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Beyond the lecture hall: universities and community engagement from the middle ages to the present day

This paper looks at the historical development of types of university in relationship to the communities which founded and continue to support them. It offers a critique of a number of ‘grand narratives’ of this process, including those developed by contemporary university leaders. Finally it attempts to assess elements of continuity and change in modern university missions. Introduction I need to begin with a health warning, or at least a pre-emptive strike against justifiable criticism. Prefacing conference papers full of original and deep contributions to our understanding of aspects of the relationship between higher education and society (reference will be made to several of the papers as I go along), this lecture is going to seem very much broad-brush, and sometimes superficial. My excuse is that I want to make a strong ‘big picture’ argument: about the value (the necessity, even) of historical sensibility in the governance, leadership and management of universities today. I’m going to try to achieve this in three stages: • I’ll first propose an almost universal ‘shape’ for the sequence of university-like foundations in the modern era. I’ll try to explain how these founding goals and achievements have been at least foreshortened, and sometimes distorted, in a series of grand narratives on the part of opinionformers inside and outside the university. • In the second section, I’ll look at the specific question of how funding (or ‘paying for’) the university and its activities has influenced this discourse. My shorthand for this section is the simple question: ‘who owns the university?’ • Finally, I’ll elaborate a small number of dilemmas that arise for university leaders. This is where my third ‘f’ (forgetfulness) comes in. The proposal is that a greater sense of institutional and sectoral history will assist in the resolution of at least some of these dilemmas. Foundations A strong case can be made for the university as a quintessentially European institution. With the exception of idealised views of the Socratic dialogues and the Aristotelean peripetea, as well the Library of Alexander (there remains a case that what is common to all conceptions of a university – in all eras – is a library), the models of a university most regularly appealed to as cultural icons are the late medieval foundations of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. What is more, these models – properly understood – were anything but ‘ivory towers,’ set apart from the societies which founded them.