There is
nothing more interesting to academics than their reflections on their own
professional identities.   And their identities are intimately bound up with
the institutions that pay their salaries.  Thus the publishing industry has
seen a new genre develop in the past few years, those that focus on the state
of the academy.  Usually the authors of these books take a rather dismal view
of the state of higher education in the United States.  Profscam: Professors
and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles Sykes and Tenured
Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education by Roger Kimball are
just a couple of representative examples that come to mind.  Sometimes the
diagnosis is that the professorate has become too politicized, usually in terms
of being too left-leaning.  Other times the problem is formulated in terms of
institutions of higher learning adopting a commercial or business model and
seeing themselves as producers of commodities traded in a competitive market
place.   Maskell and Robinson’s New Idea of a University adopts a bit of
both of these views and applies them to the situation of higher education in Great
Britain.

The situation
in Great Britain seems to be following the developmental pattern that has
already unfolded in the U.S.  "How has it happened" asks the authors,
"that we have firmly established in Britain exactly the situation we used
to attribute (rightly or wrongly) the USA?" (vii).  Maskell and Robinson
are not alone in sounding the alarm bells.  The last year has seen strikes at
British universities against what students and faculty called the "marketization"
of higher education.  Maskell and Robinson quote Britain’s 1993 Charter for
Higher Education, that charges universities "to ‘deliver’ a ‘service’,
namely higher education, to ‘customers’, in two divisions, firstly students,
and secondly business, which ‘buys’ both education and the results of
commissioned research" (3).  Thus, the old idea of the university
elaborated by John Henry Newman in his famous The Idea of a University
has been redefined into the new idea of the university held by the overseers in
charge of higher education, the idea that "Education is the same as
training; education is useful; education will make us rich (3).

Newman’s "old" idea of a
university held that education is not the same as training nor as being
instructed; that education is of the whole person, not the acquisition of
skills.  Maskell and Robinson believe that even Newman’s view was somewhat
limited in that  he believed that education is to train the intellect so that
one can become a better professional.  Interestingly, they offer Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice as showing us a more complete model of what education ought
to be.  For this novel’s key characters show us how "we can teach what is
worth knowing, even if we can’t do it by instructing" (45).  Maskell and
Robinson say

‘The unreasoned life’, says Socrates, ‘is not
worth living’.  Jane Austen goesfurther: a life without judgement…would
not be a human life at all.  But she goes further…still: the more alive
in judgement, she implies, simply, the more alive. The better the judge, the
better the critic, the better the man or woman—the better, the more alive
as a man or woman.  The characters in the novel who are most alive…are those
who judge best and whose judgements are open to being educated.  Jane Austen
writes as if  we are the sense we make and as if that sense were
not only judgeable but most plainly judgeable in the way we talk and write.  54

As illustrated by the 1993 Charter, the "language
in which universities now conduct their affairs, and the language of public
debate about education, denies the existence of the university" (62). 
This state of affairs was the result of Margaret Thatcher’s challenge that  the
university justify itself.  Unfortunately it did so in market terms.  That is,
they claimed their role is the supply of graduates essential to the expansion
of the national economy.  This belief has had a diluting effect on education. 
As Maskell and Robinson point out, for example, "in 2000 there are more
than five times as many ‘universities’ in the UK as there were in 1980" (73). 
There is a concomitant dilution of academic standards as well.    The British
system uses standard reading lists and examinations to determine who gets into
the university.  The examiners themselves have become part of the problem,
according to Maskell and Robinson.  "That the rot spreads is evidence of
the wholeness of the body (121).  The examiners are themselves less than fully
literate and the books they choose for examination are less than worthy.

In one of the most vicious chapters
of The New Idea of the University Maskell and Robinson are simply
outraged that "a book of particular worthlessness," (124) Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple, could be on the standard reading list as a
representative example of  "literature."    Here Maskell and Robinson
come close to the conservative aspirations of Harold Bloom in the Closing of
the American Mind in their concern for the integrity of the canon. 
According to them, The Color Purple is not literature, but "soap
opera."  "Only in a culture like our won, where the dominant standard
is plebeian and uneducated, could such a book ever be used to prepare
candidates for university entrance" (132-133).  One of the authors had
experience as an examiner.  His contempt for The Color Purple, it seems, was
only surpassed by the contempt he felt toward those being examined.  "

I got a shock marking a set of exam scripts; I thought them
quite bad….  (151).

Not only have governing boards,
faculty examiners, and students succumbed to the "dumbing down" of
the British university, so has the methods of assessing the effectiveness of
universities.  Maskell and Robinson claim that the very process of university ‘assessment’
concedes the case they are making, that the university has become a ‘polyversity’
(169), where Newman’s prophecy of the nightmare ‘university’ in which specialisms
have no common ground, where all has become training in skills, is horribly
fulfilled (163).

The argument of The New Idea of
the University, sometimes obscured by its strident tone, amounts to the
common sense thesis that on the positive side claims that "education has
to be a form of the pursuit of the good (171), and on the negative side claims
that "liberal education is an anomaly in the new university (175).  To be
fair to Maskell and Robinson, we must note their acknowledgement that there are
still two universities in Great Britain where real liberal education has a
chance to survive.  In fact, the authors concede, "it is actually true
that some people can still read English poetry.  While that remains true, the
university is still possible (176).  The connection between the concerns of
this book and the mental health professions may not at first seem obvious.  But
one way to look at it is this.  Maskell and Robinson are saying that technical
training in many universities comes up short as compared to the developmental
potential of a more traditional liberal arts education.  This means that mental
health professionals trained in many modern universities are simply less
developed human beings than they might otherwise be.  Well trained technicians,
perhaps.  Well developed human beings, no.  We should all be concerned about
this.

© 2004 Ben Mulvey

Ben Mulvey, Ph.D., is an
Associate Professor of philosophy and director of the Division of Humanities of
the College of Arts and Sciences at Nova
Southeastern University.  He received
his doctorate in philosophy from Michigan State
University specializing in political theory and applied
ethics.  He teaches ethics at NSU and is a member of the board of advisors
of the Florida Bioethics Network. 

Categories: Philosophical