Review of William Whyte: The University: A History in Stone, Silk and Blood

This blog was kindly authored by Lord David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science from 2010 to 2014, author of A University Education (2017) and President of the Resolution Foundation.

William Whyte’s excellent book Red Brick very effectively applied his expertise as an architectural historian to the rise of the university. He takes this further in his new book, boldly attempting a history of the university through its physical embodiment and practical needs.

At its heart is the paradox that the university is an intellectual institution operating in the world of ideas, but also occupying a physical place and with material needs. The titles of his chapters tell the story. ‘Straw’ shows the mobility of the early medieval university –  upping sticks, sometimes driven out and sometimes choosing to move to a more hospitable town. ‘Stone’ shows these institutions becoming more settled – and the start of an anxiety that their spirit was shifting from restless discovery to conservative consolidation.

Gradually halls accommodating students, and master scholars regarding their students as apprentices, come together in an integrated institution of higher education – he is very good on the significance of New College as a key example of this trend.

Associated with that new solidity was the growth of university bureaucracy. By the thirteenth century the Paris scholar Philip the Chancellor was already complaining about all the ‘meetings and discussions’ getting in the way of teaching. And frustration with the performance of the university in turn led to calls for radical reform. Luther never applied the word ‘reformation’ to the church, but he did call for ‘a good, thorough reformation’ of universities.

Luther was also worried that paper and printing would spread untruth. The arrival of the printing press is just one example of new technologies changing the way universities work. And Whyte shows how often there are fears that the role of the university is going to be

 “supplanted by other sources of knowledge and authority… coffeehouses or cheap print, religious orders or the attraction of other sorts of academy.”

Whyte argues that the sixteenth century saw the power of the courtier replacing the knight and hence there was more of a premium on learning. 80 universities were created, restored or remodelled between 1500 and 1600. However, he shows, as I did in A University Education, that England is the exception to this trend. Oxford and Cambridge suppressed the creation of new universities for centuries. Northampton finally got its university in 2005 – 740 years after its first attempt. Instead, the growth of higher education in England took the form of new colleges at Oxbridge.

Whyte shows how many of the critiques of universities and their expansion which we are familiar with now were already circulating in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Thomas Hobbes denounced the increase in the number of students as a key reason for the Civil War. A French pamphleteer warned that ‘Anyone who has once stuck his nose in a book is immediately useless for any other occupation’. Some of these criticisms were justified as stale academicism and large endowments were a threat to engaged teaching and learning. Whyte reports that the entry for universities in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Enlightenment Encyclopedie is very hostile, though oddly he omits Adam Smith’s trenchant critique of English Universities in his Wealth of Nations.

One of the themes of the book is just how much discontent there has been about universities for so long. There were often attempts to create new institutions to replace them. Universities were abolished in the French Revolution – perhaps a step too far for even their most radical critic now. To this day Napoleon’s grandes ecoles command more prestige than most French universities. 

There was a surge of optimism as new universities were founded after the War. European models of universities were emulated elsewhere in the world. UEA’s modernist buildings were the backdrop to the conclusion of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. But universities were also getting ferocious criticism. Their domestic critics saw them as threatening Western values whilst abroad they were seen as embodying them. Ayatollah Khomeini thought that ‘All our suffering is from Westernised universities’.

Whyte shows how universities depend on networks around them providing goods and services, but often the significance of these is not appreciated. It is hard to see how universities could have expanded as they have over the past thirty years in Britain without the rise of the private rented sector to accommodate the increasing numbers of students. Last year’s rent control legislation (in effect banning fixed-length tenancies) means private landlords can no longer be confident they can last a full academic year – unless it is purpose-built student accommodation. That could drive a shift to commuter students and limit access to higher education.

Meanwhile, the anxieties about universities mount. Paradoxically, some of the problems arise from the sheer desperation of parents and school students to get into them. In China, the Government is trying to ease extraordinary exam pressures on students as performance in the Gaokao determines entry chances. In the US, donor preference schemes have long made it easier to get a place, but the Operation Varsity Blues scandal showed blatant corruption as wealthy parents bought places for their children.

In 1997, Peter Drucker forecast, ‘Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive.’ For a time it looked as if MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses) would deliver his forecast. But it hasn’t happened – yet. Whyte argues that ‘the glorious abundance of the virtual has created an even greater longing for the real’.

The criticism of the university carries on. And yes, of course, there is a need for reform. But this excellent account shows how, for centuries, the growth of the university has been accompanied by forecasts of its demise and meanwhile they carry on derided, challenged, threatened but still there.