Well, after much reading and floundering about I think I am beginning to get a conceptual framework for “the idea of the University”. I’ve identified three, possibly four models.

One is the instrumental model. There’s not a lot of support for this in the academic literature, but essentially, it is the idea that a University is a training institution, focussing on supplying skilled graduates who can ultimately power the national economy. It is a model that I suspect is held to by some politicians, and can be traced back to ideas of nationalism and competitiveness. It is also, I suspect held by a great many students, especially since the introduction of top up fees. Here, we can trace it back to the medieval ideas of the studium generale, and the growth of specialist institutions in Salerno, Montpelier, (Medicine) Bologna (law) and Paris (Theology) where students moved to develop their careers. But it also owes a lot to the idea of market dominance that arose in the twentieth century. (Of course, no country has ever really dared let the market run absolutely everything – I’d love to see the Kwik Fit, “Why pay more?” Royal Navy!)

Secondly we have the Humboldtian Model of the University, where teaching is driven by research. Arose in Germany in the 19th Century, but I still need to do a bit more reading around this. This is still held up as an ideal though, and there’s still quite heavy emphasis on research informed teaching in the UK (Although, I have some reservations about  this model, which I don’t have space to go into here)

Thirdly, and not entirely unrelated is Newman’s idea of a University. Here we have the notion of training the mind, rather than just knowing stuff. Newman sounds a bit odd now, with his ideas of the university being largely responsible for the education of  “gentlemen” but if you take the dated, sexist connotation of the word “gentlemen” out, and see it as a sort of code term for the sort of active citizen who is well informed and able to critically assess public issues, I’m not sure that he is all that far off modern beliefs about the role of Universities.

 The fourth model, and I’m not quite sure it is a model yet, is based on the idea of supercomplexity suggested by Ronald Barnett. Essentially, I think Barnett takes the instrumentalist notion and blows it completely out of the water. The world is way too complex for simplistic notions of “instruction” and “skills”, and in fact university teaching tends to add to that complexity. Again, I need to revisit this, but I think these four models do give me the basis of a conceptual framework against which I can assess the activity of an EDU.