What universities do now is more important than how they came to be

So let’s talk about carcinisation.

It turns out, if you are a crustacean, looking like a crab does is pretty nifty. You can walk sideways at speed, which is handy for getting out of the way of things that might eat you. And if said thing does get hold of you it has to crunch through a load of armour, and fend off some pretty brutal claws, to get to the tasty bits.

Being crab-like is such a good deal that it is reckoned that similarly specified decapods have evolved on at least five different occasions. Faced with similar situations, nature has come up with similar solutions.

The same is true for another common configuration – that of the UK university.

Everything becomes a university, eventually

Governments and others have come up with all kinds of structures and ideas for helping people learn the high level skills and aptitudes that employers of all sorts need. On each occasion, these new interventions in the skills and innovation landscape have slowly but inexorably evolved into organisations that behave so similarly to universities that it made eventual sense to make it official.

This has tended to happen in loose waves – the current steady trickle of new universities is a genuine innovation made possible by the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act.

What tends to happen is that something is established to meet local or regional skills needs, attracts a critical mass of students and academics, starts thinking nationally and contributing to research, develops a terminal issue with car parking, and finally convinces ministers (or the Privy Council) that it needs to be treated the same ways as other things that do broadly the same job.

The case of the north east of England

How many times? Well, let’s start with a bunch of Benedictine monks in Durham who got fed up going down to Oxford to get degrees, and who worked to get their college at that university shifted up north and established as a university in its own right – magnificently involving both Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell before an 1832 Act of Parliament did the job.

Or how about two medical schools linked first to the University of London and then the University of Durham,  joining together to become a full Durham college in 1937 and then the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1963 (serious fans of this stuff will know that Durham had another crack at running a medical school in 2001, which also ended becoming a part of the Newcastle offer).

Meanwhile a local municipal technical college (established in 1901) started offering University of Durham degrees: becoming first a polytechnic and then (in 1992) the University of Sunderland. A few miles further south a private consortium developed another technical college (eventually opening in 1930), which prepared students for London examinations, saw several sustained mid-century campaigns to give it university title, before becoming a polytechnic and then (again, in 1992) the University of Teesside.

And the process hasn’t stopped – the Newcastle College Group (NCG) is registered with the Office for Students and has wielded taught degree awarding powers since 2016. It’s been educating people in the Newcastle area since 1894 (when it was Rutherford Memorial College).

An accident of birth

I’ll probably get cancelled for this, but it is only recently that the award of university title has been based on externally verifiable merit.

Our tour of the north east demonstrates that people have been setting up high quality educational institutions since forever – and the ones that became universities early simply had better connections and sharper elbows. And those elbows needed to be particularly sharp – the universities of Oxford and Cambridge ran a state backed cartel that prevented any of the many other centres of higher learning in England that have been and gone throughout history gaining university title, and this indirectly led to the growth of an alternative (and now dominant) Humboltdian model of the university in Scotland, Europe, and eventually the new world.

I’m thinking here about the noise that well-to-do Victorian industrialists could make to establish our first wave of civic universities, or the pleas for universities from local areas (beautifully documented by Mike Ratcliffe) assessed by the University Grants Commission in the 1950s and 1960s, or the slightly opaque way in which ten colleges became Colleges of Advanced Technology. Even the way in which colleges were designated as polytechnics in the late 60s is a bit murky. There are scores of institutions that, but for a decision made by a long-forgotten civil servant or minister, would have appeared as universities much earlier in the storied history of the sector.

Rankings and history

There’s a simplistic popular narrative that older universities are better. Oxford and Cambridge are the oldest and have generally been considered to be pretty good (let’s draw a veil over the 16th and 17th century here, eh?) – St Andrew’s, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen are all ancient and widely considered to be decent places. Then we get into another tier of 19th century and civic universities – all of which are now deemed to be of a fair standard – before entering the slightly more dubious post-war expansion and the various initiatives that followed.

This prompts a few awkward questions. At what, precisely, are older universities better? Did they get better simply because they have been practicing for longer? – and if this is the case, why is somewhere that has been teaching at a high level for a similar amount of time but became a university later not as good? Even if age is a factor – is being a university for several centuries before a competitor the same thing as being a university for fifty years longer, or for five years longer? How long does a university retain any traces of its former existence and mission (as a former teacher training college, a former technical college, a former slightly dubious collection of classics and divinity tutorials in a medium sized town)?

Age, like many other attempts to categorise universities, feels like it falls apart the closer you look. Not just because the link between the age of a university and its “quality” (however measured) is shaky at best, but also because pinning down an exact date for the foundation of a seat of learning is remarkably complicated. A fluke of history separates the University of Manchester (founded on some of the provision at the 1824 Mechanics Institute) and Manchester Metropolitan University (founded on some of the other provision at the 1824 Mechanics Institute). Mere chance saw the University of Leicester (preparing candidates for University of London degrees by 1927) beat De Montfort University (preparing candidates for University of London degrees by 1934) to university title and degree awarding powers.

Crabwise

Any seat of higher learning, it would seem, eventually becomes a university. The various routes that get it there are interesting in a kind of genealogical way, but largely irrelevant in 2024 unless there is also a meaningful difference in what students or staff might experience in working there. And many of these tangible differences have as much to do with simply being there longer.

If we want to know how good a university is at getting graduates into good careers, or performing research that benefits society, or making the area around them a better place to live and work, there are ways of measuring those things. If we want to look at providers that are good at teaching modern languages, or anthropology, or physics, or golf course management, there are tools to help us do that. If we need to see a list of institutions facing financial problems, or a decline in recruitment, that data is available. How old the university happens to be – or the names of the other universities it wants to hang out with – feels irrelevant in answering such questions.

Time has already eroded any fundamental differences between Bath (1966) and Bristol (1909) – that fifty seven year gap (almost equivalent to the entire life span of the University of Bath) currently feels much less important than the 42 year gap between Bath and Bath Spa (2008). I wonder if it always will.