Well. I’ve been asked to do a seminar in our “Thinking Aloud” Series. This is a series of seminars that is meant to reinvigorate the intellectual life of the University. I haven’t, of course, got the time to do it, (Regular readers, if I have any, will have noticed that this page has been a bit quiet of late.)

Anyway, I thought I’d have a look at how the history of the University impacted on a) our perceptions of the University, and b) beliefs about what the Educational Development Unit might actually do. So I had a little re-read of Pedersen’s “The first universities” Funny what re-reading can do. I hadn’t really got a clear idea of his argument in my head before, but I think I can trace three separate intellectual strands, a sort of vocational training, arising out of the high status of the scribal class in Babylonian, Egyptian and Sumerian training, a much more scientific and philosophical strand of enquiry arising out of Greek thinking, and the codification of law and order arising out of Roman attitudes to knowledge and learning. That’s a massive oversimplification of the picture, but I think it does rather support my argument that Universities (and schools) are not the ivory tower, remote from their societies that they are sometimes portrayed as being.

Nor do they have their origins in the monasteries of the middle ages. The monasteries were the only places where learning could continue (in the West, anyway) after the collapse of the Roman Empire. And even so, they were at a huge disadvantage, because the lack of a Greek speaking Roman elite, meant that much of the Greek world of learning was lost to them. Much monastic scholarship appears to have been concerned with the collection and copying of books – which did help preserve the tradition of learning. But there’s no real concept of empirical research in the monastic tradition. (In fact that appears to have been limited to the Hellenistic concept of learning – The Romans seemed to concentrate much more on practical knowledge too, going in for encyclopaedias and Handbooks. There is no concept of a “museion” (A place in which objects for research and study are collected) as there is in Aristotle’s Lykeion

But I suppose the question now, is how do we get from the Monasteries to the studia generales of the later middle ages, and from there to the Universities of today. And what influence exactly does Islamic scholarship have on all this. And what does it tell us about the modern perspectives of the University and indeed the EDU? But before going there, I’ve just had a little thought. I think there is a perception that Universities remain in the business of producing elites, even though in the UK at least, there are targets about 50% of the population undergoing HE. Like it or not, in marketing terms, exclusivity remains an important dimension to our product. Aren’t we just now talking about bigger elites? And have we really come all that far from the Babylonians? Did we ever say “Come to University and get a big advantage in life?” I think we probably did. But are we now having to say “Come to University so you won’t be disadvantaged?” I think that’s more a shift of emphasis, than a change of policy. Nevertheless, it might lead to an EDU changing its priorities from, say, developing technological enhancements to the curriculum, to say, redeveloping the curriculum to make it more attractive to a wider constituency.

Just a few thoughts really. There’s much more to go at here. I think I’m going to be in some trouble if I am to keep my seminar down to 25 mins!