Sir David Watson

David Watson is an historian and Professor of Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London.  He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton between 1990 and 2005.  His most recent books are Managing Civic and Community Engagement (2007), and The Dearing Report: ten years on (2007).  His The Question of Morale: managing happiness and unhappiness in university life will be published in October 2009. He has contributed widely to developments in UK higher education. He was a member of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's National Commission on Education and the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education chaired by Sir Ron Dearing. He was the elected chair of the Universities Association for Continuing Education between 1994 and 1998, and chaired the Longer Term Strategy Group of Universities UK between 1999 and 2005. He is a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, a Companion of the Institute of Management and a National Teaching Fellow (2008). He chairs the national Inquiry into the  Future for Lifelong Learning, which will report in September 2009. He was knighted in 1998 for services to higher education.

Re-lighting the beacons: historical perspectives on university civic and community engagement.

Former Harvard President Derek Bok is fond of describing the university as an ethical beacon:

The university reveals its own ethical standards in many ways, including its scrupulousness in upholding ethical standards, its decency and fairness in dealing with students and employees, and its sensitivity in relating to the community in which it resides (Bok, 2006: 160).

Historically, this is a powerful point.  Until the advent, in the late twentieth century, of company or for-profit universities, all university institutions grew in some way from the communities that originally sponsored them.  These acts of foundation varied according to a range of local circumstances, in time and location.  Many such founding commitments have been transformed - positively and perversely - over the ensuing years. It is revealing, for example, to look at the charters of the Victorian and Edwardian "civics" (where local and regional themes abound).  In this context, the familiar image of a university as somewhat separate from its community - as, for example, an ivory tower - is curiously unfaithful to the historical record.

Indeed one of the most powerful ways of organising the history of higher education is to look at the circumstances in which societies established different types of institution to meet their purposes at different times.  Looked at in this way, a rough pattern emerges, replicated all around the world (Watson, 2010).

The early foundations were specialist communities such as the late medieval colleges for poor scholars in England (Oxford and Cambridge), and for urban professionals (such as Bologna and Paris in continental Europe). Three centuries later, a similar trajectory was followed by the American colonial seminaries (many of which subsequently became expensive private schools in the United States, including the heart of the Ivy League). 

After a further fallow period, the next significant wave of foundations took place in the mid and late-nineteenth century.  These grew similarly out of perceived social and economic needs, but in the radically different context of industrialising societies.  Examples are the great Victorian and Edwardian Civic universities in the UK and the Morrill Act inspired Land Grant universities of the American West and mid-West, leavened by specific, primarily research-based institutions on the German Humboldtian model, such as Johns Hopkins.

In the next wave of development, the mid-twentieth century saw the establishment of local authority-based public systems of higher education, as in the English Polytechnics, the Scottish Central Institutions, and American state systems (of which the archetypes are Wisconsin and the Californian Master Plan).  These were equally specifically tied to expectations about relevant education and training, with a new element of ensuring both access by groups previously underrepresented, and progression. In many societies the result was to create what came to be known as binary systems of higher education: a group of traditional university institutions contrasted with a more local, apparently more locally accountable, and apparently more responsive pattern of provision.  Around the turn of the twenty-first century this juxtaposition posed real dilemmas for policy-makers dealing with the advent of mass higher education.  Those with binary systems felt that they had run their course; those without them felt that the only way to re-inject mission diversity was to try to create a polytechnic-style counterpoint to unresponsive autonomous universities; others who had tried the change decided they needed to change back.

These were followed by late twentieth century experiments in curriculum, pedagogy, and a further drive towards accessibility (such as, notably, the pioneering of open access, or admission of adults without formal qualification by the UK's Open University and New York's City College system, and their imitators around the world).  At the same time nations began to establish the mega-universities, as analysed by John Daniel, making use of open and distance learning technologies (ODL) to speed up participation, and to cut costs. The notion of community interest is thereby dramatically expanded.

Finally the latter part of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries have seen significant action on the frontier activity between compulsory education, optional tertiary provision, and the initial rungs of higher education. Examples are the UK phenomenon of "higher education in further education" and the vitally important American Community College network.  The latest descriptor of activity in this borderland is that of "dual sector" provision. 

Today no self-respecting university or college would dare to lack a civic and community mission (see Watson, 2007).  In crafting such a mission, understanding the "pattern" of university foundations is essential. So, too, is the use of founding purposes - however and how far they need to be updated - in testing university strategic choices. Understanding their institution's history is an important part of any university management's drive to contribute to contemporary society, including on a global scale. 

References

Bok, D. (2006) Our Underachieving Colleges: a candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Watson, D. (2007)  Managing Civic and Community Engagement.  Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill and Open University Press.

Watson, D. (2010) Universities' Engagement with Society. in The International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition, edited by Barry McGaw, Penelope Peterson and Eva Baker, Elsevier.

See also Watson, D. (2007) Historical methods applied to higher education polices and practices. London: TLRP. Online at http://www.tlrp.org/capacity/rm/wt/watson/