Now We Are Ten

In this editorial from the Spring 2010 edition of Directions, UKCLE Director Julian Webb considers the impact UKCLE has had over the last ten years, and considers the legacy of the Dearing report.

2010 is the tenth anniversary of the Higher Education Academy’s subject centre network, of which UKCLE is a part. The Learning and Teaching Subject Network (as it then was) was a direct outcome of the late Lord Dearing’s 1997 report, Higher Education in the Learning Society. Thirteen years on it is already easy to overlook the impact that Dearing has had on the higher education system. By 1996 the UK higher education system was close to collapse. Student numbers had risen rapidly in the early 90s, but funded chiefly by shrinking the unit of resource, and both teaching and research infrastructures were showing severe strains of underfunding. Dearing urged government to move to a mixed system of fees and state funding for teaching, to significantly increase expenditure on the research infrastructure, and to invest in the professionalization and enhancement of university teaching. Despite the limitations of the Dearing vision (and there were undoubtedly some), and despite the recommendations that, for good or ill, were never implemented, there can be little argument that the changes introduced in each of those areas have made UK higher education a very different place to what it was in 1997.

The Higher Education Academy and its predecessor institutions have been an important part of that story. Over the course of ten years UKCLE has, with your support, generated over 1000 pages of web resources and information for law teachers, delivered 158 events, and funded 45 projects within the legal academy. It has held ten annual conferences, each now attracting around 200 delegates from across the globe. In addition to its annual core funding, the Centre has accrued a total of £4.8M in grants, much of which has found its way into the academic community to support projects such as SIMPLE, Simshare, and the Toolkit for Law Teachers, to name but a few. And that story can be repeated, with local variations, for the 23 other subject centres that make up the network.

As UK higher education enters another period of financial constraints and cutbacks, it is important that we take stock and consider our priorities. As we approach the end of funding for the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, with cuts also to the Higher Education Academy budget for 2010-2013, and potential reductions in central services in many universities, there are concerns that a substantial part of the expertise on educational development and enhancement, built up over the last decade, may be at risk. We need to consider how we defend the advances made post-Dearing, and, indeed, recognise that Dearing’s prescription remains an unfinished project. We need also to remember that whilst Dearing was creating a vision for a higher education fit for the twenty-first century, it remained strongly embedded in the liberal tradition. In his recent Dearing Memorial Lecture at the University of Nottingham, Lord Mandelson observed:

Lord Dearing was very clear that our higher education system was central to what made our society intellectually curious and critical, what made it socially just and humane. It is the place where we define and redefine our sense of ourselves and the forces that shape us…. We have to hold very tightly to a belief in the importance of higher education as a civilising force, as the ultimate and necessary bastion of knowledge and learning for their own sake. Lord Dearing also stressed that [universities] are where we develop the basic capabilities that underwrite our economic strength. Although he did not use the word globalization, he described a globalised economy and he knew that higher education had to be central to our response to that challenge.

That vision is as relevant today as it was in 1997, and I think there are sentiments within that statement with which we can all share. Teaching is, of course, central to this conception of the university. It is primarily through teaching that we transmit knowledge, values, skills, an understanding of cultures, and, we hope, a lifelong love of learning. It is through learning and teaching that we have the opportunity to engage, as Luce Irigary observes, with the essential question of “what humanity could be as such”. A large part of this task falls to the disciplines. The disciplines largely define not just what we study, but who we see ourselves to be, whether as teachers or students. Disciplinarity in this sense is both an opportunity and a threat. Disciplines can both widen and narrow horizons. Law is fundamentally concerned with social justice, power and values. It possesses the potential constantly to alert us to the threat of the inhumane. “It could”, as Phillip Allott has put it, “so easily be the paradigm of university education.” And yet it can also fall far short of those ambitions, becoming a dry, narrow, technocentric, subject, lacking human warmth and creativity.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. We have a choice about the mark we leave on the world, and in times of economic stringency, when just getting by seems hard enough, our aspirations need to be kept alive. And it is in this endeavour, as much as in providing technical tweaks and quality enhancements, that bodies such as UKCLE must play a part. In events like our annual conference we have sought to provide legal educators with a space not just to talk about teaching, but to re-imagine their and their students’ world of education. It is creating the opportunity to develop “new ideas, new spaces, new ways to understand legal education, new ways to understand how our society actually works” (Paul Maharg).

In sum, if the subject centre network has a core, and (arguably) timeless, rationale it is this: the belief that teaching really does matter, and that together, as a discipline, we can choose to make a difference not just to the quality of learning, but, ultimately, to the kind of society that we may become. Thank you to everyone who has worked with UKCLE over the last ten years for sharing in that belief.

References

• Allott, Philip (1987) ‘Glum Law’, The Times Higher, 17 August.
• Dearing Report (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society
• Irigary, Luce (2008) ‘Listening, Thinking, Teaching’ in L. Irigary and M. Green (eds) Luce Irigary: Teaching. London: Continuum, p.237.
• Maharg, Paul (2010) Learning in Law Annual Conference: visions of legal education Zeguma (blog) 17 February
• Mandelson, Lord Peter (2010) The Dearing Lecture: The Future of Higher Education, 11 February

Last Modified: 4 June 2010