsibilities that universities now have as themselves providing a stimulus for positive change.
Whatever the case, the point is that these responsibilities have grown like Topsy. Each of them is individually justifiable, but there is no narrative that I know of that puts them all together. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much about this. After all, life wasn’t meant to be neat. Or perhaps we should. After a period of very rapid change, maybe some kind of stocktaking and “slow policymaking” is now in order.
