Professor Michael Kenny (Politics, University of Sheffield)
What are Universities for? Interrogating the Assumptions of Current and Future Higher Education Policy in the UK
The project I would like to pursue at CRASSH involves an analysis of
the main contending ideas about the rationale for public investment in
Higher Education that prevail in policy thinking within the UK.
The case for supporting Universities is typically linked to the
expectation that they should pursue such goals as enhancing social
mobility, increasing the nation’s economic competitiveness, promoting
the UK’s image and reputation globally, and providing the requisite
portfolio of skills for future generations of workers in the knowledge
economy.
A growing academic literature explores many of the implications of
these ideas for policy-makers and Universities, but much less attention
has been devoted to their underlying normative foundations and
ideological origin, and little serious public debate has occurred on
the question of what Universities are for, as opposed to how they
should be funded.
The research I propose would therefore be organised around two main questions:
1) What has been the role of politically rooted thinking and disagreement in generating new policy thinking about HE?
2) Is it the case that Universities in the UK are freighted with a
mutually inconsistent bundle of policy ambitions; and how might these
be rendered into a more coherent framework for future policy-making?
These will be pursued in two separate but related research foci:
1) An analysis of the provenance of some of these current ideas, with
particular emphasis on a period of intense ideological disagreement
about the rationale for Universities, their significance for the
national culture, and their relationship with the state that developed
from the 1960s to the 1980s (including assessments of the writings on
this topic of such figures as Oakeshott, Hayek, Cowling, Beloff,
Anderson and Galbraith). This would be supplemented by an analysis of
the development in the 1990s of theories of the knowledge economy, and
new thinking about the role of education in offsetting socio-economic
disadvantage.
2) An examination of some of the normative conflicts and policy
tensions that have arisen in relation to current ideas about the
mission of publicly funded Universities, including: whether a clearer
focus upon the pursuit of nationally designated social and economic
goals pulls against some of the cosmopolitan ideals associated with the
academy; whether older emphases on the role of Higher Education in
shaping the national culture can be sustained alongside these other
conceptions of the ‘mission’ of HE; and on whether current emphases on
social mobility and economic competitiveness justify the encroachment
by the state on the autonomy of Universities.
During my time at CRASSH, I would aim to focus predominantly on
completing the first of these components (though I would also aim to
compile materials and undertake interviews for the second) and would
seek to engage with various scholars based at Cambridge who posses
expertise in the study of intellectual history and political thought in
the twentieth century. I would also use this time to prepare the ground
for a public dissemination event which would address policy questions
central to the Centre’s thematic focus upon ‘The Future University’.
