Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

This is one of the many topics on which it can be helpful to return to the 1963 report on higher education chaired by Lord Robbins. One of the most striking things about the Robbins Report, viewed from our present perspective, is its lack of defensiveness. By this, I don’t mean that it is not careful in its reasoning or alive to the difficulties its proposals might face – it is both of those things. I mean that it is written throughout from an assumption that universities don’t need to apologize for themselves, that they have a value and a role in society that can be argued for and that society by and large recognizes. Clearly, the tone and address of the report owed something to the barely challenged dominance of the values historically associated with a governing elite, even something to the persistence of patterns of cultural deference. But in its general as well as its specific statements, the report was not apologetic or embarrassed about assuming that in ‘developing man’s capacity to understand, to contemplate and to create’, universities served what it repeatedly called ‘the needs of society’. It was not afraid to say that they did so because, not in spite of the fact that, education ‘ministers intimately to ultimate ends’, and because ‘what is taught should be taught in such a way as to promote the general powers of the mind