London calling
London calling
It is the first week of the new term, and I am making a flying visit to London: three and a half days, two meetings, a conference, and some precious hours in the library of the University of London’s Warburg Institute. After an overnight flight I check into my hotel and head straight for the first meeting, in the offices of the British Academy on Carlton House Terrace, a superb John Nash building overlooking the Mall. Then it’s time to head to the Library. The sun is shining brightly, and the temperature is spring-like in contrast to Ottawa, so I decide to walk. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it is difficult to imagine ever tiring of observing life on these streets.
Central London is a space of memories, going back to my graduate student days some 35 years ago. I work my way up Lower Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus, and then through Leicester Square and the back streets of Soho, heading to Bloomsbury. Like Proust’s ‘madeleines’, each block evokes some reminiscence, now almost forgotten. Here is the Comedy Theatre, where seats in “the gods” could be had for 50p, and where I remember seeing Hayley Mills (of whom I was totally enamored at the age of about 10) in some play whose name I can’t now recall; and there is the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, where I found a £5 note while walking to attend my Ph.D. oral, something that I took as an exceptionally good omen for what would follow. Much has changed in four decades: not the spaces, but rather the shops and restaurants which inhabit them. There were many fewer chains in the 1970s, an era before the rise of global brands, and now they seem to dominate completely. Indeed I can still remember the opening of the first McDonald’s in London, on Haymarket, and the excitement of this expatriate North American at the opportunity for some “comfort food” at a price that even a student budget could occasionally afford. Our “splurge restaurant” – the Amalfi on Old Compton Street – is still there, and appears to be thriving, but Jimmy’s, a Greek restaurant in a basement around the corner on Frith Street, sadly is no more. And the Patisserie Valerie, which served the best café au lait and croissants this side of Paris, has seemingly grown from a single location to become a national chain. Will this be Britain’s answer to Starbuck’s, which similarly began as a single coffee shop in Seattle’s Pike Place market? Indeed, all the coffee shops in London now seem to belong to chains, whereas 35 years ago none of them did. In the mid 1970s, each was individually owned and operated, many by expatriate Italians who knew well how to make espresso! In the 21st century, I wonder, will the same thing happen to universities? Will we see a process of consolidation? Of many fewer institutions, and instead the rise of international “brands”, each having multiple campuses and backed by a strong internet presence?
My destination is Woburn Square, part of the urban campus of the University of London. The stark ruins of a church, destroyed by bombing in the ‘blitz’ of the early 1940s and still a site of that memory in my grad student days, have now disappeared, and the space has a new occupant. The Warburg Institute is one of my two most favorite research spaces in all the world, the other bring the library of the British School at Rome. What makes it so? To begin with, it is “open shelf”, an essential condition for undertaking research. In my experience, many of the most useful books for a variety of research projects were those which I stumbled upon by accident, in the process of looking for something else. And the Warburg not only makes this possible, it actually encourages it, by not assigning unique shelf numbers to each individual book. Rather, a group of books on the same topic will share a classification number, forcing the reader to browse through them in order to find the one being sought. Experience has taught me the enormous value of serendipity!
It is mildly worrying that the desks in the main reading room seem sparsely populated. As a research institute, with no undergraduate students, will it survive in this age of fee-driven “academic Darwinism”? If it doesn’t, I shall feel the loss keenly, and conversations with British colleagues in recent years have left me with no doubt that the threat is a real one.
It is a curious conundrum. Historically, most institutions of higher education were founded by individuals or groups who invested their personal or collective wealth in a cause which they held dear. At the outset, governments were rarely if ever involved. The Warburg Institute, for example, began its life in Hamburg as the personal library of Aby Warburg, who moved it to the safer haven of London when conditions in Germany began to deteriorate in the early 1930s. It was really only in the middle of the 20th century that the state became heavily invested in postsecondary education, and now governments are finding that they can no longer afford it. But we have yet to find an alternative source of funding, other than by raising tuition fees … and in Britain the fee increase this year has been precipitous. But the United Kingdom government is far from being unique in this regard. Here at Carleton, the provincial government’s contribution to our operating budget has dropped over three decades from roughly 80% to below 50%; and it is sobering to recall the corollary, namely that 50 cents of every dollar that we spend comes from fees paid by our students, many of whom are going into significant debt for that privilege.
“The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin”
The Clash were far too pessimistic for my liking, although their music was otherwise great. But we certainly have some serious work ahead. Education is not inexpensive … and the combination of teaching and research even more so. Some way must be found to develop a funding model for universities that is financially sustainable, one in which amazing libraries like that of the Warburg Institute can continue to open their doors to curious readers like me.