Fahrenheit 451: The Higher Philistinism

Abstract

Most of the chapters in this book derive from collaboration between Duke University in the United States and the University of Warwick in England. It is necessary to say ‘England’ here and not ‘the Yookay’ because that might be offensive to the Scots and Welsh, not to mention the Irish, since what I have to say in this chapter largely pertains purposefully to the extreme case of England, though the other countries of the United Kingdom are unfortunately implicated to some extent as well. I am not myself a member of academic staff at either of these venerable seats of learning, though I have been involved in various collaborations with colleagues at Warwick over the years. In this context, it is extremely tempting (a temptation that I am incapable of resisting) to recall the historian E. P. Thompson’s (1970) short Penguin Education book of over forty years ago, Warwick University Ltd — Industry, Management and the Universities, in which Thompson traced student and staff resistance to corporatism at Warwick, where ‘the business university’ was being pioneered in England. ¹ It is sobering to recall Thompson’s account, in which he complained about the involvement of mainly manufacturing companies in the governance and research agenda of this university, situated on the edge of Coventry in the industrial heartland of the English Midlands, which included representatives from Rootes (then recently acquired by Chrysler International), Courtaulds, Hawker Siddeley, and Barclays Bank.