Higher education provision is an essential component (socially as well as economically) of modern social structures. British Labour and Higher Education focuses on the development of Labour policy on higher education from 1945 to 2000. It analyses the rapid expansion and series of fundamental transformations in higher education and Labour’s part in both shaping and reacting to them. The authors explore the historical evolution and Labour’s varying policy initiatives in the period, and question the place higher education has occupied in the various strands of Labour ideology. As always with ‘Labourism’, perspectives are contentious and contested, spanning the centralist ‘Fabians’, the liberal moralists, and the socialist left.
How far, if at all, have Labour’s policy stances in this area confronted the elite social reproduction functions of universities or the instrumentalist needs of corporate capitalism? Has this policy evolution given concrete evidence to support Ralph Miliband’s pessimistic assessment of ‘Labourism’ as a political formation structurally unable to confront capitalist social structures, or to see a viable ‘Third Way’, as advocated by New Labour?
Higher education provision is an essential component (socially as well as economically) of modern social structures. British Labour and Higher Education focuses on the development of Labour policy on higher education from 1945 to 2000. It analyses the rapid expansion and series of fundamental transformations in higher education and Labour’s part in both shaping and reacting to them. The authors explore the historical evolution and Labour’s varying policy initiatives in the period, and question the place higher education has occupied in the various strands of Labour ideology. As always with ‘Labourism’, perspectives are contentious and contested, spanning the centralist ‘Fabians’, the liberal moralists, and the socialist left.
How far, if at all, have Labour’s policy stances in this area confronted the elite social reproduction functions of universities or the instrumentalist needs of corporate capitalism? Has this policy evolution given concrete evidence to support Ralph Miliband’s pessimistic assessment of ‘Labourism’ as a political formation structurally unable to confront capitalist social structures, or to see a viable ‘Third Way’, as advocated by New Labour?
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: From Tawney to New Labour
2. Labour Ideology and the Context for Higher Education Policy
3. R. H. Tawney and the Reform of the Universities
4. The Only Place for a Socialist: Lindsay, Keele University and
its Legacy
5. Labour Party Intellectuals and the New Sociology
6. More Robinson than Robbins: the Evolution of the Polytechnics
under Labour
7. Wilson's Baby: Michael Young, Jennie Lee and the Open
University
8. The 'Old' and 'New' Lefts, and the Radical Student Voice in the
1960s and 1970s
9. A Postscript: New Labour and Higher Education
10. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
Explores the development of the Labour Party's policy on higher education from 1945 to 2000.
Richard Taylor is Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Wolfson
College, University of Cambridge, UK, where he was Professor and
Director of the Institute of Continuing Education until 2009. He is
Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Workers' Educational
Association (WEA), and has been Chair of the National Institute of
Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), and Secretary of the
Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (UALL).
Tom Steele is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the
University of Glasgow, UK
Richard Taylor and Tom Steele's detailed and informative study of
higher education in the United Kingdom between 1945 and 2000
documents its development against a background of recurring
economic crises and neo-conservative traditionalist and new labour
pragmatist agendas. This book is essential reading for anyone
interested in the origins of current debates about the role of the
state in higher education and its ultimate purpose and
function.
*David Scott, Professor of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment and
Faculty Director of Teaching and Learning, Institute of Education,
University of London, UK*
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