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Diversity and Esteem in Higher Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Rowland Eustace
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Abstract

There are many calls for greater variety in the provision of higher education combined with greater transferability between courses and institutions – in short, that we should end the present hierarchy of esteem in which institutions and subjects of study are commonly held.

Is this likely to be done easily? Too little consideration has been given to the size and strength of the social forces that create educational elitism. Some idea of this size and strength may be gained by looking, as a revealing example, at some educational history. Elitism has survived in times when the factors usually thought of as decisive have been strongly adverse to it. We should not hope that its virulence is any less now. New approaches are needed, and a concerted effort to decide what these approaches should be is now urgent.

To have much hope of achieving perceived equality of esteem of diverse types of higher education, an intensive study of the causes of elitism in education, and of measures that would have some chance of reducing it, is needed. A single Royal Commission type of inquiry is unlikely to be enough. A structured set of parallel inquiries might offer more hope.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , October 1974 , pp. 317 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 The conference was sponsored by the University of Lancaster and held at the University in September 1972. The papers were published in Higher Education, 2:2, 05 1973.Google Scholar

2 I.e. into Grammar, Secondary Modern and Secondary Technical Schools. Carter, C., ‘A Comprehensive System’, in Patterns and Policies in Higher Education, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 157. Mr Carter is Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University.Google Scholar

3 Scotland was an even worse case, and the survival of ancient modes of education has been even more tenacious there. See, for example, Davie, G. E., The Democratic Intellect, Edinburgh: The University Press, 1961, passim.Google Scholar

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7 As, for instance, is now happening in some branches of medical education, a field formerly dominated by the London medical schools.

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19 One of the most important, because official, indications of this belief is the Report of the Study Group on the Colleges of Education, 1966 (The Weaver Report), London: HMSO, 1966, especially Chapter v.Google Scholar

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23 Except possibly within the university System itself, as with the success of Sussex in attracting away an element of middle-class support from Oxbridge. But Sussex – ‘Balliol by the sea’ – is better seen as reforming elite education rather than as increasing diversity.