Higher Education and the Question of Conscience

Professor Sir David Watson

Open University “Discourses of Inclusion” Conference

25 April 2012

Outline• Ten “transformation” claims• Ten contemporary voices• Historical perspectives: six “layers”• Philosophical perspectives: five questions

– Conscience– Character– Calling– Citizenship– Capability

• Higher education and personal responsibility: ten “commandments”

• The question of “inclusion”

Transformation claims (1)

• Religious confirmation and/or conversion

• Personal development• Social (and political)

engagement• Technical competence• Professional

acculturation

Transformation claims (2)

• Religious confirmation and/or conversion

• Personal development• Social (and political)

engagement• Technical competence• Professional

acculturation

• Networks• Maturation• Protected time• Love of a subject• Mental gymnastics

Ten contemporary voices

University was my entry into the world in all its aspects. I found out how to study, how to listen, and how to be tolerant. I made lifelong friends and was fortunate to have some wonderful teachers.

Rob Behrens, Chief Executive of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), in the Association of University Administrators (AUA) Newslink, 66 (Summer 2010), p.7.

Except in the case of a few very vocational degrees, university isn’t about what you learn on the course, it’s about how that learning, how living and studying somewhere new, changes the way you think and who you are. Instead of forcing kids to make binding career choices at 17, higher education is supposed to give kids who would benefit from further academic development a bit of space in which to find themselves.

David Mitchell, “Three Years dossing at university? It’s the only way to train for life,” The Observer, 22 August 2010.

I always felt that I did not quite belong at the university. But that didn’t matter: Cambridge still bequeathed me a key to the British establishment. In just 72 weeks of study, I was more profoundly transformed than I could have ever expected. By the time I graduated, gothic halls no longer intimidated me; nor did walking into an oak-panelled room full of folk in dinner jackets; nor did small talk with drunk rugby players destined for a job in their uncle’s merchant bank. I didn’t feel chippy or cowed by anything, any one or any job. Perhaps foolishly, I felt well-educated.

Patrick Barkham, “Cambridge and me: how the world’s best university changed my life,” The Guardian, 9 September, 2010.

Suddenly, the joy of my three years at university flooded back to me. I realised that in countless intangible ways, those seemingly wasted years were the most hugely enriching time of my life — and that everything I’d been planning to tell the boy was rubbish.

But even if you forget the lot, you just can’t put a price on three or four years at a proper university, studying a proper subject such as history. And don’t believe any world-weary old fool who tells you otherwise.

Tom Utley, “I spent three years at Cambridge eating walnut cake, but don’t let anyone tell a degree is a waste of time.” Daily Mail, 26 August 2011

Higher Education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to another. Participating in higher education enables individuals from low income backgrounds and then their families to enter higher status jobs and increase their earnings. Graduates enjoy substantial health benefits – a reduced likelihood of smoking, and lower incidence of obesity and depression. They are less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to be actively engaged with their children’s education and more likely to be active in their communities.

Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (The Browne review of higher education funding and student finance, 12 October, 2010), p. 14.

American higher education is a system that is messy, reduplicative, unfair – just like American Society as a whole – but it has made genuine commitments to quality and to a greater degree of social justice, to the extent that it is within its control, than most other institutions of the society.

Peter Brooks, “Our Universities: How Bad? How Good? New York Review of Books, 24 March 2011, 10-13.

There are only two worthwhile objectives for everything we do, in the university and out of it: enhancing life and preparing for death. No institution needs a more detailed mission statement than that, as long as the people in it think about what it means.

Felipe Fernándo-Armesto in Times Higher Education, 4 August 2011, 19

What a contrast with the medieval idea that knowledge was a gift of God, which was not to be sold for money, but should be freely imparted. Or with the 19th-century German concept of the university devoted to the higher learning; or with the tradition in this country that some graduates, rather than rushing off to Canary Wharf, might wish to put what they had learned to the service of society by teaching in secondary schools or working for charities or arts organisations or nature conservation or foreign aid agencies or innumerable other good but distinctly unremunerative causes.

Keith Thomas, “Universities Under Attack,” London Review of Books, 15 December 2010, 9-10.

University is becoming less about traditional student experiences and more about getting the most out of an education to secure a job.

Petra Wilton, Director of policy and research at the Chartered Management Institute, in Professional Manager (Winter 2011/12), 17.

Hatred of students stretches across the whole political spectrum, through every age group and social class, and I often wonder why no politician has thought of harnessing it to his own ends…The traditional explanation for working-class hatred of students was that they outraged ordinary social values: they didn’t work….Next there was an element of implied superiority: man is born equal but some of them pass their O levels and some don’t…Finally, of course, there was and remains the element of sexual jealousy which may always have existed between the generations but is made particularly bitter nowadays by the apparently endless sexual opportunities available to young people. Something we never knew…Ingratitude, idleness, lust, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness are the main characteristics of this cancer in our midst which we call higher education.

Auberon Waugh, “Hatred of Students, New Statesman, 1975 (reprinted in Cook, 2010: 32-33)

Some hard questions

• Does it always work?

• If so, how and why?

• Who is responsible?

• Is it planned or accidental?

• A necessary or sufficient condition?

• All higher education?

Know your history (1): university “foundations” in historical perspective

• Late medieval specialist communities• Regional and national institutions serving post-

industrial society• Public “systems” of HE• Curriculum and institutional innovation• The “dual sector”• “For-profit”

Know your history (2)

UK

• Oxford and Cambridge• Victorian & Edwardian

civics• The “public sector”• Institutional

innovations (e.g. OU)• HE in FE

USA

• From seminaries to the Ivy League

• Land grant• State systems• Institutional

innovations• Community colleges

University purposes in philosophical perspective

1. The question of conscience2. The question of character3. The questions of calling, competence and craft4. The question of citizenship5. The questions of conversation and of capability

The pearl of knowledge

Through their study and teaching at the University the scholars should discover and acquire the precious pearl of learning so that it does not stay hidden under a bushel but is displayed abroad to enlighten those who walk in

the dark paths of ignorance. (Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, founder of Clare College, 1359).

In the northern parts of the kingdom the people are ignorant and almost barbarous owing to their distance from a university. The city is near these places and suitable for a university, where all lawful faculties could be taught to both ecclesiastics and laymen, who would thus acquire the most precious pearl of knowledge, and so promote the well-being of the kingdom and the salvation of souls. (Papal Bull of Innocent VIII establishing the University of Aberdeen in 1495)

“Liberal HE”

If then the intellect is so excellent a portion of us, and its cultivation so excellent, it is not only beautiful, perfect, admirable, and noble in itself, but in a true and high sense it must be useful to the possessor and to all around him; not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or a blessing or a gift, or power, or a treasure, first to the owner, the through him to the world. I say then, if a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too.

(Newman, The Idea of a University)

The reinvention of liberal HE?

Worked examples: – Dearing on breadth (recommendation 16)– The Harvard “core”– The Melbourne “model”– Aberdeen Curriculum Reform– Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: why democracy

needs the humanities (2010)

Early modern professional HE

To say that the universities lost control of the professions is too simple and far from accurate. They maintained a firm grasp on preparation for careers in the church and the civil law. New professions grew up outside the universities’ formal control. However, the new professions were influenced by the universities in many ways, some formal and some informal. Leadership of the new professions often rested in university-educated men who revered learning. The ethos of the gentleman (which had developed at least in part in the universities) spread to the professions.

(O’Day, 2009: 99).

Craft

It’s not simply that the obsessed, competitive craftsman may be committed to doing something well, but more that he or she believes in its objective value. A person can use the words correct or right in describing how well something is done only if he or she believes in an objective standard outside his or her own desires, indeed outside the sphere of rewards from others. Getting something right, even though it may get you nothing,

is the spirit of true craftsmanship. (Sennett, 2006: 104, 171,195).

Citizenship

The qualities of British life - the notion of civic duty binding people to one another and the sense of fair play which underpins the idea of a proper social order - come together in the ethic of public service [leading to] the great British public institutions admired throughout the world [among them] our

universities, including the Open University.

(Brown, 2004).

The student estate

• An independent force?

• The impact of protest.

• The university as establishment, critic, or refuge.

• Transnational campaigns.

The citizenship test (“life in the UK”)

Things you need to know:

•data from the census and the history of immigration;•national and religious holidays (predominantly Christian);•Quangos and NDPBs;•the political process;•the Constitution (e.g. the Act of Succession)•international bodies (Commonwealth, EU, UN)•how to behave (motorways, estate agents, Post Office, pubs)

Conversation

Quotes Michael Oakshott: Conversation is “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure,” as with gambling, “its significance lies neither in winning or losing, but in wagering.

William Miller, Conversation: a history of a declining art, (Yale U Press, 2006).

Capability

Freedom to choose gives us the opportunity to decide what we should do, but with that opportunity comes the responsibility for what we do – to the extent that they are chosen actions. Since a capability is the power to do something, the accountability that emanates from that ability – that power – is a part of the capability perspective, and this can make room for demands of duty –what can be broadly called deontological concerns.

(Sen, The Idea of Justice).

HE: the ten commandments• Strive to tell the truth.• Take care in establishing the truth.

HE: the ten commandments• Strive to tell the truth.

• Take care in establishing the truth.

• Be fair.

• Always be ready to explain.

• Do no harm.

• Keep your promises.

• Respect your colleagues, and especially your opponents

• Sustain the community.

• Guard your treasure.

• Never be satisfied.

The question of “inclusion”

Some health warnings:

•type-casting (and condescension);

•aspiration and anger;

•continuity, change and reconstruction;

•the cloud and the global village.

Discussion

I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.

Tallulah Bankhead

Preview

See David Watson, “The University and its Student Communities: knowledge as ‘transformation’?” In Paul Temple (ed.) (2012) Universities and the Knowledge Economy, 197-211. London and New York: Routledge.