Stephen Rowland

University College London

November 2001

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When I first learnt that I was to take up a professorship at University College London, a friend – who was not a professor – said: "Oh well, that should be alright. You know that as a professor you only have to do one thing: give an inaugural lecture. All the rest is quite voluntary." I heard the same rather optimistic story twice more before I arrived here. After two months at UCL, however, this myth was shattered. Professor Clout, my Dean, phoned me one morning and said: "Now about the inaugural." "Oh yes, I said, I know I’ve got to do one of those." "Oh no," he said, "You don’t have to give an inaugural. It’s quite voluntary."

Well, voluntary or not, I want to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoy working at UCL. That may seem a strange thing to say at the beginning of an inaugural lecture.

My reason for saying this is that I am aware that there are a lot of problems in higher education. There is a widely recognised lack of morale amongst academic staff in the sector: feelings of frustration, anger and anxiety about many of the changes that are taking place within a very constrained financial climate, and a sense that our work is not adequately valued. In considering whether the university is a place of learning, we cannot ignore the strength of these feelings.

There is a strong perception that we are being cajoled, criticised and pressurised to change, innovate and adapt, rather than to celebrate our achievement or cherish our academic values. In many ways, the climate in universities is more one of compliance than rational debate, critique and contestation which, it seems to me, are essential components of an educational process. Even the way we organise our basic ‘product’ – knowledge – is changing as the boundaries between disciplines are being reshaped. Much of what I have to say will touch upon these problems as I attempt to address the question: Is the university really a place of learning. Indeed, I will suggest that while there are some exciting opportunities and developments, there is also a deeply disturbing trend, which risks undermining the whole enterprise.

But by stating at the outset that I enjoy my work here, I want to suggest that the struggle to realise hopes against difficulties is of the nature of learning. There was never a time – a Golden Age - when the pursuit of educational ideals was an easy ride, and it could not be so. As Confucius put it: ‘No vexation, no enlightenment; no anxiety, no illumination.’ Learning is, to some extent, a vexatious and anxious business.

There is one further introductory remark I want to make. I understand the question: - Is the university a place of learning? – to relate to the learning of students and the learning of the lecturers, research workers and others who support the enterprise. One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of a university is: "the whole body of teachers and students pursuing, at a particular pace, the higher branches of learning". I understand this "body" to be the institution as a collective, as well as the individuals who work in it. We can understand the university as an institution that learns as it develops in response to the social and political forces that act upon it and in the process expresses its values and purposes. So I’m interested in the learning of the university as a whole, as well as the learning of those who work in it.

To go back a long way…

In the days when the church was the most powerful social institution, universities served the needs of the church by preserving its doctrine and training its clerics. Later, throughout the expansion of the empire, the universities took on a major function of training the élite - the administrators and the leading professionals – and providing much of the scientific knowledge that underpinned the industrial revolution. There have been further shifts in political power and consequently shifts in the ways universities relate to society. Now we are moving into a period where, arguably, the major source of power in our post industrial society is no longer the church or even the state. It is now increasingly the global economy, driven by globally oriented transnational corporations, and the knowledge based economy, which shapes higher education. According to this perspective, these are the social needs that universities are now seen to be serving and to which they are under pressure to comply.

Over this period of four hundred years or so, the distribution of power in society has changed. What does not appear to have changed radically, however, has been this relationship of service between the university and society. As before, a range of social, economic and political forces ensure that universities (just like other social institutions) serve the needs of society. And as before, we live in a society in which power and influence are far from equal. Universities are therefore inevitably constrained to serve the powerful forces within society – be they the church, the nation state, or the global economy. In that respect, they are under pressure to be compliant.

This is a very simple analysis, however, is in tension with is an opposing way of looking at the role of the university.

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According to this view – we might call it the Enlightenment view, but we can trace its roots back to the ancient Greek traditions of scholarship – the role of the academy has always been to critique existing knowledge, and contest the assumptions and the social forces that shape people’s ways of thinking. According to this view, it is through reason, careful observation and critical analysis that universities contribute to freeing society from the forces of unreason and prejudice. The role of the university, from this point of view, is not to serve the needs of the powerful, but to liberate us through the power of critical reasoning. According to this more progressive way of looking at things, the university, through scholarship, enables us not so much to serve and comply with the world as we find it, but to contest what we find and imagine how it might be different. From this perspective the university enhances society’s capacity more adequately to reflect and promote the values of democracy and social justice that are the inherent product of reasoned deliberation.

We could continue this discussion further. For example, we might observe that those who have been fortunate enough to enter higher education in order to engage in such critical scholarship, have only ever been the relatively privileged in the first place. We cannot therefore consider how access to higher education is to be widened without also considering the unequal distribution of power in society which perpetuates such privilege. Thus questions about academic excellence and the maintenance of standards must be understood in a political context which addresses the unequal distribution of wealth, power and privilege in society at large.

I don’t want to pursue the political discussion further, however. Although the analysis is incomplete, it serves to present what I believe to be the fundamental dialectical relationship between the university and society.

On the one hand, there is a sense in which universities are constrained to serve the needs of society – and therefore inevitably comply with the interests of those political forces that have most power in society. On the other hand, they contest existing knowledge, structures and values through reasoned critique and thereby enable society to grow and make democracy and social justice more possible.

The two analyses, while existing in tension, are in fact both present at any time; the university that serves society, and the university as its scholarly critic. If we put these two seemingly contrasting ideas together, we get the somewhat paradoxical idea of critical service.

The work of universities is educational. Educational work – rather than mechanical, domestic or technical work - necessarily involves both service and compliance on the one hand, with critique and contestation on the other. In other words, it involves not only accepting and conforming to the world and existing knowledge of it, but also imagining how both the world and our knowledge of it might be different.

As the mathematician and philosopher A N Whitehead put it;

"The proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge… A university is imaginative or it is nothing – at least nothing useful"

It does indeed take imagination to provide a critical service. Critical service has to work in the dynamic tension between conformity and contestation. And that is the nature of scholarship: it is both disciplined and critical.

I now want to do a little experiment to show that this dynamic tension between compliance, on the one hand, and contestation, on the other, provides a framework for viewing the individual learner’s relationship with the teacher, as well as viewing the university’s relationship with the wider society.

To do this, I want to change the focus of our enquiry radically and think about what is taking place right here and now: me giving this inaugural lecture in this lecture theatre and you listening to me.

We can view this lecture as an instance of learning. In its form it is not unlike much of the learning that typically takes place in a university setting. While you are, of course, in many ways different from an average group of undergraduate students, you are performing as learners and I am performing as the teacher. I am attempting to engage you in a subject matter of my choosing, sharing with you some of my understanding, and hoping that you will gain something of value from the event.

Now as I am giving this lecture I am wondering about what you are learning from it, but since its form precludes any kind of conversation at this point, I’m not able to check up on whether you’re receiving me, and anyway, there are too many of you to ask. If I am successful you may avoid falling asleep, may even feel that you have some grasp of what I am trying to say, may even remember afterwards the gist of my lecture. If I do a really good job, you may even go away with a crystal clear idea of what I have had to say about this subject. In that case, you will have complied with my expectations about what I had to teach, and both my performance as a teacher, and yours as a learner, will have conformed to the best predictions regarding its outcome.

And, in principle, I could set a little test to be completed by you over a glass of wine in an hour’s time, just to check up that all had gone according to plan. And you could fill up a feedback sheet to evaluate how successful I had been in communicating to you.

Well that’s one way of viewing this as a learning experience. On the other hand, there is another way of considering this episode of teaching.

It may be that you want to question some of the assumptions I am making. You may feel that what I am saying sheds light upon your experience as a learner or a teacher, or on the contrary that it is in complete conflict with your views. It may be that you feel my account is imbued with values which you share, and you’re pleased about that. Or you may feel that my whole argument is flawed by an illogical sequence of ideas. You may, after the lecture, reflect further on some of the things I have said. You may even want to rethink about your experience – say as a student – and come to see it a little differently in the light of what I have said. You may want to compare my ideas with others you have heard or read about. You may want to develop some of them further in conversation with friends.

Now if this second account of the situation is closer to what happens for you, then the event will have been more than a one way communication of information. Your engagement will have been active, critical, reflective and imaginative. My contribution will have acknowledged that what I have to say is open to question – is contestable. Inasmuch as something like this happens, the outcome of the experience will be different for each of you. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to predict in any detail what you will have learnt. While how you have responded to what I have to say may be very interesting indeed, a simple test over a drink would be unlikely to shed very much light on the complexity of your thoughts, reflections, feelings and imaginings. Indeed, even an extended essay would still be likely to miss much. And to make matters worse – worse, that is, as far as our ability to assess this educational event goes – to make matters worse it may be that some of your reflections are further reflected upon at some point in the future. Perhaps there emerges a chain of ideas that you develop, or perhaps this feeds in to a train of thinking, which continues long after you have forgotten all about this evening. But you won’t know about that until it happens, and may even then be unaware of the links with thisevening’s talk.

Now that is enough of this navel gazing. Let us return to where we were:

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What I hope to have shown by this experiment is that there are two ways of thinking about learning, just as there are two ways of thinking about the university and society. So we can replace "the university" in this diagram by "learning"

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The first account of this lecture – in which your role is to learn what I had to say - is a relationship in which you are expected to conform to expectations; the second account – which takes account of your own contribution to the ideas - is a relationship of critique, contestation and imagination. What we also notice is that the former aspect is relatively predictable and easy to assess, whereas the latter is much more difficult to predict or assess.

It follows, that if universities are to provide a critical as well as a compliant function in relation to society, then we must acknowledge the extent to which learning is not an altogether predictable activity. Learning is a bit of a risky business. Perhaps that is why Confucius said that it was a vexatious and anxious one.

It is interesting now to view the recent comments of two successive Ministers of State for Higher Education in relation to this dynamic. Notice how their comments both reflect an emphasis upon the blue ‘service’ or ‘compliance’ side of my slide.

Regarding the relationship between the university and society, the previous Minister of State for Higher Education, at a public lecture a year ago, said that its major function, as far as teaching was concerned, was now to meet the skills shortage in the global market place. Such a view was not contestable, was stated as a matter of fact, and was presumed to be common sense. It clearly portrayed the university as providing a compliant service to the market. She was not suggesting that the imperatives of the market place might be questioned by scholarly investigation; not envisaging that the university might question the relationships of power between the rich and poor within which the markets operate; she was not suggesting that the university might be concerned about the interests served by the global marketplace and how they might impact upon social justice. Her assumption - a political assumption taken to be ‘common sense’ – seemed to be that the market will and should be in control, and that the universities will comply by providing the services demanded of them.

Now such a one way transaction between the university and society mirrors a one way transaction between teacher and learner. For if we now turn to the relationship between students and their teachers at university, we find a similar relationship of compliance and conformity is assumed to be desirable. Here, for example, is the current Minister of State for Higher Education, speaking about her time as a student at university.

She said, in her first interview with the press in June, that she recollected that she had done very little work when she studied at university some thirty years ago. She only got a third class degree. "I should have been forced to do more work", she said, "it was outrageous."

Now no doubt she should have done more work, but she was holding her teachers, rather than herself, responsible for her shortcomings. Again we can see the implication here that the teacher should force compliance upon the student, whose response should be one of servility and conformity to expectations. In her view, responsibility for learning (or lack of it, in her case) lies with the teacher not the learner.

These two examples from ministers of state for higher education serve to underline the emphasis that is currently placed upon a compliant relationship between university and society, and between students and their teachers.

Using this idea that compliance and contestation are in some kind of tension, I now want to make a few comments on some topical developments relating to university learning. How are these enhancing "the imaginative acquisition of knowledge"? How are we responding to the need for education to take place in the tension between compliance, on the one hand, and contestation, on the other?

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Here is a list of some of the developments most British universities have been involved in over the last ten years. Various initiatives have encouraged us to think more seriously about how students evaluate the teaching they receive. Money has been made available to encourage us to develop innovative approaches to teaching, and to explore the potential of new technologies. Programmes of work for students offer them greater choice of subjects. Additional forms of support for students have been developed in order to improve their ability to study. They have been encouraged to develop skills, rather than academic knowledge on its own. Students have been encouraged to become more active learners, that is, to reflect upon their own learning, and gain responsibility for it, rather than merely to view themselves as the passive partners in the teaching and learning relationship. Indeed, there has been a shift from an emphasis upon teaching towards an emphasis on learning. Students, with their differences in interests, abilities and backgrounds, seem to be have been put more in the centre stage of academic work.

This emphasis upon how students learn and are taught is to be welcomed. Such changes would appear at least to acknowledge the more imaginative aspects of learning and support critical scholarship – and not just conformity and compliance – amongst our students. They would appear to be in line with much of the findings of research on university teaching over the last thirty years, and at the same time reflect the needs of the market for a more highly skilled workforce. There is no reason why such approaches should not, in principle, support a healthy dynamic between the service which universities provide for society and the critical functions of the university in relation to society.

When we take into account the wider political context, however, a rather different picture begins to emerge. In 2000 very nearly 40 per cent less was spent on educating each university student than was the case in 1990. At the same time, and partly as a consequence, machinery has been developed to ensure that an account can be given of the way these diminished resources are being spent. Measures have been devised for ensuring – or assuring – that teaching and learning is effective and that the increasingly limited resources from the public purse have been well spent. This has led to a bureaucratic account of learning:

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These measures have been concerned to quantify and compare the performance of institutions and their educational provision by making supposedly objective assessments of effectiveness.

In my two descriptions of this lecture: the first – in which I suggested that you might learn what I had to say - was easy to assess. The second – in which I speculated about the variety of ways you might respond - was very difficult to assess with any accuracy. Now the need to provide objective, numerical assessments of the effectiveness of teaching or learning inevitably prioritises the former way of looking at learning as a predictable and limited activity, rather than a more open ended process of enquiry.

Understandably, if we want to ensure value for money, we need to be able to predict and measure. The fact that learning - or at least the more imaginative or critical aspects of learning - does not so readily submit to prediction and measurement is really most unfortunate!

This prioritising of conformity and predictability impacts upon how courses are planned, upon the way students are taught, and upon the way learning and teaching are evaluated. For example, when academic staff give an account of the curriculum provided for their students, the very templates they are required to follow and questions they have to answer presuppose a particular view of the curriculum. This is a view that the curriculum – or what is to be learnt - necessarily has (and should have) precisely definable outcomes, that these outcomes can be measured, and thus the effectiveness of provision assessed. Lecturers have to assume that when they design a curriculum, they should be able to give a measurable account of what the student is intended to come out with. As we saw in my second account of this lecture – the one which acknowledged the difficulty of predicting your response – that while this might be possible as far as my intentions are concerned, such intentions can take no account of the unpredictable, long term, and individual response of you, the learner. Indeed, were I to have presented you with a very precise description of what you should learn from this lecture, I would have been blocking the more unpredictable, imaginative and possibly wayward thoughts that might be of value.

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The philosopher Wittgenstein once said: "If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." And all the more so, as far as thinking a silly thing goes. This is not to encourage shallowness of thought. It is simply an expression of one side of the coin: a side which acknowledges that learning which is to be critical and imaginative cannot be encased in a straightjacket of predictability and conformity.

The other side of the coin was nicely expressed by Noel Annan, an earlier

Provost of UCL, who described scholarly work as being the struggle "to produce out of the chaos of the human experience some grain of order won by the intellect."

Such intelligence and intellectual struggle – which is what learning is about – cannot be reduced to predictable outcomes, however politically and administratively convenient this might be. Much research through the 1960s and 70s in the schools sector demonstrated that a curriculum is a much more complex and unpredictable affair, much more like my second account of this lecture: more dependent upon what the learner contributes to the process. Scholarly work – whether we are talking about academic research or student learning – is after all a form of enquiry, and an essential feature of any enquiry is that you don’t know the outcome before you start!

So whilst many of these recent developments have been designed to shed more light on students’ learning and recognise its diverse and creative nature, a regime of audit and accountability has emerged which is seriously undermining this intended effect. It is a pressure which reduces learning to the predictable through a process of reductionism: reducing the richness of human experience to mechanical performance.

So far, I have concentrated on the way in which the increased emphasis upon university learning risks being undermined by a culture of compliance. I now want to look more optimistically at one development which may have the effect of promoting the more lively culture of contestation which is a vital feature of a higher education.

I will suggest that this may be provided by asserting the importance, but in a new way, of the disciplines, and the enormous possibilities that are emerging through interdisciplinary research and teaching.

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As someone who has, since my childhood, had some problems with the idea of discipline, and often admired the possibility of a more bohemian and undisciplined way of living, it feels strange now for me to emphasise the role of discipline, or the disciplines, in learning. Perhaps appropriate, though, on being inaugurated into the professoriat, that I should now acknowledge the central role of the disciplines in our, and our students’, search for knowledge.

From my own investigations and conversations with academics in this and similar universities it seems to me that most of us identify ourselves primarily in terms of our discipline. Academics tend to see themselves as historians or engineers who teach – and indeed often enjoy teaching – rather than primarily as teachers who just happen to have history or engineering as their subject.

A discipline, as I understand it, is not simply a body of knowledge but a way of going about the struggle to know something. The discipline describes not just the field of chaos out of which, to use Noel Annan’s words, we struggle "to produce... some grain of order won by the intellect." The disciplines also shape the kind of order we are struggling to achieve and the ways in which we make the attempt. This is what research at the frontiers of knowledge is about. But this kind of struggle also describes undergraduate students’ learning, from their point of view, as they attempt to produce some grain of order out of what, to them, appears initially to be chaotic and beyond their grasp.

Different disciplines involve different values – different priorities, that is, about their purposes. They involve different kinds of questions as well as different ways of answering them. An engineer, an architect and an ecologist might have very different ideas about what constitutes a good bridge, or an appropriate bridge in a particular situation. Thus we might say that from an engineering point of view, or from an ecological point of view, this or that is a preferable design. Similarly, a sociologist and a historian are likely to have different ideas about the significance of a painting, and different again from the viewpoint of an art critic whose speciality is painting.

During the last fifty years or so the disciplines have undergone radical changes which have led to increasing opportunities for work across the disciplines.

This has been partly because of the rapid increase in the rate at which knowledge – or at least accounts of knowledge – has increased. During the 1990s, the worldwide literature in the field of chemistry, for example, grew by more than half a million articles per year. At that rate, it would take four full time research assistants all their working hours merely to keep up with reading the titles of the chemistry articles being currently produced, without even reading the articles themselves. In the sciences, 8,500 different specialities were recently identified.

At the same time research and teaching has been more geared towards serving the economy. Now such practical or commercial needs invariably require knowledge from different disciplines. Providing water in an undeveloped region, for example, requires sociological and ecological knowledge – and probably political and botanical knowledge - as well as engineering.

This rapid expansion of knowledge, together with the emphasis upon the profitable purposes to which it might be put, has led to the emergence of new disciplines, new combinations of discipline, and increasingly to challenges of existing disciplinary boundaries. This has impacted directly upon research and upon the courses we offer students.

One result of this has been the modularization of the curriculum, in which courses of study have, in many places, been split into fragments or modules, enabling highbred courses to be constructed by students selecting different modules from different disciplines or fields of study. Now while it has been argued that this gives students greater freedom of choice and enables courses to be constructed flexibly to suit the needs of the market, such freedom comes at a cost. The cost is often the lack of coherence of courses of study, with consequent shallowness of learning and inadequate opportunity for students to get to grips with any particular discipline. In such a context, learners are conceived as being like consumers in a supermarket, picking and mixing educational commodities with little sense of continuation and development. Often called ‘multidisciplinary’, such courses are, in effect, more often non-disciplinary since the level of engagement in any one area of study is insufficient to enable learners to engage with the critical approaches, values and paradigms of any particular discipline.

While a broad range of studies – like on the liberal arts degrees in The United States - can be a valuable tertiary education, the greatest value of working across different disciplines is only achieved when learners (be they students or researchers) – begin to grapple with the contesting and often conflicting values, purposes and approaches that underlie different disciplines. Indeed, it has been argued that this kind of contestation is at the heart of what we might call a ‘higher’ education. This latter more contestable approach I would call interdisciplinarity.

Disciplines thrive on informed contestation. One only has to think of the influence of Einstein’s work on the development of physics as a discipline. His theories challenged some of the taken for granted mathematical models that physicists used to investigate the physical world which, in turn, influenced philosophical perspectives about the nature of reality. His ideas about the relativity of space and time, although rooted in the physical sciences, contributed to more relativistic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. The appropriateness of this application of ideas from one field into another has been widely contested. In the process, however, there is no doubt that they offered a challenge to accepted ways of thinking in other disciplines.

Challenges to disciplines often emerge when notions, theories and even metaphors and images from one discipline impact upon, or are adopted by, other disciplines. A more contemporary illustration comes from the work that became popularly known as Chaos Theory. Here, research initially conducted in order to try to predict the ways in which the flow of fluids changes as temperature increases (an important thing to understand if you are a meteorologist) led to very general ideas about the relationships between states of chaos (in which movement appears to be random and unpredictable), and states of order. Some of the scientists who worked in that field later employed their ideas and theories in an attempt to understand how predictions might be made concerning the movement of share prices on stock markets which, like moving fluids, in some respects appear to change chaotically, and in other respects, according to an order. In this way insights from one discipline opened up new possibilities in another. Later still, ideas from chaos theory stimulated new ways of understanding in the field of management. Indeed the notion of chaos and the idea of "working on the edge of chaos" have become the jargon of a clique of management gurus. A recent article in the press even argued that ideas from chaos theory and the related field of complexity science provide a way of understanding the organisation of Osama Bin Laden and the al-Qaida, an organisation whose complex network appears to have no clear locus of centralised management and is therefore liable to behave in ways which are difficult to predict.

I must emphasise that such application or appropriation of ideas by one discipline from another is, and should be, highly contested. Theories derived from one context of knowledge cannot simply be transferred into another. It is a process which, fired by curiosity, should be at once rigorously disciplined, and also imaginatively playful.

Children are, of course, specialists when it comes to the playful transfer of ideas across fields of experience. As a researcher of young children, I would often observe the delight of a child who discovers that such dry things as multiplication tables can be represented by satisfying patterns. And later, that interesting shapes and patterns can be understood in terms of numbers. Such "play" – for that is often how it is experienced - can give new meaning to how children understand numbers and design, and the relationship between these two initially different areas of their experience. Such creative leaps of imagination are as important, though perhaps much more difficult, in the learning of the university researcher as they are in the learning of young children.

Interdisciplinary learning and research offers this imaginative possibility of transferring ideas and metaphors - and of contesting assumptions and expectations - in a deliberate and systematic fashion between the disciplines involved.

Let me illustrate this with a more local and contemporary example. Stimulated by the interests of the previous Chief Medical Officer, there has been a recent development of a field called medical humanities. UCL is one of a number of universities that have recently set up centres and senior appointments to develop this field in which disciplines such as literature, philosophy and art are brought to bear upon the business of medical practice, health care and the related medical education.

Now medicine is a human science – or at least, an application of science to the human condition. Such a field must therefore inevitably involve humanistic as well as scientific understanding. Recently, however, the President of the General Medical Council accused his own profession of expressing a culture based upon a narrowly scientific outlook towards patient care. The field of medical humanities can be seen as an attempt to correct such a narrowly scientific bias.

Now the point here is not to produce doctors who write good poetry, nor doctors who are nice, sensitive, ‘humanistic’, people, desirable though these qualities may be. Nor is it to merely to coat the pill of inhuman medical science with an icing of tasteful arts.

Rather, the exciting interdisciplinary possibility here is that insights from the humanities will contest accepted norms in medical practice, and that the realities and demands of medicine and health care will produce new insights in these humanities. Indeed, even the very idea of what it is to be a "doctor" on the one hand, or an artist or poet on the other, will be informed by an engagement between humanistic and scientific forms of enquiry.

Such a development inevitably will involve argument and contestation as the presumptions and practices in the different fields confront each other. Such contestation would contribute to growth in both the disciplines of medicine and the humanities.

In order for such an interdisciplinary approach to fulfil its potential – with the consequent intellectual challenges for students and academic staff – opportunities need to be provided for students and staff to meet and engage with each other across disciplinary boundaries. Spaces have to be created where uncomfortable questions can be asked and tentative ideas explored without the continual fear of failure that too often dominates the academic life.

This needs to be a real engagement with the intellectual work of teaching and research, not merely staff meeting in order to manage procedures, or students

engaging with one area of study after another without exploring the conflicts and differences between them.

It also means that teaching and learning, like research, must be focused on and motivated by a passion for the subject. Without this, contestation is trivial. In the current climate of accountability and risk aversion, words like passion and love of the subject never figure in the prescriptions and requirements of central agencies with their focus upon developing skills, gaining qualification and maintaining standards.

I remarked earlier that the discipline is perhaps the most important feature by which we, as academics, identify ourselves. Interdisciplinary work offers the potential for contestation to play a more prominent part in university culture, with a consequent enlivening of learning for both students and staff. It can thus provide an antidote to the culture of compliance that has recently tended to predominate. It requires, however, that we have the confidence to step outside our disciplinary boundaries, not leaving that disciplinary identity behind, but being prepared to engage in a scholarly way with colleagues and students (and indeed the wider public) who may not share our priorities, assumptions or our specialised languages. It also requires that we reject the view that teaching and research across disciplines can be organised merely by carving up fields of knowledge into fragmented commodities.

Interdisciplinary engagement of this sort, with its conflicting values and priorities, can feel unpredictable as the existing assumptions of one discipline are challenged by those of another. This unpredictability – like the unpredictability of what you might learn from this lecture – is an essential feature of enquiry, research and education. In a society which has become increasingly unpredictable, it is important that we, and our students, acknowledge and are able to cope with our inability to predict the outcome of our search for knowledge.

The present obsession with reducing the complexity of imaginative learning and knowledge to measurable quantities and simplistic formulae is borne of a fear of the unpredictable. This is a fear that unless we can provide detailed measurements of our work and give it a price, we will be unable to trust in its value.

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To conclude, then, the university is indeed a place of learning. It is, however, moving into a new set of relationships with the wider social and economic world. As a consequence, exciting possibilities are emerging, and attention is increasingly being focused upon the contribution that learning and research can make to the wider community. In the process, however, it is vital that we find ways of creating and protecting the space to stimulate debate, contestation and imagination amongst students, staff and the wider community. These are as necessary conditions of higher education as they are of democracy itself. To promote them is indeed, as Confucius put it, a "vexatious and anxious task" in the face of a culture of compliance which, driven by more powerful economic and political forces, threatens to undermine these educational values.