Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960 with Dr. Miles Taylor

Hi everyone. I'm Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast. There's something distinctive about universities that were founded in the 1960s. Maybe it's the brutalist architecture. Maybe it's the wild, naive but hopeful sounding principles on which they were formed, but they seem very different. And even though decades later, their distinctiveness may have been worn down by the winds of isomorphism, there's still something that lingers and distinguishes them from both their older and younger neighbors. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced in England, where these universities were at the forefront of higher education massification, but the movement has echoes all around the world. Here in Canada, most notably at Trent, York, and Simon Fraser Universities.
A few years ago, two historians, Jill Pellew from the University of London, and Miles Taylor, now at the University of Berlin, brought together a group of historians of education around the world to produce a set of essays called Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s. It's an absolutely fascinating and thoroughly cosmopolitan book.
Today, my guest is one of those co editors, Miles Taylor. In our interview today, we tackle a whole range of questions. What was it that made utopian, interdisciplinary focused universities such a fad around the world for a decade or so? How did governments, who thought they were buying a lot of new STEM programs, react to being loaded with these utopian and occasionally revolutionary institutions? And finally, what happened to utopianism? Why did the dream slowly fade away in the 1970s and 1980s? Was politics to blame, or did Utopian University simply get mugged by massification?
It's a fun interview. So without further ado, let's go to Miles.
Alex Usher: Miles, you titled this book of essays Utopian Universities, and you use that as a kind of a, a catchphrase is probably the wrong word, but it's a, it's a, a way of connecting a set of similar institutional births, right? You talk about 200 Universities that were built in the 1960s and they do have some interconnecting themes. What were those interconnecting themes and why did they transcend international borders so easily?
Miles Taylor: So I think we deliberately chose the title Utopian for the collection of essays edited by myself and my good colleague and friend, Jill Pellew, and that was partly to register the terrific idealism, the atmosphere of sense of opportunity, positivity, emerging out of the chaos of the 1940s, the austerity of the 1950s, into a, into if you like, a brave new world. And we felt it was legitimate to use the term utopian, because people did use it at the time, about aspirations for education in a variety of formats. So not just higher education for the baby boomers, but also for continuing education, for people coming out of the armed forces, for people in blue collar jobs. So we felt that was justified. And what seemed particular to this period, and off— obviously there's differences across time and space and we'll talk about some of those, was the commitment to public higher education in a way which we've not seen since and we probably didn't see before.
This was, it wasn't a massification of the student experience that we now have, but it was governments around the world focused on using taxpayers money to create a tertiary education sector, and I think that was very different from what had gone before, and a part of that meant that these were newly designed campuses. They broke from the model of the city of the urban university and and, you know, looked and functioned differently from what had gone before.
Alex Usher: So you make the point early on in the book that the creation of these new universities were the product of, they were state led processes, right? But did states really set out to create utopian universities? I mean, you know, states are conservative by nature, I think, you know, when it comes to these kinds of things and you know, revolutionary institutions have a way of, you know, taking on a life of their own. So is this really what they meant to do? Or was the you know, what was... how did they come to do that kind of thing when they wouldn't, they weren't temperamentally suited for it.
Miles Taylor: No, indeed. And this was a this was a wartime generation who were planning a post-war world, and they were used to a different kind of organization of society during wartime and during the kind of reconstruction areas that followed all over the globe. However, they unleashed something which became utopian. I don't think they expected, anticipated the University of California and everything that happened there. They didn't anticipate the radical universities of Paris and London and parts of Italy and Germany in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, if you like, they unleashed a monster that they couldn't really control. It certainly wasn't there in the blueprints. I think early on, the expectation was that you would be creating a technocratic society in today's parlance of people who were rather nerdish, who were rather, you know, focused on research and technology, but who weren't going to be strong in the kind of disciplines, arts and humanities particularly, that produce critiques of society. They couldn't have been more wrong. But I think it was unexpected. It wasn't planned. The goal was higher education for a larger proportion of the population. But the actual form that it took was something that, it couldn't be anticipated, and I think quite surprised many of the planners of the period who realized by the early 70s, perhaps they'd pushed things too far in a certain direction.
Alex Usher: So what was it that allowed institutions, the wiggle room to, to, you know, to take a government's plan for a STEM oriented kind of system and turn it into something as which, as you say, was kind of utopian, like what was the wiggle room that allowed them to do that?
Miles Taylor: The economic brakes were off, the financial restraints around investment in public facilities, public services, public buildings, came off at different moments in the 1950s and the early 1960s. And I think there was a, you know, there was a flood of public money that was available for these projects and in ways that we couldn't really imagine now. That was partly it and then of course, I think there was the demographic shift so the baby boomers were coming of age and they needed new universities to fill up those spaces because they were supplying in a lot of countries the public services of the future, so these new universities were training new civil servants, training new teachers. It was an expanding managerial public sector and you needed the kind of finishing schools to, to give those people proper training.
Alex Usher: Interesting. So, a lot of the articles in the book seem to focus on the role of a visionary founding vice chancellor, right? And that makes sense to me in, in, you know, because they've got a lot to say about the way that an institution debuts. But how did a state led process ending, end up handing so much effective control to local vice chancellors. Again, like it's about handing over the keys. Here, give us this technocratic STEM organization and the vice president, the vice provost takes her as, pardon me, the vice chancellor takes us off in a completely different direction. So that's my first question. How did it end up handing so much control to these founders?
And second of all, why do you think so many visionaries ended up in charge of universities at the same time in different parts of the world?
Miles Taylor: Let's take the second question first, because I think it speaks to the kind of global interaction that's going on. I mean, this was a remarkably cohesive generation of vice chancellors who, particularly in the Anglophone world, spoke to one another. So, the UK was learning from the US, the new universities of East Asia and parts of Africa were sending visitors over to look at the UK experiments. There was even, you know, dialogue going on, obviously, between some of the new European universities and the Americans the Freie Universität, the F3 University, Berlin, a little bit earlier, and some of the other reform universities of what was West Germany were stimulated and in some places funded by American foundations. So, so I think there was a lot of, there was a lot of discussion of an international nature happening, and you can see it in journals like Minerva, you can see it in some of the congresses taking place in the late 50s, early 60s, where these vice chancellors were coming together and speaking as a kind of international community of university designers. But the other thing is that if you ask what many of these men, and they were all men, were doing around 1940, 41, 42, they were part of the state. They were part of the intelligentsia who were drawn into wartime planning and they moved seamlessly out of working for the wartime state in many of these countries that are in the book to taking up a role in higher education. So in a way they are state actors already. But then there's another little twist, which is that many of them come from the traditional universities. So, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and what they're doing is experimenting in a free way, with a free rein, that they wouldn't normally be allowed in their own rather more medieval originating colleges.
Alex Usher: It's time for us to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Okay, Miles, I want to stay on the subject of curriculum. What, I was actually surprised by this in the institutions, because I was hearing ideas, which I had heard probably in the 2010s, the late 2000s, about university organization that I didn't realize had antecedents in the 1960s, and that's this notion that we're going to experiment with traditional arrangements of departments and faculty. We're not going to have faculties. We're going to make it, you know, it's all going to be at the department level and they're going to have you know, different levels of autonomy and we're going to be able to be much more fluid that way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What was the impulse that led to this kind of experimentation and how long did these experiments last? Because I don't think there's many of these institutions where those are still in place.
Miles Taylor: No, the great vogue was for what they called interdisciplinarity. And of course, as you say, that came back with a real force in the 2000s and 2010s to ask questions across the range of scholarly subjects with a particular purpose in mind, not just to be stuck in your silo, and think just as a biologist or just as a historian. But I think a lot of this was an ideological impetus in the 50s and 60s, over the, it's overshadowed by the experience of what happened in the universities in Nazi Germany, where science was used for, fatal ends, and also the humanities were used for propagandist ends. So something needed to be done to humanize science and to also make the arts and humanities the critical disciplines that they had once been. And I think it was a very strong move, partly influenced by the great exile from Nazi Germany and Austria, of so many intellectuals to the rest of Europe and to the UK and to the US to really think about subjects which are going to develop critical capacity and not fall into the old ways of study, of doing history and politics and some of the life sciences, which it was felt had been part of the Nazi machine.
Alex Usher: Right. So in that sense, the Nazi exodus was not seen just in the STEM types, the, you know, the Einsteins who had to leave the country, but it was actually the ones who ended up at the new university in New York, right? The the humanities that may have had a longer effect on the trajectory of universities.
Miles Taylor: Yeah. And it, you know, it's in disciplines such as sociology where you, which was the kind of poster poster subject for the new universities in the 1960s, that you see a lot of that greater critique of both the scientific basis of study, but also the qualitative basis of study, trying to stop what, what was, felt in common parlance of the nazification of academia.
So I think it's, I think it's, you know, it's partly we need new subjects for new folks, but it's also we want to escape the ways in which the universities became so partisan and the creatures of authoritarian states in the 19 in the 1930s and 40s. And of course, just to finish on that point, the utopian universities are not happening in, in the totalitarian world. I mean, there's a marked lack of expansion, obviously, China, the cultural revolution, and at the same time, the Soviet Union, which has not got the funding to put into, to expansion of universities. So this is a very, this is a very you know, Western world and it's places of influence around the world where this is happening.
Alex Usher: And so how did, how long did those experiments last? I mean, eventually the isomorphism of higher education took over and these institutions went back to having normal faculties and that kind of thing. I mean, how long did that, did those experiments last? When did they fall into disuse?
Miles Taylor: Well, I'm not an economic determinist, but I, you know, I think we see the release of public funds to, to support these kind of innovations around about 56, 57, which coincides with the Sputnik moment. And then we have oil shock in 73, and you have very few new universities being founded after that. And when you do begin to get an expansion again in the 90s and 2000s it's the private universities that become the norm, and that's very much the case today. So I think it's partly the money runs out, but I also think the ideas, idealism fades. I think the revolution, student revolutions of 68 and 69, which of course are not just in Western Europe and USA and Canada, but are happening in other parts of the world in the so called Global South. I think they are a shock to the taxpaying community who have been asked to fund these experiments in higher education. And I think there's a demise in the idealism, which coincides with the you know, the lack of the, what you call the wiggle room, the financial wiggle room to support them.
Alex Usher: So, one other thing that, that's a clear spine in the book is the role of architecture. Right? I mean, these nine, some of the new institutions are very distinctive. So in Canada, there's Simon Fraser and that's designed by Arthur Erickson. You know, in the UK, I think University of East Anglia, and of course there are oth— in the U.S. it would be Illinois, Chicago.
Why was that such a prominent feature of these institutions? You know, I mean, how did architecture and curricular experimentation interact, if at all?
Miles Taylor: I think they do interact. I think there's a radical campus design, which tries to take out hierarchy so that you don't get it dominated by administrative or rector or vice chancellor buildings, but you populate the campus with the learning parts, and you don't create silos of the Faculty of Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Arts. You, you mix up the teaching space. You go for seminar rooms, tutorial rooms, rather than large lecture theatres, and another thing which I think was very green and ahead of its time, they prided themselves, a lot of these campuses, on being 10 minute campuses. It only took you 10 minutes to get from any part of the campus to another part. So they were designed to be traffic free, in the sense that traffic was confined to the perimeter, and the inside of the campus were walkways and intelligently designed weatherproof walkways, interconnected spaces leading to the learning and library and even to the residential spaces. So they were visionary communities. And the idea was that, and this was a common vibe in the 1960s, that people would enjoy living together, that if you create this kind of living space and you mix up men and women and people from different social backgrounds, you will create some kind of harmony, you know, we know it didn't always work like that. So I think there was a—
Alex Usher: Do you think the fact that so much of it was built in concrete, like, like it's a brutalist style, that's the other thing that so many of them have in common, right? And mean, I have to say, if I think about those institutions in retrospect, I'm thinking of them from 50 years on when the concrete is wearing away and you know, it's got, it changes their image a little bit I I think.
Miles Taylor: And, and behind the concrete, of course, sits the asbestos. So these are major you know, buildings of disasters these days. Well, you know, concrete was readily available, and so were public architects. It's not just university campuses, it's housing projects, it's shopping malls. There's a, again, the financial breaks are off, so the money is available and the commissions are available for a whole generation of, you know, slightly Bauhaus type influence people from the 30s, who now have commissions coming in left, right, and center. And, you know, they become an architect's playground. And they can try so many different things and it's not just a phenomenon, this brutalist campus architecture confined to the sort of examples you have given, but also you can find it in the British Commonwealth, you can find it in some of the higher education systems in, in, in South America and in the Middle East where the American and Canadians are particularly influential. So I think it's a moment, you know, another 25 years and it would have been Chrome. 50 years and it would have been a much more green and environmental friendly style of building. But I you know, I, some of them are beautiful. I mean, some of them are hideous and ugly, but some of them have retained the sort of aesthetic of what they were trying to achieve then.
Alex Usher: So I don't think any of the book— universities covered in these essays would still be considered utopian, right? Like they, they got mugged by reality. And I don't know if the extent to which that's money. That's one thing you suggested. Massification, you know, they started holding far more students than they were designed to hold. Who got it right for the longest? And, know, I mean, I mean, were, were there conditions where this utopianism survived a bit longer than elsewhere.
Miles Taylor: My own view, and it is my view, I'm not, I'm just not sure if my co-editor feels the same about this, but I think small is beautiful, and some of the most successful of these experiments don't look, are not too unlike the classic liberal arts college, you know, your Reed College your Swarthmore which are really focused on the campus experience, and the task of teaching undergraduates with a sprinkling of masters and PhD students. They they are strong on the liberal arts, you know, going back to the studium general of the middle ages. They have science, but they don't have hard scientific research. And one of the things, one of our chapters picks up on is how, particularly in the UK, to a lesser extent in the US, hard science, the hard science of the Cold War, is not something that is carried out in the universities. So I think that's part of the explanation is that this sort of university becomes too much like a general university, competing with the Ivy League, competing with Oxbridge to do the same kind of thing, and loses its distinctness and a lot of that distinctness is tied up with being fairly small. And they're not anymore. I mean, I mean a university like Sussex dominates the economy of the town, the city of Brighton. So many of these universities like Warwick are absolutely huge now. They're not ten minute campuses. You know, you'd need a bus taking 20, 25, 30 minutes to just get you from A to B.
Alex Usher: Can you imagine a future in which utopia makes a return to higher education?
Miles Taylor: It's a very good question and I've thought about it a lot since we finished the book because of course we're historians and we kind of look back and not look forward, but hey, yeah of course, I mean, the green agenda is something that universities should be able to satisfy. I mean, they understand the, the science, environmental sciences, for example, as a subject was a a strong feature of some of these universities in the late 1960s and 1970s. I think they, they understand pedagogy, they understand curriculum, they should be able to do it. What, so I think in terms of the format, universities could probably return to being utopian in some kind of way. But I think we've missed the moment. I think higher education now is not something in which the state feels a need to invest in. You know, the economics don't stack up and we have this huge problem in, in, in parts of the Western world, the country where I am in, Germany, and in the UK, where it's very hard to afford a publicly funded higher education system anymore. And Canada and the US have similar versions of the same problem. So I think the moment has passed, but I think materials for a utopian campus are a really thought through blueprint for how you combine a residential college system with inspiring, challenging subjects fitted for a society that's changing. Yeah, I don't see why that can't happen again.
Alex Usher: Miles, thank you so much for being with us today.
Miles Taylor: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Alex Usher: That was Miles Taylor. He's co editor with Jill Palou of Utopian Universities, A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s. It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany McLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our viewers and listeners for tuning in. If you have any questions about today's episode or suggestions for future ones, please don't hesitate to get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss an episode. Join us next week and our guests will be Chief Executive of Universities New Zealand, Chris Whelan. And he'll be talking to us about that country's new review of higher education policy known as the University Advisory Group. Bye for now.