Peter Wade explores the relationship between the university and the state. Historically the state has recognised universities as key institutions in the reproduction of societies through research and teaching. More recently, university research has been subjected to greater regulation as it holds a special place in government agendas. One way forward would be to evaluate both teaching and research in terms of how closely the two were connected and how far the former has inspired the latter to understand the broad social impact of universities

Wade, Peter

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4/12/2013The REF’s narrow definition of impact ignores historical roleof teaching in relation to the social impact of the universityblogs.lse.ac.uk /impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/12/ref-impact-the-state-and-the-universities-historical-perspectives/Peter Wade explores the relationship between the university and the state. Historically the state hasrecognised universities as key institutions in the reproduction of societies through research andteaching. More recently, university research has been subjected to greater regulation as it holds aspecial place in government agendas. One way forward would be to evaluate both teaching andresearch in terms of how closely the two were connected and how far the former has inspired thelatter to understand the broad social impact of universities.With the REF occupying ever greater quantities of the time of academics and administrators in UKuniversities, it is helpful to step back and get a bird’s eye view of the historical relationships betweenuniversities and the state. Educational establishments have generally had a close relationship with state, despite thefact that European universities were basically religious institutions in their origins. China under the Zhou dynasty (ca.1000-250 BC) had five imperial schools teaching Rites, Music, Archery, Charioteering, Calligraphy, andMathematics. The Jixia academy was founded in China in ca. 318 BC and “For the first time on record a state beganto act as a patron of scholarship out of the apparent conviction that this was a proper function of the state or ameans of increasing its prestige”.In Europe, medieval universities were linked more to Church than state, emerging out of monasteries and cathedralschools, which were designed to train clergy. The early universities started as private corporations made up ofprofessors and their students, but they soon began to seek state protection. Students at the University of Bologna,founded 1088, were granted special privileges by Emperor Frederick.Funding arrangements in this period were varied. In 11th-century Bologna, students paid for the teachers and prettymuch ran the show. In Paris in 1150, university teachers were paid by the Church. Oxford and Cambridge weremainly supported by a combination of the state and the crown, closely connected entities. In general, universitieswere religious institutions, but in order to operate they needed, and generally got, secular support from the Europeancrowns, partly because the state increasingly wanted educated administrators: universities became schools for theintellectual elites and ruling classes.The state took an increasing role in overseeing the universities. In 13th-century Oxford and Cambridge, the localsheriff was ordered to imprison students who did not register as scholars within a fortnight of their arrival. In Padua,Perugia, Modena and Siena, local communes funded professors and teachers at the universities, while in Bologna,the municipality increasingly took over from the students in the funding of the university. The university in Pragueflourished mainly because of the support of Emperor Charles IV, who funded the buildings and the masters’ salaries.This trend towards state/Crown support continued through the early modern period, with the state takingprogressively on more of the functions of organising society, including learning, in order to produce qualifiedfunctionaries and, increasingly, with a view to consolidating a “nation”. In post-Reformation Protestant areas ofEurope, Martin Luther exhorted princes and their learned councillors to support and regulate universities; Catholicareas followed suit, especially in relation to law and medicine. Swedish universities in the early modern period weresupported heavily by Crown/state funds, which supplied endowments of land or gave income from Crownlands. From the 16th century, Oxbridge colleges derived most of their income from land and endowments, makingthem pretty independent financially.By the 16th century, intellectual humanism – in which students were prepared for a life of civility by learning1/3grammar, rhetoric, logic, maths, music, astronomy – had taken hold; it would prove a long-lasting trend, underlyingthe “greats” at Oxford (classical literature, history and philosophy). But a key theme was also the preparation of asocial class of people who could run society (and the Church). Thus subjects studied from medieval times through tothe 18th century often focused on theology, law and medicine (to provide clergy, public servants and doctors) and,increasingly in the 17th and 18th centuries, natural sciences.In England, the Church continued to dominate heavily in Oxbridge  and in the 18th century the colleges still operatedas “arms of the Church of England and defenders of established tradition”. As late as the 1820s, Oxbridge suppliedover 80% of Anglican clergy in England. Generally, it seems that secular influence over universities came relativelylate in England, compared to Scotland, Continental Europe and the USA: Harvard, established in 1636 by theMassachusetts legislature, became increasingly secular during the 18th century.Wilhelm Humboldt’s idea of the university is often cited as setting the model for universities from the early 1800s. Inhis vision, research and teaching were linked together in a disinterested search for truth and progressiveknowledge. Yet the support of the state/crown was necessary and Humboldt’s project to build the University of Berlin(1810) was proposed to the King of Prussia; the professors there served as state functionaries. The Frenchuniversities were also strongly controlled by the state and even more so the Grandes Ecoles, which were and aretraining grounds for civil servants as well as academics.During the 1800s, Oxbridge colleges were subject to gradually increasing state intervention, albeit with the state asa hesitant party. On the one hand, the liberal 19th-century state was uncertain about intervening in what waseffectively a private corporation – which also buttressed the elite; on the other hand, Oxbridge was increasinglyseen to be failing to fulfill the proper role of a university. The colleges were not generating progressive researchknowledge, as the Humboldtian idea of university decreed they should. Also these universities were not “dischargingtheir educational responsibilities to the nation” – they were too elitist, especially in the light of increasing middle-classschool education. But the nature of that education remained broadly humanist, even in the face of such pressures: inearly 20th-century Oxford University, about 50% of students still did “greats”, while another 20% did modern history.Reform in England therefore consisted of creating a framework in which universities could implement internalchanges – legislation was passed in the form of 1854, 1856, 1877 Acts, which removed some of the Oxbridgecolleges’ ties to the Church and forced them to transfer some of their resources to the Universities, allowinginvestment in better university-wide research facilities, such as science labs. The state also created otheruniversities, such as the University of London (1836), which was non-denominational and less elitist.Overall, then, the state has always taken a strong interest in universities as key institutions in the reproduction of(national) societies. This in itself should come as no surprise to us. It has always engendered the kind of tensionswe are accustomed to. States often set up universities with a great deal of academic and institutional freedom –generally including protection from market forces – thus setting academic autonomy against state intervention.States also often established universities to promote national or regional interests, whereas academic practicetended to be more international in scope.In the UK, we have seen a gradual process by which academic autonomy has been increasingly subjected to staterestrictions. In 1988, the Education Reform Act abolished the University Grants Committee (established in 1919) andreplaced it with the HE Funding Councils, which, some argue, allow government priorities to be imposed moreeasily. It can be argued that it is only in the 1900s (and the late 1900s in UK) that university research has come tooccupy a special place in government agendas, more divorced from teaching than in the Humboldtian model.Research has increasingly been seen as driving “industrial progress, military strength, and social welfare”.In this respect, it is notable that REF’s definition of impact virtually ignores the everyday business of teaching,whereas teaching has been a concern of states for hundreds of years, understood in relation to the broad socialimpact of universities. This concern seems now to be abandoned to the market, albeit a regulated one, and a furtherwedge driven between teaching and research by narrow REF definitions of impact.2/3If we want teaching and research to be better connected, however, the question remains of how to do that in an agein which 40-50% of school-leavers of university age enter higher education. One way forward would be to evaluateboth teaching and research in terms of how closely the two were connected and how far the former was inspired bythe latter. Rather than spurring academics to orient their research to non-academic “users”, such a measure wouldprompt them to translate their research into undergraduate-friendly teaching, creating new generations of research-savvy graduates who would act as conduit by for the dissemination of this knowledge into the wider society.This text is based on the introduction to a seminar on “Impact: approaches and contexts”, which formed part of anESRC-funded Seminar Series on “The Impact Agenda”, at the University of Manchester, 12 January 2011.Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of theLondon School of Economics. About the authorPeter Wade is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.  His publications includeBlackness and Race Mixture (1993), Race and Ethnicity in Latin America  (2nd edition, 2010), Music, Race andNation: Música Tropical in Colombia (2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective  (Pluto Press,2002), and Race and Sex in Latin America (2009). His current research focuses on issues of race and new genomictechnologies. He is directing a project on “Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparativeapproach”.Copyright © The Author (or The Authors) - Unless otherwise stated, this work is licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution Unported 3.0 License.3/3

The REF’s narrow definition of impact ignores historical role of teaching in relation to the social impact of the university

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