The initial role of the University in early capitalist society was obvious: it was one of acting as a nursery for a new bourgeois elite. It dealt with pure knowledge, progress in culture and the training of gentlemen who were able to fill any post with credit.
A contrary tendency was evident, however, from very early on. A straw in the wind is a letter from the physicist Playfair to the Educational Administrator Lord Taunton. It was written after the industrial Paris Exhibition of 1867, where British industry had failed lamentably in face of foreign opposition. "The one cause upon which there was most unanimity of conviction," Playfair wrote, "is that France, Russia, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, possess good systems of industrial education for the masters of factories and workshops, and that England possesses none."
The process of welding the University into the economy was slow in Britain. The tempo was quicker in the U.S.A. and, by the turn of the century, Thorstein Veblen saw the university as a corporate structure in process of adaption into industrial society. He polemicised vigorously against "the conduct of businessmen" and their "perversion of scholarly values by the predatory ethics of business,"
The second world war firmly established the correlation between economic progress and higher education: both as research and training establishments. The sociologist, Drucker, raised no eyebrows when he boldly stated: "the highly educated man has become the central resource of today's society, the supply of such men is a true measure of its economic, military and even of its political potential." The point was taken in the Robbins Report, where it was accepted that its fine and very liberal aims for education were all underpinned by the need to increase productivity.
It is instructive to examine the educational system of the U.S.A. In very broad terms, it is reasonable to accept that this system is a model that the British system will attempt to approach. They have carried through their explosive growth in higher education in a way that is just being initiated in Britain. In the U.S.A., the percentage of 16-21 year olds in higher education was 4% in 1900. This has risen to approximately 15% in the 1960's. The role of higher education as a nursery for a bourgeois elite has been overlaid by a far broader function: that of a mass training scheme for the emergent technological society.
One further set of statistics is necessary to complete the argument. This relates to the cost of education in the U.S.A. In 1900, the human capital value of the labour force was 22% of all productive capital. In 1957, this had risen to 2%. Education is now the major form of investment in the modern economy. It is this changing role of education that has been responsible for the wave of student protest in the advanced capitalist countries, for this process has brought with it a series of contradictions and political overheads.
The growth in higher education, especially in Britain, has to be worked for. After decades of deliberately curtailing educational opportunities for the working class, a mobilisation of this "pool of talent" has to be carried through. The old hierarchy of status in the educational system will be the necessary casualty in this process. (This explains the fondness of many social democrats for comprehensives and their antagonism to public schools.) A whole new democratic rhetoric of equality of opportunity will have to be sounded to destroy the deference of working class students and to make them at home in the educational system. In contradiction to this new fostered ethos comes the grading function of the University. Selection becomes increasingly resented by the students and the exam system is challenged. This contradiction is not easily resolvible for the "cooling-out function" of the University and the consequent drop-outs it produces is inherent in the class society the University serves.
A further problem that capitalism faces is the size of the bill for education. The unwillingness of capitalism to foot this cost leads to two results: there is a permanent under-production of skilled manpower; at every turn capitalism tries to force the student to finance his own education. This constant kite-flying for student loans has to be seen in this light. The latent approach, produced by the Fabian, Howard Gloucester, is for a progressive tax on all graduates. The economics and skimping are most obvious in colleges of education which suffer under the Cox and Box system. The net result of these strategies is, more and more, to impose a trade union consciousness among students.
The curricula of university courses similarly reflect the contradictions within the system. On the one hand, the economy demands more highly educated workers who are capable of creativity and personal initiative; on the other, capitalism is afraid of producing workers who will challenge the divisions of labour and the division of power. This is not an over-statement of the case, as consideration of the Cornmarket Careers Centre Survey shows. This survey found that 36% of firms would not employ student protesters. It was felt, particularly by small firms, that the concern could not absorb independent or outspoken personalities. The jobs available for graduates are not those of top management but rather of highly skilled workers. Trained and articulate men are produced for totally unsatisfying jobs. It is this awareness of the incompatibility of capitalism with human satisfaction that has entered the student consciousness.
The answer of capitalism to the threat of education is specialisation. The sciences are made crudely utilitarian and vocational, while the humanities are emasculated into abstract disciplines. The product hoped for is a specialist: an expert in his own field and ignorant in any other; a fragmented, non-social and nonpolitical conscientious non-objector - theory is ignored in favour of empiricism, micro-analysis and methodology. And the students hate it and demand control over their own curricula.
As the universities increase in size and in function they are forced to adopt a further aim: the socialisation of their students. It has always been a job of colleges of education to "gentle the masses" and hence the stress on formal dinners, etc., where the aspirants to middle-class values could be taught how to eat. The universities, with their widened entrance, now have to do the same. Discipline becomes an important watch word in training the students to accept the saddle of a class society. The students then fight back against petty restrictions for control of halls of residence and their union buildings etc. Thus a further contradiction is introduced into the educational system.
One further aspect of the new university and the new student militant remains to be explored. The struggle of the students is directly against neo-capitalist planning. They are the victims or the "generosity" of neo-capitalism's educational provision and, therefore, many activists are produced who are immunised with regard to neo-capitalist ideology. This is high-lighted when the orthodoxies of the labour movement, both social-democratic and stalinist, have surrendered to this ideology of "planning". Isolated from the reformists large sections of the student militants grope their way to a revolutionary consciousness. The need for capitalism to produce skilled workers may lead to the production of skilled revolutionaries.