Universities and Nations in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The role of universities in shaping national identities in Britain does not fit the standard pattern of that relationship elsewhere. Modern projects of nation-building, Gellner argued (1983: 34), have typically required a hierarchically ordered education system with national universities at the top, educating the leadership class and — according to Hroch (1985: 22–3 and 145–9) — defining the nation’s culture through scholarship and teaching. Although, as Anderson (2004) notes in his careful comparison of the development of universities throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, no country conforms to Gellner’s and Hroch’s model exactly, describing it as the standard is not inaccurate. It was most obviously true of the territories ruled by the Habsburgs and by Russia, but was also found in Greece, Norway, Finland and Belgium: the national movements there found their origins in university culture, and new national universities became a source of leading personnel for the states that were eventually formed in the twentieth century. In the words of Cohen (1996: 241), on the Habsburg lands, it was believed that advanced education could aid nation-building by producing ‘new professionals, higher officials, and educated employees, but also by shaping students’ social and political consciousness’. In different but analogous ways the model can also be applied to the unifying nation-building of Germany, Spain and Italy. For example, the university-educated professionals in Italy ‘helped to bind a culturally underdeveloped and divided civil society to [the new] nation state’ (Meriggi, 1993: 430–1; Malatesta, 1995). France provided the template, dating from Napoleon’s remoulding of higher education to form a new national leadership, the legacy of which persists today.