Full Description
Higher education provision is an essential component (socially as well as economically) of modern social structures. The British Labour Party and Higher Education focuses on the development of the Labour Party's policy on higher education from 1945 to 2000. It analyses the rapid expansion and series of fundamental transformations in higher education and Labour's part in both shaping and reacting to them. The authors explore the historical evolution and Labour's varying policy initiatives in the period, and question the place higher education has occupied in the various strands of Labour ideology. As always with Labourism', perspectives are contentious and contested, spanning the centralist Fabians', the liberal moralists, and the socialist left. How far, if at all, have Labour's policy stances in this area confronted the elite social reproduction functions of universities or the instrumentalist needs of corporate capitalism?
Has this policy evolution given concrete evidence to support (Ralph) Miliband's pessimistic assessment of Labourism' as a political formation structurally unable to confront capitalist social structures, or to see a viable Third Way', as advocated by New Labour?
Contents
Part I: The Context; 1. Introduction; 2. The Ideology of Labour's Social Policy since 1945 and the Context for Higher Education Development; 3. The Dimensions of Change in Britain's Higher Education since 1945; Part II: From Post-War Reconstruction to Robbins: 1945 to 1963; 4. The Christian Socialist Moot and the 'Crisis in the Universities'; 5. The Moralist Tradition; 6. The Vocational, Utilitarian Imperative, and the Increasing Dominance of Science and Technology; 7. The Marxist Left, Workers and Higher Education; Part III: University Expansion in the 1960s and Labour's "New Society"; 8. The 'Plate Glass 1960s' Universities; 9. Labour and the Polytechnics; 10. The Open University; Part IV: Binary and Beyond; 11. Labour in Retreat: The Responses to Educational Thatcherism and the End of Binarism; 12. Whatever Happened to Adults? New Labour, Lifelong Learning and Mass Higher Education; 13. Postscript: Higher Education and Labour After Blair; References; Index.
