SIX hundred years ago, “the three pillars on which civilization rested were the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the universities”. This is how Bertram, Lord Bowden, principal of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in the UK, opened eight pages of coverage on “Universities and Society” on 26 March 1970.
He charted how universities came about, including a pivotal moment in 1415 when , and “students fled in panic – to … Heidelberg and several other universities”. The humanist, independent model they founded there was resisted in England. Bowden, developing the theme of independence, noted that 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold “discovered that Continental scholars refused to acknowledge that Oxford was a university… It was no more than an expensive finishing school for the scions of the aristocracy.” Its image “haunts us in England even yet”.
Into the 20th century many universities were loath to accept engineering and technology as subjects worthy of study, wrote Bowden. Again, he linked this to ideas of independence: “It is just as wrong for universities to allow themselves to be dominated by industry or by the government as it is for them to ignore the problems with which industry and government are struggling.”
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Clues to what prompted our coverage are in another part of it, in which Jonathan Rosenhead , referring to “allegations that local industrialists … have been monitoring the external activities of certain left wing lecturers” at the University of Warwick, UK. The backdrop was a student . Reports elsewhere administration “had become so … enmeshed with the upper reaches of consumer capitalist society that they are actively twisting the purposes and procedures of the university”, and that the occupiers found files on surveillance of staff.
Our coverage concluded with the inauguration of the UK’s innovative distance learning. It would, Geoffrey Hollister and Michael Pentz predicted, be the perfect setting to develop “computer diagnosis, computer-aided design, and automatic traffic guidance”. Those topics have filled our pages over the half century since.
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