Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education: Expansion and Development in Post-War Britain(Research into Higher Education)

This thought-provoking book addresses the persistent anxieties surrounding the purpose and direction of higher education, offering a nuanced historical perspective on its transformation. Using Cold War Britain as a lens, the book challenges the prevailing narrative that marketisation was an external imposition, revealing instead how the dynamic priorities of social democratic higher education inadvertently paved the way for their own supersession. Drawing on novel archival insights, it explores experimental initiatives by university leaders and employers and reveals how post-war public investment in universities was justified through a dual logic: empowering young people to pursue their individual self-interest, while cultivating the ethical application of specialist knowledge in service of liberal capitalism. It goes on to show how the novel accountability frameworks they constructed, intended to maximise freedom, contained unstable tensions – tensions that remain in today’s neoliberal system. Packed full of research, case studies, and policy implications, the book interrogates the successes and failures of innovative teaching and learning practices, as well as the evolving relationship between universities and industry. Throughout, the author offers critical insights into how liberal education might be reimagined to sustain universities in their service to the common good. This is essential reading for students, academics, policymakers, and anyone seeking to understand the moral principles underpinning higher education and their influence on its future.

Table of Contents:
1. Post-War Higher Education: From Social Democracy to Neoliberalism? 2. The Puzzle of Lionel Robbins: How a Neoliberal Economist Expanded Public University Education in Post-War Britain 3. The Purpose of Higher Education in the Robbins Report, 1960-1963 4. The Binary Divide and Liberal Education 5. Employers And Universities: Making the Graduate Work for Industry 6. Building Breadth at the New Universities of York, Warwick, and Stirling, 1959-1972 7. After Social Democracy: Higher Education and The Future Appendix: Archival and Manuscript Sources

About the Author :
Josh Patel is a Senior Education and Policy Researcher at the Edge Foundation, where he conducts research on tertiary education, with a focus on the relationship between further and higher education, general, liberal, and vocational education, and historical policy development.

Review :
"An excellent history of university expansion in the UK in the early post war period. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual influences on those who led these changes and what it meant for university staff and students." Huw Morris, IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, UK. "Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education represents an ambitious reinterpretation of the value systems which underpinned British higher education in the post-Robbins period. It makes a significant contribution to the historiography of higher education and to our understanding of how liberal democratic values have been overtaken by an illiberal economic and market-based philosophy." Michael Shattock, author of Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945-2011 and The Governance of British Higher Education (with Aniko Horvath).