Something has gone deeply wrong with the university — too deeply wrong to be put right by any merely bureaucratic means. What’s wrong is, simply, that our official idea of education, the idea that inspires all government policies and ‘initiatives’, is itself uneducated. With the growing emphasis in higher education on training in supposedly useful skills, has the very ethos of the university been subverted? And does this more utilitarian university succeed in adding to the national wealth, the basis on which politicians justify the large public expenditure on the higher education system? Should we get our idea of a university from politicians and bureaucrats or from J.H. Newman, Jane Austen and Socrates?

The New Idea of a University is an entertaining and highly readable defence of the philosophy of liberal arts education and an attack on the sham that has been substituted for it. It is sure to scandalize all the friends of the present establishment and be cheered elsewhere.

From the Reviews

(Hardback edition, Haven Books, 1991)
  • 'May well become a seminal text in the battle to save quality education'. Anthony Smith, THES
  • 'This wonderful book should make the powers that be stop and think'. Chris Woodhead, Sunday Telegraph
  • 'Blunkett should read this book — but he won’t'. Peter Mullen, Spectator
  • 'A severe indictment of the current state of British universities'. Oxford Magazine

    • 'I think a serious claim could be made that it is the single most important essay published on the university system in the past twenty years'. Mark Le Fanu, Cambridge Quarterly
  • 'The New Idea of a University is a question we ought to have debated 10 or 15 years ago and still avoid'. John Clare, Daily Telegraph
  • 'People within higher education will empathise with the disenchantment of the authors at the current state of universities in Britain.' Richard Race, British Educational Research Journal
  • 'Perceptive, vicious, and often hilarious polemic'.  Stephen Burwood, Journal of Applied Philosophy
  • 'The value of the book is in getting the reader to consider what, in the twenty-first century, the nature of a university should be. Also, to question just how a utilitarian university succeeds in adding to the nation's wealth, the basis on which huge amounds of public expenditure on higher education is justified.'  David Thompson, Educational Review

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    Full text of front matter (preface, contents etc.) Acrobat pdf format
    Edgeways Books (Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson's website)
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