Do you remember Stand Up, Nigel Barton? It is one of those legendary BBC television dramas first screened on Wednesday nights in the mid-1960s and repeated in every decade since. Written by Dennis Potter and clearly autobiographical, it charts the progress of a scholarship boy from a sleepy village school to the dreaming spires of an Oxbridge college. Not surprisingly, Nigel stumbles into a class "no man's land", where he is vilified both by villagers and students.
Its 1965 techniques have dated (dreadfully!) but its central theme, which focuses on class and education, has not. It's an old story, of course: poor, bright boy among wealthy, mixed-ability snobs, some of whom are receiving an elite education just because daddy's wallet is as thick as they are. Last week's Higher Education Authority "Report on Non-Completion" raises questions, not just on access to and completion rates in university education, but on the very idea of a university at the start of the 21st century.
Originally training colleges for the clergy (hence the anachronistic academic robes descended from church vestments), universities evolved into places where well-to-do people - men mostly - could receive an education. The idea was to turn them into "gentlemen". As Bertrand Russell remarked, if you have to have an aristocracy, it's better to have them civilised, but, of course, it's more civilised not to have them at all. He should know.
Anyway, because of this role, the idle rich infested universities - the older the institution, the more thorough the infestation, was the rule of thumb - and for centuries universities remained off limits to the vast majority of the population. Even Cardinal Newman, in "The Idea of a University: Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin" (1858), stressed "gentlemanly", Athenian values. His focus, typically Victorian, was on the relationship between character and university education.
This old model, requiring a feudal or semi-feudal society to sustain it, tended, out of self-interest, towards conservatism. The "gentlemen" were on to a good thing, so why change? In fairness though, it did produce some genuinely civilised and scholarly people who made progress possible. Society had use, for instance, for the skills and knowledge of professional people.
Universities then expanded to become training schools for the professions, churning out doctors, teachers, lawyers, architects, engineers, accountants and the rest, including, of course, more academics to guarantee self-perpetuation.
None the less, the older, purely class based image of a university as a grandiose finishing school also endured. It had, after all, persisted for centuries and was generally endorsed by the new kinds of graduates who were eager to partake of what was often stridently sold as a touch of aristocratic cachet. Even today, attempts to foster and maintain college loyalties persist and not merely to extract loot from wealthy alumni.
Among large sections of the population - and with good reason - universities can still appear intimidating, snobbish and patronising, some, of course, more so than others. Still, for most of the middle-class, whether seeking knowledge, prestige or both - or indeed, even mistaking one for the other - access has been greatly improved. But greater access has, predictably, also led to university places not being as prized as they were in earlier generations. Increasing numbers of families take them for granted.
Time was when a Primary Cert was the standard. Later, a secondary schooling, once rare, replaced that. Now, many employers seek workers with a degree and so it goes. The education bar that must be overcome to get the better jobs is raised while the social bar to get into university is lowered. It can sometimes seem that education - a primary force in getting us this far - is a victim of its own success. Yet reactionary attempts to re-boost the status of university education - by fomenting some reworked elitism - are invariably poisonous.
It is true that the old feudal model, in which a tiny minority was supported by the sweating multitudes, allowed for indulgences which even included pure learning - the high ideal of learning for learning's sake. But the poison of that model, with its parasitism and mass-exclusions, outweighs all arguments for resurrecting it. Fair enough, we can call for a meritocracy and argue that the only aristocracy is the aristocracy of talent. But without equal crossclass access, that can't be judged. Even with the points system, university access remains social and hereditary to an alarming extent. The lowering social bar appears to have jammed.
IT IS striking that as university education, albeit not always thanks to the universities, is losing much of its elitist image, that contemporary criticisms of it increasingly focus on relevance to employment. Indeed, the adjective "academic" is probably more often popularly used to mean "irrelevant" than "scholarly". Computer science students - the category with the highest drop-out rate - interviewed by RTE on the day the recent report was published, objected to learning aspects of computing which were not immediately transferable as job skills.
At what point does beneficial practicality become strangling pragmatism? More and more students speak (in gratitude as well as in condemnation) of university as being divorced from "the real world". Yet, this is a "real world" which lavishly rewards Westlife, the World Wrestling Federation and even people who exploit child labour. It does so because the market is becoming not only the dominant but almost the sole determinant of worth.
No doubt, there is some pointless research, teaching and learning pursued in universities. But is that not inevitable? "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it," said Albert Einstein. There's certainly enough nonsense in business or would the world be a poorer place without, for instance, the junk sold by The Shopping Channel and other outlets (supply your own choices)? Clearly, there's a great deal of pointless sound and fury in the yardstick "real world" of commerce.
That said, it's easy to understand that a society (OK, an economy) which supports universities wants to know what it's getting in return. Let's be frank about this: it's difficult to convince a bloke wielding a shovel or an office-worker buried by the overflow from an in-tray that part of their income tax should go to keep some believed-to-be-indulged characters learning for learning's sake. Having learned from their own paymasters, they want rapid results, and who can blame them?
So, committing public money to universities is not always politically popular. But dangerous attitudes have arisen with the increasing dependence of universities on private money. Genuine arguments about the most mutually beneficial relationship of universities to democratic society are of a different order to the hostile economic debunking which often obtains today.
In the past, ideologies, most notably, fascism, rejected reason and controlled universities. Now "market relevance", though crucial, has gained such excessive influence that we ought not be surprised when some students seek it in its most undiluted forms. In fact, those who drop out primarily because they perceive their courses to be deficient in workplace relevance are arguably more in tune with the spirit of the times than those who study on. We don't need higher degrees in logic to work out what this says about the times in which we live.
TODAY, Trinity College, Ireland's oldest university, elects a new Provost. Because of its age and Ireland's history, Trinity's own history reflects religious roots (hence the name) and incorporates a protracted period as a finishing school for aristocrats and upper-middle-class Protestants. With the advent of greater democracy, professional training and competitive scholarship have naturally become more important to Trinity as they have to Ireland's other third-level colleges.
At the start of this new century, it is unclear what the relationship between the public and university education ought to be. At an average of £3,700 per student per year, the tax-paying public clearly has a right to expect something in return. Yet, the entire contract can't be totally reduced to money. There's got to be a balance found between the production of undereducated functionaries and over-educated tossers. It might help greatly if students had to be older to enter the system.
For Irish universities themselves - well, internal debates about the relative values of teaching and research will continue. So they should. Without good teaching, there's no reason why graduates should value universities. Without good research, to test by reason what people are compelled to believe by state, religion, business, social environment and personal circumstances, there can be no societal progress. Economic progress merely needs functionaries, albeit skilled to a certain level. Societal progress demands more.
Part of that "more" could be Irish higher education becoming more reflexive, more ready to research itself, its politics, traditions, assumptions and aims. There are dangers, of course, with all internal investigations and academia is no different. Britain, from which Ireland's universities have largely taken their ethos, has already examined its own universities. It has, however, been a bureaucratic boxticking exercise with all the vision you'd expect of anally retentive mandarins.
Ironically perhaps, what's required is an Irish solution to an Irish problem or, more accurately, an Irish problem in gestation. Internationally, our drop-out rates are very low but they may not always be. Reaching out to expand participation in university education should remain an ideal but, clearly, it needs greater support. Sure, budgets are finite, but is developing, say, even more spectacular graphics for kids' computer games really more worthy than educating people who didn't have the most ideal of starts? Ultimately, of course, it's all a question of what constitutes worthwhile knowledge.
Still, the biggest threat to the ideal that universities should serve the community and in return be granted space and time for genuine freedom of thought and expression, comes from the shrinking state and the growing market. Persuading the population to support the spending of public money on pursuits which not all our captains of industry sympathise with is no easy matter. It is especially difficult when the captains control so much of the propaganda. Telling really that Nigel Barton's inventor, Dennis Potter, named his cancer "Rupert" after one particular media mogul.