This week’s climax to the most recent series of University Challenge prompted Amol Rajan, the new host, to reflect on the sparkling intelligence of another cohort of students, though he noted that the world of commerce and industry does not seem to be snapping them up to transform our economy. In another regular BBC slot, this time on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, Rev Dr Sam Wells pondered on “what truly makes a university”, which he suggests goes beyond knowledge. Wells expresses a concern about the commodification of knowledge, which he sees as a threat to universities. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention graduate employment, which leaves a question: what is the real value of a university education?
This question is at the core of an ongoing piece of work that is occupying Higher Education institutions across the country, prompted by the inclusion in the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework of a new concept: “Educational Gain”. Educational gain is an elusive measure of the value added by university education, above and beyond what is learnt in lectures and seminars. Last week Prof Dilly Fung published a comprehensive review examining how the top 51 universities articulated educational gain for their students. This reminded me of a piece I wrote several years ago about my own very personal gains from a university education…
I always wanted to go to university. Even at primary school, whenever anyone asked what I wanted to do when I left school I would say, “go to university.” I have no idea where this urge came from; no-one in my family had been to university, nor, to my knowledge, had any close friends. Maybe it was just that I liked learning and wanted the school experience to last as long as possible. In any event, it was one of my 3 main aims in life.
I was fortunate enough to sail through school, got a handful of university offers, and scraped into Durham, where I arrived in October 1984 to study physics. I had little real idea of what to expect, but I’d read The History Man and watched Brideshead Revisited, so I felt well informed, and on arrival I decided to forgo the Principal’s cheese and wine party to iron my undergraduate gown. Thankfully George from the room next door spotted me and dragged me out for my first lesson: when settling in to a new place 250 miles from home it’s a good idea to get to know some other people from the outset. From then on I lapped up lesson after social lesson. I discovered a whole new world that had been unwittingly hidden from me by my simple and relatively sheltered upbringing.
I met people with regional accents (some were even from abroad!) and heard about things that were way beyond me: politics and philosophy, history and art, and of course the miners’ strike. But I majored in gastronomy, munching my way through an immense array of novel foods. I ate cheese that wasn’t cheddar, fish that wasn’t fried, vegetables that weren’t green, and I experienced the delights of vol-au-vents for the very first time. I discovered that sauces could be colours other than red or brown and that meals could be enjoyable communal events, having been brought up not to talk at the table. No culinary avenues remained unexplored, but my greatest advances in learning lay in pasta, and the primary life-changing lesson came early on in the first term.
In Durham we were assigned a “moral tutor”. Presumably someone whose role was to keep undergraduates on the straight and narrow; an external conscience perhaps, or moral compass in human form. My tutor did this by treating me and my fellow tutees to a meal once a term, and inviting us to annual soirees at her home. These provided opportunities to meet her eccentric husband and to join them as they slowly but inexorably descended into oblivion, fuelled by copious quantities of whisky – another taste new to my palate. The pair of them were a fascination to me, as they unselfconsciously threw words like “lugubrious” into everyday conversations, quoting Shakespeare and Chaucer while talking about putting the bins out, and generally behaving in exactly the way I’d expected academics to conduct themselves.
For our introductory meal together we were invited to a small restaurant which we were assured was nothing special, and which served plain and simple food “like cannelloni”. I was mystified. When a fellow tutee explained that cannelloni was simply a big pasta tube this did nothing to enlighten me, just added to my confusion.
I should explain that up to this point my only experiences with pasta had been in art lessons in primary school. Pasta shapes were brittle yellow pieces that we would stick to sheets of card with marvin medium pva (hours of fun peeling the glue off your fingers later). My crowning glory in terms of pasta art was a life sized replica of Tutankhamun’s death mask, generously sprayed with gold paint by Miss Medlock in an aerosol frenzy, and almost indistinguishable from the real thing which was on display at the British Museum (so we were reliably informed by Blue Peter). Sadly the journey home from school in my satchel did it no favours as most of the pasta shapes fell off, but I remained proud of it and still am to this day.
Spaghetti on the other hand came in tins, was slimy and orange, and was usually shaped like letters of the alphabet – although I was aware that you could get a long, stringy variety. The idea that those fragile art materials were just desiccated forms of the slippery day-glo worms would never have occurred to me, still less the thought that pasta could be made at home with the aid of a miniature mangle and a surfeit of free time. I’d assumed you bought pasta in an art shop or stationer’s, although I’d looked in vain for it in W H Smiths with my Christmas vouchers.
So I went along to that first meal intrigued but open-minded, discovered that pasta is perfectly edible, and the rest as they say is history. I continued to learn during the three years of my degree, and have letters after my name (as my dad puts it), an embossed certificate, and the obligatory photographs to prove it. Since then of course time has passed, and now I can remember little of solid state physics, would barely recognise Schroedinger’s equation, and my maths skills have regressed to GCSE levels. Taxpayers should be reassured, however: government grants for maintenance and tuition fees were not wasted, as I can now tell the difference between cannelloni and conchiglie, make a mean lasagne, and prepare penne without a tube of glue in sight.
I delighted in university and feel unbelievably lucky to be part of Higher Education again. I remain convinced that education – at all levels – is about so much more than work, (see the post by Julie Kent and me here) and should be about promoting a joy in learning. My current work on educational gain is fascinating, but like Sam Wells I’d want to be sure it’s not just providing more metrics for a neoliberal marketplace.
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