Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

Let me conclude with one final observation. When I was preparing these remarks, I weighed up the risks involved were I to cite George Davie’s classic work from 1961, The Democratic Intellect. One risk is that this is by now a hackneyed and overworked allusion; another is that of seeming to forget that the story Davie had to tell was, as far as nineteenth-century Scottish universities were concerned, a story of decline. But it is not entirely wishful thinking to observe that some version of the tradition to which Davie’s celebrated title has come to refer does still have a resonance in current debate in this country, and in that respect Scotland has at least one crucial advantage over England. South of the border, the intellectual and educational case for the distinctive value of universities is poorly articulated, and as a result it is not a political force with which the government has to reckon. Instead, we get third-hand clichés about promoting economic competitiveness and training an adaptable workforce. Of course, you get a lot of that in Scotland as well, and it is obviously easy to fall into a cheap romanticization of the ‘lad o’pairts’ tradition and all that. Nonetheless, the advantage lies not just in having such a tradition to appeal to, but in the fact that it is a tradition with built-in democratic purchase and appeal. It is very cheering – and, for an Englishman these days, all too rare – to come across a sentence in an official document that declares as round...