The View From Here

There are certain phases in the university cycle when the life of the mind is everywhere in chains to the performance indicator. This month every department in the land lies in the shadow of the gaolhouse door over which is emblazoned RAE - acronym of an especially anxious hour almost upon us when the 1996 results become known.

I am not going to fill this space with a rehearsal of the pros (there are some, really there are) and the cons of the Research Assessment Exercise. Rather, I shall use it to describe the blessed relief afforded me last month when I was obliged to go back to our kind of basics - the purposes of a university, the superglue which binds (and always has bound) those engaged in our singular though conglomerate exercise.

The reason I pushed aside the marking for such ponderings was the kindness of the University of Westminster in awarding me an honorary D Litt and asking me, once the degree was conferred, to address their presentation ceremony in the Barbican Centre. And, as I put pen to paper, it was not to the great Cardinal Newman that I turned for inspiration on the idea of the university, but to two very different adornments of the London School of Economics during its high years: the economic historian RH Tawney, and the philosopher Karl Popper.

I have always believed that other professions reflect the essentials of the university approach in some of what they do (even the best of broadcasting and the quality end of the written press). But nowhere else is, or could be expected to be, the kind of citadel where evidence, untrammelled minds and constant inquiry determine what is said and written - Popper's classic recipe for protecting open societies from those who would close them.

Such evidence-driven curiosity is what binds all those engaged in the university enterprise, teachers and taught. It is the badge of the common citizenship that makes up the republic of the mind, and that republic does not distinguish between the disciplines, or their tilt to the pure or the applied.

But for me the special British angle on this, our local sub-republic, if you like, has never been better expressed than in the essay Tawney wrote in 1917 while home recovering from wounds received on the Western Front. He called his piece "A National College of All Souls"; naturally, his title alluded to that august adornment of Oxford University.

This is how Tawney began: "A little less than 500 years ago, a great man desired to commemorate the end of one of the most futile and miserable wars in which the English nation was ever engaged. He endowed a college `to pray for the souls of all those who fell in the grievous wars between France and England'. We stand for a moment where Chichele stood, because we stand upon a world of graves. With a nobler cause we ought not to be content with a memorial less noble."

What Tawney wanted as the nation's memorial to the Great War was an education for all that was "generous, inspiring and humane" to replace an existing "system of public education" that was "neither venerable, like a college, nor popular, like a public house, but merely indispensable like a pillar- box".

In language that should be placed in front of Sir Ronald Dearing and his people, Tawney decried an approach that was so narrowly utilitarian thanks to its "spiritual crassness" and "contempt for disinterested intellectual activity" that it had impoverished both the country's commercial acumen and its scientific research. "Only those institutions are loved which touch the imagination," he declared.

As I brooded on what to say to the graduands at the Barbican it struck me that Tawney's words have a special, a renewed resonance in the era before us (perhaps it's already upon us) when working lives will be both shorter and more skill-filled and post-working life, our so-called third age, will be longer and will require deep, self-sustaining curiosity if we are not to wither spiritually and intellectually. I shall intone them to myself the morning the RAE results arrive down the Mile End Road

Peter Hennessy is professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London.