Interlude A New challenges: teaching Modern History in a ‘new university’

Iwan Morgan

In 1992 the Further and Higher Education Act enacted by John Major’s Conservative Government awarded university status to the UK’s thirty-four polytechnics with concomitant authority to issue their own degrees. Polys, as popularly known, had come into being in 1969 as part of the higher-education expansion undertaken by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in response to the Robbins Report of 1963. Secretary of Education Anthony Crosland intended them to offer vocationally orientated education across a wide subject range, including science, technology, public administration, accountancy, law and journalism, to complement the academic focus of traditional universities.¹ The binary divide’s elimination partly reflected the growing conviction in government that investment in higher education regardless of disciplinary focus would benefit economic growth. More significantly, it embodied the realisation that the rapid growth of social mobility within non-manual classes would likely create exponential demand for higher education, something young people increasingly saw as inherently valuable for personal development and independence regardless of subject focus. As Peter Mandler has recently argued, the 1992 legislation marked the ultimate triumph of democracy over meritocracy in the modern development of UK higher education.²

Peter Mandler himself was deeply engaged throughout the 1990s with the hands-on challenges of democratising history provision in a new university. He joined the Politics and Government department of what was then City of London Polytechnic as it was preparing to sail into new disciplinary waters as a renamed Politics and Modern History (PMH) department when the ‘old’ Poly became the ‘new’ London Guildhall University (LGU). Its experiences provide an on-the-ground case study of the exhilarations and tribulations of navigating that brave new world, which are deeply imprinted on this author’s personal memory as then head of PMH.

PMH’s development of Modern History accorded with London Guildhall’s ambition to create new degree offerings in keeping with the academic ethos of a university. We saw ourselves as renewing provision of a subject once at the heart of the founding mission of LGU’s earliest precursor. To promote moral and intellectual uplift through education, Reverend Charles Mackenzie had established the Metropolitan Evening Classes for Young Men in Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate, in 1848. At a fee of one shilling per session, students gained access to a broad curriculum that featured Classics, English, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and History. However, Mackenzie did not have to worry about education-market pressures that his 1990s successors had to confront head-on.

City of London Polytechnic operated under the jurisdiction of the Inner London Education Authority, which regulated degree provision in its higher-education institutions to prevent excessive competition for students. This policy had protected its Politics programmes while prohibiting its development of History programmes that were the preserve of other polys. As a further regulatory safeguard, all polytechnic degrees were awarded under the aegis of the Council of National Academic Awards rather than the individual poly. PMH now found itself competing in a History-degree free market with almost every university, new and old, in the land and carrying an institutional brand with almost no name recognition in the discipline.

In essence, we had to decide what segment of the market to target and devise a programme that appealed to the kinds of students we hoped to attract. We had developed our Politics and Government provision twenty years earlier with a strong vocational core for students wanting a career in public administration, but we now aimed to develop an academic product that students had to find appealing for its own sake rather than for a specific occupational outcome. We had no illusions of enrolling well-qualified applicants whose A-level grades gave them access to well-established universities. Our target groups were Greater London-based mature students seeking belated entry into higher education, minimally qualified metropolitan eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds who lacked good A-level grades, and school-leavers from our neighbouring boroughs (notably Tower Hamlets and Hackney), many from immigrant families lacking a tradition of humanities study at university.

Devising the Modern History single- and joint-honours programmes that appealed to these diverse groups was no easy matter. We also faced significant resource constraints when LGU experienced major financial problems that limited opportunities for new hires. By and large, however, we produced an attractive single-honours programme featuring first-year core units in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century European History and Historical Methods and wide-ranging level two and three options in British History, International History, American History and European History. The culmination of the programme was the 10,000-word dissertation that enabled students to research a viable subject of particular interest to them (rather than being tied to final-year special subjects, which did not feature in our provision).

Student numbers were solid but never spectacular as we built up the degree. Nevertheless, the overall quality of the student academic performance signified that our programmes had worthwhile outputs. We felt vindicated in having encouraged our students to set themselves the highest standards they were capable of and helping them to achieve these. Despite our recognition that good teaching would be the primary ingredient for such success, we also understood the utility of supporting that with strong research. Our achievement in being the top-rated History unit-of-assessment of any new university in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise made students feel that they belonged to an academically reputable department rather than being remaindered cast-offs in the scholarly bargain basement.

In 1998 another research development promised further benefits when the Heritage Lottery awarded LGU funding to build a new home for the Fawcett Library, a major archive for women’s history hosted by City of London Polytechnic/LGU since 1977. Its construction was on the site of a former wash house – with the façade preserved as a symbol of working-class women’s past labours – in Calcutta Street, London E1. Granted an opportunity to enhance awareness of our programmes among female students, an increasingly important segment of the national higher-education market, we planned new provision in women’s history, including the eventual development of a MA once the Fawcett Library reopened under its new name, the Women’s Library, in 2002.

As a new century dawned, Modern History seemingly had a secure future at LGU. We now envisaged developing African and Indian-sub-continent history provision to increase our appeal to local communities. Events beyond our control turned such hopes into dust, however. In 2002, LGU merged with the University of North London to form London Metropolitan University. In the consequent restructuring, the Modern History section of our department was absorbed into the larger Humanities department that existed in North London, while our Politics section was amalgamated with its North London co-disciplinarians. By then Peter Mandler had departed to take up a professorship at Cambridge, soon to be followed by other historians who disliked the top-down ethos of the new university’s management and left to find positions in other institutions. London Metropolitan almost immediately encountered recruitment problems that made it difficult to balance the books, something that spelled trouble for History, which tends to do well in institutions that are generally in good financial health.³ Deciding that massive savings were required, the university’s management terminated History provision as part of a broad programme of retrenchment in 2011. This foretold the fate of numerous high-quality History departments in new universities in the resource-constrained 2020s. Amid staff redundancies, History’s presence at London Metropolitan took a final blow in 2012 when general cost-cutting led to the transfer of the Women’s Library archives to the London School of Economics.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this case study of teaching History in a ‘new’ university in the 1990s. On the negative side, our experience ultimately underlined the reality that the academic quality of History provision mattered less than the money it brought into the institution in the calculations of new university chiefs. The positives are more significant, however. Firstly, teaching History in such institutions was perfectly viable if programme structures and content were made user-friendly for their specific student markets. This meant thinking of the subject more as a personal consumption good rather than a public investment benefit. Secondly, it was possible for widely published specialist historians with a strong sense of collegiate mission to democratise the discipline without compromising their own academic standards and research aspirations. Finally, and most importantly, the London Guildhall experience suggests that history’s best guarantee of academic endurance, albeit in a smaller range of UK universities than seemed likely in the halcyon 1990s, is continuing adaptability to disciplinary democratisation. A sound future for engagement with the past depends on the capacity of practitioners to make it relevant to an increasingly diverse student body and to remain accountable to the interests of those they teach.