The historian's function is often that of restoring complexity to a past reality which some bold and excessively binary conceptual scheme has made too simple. In the present case, the conceptual villains are the terms ‘state’ and ‘market’, and the reality in question is the understanding of the development of British universities, principally in the early and mid-nineteenth century. The long reign of interventionist government in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe after 1945, effectively postponed critical discussion of the role which markets played, and continued to play, in shaping the patterns of higher education. The dramatic reversals of this policy in the course of the 1980s made it too easy for academics in Britain in particular to speak as though a long and uninterrupted, and largely benign, relationship between the state and ‘its’ universities had been rudely shattered by a wholly new insistence on introducing the play of market forces. Both the earlier orthodoxy and the more recent response tended to tell the story in over-simple terms; in particular, both worked with a reified and unhistorical notion of the opposition between ‘state’ and ‘market’ as fixed and mutually exclusive terms. This essay seeks to provide a more nuanced account of their reciprocal relationships during a key period in the shaping of universities in Britain.

In reality, the idea of the market, and of markets themselves, are relevant to any discussion of what has been termed the disintegration of the Georgian ‘confessional state’ in the early nineteenth century. This was followed by a long period of the re-shaping of the instruments of government in accordance with the presumed temper and spirit of the age.

In writings about the history of British education, supply is easier to discern than demand. The actions of market providers – schools, colleges and universities, but also parliaments, cabinets, prominent politicians, civil servants and leading academics – leap from the pages of the past to provide a fairly obvious account of the facts at major turning points. Demand, especially if it is mass demand, is more difficult to explain. The indicators are harder to interpret. In crude fashion, enrolments are at least one tangible measure of the existence of market pressures. The causes of a sudden rise or fall may not be readily explicable, but the consequences have measurable effects on such variables as space use and the quality of facilities, size of teaching and support staffs, institutional income or curricular diversity. Student numbers affect housing, the provision for recreation, commercial activity and transportation. A ‘critical mass’ of students influences teaching relationships. Several of these variables are also affected by supply irrespective of demand, since curricula, to take only one example, can be altered even if there is no increase in numbers or shift of interests within existing markets. Staff augmentation can similarly occur without apparent increases in demand.

History is about origins, transformations and outcomes. But the outcomes are always temporary or even false. Historians who write on topics of contemporary concern consequently face obvious dangers when they assume that a trend is over, granting them a licence to pontificate. It is therefore best to admit at the outset that I fell prey to a minuscule amount of moralising possibly excusable in light of the intense and to me disturbing political and ideological academic exchanges of the last thirty years. But in general I hope readers will agree that I am primarily interested in understanding events in accordance with the conventional rules of historical practice.

In composing this work, drawing together materials from many locations, revisiting arguments in the light of recent developments, comparing early and later thoughts and trying to absorb the insights and learning of valued colleagues from many countries, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had more origins than I at first imagined. The chapters tell all, but a short list can be added here. I am clearly concerned about the origins of a way of thinking about universities that is, even in its denial, permanent; about a species of creature called an ‘undergraduate’; about market discipline as a concept, a fact and a method of historical inquiry; about failure, not just the absence of success but a lingering sense of inadequacy and how universities have contributed to both.

A METROPOLITAN PESTHOUSE

The history of the invisible hand of the market in relation to English universities is also illuminated by analysing the foundations and subsequent evolution of the University of London and its colleges.

Three particular themes or threads run through the course of the following discussion. The first is the relationship of the London University to its specific urban environment at the time of its founding, meaning the relationship of the university to an actual or potential local market for students, resources and services. The second is its relationship to other preexisting educational institutions against which, inevitably, it was compared and measured. And the third is the position of the new university with respect to certain special features of Britain's urban and national cultural history.

Conceived in 1826, the London University was only the third university to be created in England, although smaller Scotland had five, two of which, Marischal and King's College, were university colleges later united as Aberdeen University in the middle of the nineteenth century. London was not established as a rival to Oxford and Cambridge, whose curriculum and socially exclusive intake had long been under attack, but as a university serving a different market. It could not be convincingly argued that London's establishment was necessary because of the decline of Oxford and Cambridge. The fortunes of the ancient universities were actually on the rise at the time of London's founding.

PROLEGOMENA: VANISHING IDENTITIES

Universities today arrive packaged in every conceivable shape and style. We should not be surprised. In its long and impressive history as a distinct institution within western civilisation, the university has never assumed a single form or followed a single pattern, nor, despite undeniable similarities in organisation and curriculum, has one university been a carbon copy of another. National differences of organisation, mission and curriculum have been plentiful; and within nations themselves numerous forms have coexisted.

This remains the situation, and if anything the variety of types has multiplied even more in the hospitable environments of our own century. In Austria and Germany many ‘universities’ of that designation are relatively specialised institutions, wirtschaftsuniversitäten or technische universitäten. Austria established a University of Mining at Leoben and a University of Educational Services at Klagenfurt. In the 1990s more than half of all French universities offered programmes of study confined to a limited range of specialties. In the fomer Soviet bloc, exclusively focused universities were established in conformity with communist government policy to concentrate on applied subjects. A University of Economics was established in Hungary in 1948, followed in the next year by a University of Heavy Industries and two years later by a University of Chemical Industry. In Stockholm, Lyngley (near Copenhagen), Paris, Lausanne, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, high-prestige engineering establishments have long flourished. They do not carry the hallowed name ‘university’, but this has not been a drawback.

PROLOGUE

G. M. Young remarks in a footnote in passing, that the poet P. B. Shelley and his friend and biographer, T. J. Hogg, ‘seem to me the first undergraduates, recognizable as such, on record’. We cannot know exactly what he meant, but we can surmise from Hogg's Life of Shelley and the facts of Shelley's residence at Oxford that he spotted in the circumstances of the poet's rebellion and expulsion a set of attitudes towards a university experience that approximated a style of response more typical afterwards. He could not have meant that subsequently all undergraduates would recapitulate the direct experiences of the two friends. But he probably meant that in and around Shelley, just before and after, a university education became a more significant, even a defining experience in the lives of those whose institutional connections earlier were more tenuous, less problematical or emotional and who were not so personally identified with the institutions, the routines and the history of the universities. They hardly shared in its ‘idea’ or experienced its ‘place’.

We can therefore attempt to fill in the spaces that Young provides us by examining the emergence of a student estate and condition in which the university became a stage in the life cycle of the undergraduate, a necessary step on the path to adulthood and maturity. We can also notice the gradual appearance of a literature that purported to explore the meaning of that estate in story and novel.

WHAT PRICE SUCCESS?

A university may have an idea, it may sometimes be a place for the teaching of universal knowledge, but it is also the arena in which young minds are probed, irritated, extended and weighed in the balance of life chances. Evaluation is painful and hard on the ego. Judgements translate all too readily into a string of numbers or letters indicating different levels of proficiency. If there is a single aspect of pedagogy that promotes anxiety and makes students petrified, it is exam-taking, especially and most acutely in the form of competitive examinations. The thought that there is only so much room at the top is chilling. Even success in academic studies can instil or widen an inherent sense of inadequacy. ‘Success’ is an elastic concept: after all, one may only be relatively successful. It is often afterwards, when memories of fright and anxiety have eased, that the mystery and surprise of place are strongly felt. The passage of years allows for many of the less agreeable aspects of the university's examination culture to diminish. Time permits the acquisition of skills and knowledge other than those emphasised by teachers, although a self-conscious liberal arts instructor will take credit for establishing the foundation upon which future success is built.

INTRODUCTION: THE UNIVERSITY AS MILIEU

In Chapter 1 Newman's idea of a university was explored (yet again) in relation to the famous definition of his lasting work. A university was (is) ‘a place of teaching universal knowledge’. The emphasis falls on the word ‘teaching’. This was opposed to several other conceptions of a university but specifically to what eventually became the dominant transatlantic idea, at least in the view of an international community of researchers, that is to say, the German idea of original inquiry.

This opposite idea focuses on wissenschaftliches Methoden, the methods or process needed to convert information into knowledge. The stress falls on the process of conceptualisation, analysis and the organisation of facts into connected hypotheses and theories, to be added and corrected as an on-going scientific commitment. Whether that process is absolutely valuefree, or relatively so, whether it is teleological and biased is an indissoluble part of the knowledge enterprise, provoking further reflections and debate and a vast literature on evidence and proof, the sociology of theory manufacture or the historiography of disciplinary specialisation. At issue are certainty not authority and the modes of inquiry best suited to representing actuality. Furthermore, the German idea of a university implies that certain fields of knowledge may become obsolete, in which case the careers of their practitioners can be in jeopardy.

INTRODUCTION: IDEAS OF A UNIVERSITY

The subject of this chapter is the history of the ‘idea of a university’, or rather, it is the history of the idea that a university derives its identity from an idea. The subject is puzzling. Why does a university require an ‘idea’? Quite simply, it does not. The historical answer, however, is more interesting. Whether or not a university needs an ‘idea’, it has been assigned one, more than one, in fact. For two centuries a particular kind of debate has gone on, revived in every generation, concerning the role and purpose of a university and the education it provides. The debate has been inconclusive. Yet what is significant about the history of the idea of a university is the search for one, the striving after an ideal that must satisfy two conditions: it must be pure, like a platonic ideal, and it must be lasting, superior to all apparent transformations.

By ‘idea’, then, is meant an inherent purpose, embedded, as it were, into the university and possibly its history – but this is not always clear from debate. An ‘idea’ is also a genetic code that dictates the subsequent development of a university; but like all such inheritances, the signals are not always recognised.

Metaphors such as these come readily to mind, for the history of the idea of the idea of a university lacks precision.