Commentary
‘The UNIVERSITY will be for the people’: arts, humanities and the founding of the civic universities
Abstract
The paper addresses the current crisis in the Arts and Humanities by a foray into history, looking at the ideals and expectations that lay behind the founding of the civic universities in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Focusing particularly on the case of the University of Sheffield, it explores what founding a university ‘for’ the people meant at that time, and the support from all sides for an education that was not only open to all, but encompassed Literature, Music Education (following the Hadow Reports) and Philosophy as well as the Sciences and more technical instruction. Public engagement, in multiple forms, lay at the heart of these conceptions of a civic university. Considering our current situation, the paper suggests it is time to overturn misplaced conceptions of a ‘useful’ education, and to return to earlier ideals of a university that was truly for the people. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
crisis in Humanitiescivic universitiespublic engagementmusic educationHadow ReportsCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Shuttleworth, S. (2024), ‘“The UNIVERSITY will be for the people”: arts, humanities and the founding of the civic universities’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a36 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a36crossref
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