Contemporary concerns over higher education

Contemporary concerns over higher education are usually focused on numbers and costs. Less attention is paid to the concentration of knowledge production, validation and transmission within academia. Yet the authority of church and state, community and family has been largely replaced by the academic, profoundly altering the nature of knowledge and its impact on society. Knowledge Monopolies charts the improbable rise of the academic empire, the tactics that sustained its growth, its impact on the nature and uses of knowledge, and the likely outcome of the battle for survival caused by its spectacular growth and consequent exposure to new economic and political pressures.

The natural sciences’ challenge to belief in a 4,000-year-old Earth, an orbiting sun, spontaneous generation, witchcraft, ghosts and luminiferous ether is well documented. Social sciences’ equally spectacular social impact is less comfortably addressed by practising academics, since it admits the reflexivity of the enterprise: engaged researchers influencing as well as being influenced by what they study, helping to define and transform the world they set out only to reveal. Across the twentieth century the social sciences have become major parts of the curriculum in schools and higher education. They have changed our understanding of our selves, relationships and beliefs. Increasingly we think in terms of the economic, psychological and social. We assume that there is knowledge of our everyday lives together, validated by academics, reliable enough to guide policy, practice, everyday belief and behaviour. With the academisation of knowledge, social scientists need to consider the implications of their success in providing the way humans make sense of their world.

A knowledge society?

Most of today’s recognisable sciences (the term slowly replaced ‘natural philosophy’ from around 1830) were founded outside universities. The Royal Society had been mainly a club of friends, patrons and interested gentlemen amateurs. Its efforts to make members share and publish their results were often hampered by personal or commercial rivalries, such as the long stand-off between leading mind Isaac Newton and secretary Robert Hooke; publication was more usually in magazines such as the Quarterly Review or the Edinburgh Review. The nascent ‘knowledge society’, diffusing its ideas so they could be deployed for practical advantage, reacted against an institution that had traditionally confined knowledge to an elite, and detached its intrinsic worth from social values or economic value.

Yet by 1950 this moribund, outmoded institution was about to enter the most sustained and spectacular growth of any social institution. By the end of the century it would dominate social thought, activity and organisation in a way no mid-century political dictator had ever achieved. In 1900 there had been 14 universities in Britain with 20,000 students. This had risen to 31 universities with 100,000 students by the time of the Robbins Report (1963), whose recommendations accelerated the growth. By the end of the century there were 176 higher education institutions, including 115 universities, enrolling over 1,300,000 full-time and 900,000 part-time undergraduate students, and employing over 70,000 full-time staff. Postgraduate intake rose proportionally even more strongly: from 43,000 full-time and 18,000 part-time higher degree students in 1970 to over 170,000 full-time and nearly 300,000 part-time at the century’s end. In October 2004, the number of students arriving at UK universities exceeded 1 million for the first time.

As remarkable as the rise in numbers were the reasons for the expansion. Whereas ancient universities cloistered themselves to shut out the distractions of the world, their modern counterparts opened their doors onto main city streets, or invited the new commercial realities onto their campuses. Universities were being pressed to engage with economic and social affairs, stripping away the insulation through which academics had sought knowledge for its own sake. When London and other major towns established their first universities in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were surrounded by an array of institutions that showed the unmet demand for technical and professional skills. Colleges of Science, Dissenting Academies, Training Colleges, Technical Colleges, Mechanics and Evening Institutes, Literary, Philosophical and Statistical Societies answered to workers’ and professionals’ as well as industrialists’ need for new knowledge, comprising a genuine public sphere. Many marched towards university status in the subsequent century.

The Robbins Report (1963) saw expansion and reform of higher education as essential for maintaining a competitive position in the world. A generation later, the Dearing Report (1997) identified the university as the key source of knowledge and human capital for underpinning prosperity and human wellbeing in a democratic society. Where higher education had once been seen, like the wider welfare state, as a luxury product of economic development, it was now widely viewed as a vital input. Its expansion was prioritised by poorer countries seeking a way into industrial development as much as by richer countries seeking a way out of it.

Knowledge Monopolies: The Academisation of Society

Historians and sociologists chart the consequences of the expansion of knowledge; philosophers of science examine the causes. This book bridges the gap. The focus is on ‘academisation’ — the paradox whereby, as the general public becomes better educated to live and work with knowledge, the ‘academy’ increases its intellectual distance from the public, so that the nature of social and natural reality becomes more rather than less obscure.