Early on in this excellent book, Gordon Graham wryly notes the influence that satirical novels such as Porterhouse Blue, Lucky Jim and Changing Places have had on the public's perception of our universities. Anyone who would like a more profound understanding of what these institutions are and ought to be about should read Graham instead. In particular, this volume ought to be compulsory reading for every government minister or civil servant with responsibilities in this area. Professor Graham teaches moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and is thoroughly equipped to provide the imaginative, dispassionate and careful analysis that higher education so desperately needs.
More than half of the book consists of a revised version of the previously published Universities: the Recovery of an Idea. It begins with a brief history of the universities, which identifies in particular three types: the medieval university, an independent community of scholars dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the provision of a general education for future citizens, which includes training for certain professions; the Napoleonic university, which is entirely subject to political control and consequently heavily utilitarian in its curriculum; and the Humboldtian community of scholars devoted to the pure pursuit of knowledge. Since Newman lectured on ‘the idea of a university’ in 1854, there has been a tendency to defend universities either as useful or as seeking knowledge for its own sake. Graham argues that neither alternative captures the medieval model, which he prefers.
Graham provides a subtle exploration of the contrasts between ‘training’ and ‘education’ and between ‘use’ and ‘value’. No subject is simply ‘useful’: useful means useful for something. If you want to read Homer then learning Classical Greek is useful. Conversely, engineers are useful only if we need things like bridges; we need bridges in order to travel, and we travel in order to enrich our lives in some way. What are valuable are the things for which we travel. Universities are valuable insofar as they contribute to the enrichment of society, and society is enriched not only by material wealth and welfare but also by knowledge. Furthermore, Graham argues, bits of knowledge are not valuable in themselves, but have value insofar as they contribute to our wider understanding; it is understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live that should be the aim of ‘study for its own sake’. That is why some subjects are worth studying in themselves rather than for their practical consequences or for any ‘transferable skills’ that they might develop.
Graham's clear sense of the purpose of university education enables him to make a series of penetrating observations about the mass of bureaucratic procedures that have in recent decades been introduced into universities with the professed aim of improving them. For example, both modularisation – which in theory allows the student to select discrete chunks of learning to make up a degree course – and evaluation by student questionnaires assume that the student, who is treated as a kind of consumer, knows better than the teacher how learning should be done. In particular, they assume that the student has a set of disconnected desires which the course ought to satisfy. On the contrary, Graham argues, an important part of serious study is, precisely, to educate the desire: one learns how to appreciate listening to Bach or reading Kant, and how the different parts of a subject hang together. Indeed, a lecturer deserves his salary only because he has the ability and experience to know and explain such things.
The student is not in fact a ‘consumer’, nor is learning a ‘product’. Graham has a sharp eye for the misleading and often damaging application of the language of consumerism to education. To take one example, if research is valued for its ‘output’, there is no room to recognise the contribution of the scholar of deep and wide learning who publishes rarely, if at all. Indeed, as Graham shrewdly observes, the best scholars are likely to be the ones who publish least, because they have the most complete knowledge of what has already been said in their subject. Again, the distinctive nature of academic work is such that if those responsible for managing its resources see themselves as directing rather than supporting scholars and teachers they will inevitably frustrate their proper purposes. In other words, the language of ‘line manager’ and ‘chief executive’ is out of place in these institutions.
Professor Graham concludes this extended essay by reflecting on how to finance universities. He exposes the ambiguities in talk about ‘universal access’, and makes the important point that the burden of taxation used for funding universities will fall disproportionately on the poor rather than the rich. At the same time, he acknowledges the genuine social benefit of liberal as well as technical education. His conclusion is that fees charges directly by universities could supplement public funding in a way that would both be just and offer a much-needed measure of financial autonomy.
A series of short essays then explores topics such as electronic learning, the nature of humanities, the role of spiritual values in universities and the mistakes made in the recent and continuing efforts at reforming the universities. Graham's gift for combining theoretical clarity and precision with practical common sense consistently bears fruit. Above all, he shows how far policy has been confused by the lack of careful attention to concepts. At the same time, he points out that no serious attempt has been made to assess the impact of the very methods chosen to improve the universities; the evidence suggests repeatedly that they have, at the least, failed to be cost-effective. A further valuable feature of Graham's writing is his deliberate avoidance of polarisation: valuing medieval history does not require one to denigrate the study of hotel management; one can recognise the need for universities to be commercially viable without reinterpreting their aims as commercial; universities need both to adapt to new conditions and to recognise the value of stability and the costs of any large-scale change.
The study of humanities is valuable, Graham argues convincingly, not because it makes our lives more prosperous, but because it makes them more meaningful. It is perhaps ironic that this book shows how much we need good philosophy in order even to be prosperous. At the very least, the sort of patient, balanced and lucid analysis that the volume exemplifies, if it became the norm in political and administrative thinking, might avoid enormous costs of time, effort, money and anxiety. However, Professor Graham could never have become a fine philosopher had he tried to do so simply in order to think more efficiently about the running of universities; he could do that only by caring about philosophy for itself. More generally, good universities might turn out to benefit society in all sorts of unexpected ways; however, they will become good universities only if we value them for themselves, as institutions dedicated to enriching our lives through the pursuit of truth and understanding of whatever is important about human beings and the world in which we live.
