Over a century has passed since those words were written, and in that time Clare has undergone a pattern of ascents and declines, marking the thoughts and concerns of the student and academic body at LSE through periods of profound political and social change. Clare has been many things, at times a poetry journal, a taxation journal, a bundle of perceptions, a strident radical voice. It has published expletives, escapades, exposés alongside weighty treatises on local government and global political analyses. What it has always been, and will remain, is a voice on the accelerated margins of university culture, presaging broad generational shifts in academic paradigms, dispelling the liberal myth that education is a neutral or apolitical activity, and giving thoughtful voice to those students whose need to be heard is paramount.

The new incarnation of Clare seeks to draw from this textured history to find a new identity for Clare as a critical arts journal. Critical in the sense that its voice seeks to “talk truth to power” engaging critically in contemporary academic debate, reflecting student concerns about the direction of Higher Education, attacks on public space, and the erosion of LSE’s core values. And as an arts journal, to return pleasure to thought, to look to new means of knowledge production, radical ways of presenting that knowledge, a deconstructive undermining of format and form, so that the social sciences at LSE might still come to understand the arts as a galvanising force, and crucial to its vocation of truth-telling.

At a time of global economic crisis, the school’s directing powers, their acute noses twitching in the changing winds, may now appear to be undergoing a readjustment of capitals, and LSE might just be beginning to exploring its own ‘literary-turn’, instanced by the Director’s fondness of reading, the increased arts budget and the upcoming literary festival, Clare exists to prevent there being simply empty celebration, fireworks for the reflected global standing of the insitution, instead grounding it in a community of student and academic production, to being the social sciences here closer to art, both online and off.

We believe there is no clearer expression of the social than in literature and art. The art object retains complex histories, it offers concrete insight – as data it is unsurpassed. As Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz writes “A distance achieved thanks to the mystery of time must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness.” The vivid markers of art speak to us with force that no technical language can reproduce. Art’s ability to frame our imaginations, the unique emotional leverage it may wield over centres of power, make it an enterprise of critical import here at LSE. Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty understood art to be requisite precursors to the political imagination, Karl Popper makes clear to us that art is the intuitive bedrock of scientific endeavour, what we might understand is that art may serve to invigorate the engine of democracy, equality and social justice that many here believe LSE should be.

Clare was produced on a small budget, beset by sordid externalities. Informed by the zine movements and alternative publishing as much as by the staid world of academic journals, we eschewed notions of shallow professionalism, we turned those inadequacies into badges of pride, and our many shortcuts into statements of intent. As G.B. Shaw wrote in this journal one hundred years ago ‘Let me recommend you to practice cheating. It is a most valuable and instructive exercise; only you must do it in the spirit of an artist, and certainly not for irrelevant pecuniary gain.’

Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. He has taught at Oxford and Amherst College and had visiting posts at European universities. He was one of the founding editors of New Left Review and is on the Editorial Board of 
The Nation. His most recent book: After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in The Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2001. He is presently writing a memoir.

Yet hath my night of life some memory,
my wasting lamps some fading glimmer left.
Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, V. 1.

“That’s history” is an American expression, in which “history” means not the past recalled or invented but dropped into the memory hole, or in any event not deemed worth bothering about. No nation, of course, is more imprisoned in its past than mine, not despite but because of its obdurate refusal—even with the great efforts of our historians—to face it. The failing isn’t exclusively American, and affects cultures and institutions great and small. Even the LSE in its bright and shining new form, might profit from a look back. An entirely personal one follows.

I came to the LSE in the fall of 1953, aged twenty-seven, as an Assistant Lecturer in Sociology, and left in 1959 for an appointment at Oxford University. When I arrived, I had visited the UK twice previously; the first time being earlier that year for ten days, and then again briefly for the interview preceding my appointment. I had spent the academic year 1952-53 in Germany (at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg), gathering material for a Harvard doctorate in sociology on the Reformation in the German cities. Taking up the post in London, then, entailed entering two very different European cultures in rapid succession.

I suppose that I could claim that as a native New Yorker from the Bronx, when areas now entirely Black and Latino were inhabited by a large Jewish community with Italian and Irish districts at the borders, I was used to cultural diversity. The claim would be untrue. The New York I grew up in was marked by class and ethnic segregation. I attended the academically excellent high school of the City College of New York, where the students were mostly from the Jewish lower middle and working class.

I had an advantage, since my father was a high school teacher and there were plenty of books in our home. Our teachers, actually, were rather different. Those were Depression years, and many of them had doctorates. Ten years later they would have been in university teaching posts. An interesting contingent were the Irish, who brought to the classroom something of what I later identified as Jesuit rigour. There were old family Protestants and, of course, a considerable contingent of Jewish teachers of my father’s generation. One teacher had helped the Spanish Republic, another worked with Einstein: we were much impressed by each.

The atmosphere at school (Townsend Harris High School, named for the first American pro-consul in Japan) was a singular mixture of political fervour and the progressivism of the New Deal. Some students came from unionized families, and the struggles between Stalinist and Trotskyite interpretations of the world crisis found their way into our political arguments. The Nazi-Soviet pact divided our spirits, but we resented the legislative harassment and dismissal of a very few of our teachers who were Communists. Our teachers espoused a standard version of American higher culture, descended from New and Old England in a straight line. One who was dismissed as a Communist taught Wordsworth, but I do not recollect mention of the poet’s ardour for the French Revolution.

It was only when political activity in a New Deal student movement brought me out of this milieu that I met persons of my age from much more prosperous families. Children of bankers, lawyers, physicians, they lived on Central Park West or West End Avenue, a social world removed from ours. They took for granted that they would be going to elite private colleges. One of them, who attended a private school, introduced me to the cultural-political journal Partisan Review, whose attempted fusion of Marxism and modernism was bewilderingly different from the progressivism I had inherited at home and at school. The journal’s London correspondent was George Orwell. It was a period in which I read widely, encountered both Harold Laski and John Strachey, and learned about the Fabians and the founding of the LSE. I learned of its connection with the struggles of the thirties and forties, and before I was sixteen, it had mythic status for me.

Meanwhile, film and novels made London and Britain more tangible. Of course, we all remembered Britain’s truly finest hour—between the fall of France and the German attack on the Soviet Union. Like many in my generation, I can still visualize the cartoon by Low depicting a Tommy on the English cliffs, shaking a fist in defiance of a black cloud moving across the Channel: “Very well then, alone!”

I spent a semester at City College after leaving high school in January of 1942, and then went to Williams College in the fall. It was the incarnation of New England’s culture, this time espoused by a faculty composed entirely of Americans from early waves of immigration, many of whom were ardent New Dealers. I interrupted my college studies at seventeen, and worked for two years for a US government wartime propaganda agency in New York, where I met a lot of American journalists from Kansas and Texas and other places I knew only from film and novels. I returned to college at the end of the war, and then began doctoral studies at Harvard in 1947.

I spent five splendid years at Harvard, where a resident tutorship in one of the houses and wide acquaintanceship in the university brought me out of the narrowness of Harvard sociology, with its ambitions to construct a science of society. The rest of the university had its own deformations. Harvard understood itself, correctly, as the intellectual capital of the new American empire. The United States as the heir of the ages—and especially of tired Europe—was its belief about the nation, inextricably tied to the conviction that since Harvard served country so well, the rest of America was bound to be delighted by Harvard’s leadership. (There is a bon mot about Harvard: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you cannot tell him much.”) A good deal of this was clothed as a theory of historical progression, in which the US incarnated modernity, the goal—however distant, and however little they knew or acknowledged it—of all cultures. It was this superbly uncritical view of the US which made it unnecessary for Harvard, in the early Cold War years, to deal seriously with either Marxism or with less triumphalist interpretations of our own history.

Great Britain had a role in this, as an honored if distant ancestor, whose descendants were shabby, if still genteel. Quite a few Harvard faculty members had studied in the UK, mainly at the older universities, many had wartime memories of Great Britain, some had worked with British officials during and after the war. There was some interest in the new welfare state and the work of the Labour governments. The end of British Empire was taken stolidly, as if a fact of nature, not history. Hobbes, Locke and Mill were certainly more familiar than Rousseau and Comte. Keynes had become an icon, the struggles over his legacy in the UK and Europe of interest to a very few. There was a residual attachment to Britain, a familial deference without sharp contours. A stream of British academic visitors passed through, their conversational talents often more evident than their intellectual achievements. Karl Popper spent a year at Harvard, but—important in Cambridge—charmed no one. Isaiah Berlin, by contrast, was a welcome visitor, who also had the supreme virtue of flattering his hosts’ belief that they were now at the apex of civilization.

Between Harvard and the LSE, I spent a year in a country whose elites treated Britain and things British with distant respect. World power had passed to the US and to the Soviet Union, in possession of a third of Germany. It was thought indiscreet to speak or write openly of Britain’s eclipse—and, in any event, the German elites were trying desperately to extricate themselves from the consequences of their own defeats. I do think that many educated Germans admired what they thought of as British dignity in an altered historical situation, and they were European and insightful enough to attribute it to the British sense of historical continuity. Perhaps, indeed, that was what the Harvardians admired in Britain: it was a university peopled by those ambitious above all to move out of their own milieu.

These were the experiences I had before coming to the LSE. None prepared me for the most obvious of initial obstacles: I had to learn a new language, or several, since the classes and peoples of Britain did not speak in one tongue. To make matters more difficult, much of the new language was unspoken. It consisted of conventions of address, meaningful pauses, small coughs, slight movements of the head, quiet inflections of voice, and occasionally, the sheer refusal of response. It took me a while, for instance, to grasp that in learned debate, the phrase “I do not quite understand” had to be translated as “I understand all too well, that is, I see through your preposterously weak argument.”

The techniques of sly indirection and punctuated silence of the Senior Common Room had counterparts at the greengrocers, but these too had to be learned.

No historical intuition, further, prepared me for the fact that Britain was exhausted. The twenty-one years between the cross Channel carnage of the First World War and the home terrors of the Second were definitely not a long respite: there was the Depression.

Six years of war thereafter had drained many of energy, and the vigour of the young was reined by an inherited scepticism: they learned, early, that starting over was an illusion.

The material deprivations of the immediate post-war years were not compensated by the élan of social reconstruction. I arrived in the UK two years after Attlee left office, met both the leaders and followers of Labour’s campaigns, and did not think that theirs was a condition of all passion spent. It was, rather, of tasks dutifully accomplished.

The contrast with the self-satisfied optimism of Harvard was very great. Therein, however, was a lesson I could not have learned on the other side of the Atlantic. My British colleagues in the social sciences (and their contemporaries in the arts) took the density and resistance of history as given. My twenty-one year old students were more aware of the complexities of their existence than their counterparts in the US.

The caricatured British don whose philosophy of history reduced itself to “History? History is one damned thing after another!” was onto something, although there were more elegant ways to describe slow processes of historical accumulation. It was not an accident that British historians gave Marxism a depth and specificity its schematic proponents usually lacked. Like their less radical colleagues, they did not expect to leap into a new world: the one they lived in, they thought, was here to stay for the indefinite future. The resigned scepticism with which they all scrutinized new ideas could and sometimes did degenerate into complacency. It was, however, the resistance to dogma of intellectually low churchmen—not the worst thing in a world of multiple illusions.

A Community of Teachers and Scholars

The first topic may be introduced the following way. We often hear a graduate saying that he was educated at a particular university. We often hear a university teacher saying that he taught So-and-so when the latter was a student. But we never hear a university teacher saying that he educated So-and-so. To say that would be obviously presumptuous. The inference is plain and important. Students, like other people, must educate themselves.

Broadly speaking, a university can and should do two things, in connection with providing educational opportunities. The first is to create conditions under which a closely knit student society or community can arise. The importance of this is to be found in the fact, so much emphasised by Newman, that education largely comes about by the association of students one with another. The second is to facilitate and encourage all those activities and interests of students, whether pursued singly or in common, which are part of education. While the inadequacies of universities in relation to these two things must be admitted, the universities may fairly say that it is lamentable that so few students use fully such chances as they have. In this matter of education, students must take the initiative. They must deliberately seek to widen their interest, sympathies, and understanding, to explore literature, the arts and philosophy. And they must exert themselves in more than dilettante fashion.

It is equally the duty of students to learn as teaching is the duty of a university. Our scheme of studies is planned on specialist and not on general lines. A specialist scheme of study is often criticised; it is said that such a scheme is narrow. In one sense this is obviously true. The inference is then drawn that such a course of study is narrowing in its influence upon students; but this is not necessarily true at all. We construct on specialist lines because it is only through intense study in a limited field that a student can come to understand what real knowledge of anything is—thorough, accurate, detailed, objective, comprehensive knowledge. I do not mean that within three years a student can attain to real knowledge of his chosen field; but he can come to understand what real knowledge is—to recognise and appreciate it whenever he comes across it. This ability to distinguish between real knowledge and half knowledge is an acquisition the value of which it is hard to overestimate; moreover, it is something seldom learnt outside universities, and therefore one of the greatest gifts which a university can bestow. In the truest sense of the phrase, this is a widening experience.

Hideous Romanticism?

It is useful to distinguish between teaching and training. By training in this context is meant instruction in a method, and in any university course there must be some training—training in methods of acquiring knowledge. But training is also needed for the practice of professions. We have the fact that our degrees are not tickets of entry into privileged reserves; our graduates are not certified as able to render special services needed by the public. They have got to prove that what they have gained during their university course has made them more valuable members of society than they would have otherwise been. And how can they prove it? By showing that they have a wide angle of vision, are flexible in mind, are open to new idea, can think accurately, are both intellectually discipline and intellectually adventurous, and above all, that they possess that modesty which should characterise anyone who has ever grappled with the fundamental problems discussed in universities.

The Special Place of the University

Today, universities stand well—very well—in the eyes of the public. The universities are regarded by the public as power-houses whence the state derives energy to solve its pressing problems. When we look round, we see that the universities have become centres of ceaseless activity in the region of contemporary affairs; their staffs are reservoirs upon which the state draws when it looks for men to serve on commissions and committees, as advisors and consultants, and in many other capacities. But is it not possible that the universities are valued for wrong or irrelevant reasons, even that they are straying somewhat from their rightful path? Certainly the young people and their advisers, parents and schoolmasters, tend to have quite other views about the functions of universities and to regard them as gates into well-paid occupations. Nevertheless such views are not necessarily altogether mistaken; it is proper to hope that the recruits to the better-paid occupations, which in general are the more responsible and influential, will be drawn from among those who have been members of a university striving to carry out its true functions. As to the universities themselves—suppose that they conducted a critical self-examination, would they find that they were keeping the true aims set out by Mr. Eliot? Such a self-examination would surely give rise to some disquiet.

The suggestion that the universities may be straying a little from their true path raises the question whether they are acting under some compulsion from outside. It is often said that the independence of universities may be endangered by their dependence upon public funds. There is some reason to think that they are changing their ways, and if so, it is by their own choice—though they may have made it unconsciously. It is possible that universities are allowing themselves to become organs of the state—of the welfare state—that they are being subtly conditioned, turning out immediately useful products and being assessed, and assessing themselves, by their productivity in this line.

This possibility deserves discussion. An impressive case can be made out that during the present state of affairs all efforts should be directed to solving our immediate problems. But is this case sound? There are always immediate problems. Is it not the duty of the universities to stand a little away from the immediate stress, the hurly-burly of the day; not because they are careless of it and indifferent to it, but because they believe that only by the continued attention to their own special tasks can the conditions be created in which the stress can best be relieved?

It is impossible to suppose that the public will ever fully understand and appreciate universities which are confining themselves strictly to their proper function. If a single phrase had to be found to describe the true life of a university, it might be said that it is a place where a never-ending informed conversation is in progress, a conversation that leads to no conclusion not in need of revision. But the public is not likely to pay much for places of that sort.

Today, the motto still reads rerum cognoscere causas: to understand the causes of things. But in this new academic world of league tables, research assessments and top-up fees we need to ask ourselves: ‘What is the mission of LSE?’ ‘What is its purpose?’ ‘Does it indeed need an aim beyond providing a high quality environment for its learners and researchers?’

The real question is perhaps: ‘What is the point of a university at all?’

“A Community of Teachers and Scholars”

The appellation ‘university’ is derived from the latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which loosely translates as a “community of teachers and scholars”. This is something that needs to be rediscovered today.

A university is clearly not an adolescent nursery spoon feeding students absolute truths; or a factory churning out individuals who can brandish their degrees and be considered omniscient in their field. Nor it is a manufacturer of musings on the world—opinions written from ivory towers that may have value on paper, but do not change the facts on the ground.

The fact that the LSE is not entirely guilty of these is no cause for complacency. Its activity should be rooted in the society that it seeks to examine; the point more than ever is not to analyse the world, but to change it, as many of the great academics at LSE indeed have.

For much of their modern existence, universities have been the gatekeepers to influence in society. Under recent governments, the marketisation of education has deepened this attitude. Universities are seen as part of a conveyer belt into the workplace, with more and more people seeking degrees that will help them fill jobs vital to the continued buoyancy of the economy. University becomes an instrument in career progression; courses are restricted, and avenues for exploration curtailed to streamline students into focusing on exams, assessments and the qualifications they will need to slot into their place of work.

For the individual, particularly under the regime of tuition fees, preparation for university begins at an ever-younger age. Acceptance to the best courses is increasingly contingent on going to the right secondary or even primary school, getting the right grades and, financially, scrabbling together a job in their early teens to cover a fraction of the debt that they will incur. For parents, it begins even before the child is born. Getting into the best school often means being in the right area; being in the right area means being in the right job; and being in the right job means the right qualifications; the circle is closed and it repeats itself again and again.

Tuition fees are key to marketisation, particularly when the current ‘cap’ of £3,000 is lifted, allowing some universities to charge huge amounts and cream off the best students. Financial pressures squeeze and stress students to choose courses which they might not like but will hopefully lead to lucrative jobs. The pathway to the American system is already clearly signposted in Britain.

If the government can find £25bn for unnecessary nuclear weapons, countless billions for the ongoing quagmire in Iraq, and hundreds of millions for ID cards and other wasteful initiatives, what is keeping us from funding a positive investment in the future generation? If the considerably well-off are willing to go into debt in order to fund their children’s university education, who is to say that the public will not accept higher taxation on those who can afford to pay in order to get better services?

Hideously Romantic?

Beyond fees, it would be hideously romantic to fool ourselves into thinking that some halcyon age once existed where everyone who deserved a place at university received one, and where inequality was nonexistent. There has always been a market in prestige, and reversing the recent tide of marketisation or abandoning fees would never be enough to overcome inequality. Nevertheless, it is clear that a battle for the soul of the entire education system, particularly higher education, is commencing, with the silent revolution of marketisation winning ground.

In truth, there is no definitive answer to the question of what a university constitutes. Each of us will make of it what we will, with our own prejudices and opinions. Nevertheless, for many, a university can and should be a centre of original and competing ideas; a place where cutting edge research is passed on through inspiring, state-of-the-art teaching in order to spur further innovation and intellectual development. The qualifications obtained are important, but the holistic university experience is the key. University life is the sum of all aspects of student life, including the classroom, the Library, the local environment, student activities, and more.

Fundamentally, the old mantra that education is a right, not a privilege, is more relevant than ever. The inequality rife in higher education should appal us, as it would no doubt have depressed the Fabians. Currently, just over 50% of those going to independent fee-paying schools will end up in a Russell Group institution. At the other end of the scale, just over 10% of those coming from FE colleges and around 25% of those from state schools will get into the same universities. This does not begin to take into account the inequality between ‘good’ state schools and FE colleges, and ‘bad’ ones.

LSE’s Special Place

LSE is a Russell Group institution with a great deal of political clout and influence in the education sector. It can and will be a significant player in the future of higher education and how that future is created.

LSE is special and should remain special, with its uniquely cosmopolitan environment and its rounded social sciences outlook. But that does not mean that people should have to strain every sinew—and that of their families—to be able to get here in the first place.

If LSE has a mission today, surely it is to break down the social barriers to learning, and to throw light onto neglected areas of society that are crying out for champions. LSE could widen its participation on a massive scale, by putting its research into practice and making the learning environment it creates open to those with the ability, not the wealth. Above all, LSE could champion its position in this diverse and international city, to become fully embedded in the London community, address its problems and use its international, historic position as a launch pad for new ideas.

Perhaps, the question comes down to how one really understands the causes of things. We learn by doing; and so should LSE.

Aled Dilwyn Fisher, LSE Students’ Union General Secretary 2008-9

Aled Dilwyn Fisher is General Secretary of the LSE Students’ Union. Originally from Cardiff, Wales, he completed a B.Sc. in International Relations and History this year before taking up his Sabbatical role. He was previously Environment and Ethics Officer of the Students’ Union as well as an LSE delegate to the National Union of Students (NUS). He is an active member of the Green Party of England and Wales, and was the youngest London Assembly candidate in the 2008 London Elections.