Context
Relations between universities and their geographical, cultural and political contexts are a source of enduring concern. The academic and the civic have been regarded as, variously, opposed, inextricable, and mutually complicit. In the New Jersey school system, the Plainfield Academy for ‘at-risk students’ recently elected to change its name to the ‘Barack Obama Academy for Academic and Civic Development.’ Across the United States education is being newly described in terms that unite learning and citizenship imperatives; in the United Kingdom, citizenship has become a statutory element in the National Curriculum for Schools. In higher education the ‘knowledge transfer’ agenda attempts to build new relationships between academics and the ‘users’ of research. Such initiatives need to be understood within a broader framework which is both historically dense and conceptually sophisticated. Long before the nineteenth-century emergence of the English civic university movement from private institutions led to the foundation of the great city universities of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, Scotland had ancient universities embedded in and supported by their city contexts. The University of Edinburgh was founded in 1582; known as the ‘tounis college,’ it was promoted by the ministers and Town Council. But, as a recent historian has put it, ‘A university could be an affliction as well as an asset’ to the community that fostered it: Throughout most of western Europe students had, since the Middle Ages, developed an unenviable reputation for drunkenness, brawling and whoring. Worse, universities were founded by bishops, and both staff and students might also enjoy legal and social privileges, granted to them by their ecclesiastical patrons, setting them apart from local society. Medieval Brussels, Barcelona and sixteenth-century Nuremberg had all turned down the prospect of a university on these grounds. Every university has its own history of ‘town and gown’ relationships: close, mutually supportive, troubled and antagonistic. At any historical moment and in any particular location, the relationship between the academic and the civic may reveal much about a society’s values, anxieties, practical requirements and larger aspirations.
Description
IASH has strong connections with some of the great European city universities, including Utrecht, Bologna, Charles University in Prague and Jagellonian University in Krakow. This research theme will address particular aspects of the dialogue between different universities and their civic contexts; comparisons between how relationships have been sustained in different national and cultural contexts and at different points in time; and more conceptual issues around the identification and constitution of learning and research as special activities, and the effect of institutionalising them in centres located in, but set apart from, other aspects of civic life. What did, and do, nations and cities want from their universities and their academics? If in the eighteenth century Edinburgh’s town council promoted reform of the University to fit it to provide a modern education for a participant in ‘civil society,’ it seems now that universities are increasingly urged to provide vocational training and practical innovation to support a business economy. The effects of civic pressures on disciplinary formation and innovation are complex and penetrate well beyond the teaching curricula of universities to re-shape the very idea of ‘research’ and its value to society. When did the image of the ‘ivory tower’ emerge to isolate what went on in universities from the life that surrounded their precincts, and to what extent does that image still remain in the minds of citizens? Do academics still retain an aura of cultural authority, and from what is it assumed to derive? In the context of government pressure to demonstrate the ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ components of university research, we shall investigate the mechanisms by which ideas are generated, transmitted, and ‘applied’ in extra-academic environments. At its largest, this theme invokes the relationship between social existence and the generation of knowledge.
Fellowships
Applications for Fellowships in relation to any aspect of this theme are invited from researchers in any field of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.