- Email: [email protected]
Remembrance of things past
Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375 www.elsevier.com/locate/highedpol
Remembrance of things past Sheldon Rothblatt a, b a University of California, Berkeley, USA Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
b
1. Introduction We have come together to celebrate the tenth birthday of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers and the twentieth birthday of an organization critical to it, the Centre for Research on Higher Education and Work in Kassel, the two linked by the energizing presence and the sheer energy of our colleague Ulrich Teichler. We meet, as is ®tting in his city, the city of the UniversitaÈt Gesamthochschule Kassel. I address the theme of the conference, which is to evaluate the achievements of higher education research, by which is meant the success our combined eorts have had in comprehending and explaining the manifold relationships between universities and colleges and society. But this is a scholarly statement. Some of us are public policy analysts. Rephrasing the question then yields the following: how, and with what success, have higher education studies in¯uenced government public policy with respect to the functioning of higher education systems in countries from which our membership is largely drawn? My general answer to both these questions are mixed. There have been successes de®ned in terms that the founders of CHER expressed. Yet to expect an academic association such as ours to have a fundamental impact on government or regional or industrial policy is aiming very high indeed. Decision-making in the political and economic sectors is both an extraordinarily complex process and equally dicult to describe. There are many players, accidents and contingencies. Perhaps we ought to acknowledge that reality more straightforwardly and incorporate assumptions about decision-making, whether at governmental or at institutional levels, into our analyses. The scholarly enterprise is largely in our own hands. We provide journals with editors, conferences with organizers and higher education with courses and 0952-8733/99/$20.00 # 1999 International Association of Universities. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 5 2 - 8 7 3 3 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 2 0 - 3
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S. Rothblatt / Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375
teaching. We select the topics to be investigated, adjusted of course to the parameters established by academic sub-®elds and career-building. When it comes to this area of autonomous or semi-autonomous activity, our standards or work and inspiration can be improved, our imagination stimulated, our ®ndings brought more in line with the actual experience of individuals and societies. I am an historian by training, career and inclination. Yet I am hardly past bound. I welcome many of the departures that have occurred in the history of higher education. We live in an age of mass access education. It is right and just and sensible and utilitarian that we provide every citizen of a democracy with the opportunities that higher education provides. It is desperately important to develop cultures that increase our capacity to serve many dierent types of interests and talents in ways designed to enhance both. Environments need to be maintained that encourage a sense of being and belonging, teaching that is ®rmly united to learning and addressed to the learner and results in enhancing selfworth. 2. Remarkable technological success At the same time we must still think about how to maintain strong elite programs without which our nations as cultures are likely to sink into utter mediocrity. I often believe that our elite programs and institutions have in fact declined in terms of the very cultural ideals of a university to which I have referred. The nations of the western world have managed to combine remarkable technological success of the most imaginative kind with the commercialization of everyday life and the reduction of personal relations to the level of the purchase of commodities. We also have the opposite end. We still produce avant-garde art; but that is often (as a critic once wrote) a ``terrorism of the higher culture'', a kind of back-bench art that de®nes limits but needs to be brought forward for healthy incorporation into more domestic concerns. However, I will resist the temptation to preach even more and ask only that this subject, the question of the relationship of elite and mass education, be examined by us for particular institutions with larger questions in mind. The expansion of higher education in general is a worthy undertaking, especially when it is combined Ð as it has Ð with creative initiatives in teaching and scholarship. Go back one hundred years and notice how stereotyped teaching had become in Europe (or America). Think now to the larger number of classroom initiatives and experiments to be found in most countries (there are notable exceptions not, of course to be named out loud). Naturally we want these initiatives to work well. But I am not so certain that the actual outcome (if we can measure it as more than output) is as important as the attempting. Students respond to experiments undertaken in their interests, and teaching is the process of persuading learners that they are important. These are subjects for CHER.
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3. Reigning concerns For the last thirty or more years the reigning concern of public policy as adopted in most countries has been broadening access, bringing certain minority groups in the United States into the universe of educational opportunities, bringing working class families in Europe into higher education and ®nding the means for supporting these larger numbers. That story, properly told, consists of trial and error, hesitations, interruptions, unforeseen circumstances. But how many CHER members have studied these phenomena in detail? Large numbers of older students are now ¯owing into higher education as never before, not only the ``mature'' student, the single mother returning to university, the mid career professional in search of upgrades, but retirees and elderly whose interest is in keeping their minds active even as their bodies lose their cunning. This is marvellous. CHER scholars have preferred to study revenue alternatives, have protested in certain cases against budgetary shortsightedness, have considered the management styles that accompany new methods of resource allocation and have weighed, protested against or happily re®ned the numerous schemes for institutional assessment, evaluation and audit that now consume so much academic and bureaucratic time in Europe, in some countries much more than in others of course. CHER researchers, most notably here in Kassel, have carefully studied the connections between higher education training and labor markets, as well as attentively observed the movement of student populations across Europe as a consequence of the remarkable experiment in supranational government so prominent a feature of these last decades. These agenda are obvious, in the sense that as they involve major transformations in society, and in the provision for higher education, they simply cannot be ignored. 4. Achievements I turn now to a dierent description of what CHER has attempted to achieve. Here I can fortunately draw on the words uttered four years ago by one of our colleagues. He identi®ed three aims of this organization. The ®rst was to create a higher education community, meaning a collection of investigators whose common interest was in something called higher education, higher education policy, higher education studies. Centers for these have proliferated in the years since the 1950s. The creation of enclaves for the systematic study of subjects, topics and problems relevant to the operation of colleges and universities Ð that is certainly new in the history of educational institutions. ``In coming together,'' wrote Guy Neave, ``we believed that the results of our exchanges would be greater Ð and certainly more rewarding Ð than the sum of our individual eorts.'' The second aim he identi®es Ð it is a subset of the ®rst Ð is the linking of core disciplines. These keep expanding, to the point where eight of them isolated in 1984 have swelled to 20. And we are still counting. This has been a formidable
370
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development. However, whether we have managed to inform higher education studies with a broadened perspective is to my mind problematical. I speak now not of multidisciplinary work, since almost any set of ideas or methodologies are almost automatically interdisciplinary. Higher education is not a discipline in any case, but a subject area. I question our success because I ®nd that our annual meetings have become more or less like those of other conferences and associations, if smaller in scale, with the same types of papers, formats and analyses, too discrete I believe, too overstocked with presentations, so some sessions are relatively unattended. Invariably we encounter too little time for discussion. Probably we should experiment with dierent formats. We could try to solicit presentations from investigators of dierent academic backgrounds and specialties who are examining the same problem from their own perspectives and who have had a chance to consult beforehand. We could narrow the number of presentations, create more forums, throw out more challenges? Would that work? Can we ®nd a way of doing this? 5. Specialism, classi®cation and the naming of names I am not complaining about narrow specialism, although I might be complaining about narrow-minded approaches, a hesitation to let the mind swing more imaginatively so as to better illuminate the width of our subject, the fact that education involves every scrap of knowledge that we have about how institutions work and decisions are taken, how emotion is entangled with reason, how the personal and the institutional conjoin (if they do). I want to stress that neither Guy Neave nor I regard specialism as ipso facto narrow. I follow Alfred North Whitehead in this regard, believing that it is wise and best to have an interest that can be isolated and examined in detail. We recall that one of the ®rst steps in all knowledge gaining is to classify and categorize. The ®rst human being, Adam, we are told in a midrash (a biblical commentary or speculation), was given the essential task of naming all the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden. So the naming was a critical ®rst step, but so was the Garden, the environment in which all living creatures and organisms were domiciled. We recall that Neave said that it was the hope of CHER that the de®ciencies of each of us would be repaired by the whole. The CHER founders believed that it was consequently the obligation of scholars to be alert to the assumptions of other areas of inquiry and to try to move sideways out of a specialty into the domain of others, or, of equal importance, engage in far more comparative work. We do little of that as an association beyond OECD-type indicators and comparisons, but how often do we probe beyond these surface criteria to underlying meanings, assumptions and structures? Comparative scholarship is dicult to achieve. It is dicult for historians, who typically spend a lifetime studying in depth the story of one nation. To attempt to acquire that kind of knowledge for more than one nation is to invite a nervous breakdown. But what if we worked more closely together, carefully laying out the stages of a possible comparison and drawing on our
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371
collective knowledge to provide new levels of comprehension? As classifying knowledge is the ®rst step in scholarship, comparison is almost the ®nal step in comprehension. 6. Resisting the temptations of government and bureaucracy And the third task that CHER set for itself was to resist the easy temptation to de®ne the higher education agenda mainly as the drivers of public policy de®ned it, meaning for most countries the action of governments and bureaucracies. That is to say, CHER's membership being largely academic (irrespective of individual aliations), there was to remain service to academic ideals, to the ways in which the leading institutions of higher education have gone about building science and scholarship and to values that de®ne a community of seekers. I would like to add that if it is the case that certain of our institutions have grown more fragmented internally, as is the common perception, then it is all the more incumbent upon small organizations like CHER to retain the goals of fellowship and cooperation. But is it absolutely the case that our institutions are now anomic, bureaucratic, impersonal, bereft of all forms of collegiality, dehumanized? I often think so, but how seriously have the issues been investigated? Tony Becher's study of academic disciplines, the globalization of academic life, creating cross-national friendships, and research collaboration, the employment of new technologies that ease and encourage distant communication suggest disintegration at the level of particular institutions. And yet as an historian, and a student of institutions, I might well ask myself if there exist alongside these tendencies new internal rearrangements, new networks and institutional collaborations that may well bypass the old Ð the traditional departments of American universities and the faculties of European ones Ð in the process of creating the new, such as subject area research centres. Some universities have abolished the traditional internal boundaries. Whereas these experiments have yet to be adequately assessed, how do we know that they have not repaired some of the seams within colleges and universities? The problem of contract teachers and part-time lecturers certainly does not augur well for bonding, that we must confess. We should invite our membership to examine closely the nature of institutional identity, how working relationships are maintained in the era of global travel and electronic communication, the success, strength or virtues of voluntary relationships in associations such as CHER versus the type of formal organization and hence involuntary associations that have characterized departments and faculties. My conclusion after attending many CHER meetings is that vital aspects of the institutional and professional life of higher education researchers are simply ignored. 7. Another grande peur And that brings me directly to Neave's fear, in his 1994 address, that the
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temptation for researchers to more or less follow the agenda set down by policymakers would dominate investigations, because research in the policy social sciences follows money. I implied in my earlier remarks that this may have occurred. I will now say directly that it has. I am not against it, but there is the other half that we should take cognizance of. Higher education institutions, Martin Trow wrote several decades ago in a classic paper, have two lives, the outer and the inner. CHER has heavily focused its attention on the outer. That is to be expected. Most of CHER's membership are in social science disciplines bearing on policy studies. Many of the most visible issues of the last third of a century have involved higher education as a ``system'' and as a structure. Funding, evaluation, government/industry/university relations, student mobility, evaluation and assessment Ð these are the connecting links to wider questions of the adaptability of universities to changing support links and expanded missions. Technologies Ð now one of the truly major topics in the expansion of higher education Ð is another. I am sure that the CHER membership will think of many more. Yet external connections have repercussions inside. Issues of ®nance aect all aspects of the functioning of higher education systems. So focusing on external or foreign relations does not by any means automatically exclude the study of internal reverberations.
8. The historian's confession If the CHER scholars have concentrated mainly or directly on external relationships in higher education, most historians of universities and colleges have ignored the critical aspect of outside involvements. That is, until very recently, historians at best have touched upon the pertinent themes without reference to the analytical lexicon that would allow historical methods to interpenetrate with sociological conceptions. Historians easily move sideways. I will not now raise the interesting de®nitional question of whether history writing is a discipline as much as it is a state of mind, a perception of what happens to people and institutions that are time-bound. There are, it is certain, very few historical studies directly focused Ð not in passing, but directly focused on policy issues, on the history of university ®nancing, on changing admissions policies, on the governance of institutions, the roles of departments, faculties, senates, courts and boards of trustees, studies of the appointments process and the structure of academic careers in various countries Ð nothing comparable to Burton Clark's magni®cent slicing through the nature and functioning of Italian universities, or David Riesman's and Christopher Jencks' superb The Academic Revolution. It is therefore hardly surprising that historians qua historians have usually not been very conspicuous as participants in discussions about policy issues. To this day CHER rarely includes a solidly historical connection in its annual meetings, and I am certain that a review of paper proposals would reveal few historical topics on oer.
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But what historians have done well is to articulate certain aspects of the inner life of universities, particularly in relation to developing lines of scholarship and science, to changing styles of classical literature, for example, to the growth of laboratories, and now, thanks to several architectural historians, we have some wonderful studies of campus environments as learning environments, although more work needs here to be done. We are getting better; and I hope that more and more researchers in higher education will see that present-mindedness is not always the best way to examine a contemporary problem. It is not that history teaches by example or that the past repeats itself. The past never repeats itself; but history, when properly aligned, portrays the richness of the contexts in which policy decisions need to be made. So I call for histories that intermesh with policy studies, and policy studies that do not simply use historical information as background but as a means of providing depth, perspective, even irony to such studies. That may Ð since history is good at introducing the unfamiliar and the element of surprise Ð reduce the temptation for policy studies from becoming all too obvious and from following the leader.
9. Sins of omission I have suggested, if too brie¯y, how many topics of critical importance are not being investigated by CHER members. I have also appealed to you for more creative scholarship and analysis, of a kind that takes into account human complexity and indeterminacy. I must now admit that there is a substantial intellectual and heuristic danger in using a title such as mine. ``The Remembrance of Things Past'' suggests a romanticization or sentimentalization of past times. Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet Ð ``When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past'' Ð begins with this promise, but I quote the next line: ``I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.'' The poet jumps from sweet and silent thought to waste and disappointment. But the end of the sonnet restores the whole again, as love and friendship are recalled. The title is best known in French as Proust's journey through memory, A la recherche du temps perdu. What is sentimental in Proust is the very process of recollecting itself, the power of remembrance for art and for personal meaning. His past is not wonderful. Many of his characters are deplorable. We could not possibly wish for the past world of privilege, self-indulgence and self-absorption, although our world is very much its descendant in too many aspects. No, I want to remember but not to sentimentalize. One way is to recall the nature of one of the institutions that we study. I mean of course the ``university''. The university has come down to us through the centuries as a unique creation, miraculous in its longevity as the second oldest institution in western culture with a continuous history. In the nineteenth century it became a particularly selfconscious institution, weaving into the threads of its daily labors a conception about its higher Ð indeed its highest Ð purposes.
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10. Sublime discontents Much doubt has been cast by historians on whether universities ever were wholly motivated by sublime aspirations. For earlier centuries we ®nd instances of national or ethnic prejudices, religious exclusion and intellectuals in the service of ideologies. (That may well be the de®nition of an intellectual, the younger Julien Benda notwithstanding; where once he spoke of value-free knowledge, he later spoke of the promises of communism.) Scholarship was often fabricated in support of reigning monarchies, not to mention in our own terrifying century the triumph of totalitarian regimes, the purging of universities, their in®ltration by commissars. Who commits these crimes? Why do people whose lives are presumably dedicated to telling the truth succumb so quickly? Of course one answer has always been that failure to do so brings horrible retribution. Yet I ask whether professors were always unwilling accomplices of brutal regimes? I wonder by asking why after the defeat of fascism Enrico Fermi was never invited back to assume the chair he held in Italy? He was a great catch for America and contributed mightily to the extraordinary post-war revolution in high energy physics. But he might have enriched Italy and helped the nation cleanse her past. You have heard such tales. Doubt has been cast on the great traditions of university self-perception, on whether, for example, German universities ever truly incorporated a dominant ethic of Bildung, with its aim of personal as well as national spiritual amplitude. Sceptics point out (convincingly) that Humboldtianism cannot be reduced to a single formula, such as the pursuit of value-free knowledge. And has Cardinal Newman's ``idea of a university'' ever been a genuine rallying point for academics? The Scots did not need him, having home-grown traditions of their own that addressed actual Scottish needs. Anglophone universities founded from the mid-1850s onwards have taken little or no heed of him. American scholars are interested in his ideas, especially lately, but he has had no impact whatsoever on the development of American Roman Catholic universities and colleges. None of the great American departures in higher education, such as the land grant university, was inspired by Newman's conception of what a university had been and should continue to be. Still, we must look further to articulate the role of ideals or idealizations in understanding higher education. The great nineteenth-century conceptions, bundled together as the ``idea of a university'', were born out of a perceived need on the part of university-related thinkers and statesmen to stabilize an institution that seemed threatened by worldly concerns. There was created what anthropologists and theologians might call a mythopoeic culture, not exactly true but true in its capacity to tell a plausible story about itself that imparts meaning to life. It was true in the way that the philosopher John Locke's theories about life in a primordial state of nature was true. Men and women have never lived under such absolute conditions of freedom as he posited. Better Aristotle's assumption of people as social and political animals. Yet Locke's understanding of the meaning of freedom became the basis of those ideas of political liberty that
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eventually transformed the western world and continues to inform our discussions about citizenship, self-government and duty. Past conceptions about the meaning of higher education are valuable as reminders of the manifold possibilities of universities. They are also indications of the emotional levels underlying the history of education as the history of human aspirations. They suggest that in classrooms around the world communication of a special kind has taken place and continues to take place. That is why we should remember how higher education institutions actually function when we are discussing policies, programs, changes and goals. Historians have a major role to play. But historical-mindness should inform all policy studies. 11. Envoi I dwell on the academic historical profession because it is my home in the university, it is what I do in the classroom and because, in the call to this annual meeting, we were invited to re¯ect on how our particular discipline is related to the work of CHER. So I ask that you forgive me for violating the principle enunciated so well by the character ``My Uncle Toby'' in Laurence Sterne's perverse eighteenth-century epic novel, Tristram Shandy. This odd character (they are all odd in the book, except the hero, Tristram Shandy, because he is not born until the story is over) was wounded in the wars that took place between France and England at the end of the seventeenth century. He spent his lifetime remembering his particular past, rehearsing and reviewing the battles. He has no time for other thoughts or people. The author comments that it is all right to be so absorbed. But there are limitations. One may ride one's hobby horse (that is where the expression in English comes from), but one must never ever ride it on the king's highway. You have allowed me to ride forth on the king's highway today, and I am grateful to you.
Remembrance of things past Sheldon Rothblatt a, b a University of California, Berkeley, USA Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
b
1. Introduction We have come together to celebrate the tenth birthday of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers and the twentieth birthday of an organization critical to it, the Centre for Research on Higher Education and Work in Kassel, the two linked by the energizing presence and the sheer energy of our colleague Ulrich Teichler. We meet, as is ®tting in his city, the city of the UniversitaÈt Gesamthochschule Kassel. I address the theme of the conference, which is to evaluate the achievements of higher education research, by which is meant the success our combined eorts have had in comprehending and explaining the manifold relationships between universities and colleges and society. But this is a scholarly statement. Some of us are public policy analysts. Rephrasing the question then yields the following: how, and with what success, have higher education studies in¯uenced government public policy with respect to the functioning of higher education systems in countries from which our membership is largely drawn? My general answer to both these questions are mixed. There have been successes de®ned in terms that the founders of CHER expressed. Yet to expect an academic association such as ours to have a fundamental impact on government or regional or industrial policy is aiming very high indeed. Decision-making in the political and economic sectors is both an extraordinarily complex process and equally dicult to describe. There are many players, accidents and contingencies. Perhaps we ought to acknowledge that reality more straightforwardly and incorporate assumptions about decision-making, whether at governmental or at institutional levels, into our analyses. The scholarly enterprise is largely in our own hands. We provide journals with editors, conferences with organizers and higher education with courses and 0952-8733/99/$20.00 # 1999 International Association of Universities. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 5 2 - 8 7 3 3 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 2 0 - 3
368
S. Rothblatt / Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375
teaching. We select the topics to be investigated, adjusted of course to the parameters established by academic sub-®elds and career-building. When it comes to this area of autonomous or semi-autonomous activity, our standards or work and inspiration can be improved, our imagination stimulated, our ®ndings brought more in line with the actual experience of individuals and societies. I am an historian by training, career and inclination. Yet I am hardly past bound. I welcome many of the departures that have occurred in the history of higher education. We live in an age of mass access education. It is right and just and sensible and utilitarian that we provide every citizen of a democracy with the opportunities that higher education provides. It is desperately important to develop cultures that increase our capacity to serve many dierent types of interests and talents in ways designed to enhance both. Environments need to be maintained that encourage a sense of being and belonging, teaching that is ®rmly united to learning and addressed to the learner and results in enhancing selfworth. 2. Remarkable technological success At the same time we must still think about how to maintain strong elite programs without which our nations as cultures are likely to sink into utter mediocrity. I often believe that our elite programs and institutions have in fact declined in terms of the very cultural ideals of a university to which I have referred. The nations of the western world have managed to combine remarkable technological success of the most imaginative kind with the commercialization of everyday life and the reduction of personal relations to the level of the purchase of commodities. We also have the opposite end. We still produce avant-garde art; but that is often (as a critic once wrote) a ``terrorism of the higher culture'', a kind of back-bench art that de®nes limits but needs to be brought forward for healthy incorporation into more domestic concerns. However, I will resist the temptation to preach even more and ask only that this subject, the question of the relationship of elite and mass education, be examined by us for particular institutions with larger questions in mind. The expansion of higher education in general is a worthy undertaking, especially when it is combined Ð as it has Ð with creative initiatives in teaching and scholarship. Go back one hundred years and notice how stereotyped teaching had become in Europe (or America). Think now to the larger number of classroom initiatives and experiments to be found in most countries (there are notable exceptions not, of course to be named out loud). Naturally we want these initiatives to work well. But I am not so certain that the actual outcome (if we can measure it as more than output) is as important as the attempting. Students respond to experiments undertaken in their interests, and teaching is the process of persuading learners that they are important. These are subjects for CHER.
S. Rothblatt / Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375
369
3. Reigning concerns For the last thirty or more years the reigning concern of public policy as adopted in most countries has been broadening access, bringing certain minority groups in the United States into the universe of educational opportunities, bringing working class families in Europe into higher education and ®nding the means for supporting these larger numbers. That story, properly told, consists of trial and error, hesitations, interruptions, unforeseen circumstances. But how many CHER members have studied these phenomena in detail? Large numbers of older students are now ¯owing into higher education as never before, not only the ``mature'' student, the single mother returning to university, the mid career professional in search of upgrades, but retirees and elderly whose interest is in keeping their minds active even as their bodies lose their cunning. This is marvellous. CHER scholars have preferred to study revenue alternatives, have protested in certain cases against budgetary shortsightedness, have considered the management styles that accompany new methods of resource allocation and have weighed, protested against or happily re®ned the numerous schemes for institutional assessment, evaluation and audit that now consume so much academic and bureaucratic time in Europe, in some countries much more than in others of course. CHER researchers, most notably here in Kassel, have carefully studied the connections between higher education training and labor markets, as well as attentively observed the movement of student populations across Europe as a consequence of the remarkable experiment in supranational government so prominent a feature of these last decades. These agenda are obvious, in the sense that as they involve major transformations in society, and in the provision for higher education, they simply cannot be ignored. 4. Achievements I turn now to a dierent description of what CHER has attempted to achieve. Here I can fortunately draw on the words uttered four years ago by one of our colleagues. He identi®ed three aims of this organization. The ®rst was to create a higher education community, meaning a collection of investigators whose common interest was in something called higher education, higher education policy, higher education studies. Centers for these have proliferated in the years since the 1950s. The creation of enclaves for the systematic study of subjects, topics and problems relevant to the operation of colleges and universities Ð that is certainly new in the history of educational institutions. ``In coming together,'' wrote Guy Neave, ``we believed that the results of our exchanges would be greater Ð and certainly more rewarding Ð than the sum of our individual eorts.'' The second aim he identi®es Ð it is a subset of the ®rst Ð is the linking of core disciplines. These keep expanding, to the point where eight of them isolated in 1984 have swelled to 20. And we are still counting. This has been a formidable
370
S. Rothblatt / Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375
development. However, whether we have managed to inform higher education studies with a broadened perspective is to my mind problematical. I speak now not of multidisciplinary work, since almost any set of ideas or methodologies are almost automatically interdisciplinary. Higher education is not a discipline in any case, but a subject area. I question our success because I ®nd that our annual meetings have become more or less like those of other conferences and associations, if smaller in scale, with the same types of papers, formats and analyses, too discrete I believe, too overstocked with presentations, so some sessions are relatively unattended. Invariably we encounter too little time for discussion. Probably we should experiment with dierent formats. We could try to solicit presentations from investigators of dierent academic backgrounds and specialties who are examining the same problem from their own perspectives and who have had a chance to consult beforehand. We could narrow the number of presentations, create more forums, throw out more challenges? Would that work? Can we ®nd a way of doing this? 5. Specialism, classi®cation and the naming of names I am not complaining about narrow specialism, although I might be complaining about narrow-minded approaches, a hesitation to let the mind swing more imaginatively so as to better illuminate the width of our subject, the fact that education involves every scrap of knowledge that we have about how institutions work and decisions are taken, how emotion is entangled with reason, how the personal and the institutional conjoin (if they do). I want to stress that neither Guy Neave nor I regard specialism as ipso facto narrow. I follow Alfred North Whitehead in this regard, believing that it is wise and best to have an interest that can be isolated and examined in detail. We recall that one of the ®rst steps in all knowledge gaining is to classify and categorize. The ®rst human being, Adam, we are told in a midrash (a biblical commentary or speculation), was given the essential task of naming all the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden. So the naming was a critical ®rst step, but so was the Garden, the environment in which all living creatures and organisms were domiciled. We recall that Neave said that it was the hope of CHER that the de®ciencies of each of us would be repaired by the whole. The CHER founders believed that it was consequently the obligation of scholars to be alert to the assumptions of other areas of inquiry and to try to move sideways out of a specialty into the domain of others, or, of equal importance, engage in far more comparative work. We do little of that as an association beyond OECD-type indicators and comparisons, but how often do we probe beyond these surface criteria to underlying meanings, assumptions and structures? Comparative scholarship is dicult to achieve. It is dicult for historians, who typically spend a lifetime studying in depth the story of one nation. To attempt to acquire that kind of knowledge for more than one nation is to invite a nervous breakdown. But what if we worked more closely together, carefully laying out the stages of a possible comparison and drawing on our
S. Rothblatt / Higher Education Policy 12 (1999) 367±375
371
collective knowledge to provide new levels of comprehension? As classifying knowledge is the ®rst step in scholarship, comparison is almost the ®nal step in comprehension. 6. Resisting the temptations of government and bureaucracy And the third task that CHER set for itself was to resist the easy temptation to de®ne the higher education agenda mainly as the drivers of public policy de®ned it, meaning for most countries the action of governments and bureaucracies. That is to say, CHER's membership being largely academic (irrespective of individual aliations), there was to remain service to academic ideals, to the ways in which the leading institutions of higher education have gone about building science and scholarship and to values that de®ne a community of seekers. I would like to add that if it is the case that certain of our institutions have grown more fragmented internally, as is the common perception, then it is all the more incumbent upon small organizations like CHER to retain the goals of fellowship and cooperation. But is it absolutely the case that our institutions are now anomic, bureaucratic, impersonal, bereft of all forms of collegiality, dehumanized? I often think so, but how seriously have the issues been investigated? Tony Becher's study of academic disciplines, the globalization of academic life, creating cross-national friendships, and research collaboration, the employment of new technologies that ease and encourage distant communication suggest disintegration at the level of particular institutions. And yet as an historian, and a student of institutions, I might well ask myself if there exist alongside these tendencies new internal rearrangements, new networks and institutional collaborations that may well bypass the old Ð the traditional departments of American universities and the faculties of European ones Ð in the process of creating the new, such as subject area research centres. Some universities have abolished the traditional internal boundaries. Whereas these experiments have yet to be adequately assessed, how do we know that they have not repaired some of the seams within colleges and universities? The problem of contract teachers and part-time lecturers certainly does not augur well for bonding, that we must confess. We should invite our membership to examine closely the nature of institutional identity, how working relationships are maintained in the era of global travel and electronic communication, the success, strength or virtues of voluntary relationships in associations such as CHER versus the type of formal organization and hence involuntary associations that have characterized departments and faculties. My conclusion after attending many CHER meetings is that vital aspects of the institutional and professional life of higher education researchers are simply ignored. 7. Another grande peur And that brings me directly to Neave's fear, in his 1994 address, that the
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temptation for researchers to more or less follow the agenda set down by policymakers would dominate investigations, because research in the policy social sciences follows money. I implied in my earlier remarks that this may have occurred. I will now say directly that it has. I am not against it, but there is the other half that we should take cognizance of. Higher education institutions, Martin Trow wrote several decades ago in a classic paper, have two lives, the outer and the inner. CHER has heavily focused its attention on the outer. That is to be expected. Most of CHER's membership are in social science disciplines bearing on policy studies. Many of the most visible issues of the last third of a century have involved higher education as a ``system'' and as a structure. Funding, evaluation, government/industry/university relations, student mobility, evaluation and assessment Ð these are the connecting links to wider questions of the adaptability of universities to changing support links and expanded missions. Technologies Ð now one of the truly major topics in the expansion of higher education Ð is another. I am sure that the CHER membership will think of many more. Yet external connections have repercussions inside. Issues of ®nance aect all aspects of the functioning of higher education systems. So focusing on external or foreign relations does not by any means automatically exclude the study of internal reverberations.
8. The historian's confession If the CHER scholars have concentrated mainly or directly on external relationships in higher education, most historians of universities and colleges have ignored the critical aspect of outside involvements. That is, until very recently, historians at best have touched upon the pertinent themes without reference to the analytical lexicon that would allow historical methods to interpenetrate with sociological conceptions. Historians easily move sideways. I will not now raise the interesting de®nitional question of whether history writing is a discipline as much as it is a state of mind, a perception of what happens to people and institutions that are time-bound. There are, it is certain, very few historical studies directly focused Ð not in passing, but directly focused on policy issues, on the history of university ®nancing, on changing admissions policies, on the governance of institutions, the roles of departments, faculties, senates, courts and boards of trustees, studies of the appointments process and the structure of academic careers in various countries Ð nothing comparable to Burton Clark's magni®cent slicing through the nature and functioning of Italian universities, or David Riesman's and Christopher Jencks' superb The Academic Revolution. It is therefore hardly surprising that historians qua historians have usually not been very conspicuous as participants in discussions about policy issues. To this day CHER rarely includes a solidly historical connection in its annual meetings, and I am certain that a review of paper proposals would reveal few historical topics on oer.
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But what historians have done well is to articulate certain aspects of the inner life of universities, particularly in relation to developing lines of scholarship and science, to changing styles of classical literature, for example, to the growth of laboratories, and now, thanks to several architectural historians, we have some wonderful studies of campus environments as learning environments, although more work needs here to be done. We are getting better; and I hope that more and more researchers in higher education will see that present-mindedness is not always the best way to examine a contemporary problem. It is not that history teaches by example or that the past repeats itself. The past never repeats itself; but history, when properly aligned, portrays the richness of the contexts in which policy decisions need to be made. So I call for histories that intermesh with policy studies, and policy studies that do not simply use historical information as background but as a means of providing depth, perspective, even irony to such studies. That may Ð since history is good at introducing the unfamiliar and the element of surprise Ð reduce the temptation for policy studies from becoming all too obvious and from following the leader.
9. Sins of omission I have suggested, if too brie¯y, how many topics of critical importance are not being investigated by CHER members. I have also appealed to you for more creative scholarship and analysis, of a kind that takes into account human complexity and indeterminacy. I must now admit that there is a substantial intellectual and heuristic danger in using a title such as mine. ``The Remembrance of Things Past'' suggests a romanticization or sentimentalization of past times. Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet Ð ``When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past'' Ð begins with this promise, but I quote the next line: ``I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.'' The poet jumps from sweet and silent thought to waste and disappointment. But the end of the sonnet restores the whole again, as love and friendship are recalled. The title is best known in French as Proust's journey through memory, A la recherche du temps perdu. What is sentimental in Proust is the very process of recollecting itself, the power of remembrance for art and for personal meaning. His past is not wonderful. Many of his characters are deplorable. We could not possibly wish for the past world of privilege, self-indulgence and self-absorption, although our world is very much its descendant in too many aspects. No, I want to remember but not to sentimentalize. One way is to recall the nature of one of the institutions that we study. I mean of course the ``university''. The university has come down to us through the centuries as a unique creation, miraculous in its longevity as the second oldest institution in western culture with a continuous history. In the nineteenth century it became a particularly selfconscious institution, weaving into the threads of its daily labors a conception about its higher Ð indeed its highest Ð purposes.
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10. Sublime discontents Much doubt has been cast by historians on whether universities ever were wholly motivated by sublime aspirations. For earlier centuries we ®nd instances of national or ethnic prejudices, religious exclusion and intellectuals in the service of ideologies. (That may well be the de®nition of an intellectual, the younger Julien Benda notwithstanding; where once he spoke of value-free knowledge, he later spoke of the promises of communism.) Scholarship was often fabricated in support of reigning monarchies, not to mention in our own terrifying century the triumph of totalitarian regimes, the purging of universities, their in®ltration by commissars. Who commits these crimes? Why do people whose lives are presumably dedicated to telling the truth succumb so quickly? Of course one answer has always been that failure to do so brings horrible retribution. Yet I ask whether professors were always unwilling accomplices of brutal regimes? I wonder by asking why after the defeat of fascism Enrico Fermi was never invited back to assume the chair he held in Italy? He was a great catch for America and contributed mightily to the extraordinary post-war revolution in high energy physics. But he might have enriched Italy and helped the nation cleanse her past. You have heard such tales. Doubt has been cast on the great traditions of university self-perception, on whether, for example, German universities ever truly incorporated a dominant ethic of Bildung, with its aim of personal as well as national spiritual amplitude. Sceptics point out (convincingly) that Humboldtianism cannot be reduced to a single formula, such as the pursuit of value-free knowledge. And has Cardinal Newman's ``idea of a university'' ever been a genuine rallying point for academics? The Scots did not need him, having home-grown traditions of their own that addressed actual Scottish needs. Anglophone universities founded from the mid-1850s onwards have taken little or no heed of him. American scholars are interested in his ideas, especially lately, but he has had no impact whatsoever on the development of American Roman Catholic universities and colleges. None of the great American departures in higher education, such as the land grant university, was inspired by Newman's conception of what a university had been and should continue to be. Still, we must look further to articulate the role of ideals or idealizations in understanding higher education. The great nineteenth-century conceptions, bundled together as the ``idea of a university'', were born out of a perceived need on the part of university-related thinkers and statesmen to stabilize an institution that seemed threatened by worldly concerns. There was created what anthropologists and theologians might call a mythopoeic culture, not exactly true but true in its capacity to tell a plausible story about itself that imparts meaning to life. It was true in the way that the philosopher John Locke's theories about life in a primordial state of nature was true. Men and women have never lived under such absolute conditions of freedom as he posited. Better Aristotle's assumption of people as social and political animals. Yet Locke's understanding of the meaning of freedom became the basis of those ideas of political liberty that
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eventually transformed the western world and continues to inform our discussions about citizenship, self-government and duty. Past conceptions about the meaning of higher education are valuable as reminders of the manifold possibilities of universities. They are also indications of the emotional levels underlying the history of education as the history of human aspirations. They suggest that in classrooms around the world communication of a special kind has taken place and continues to take place. That is why we should remember how higher education institutions actually function when we are discussing policies, programs, changes and goals. Historians have a major role to play. But historical-mindness should inform all policy studies. 11. Envoi I dwell on the academic historical profession because it is my home in the university, it is what I do in the classroom and because, in the call to this annual meeting, we were invited to re¯ect on how our particular discipline is related to the work of CHER. So I ask that you forgive me for violating the principle enunciated so well by the character ``My Uncle Toby'' in Laurence Sterne's perverse eighteenth-century epic novel, Tristram Shandy. This odd character (they are all odd in the book, except the hero, Tristram Shandy, because he is not born until the story is over) was wounded in the wars that took place between France and England at the end of the seventeenth century. He spent his lifetime remembering his particular past, rehearsing and reviewing the battles. He has no time for other thoughts or people. The author comments that it is all right to be so absorbed. But there are limitations. One may ride one's hobby horse (that is where the expression in English comes from), but one must never ever ride it on the king's highway. You have allowed me to ride forth on the king's highway today, and I am grateful to you.