For the historian of education, reading institutional histories is an occupational hazard. Sometimes the only published source for material that would otherwise be lost or unobtainable, they are unavoidable, no matter how problematic. Ranging from the superficial and self-congratulatory to the impossibly tedious and detailed, there are many that manage to be both smug and dull. To make matters worse, it is a genre that has few expert practitioners. Most institutions—even those that celebrate their research excellence in other fields—appear content to appoint eager amateurs to write their histories. Enthusiasm, diligence, or simple willingness seem to count more than expertise. Even the better books are frequently narrow in their focus, asserting the uniqueness or importance of the institution without ever truly comparing it to any others.
Joanna Bourke's Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People teeters on the edge of danger. It is an insider's story and one commissioned by the college authorities. Bourke is not, as she admits, a historian of higher education, but rather a specialist in interpersonal violence, a field of research that has only limited and sporadic relevance to modern university life in the United Kingdom. Nor does she ground the book in the sorts of secondary reading that might enable telling contrasts or broader comparisons to be drawn. Almost uniquely for a book on the history of British higher education, Bourke does not cite Sheldon Rothblatt's much-cited publications on the subject—from The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1968) to The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America (2007). Nor does she engage with Carole Dyhouse's foundational studies of gender and women's experiences (No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870–1939 [1995]; Students: A Gendered History [2005]). Nor is there any place for Robert Anderson's many influential works on the subject (among them British Universities Past and Present [2006] and European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 [2004]). Nor does she engage with Rosemary Ashton's relatively recent book on Bloomsbury (Victorian Bloomsbury [2012]), Matthew Andrews's history of King's College and University College London (Universities in the Age of Reform, 1800–1870: Durham, London and King's College [2018]), Peter Mandler's Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (2020), or the small collection of books published over the last decade on the history of the Regent Street Polytechnic and its successor, the University of Westminster. For the seasoned reader of such texts, these absences are disconcerting.
And yet, Bourke's Birkbeck is that rare institutional history that is both a genuine pleasure to read and provides real insights into its subject. Bourke is, of course, a distinguished and prolific historian, never afraid to take on big subjects. Her previous books include Fear: A Cultural History (2005) and An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (1999). In Birkbeck, she offers a truly total history of the institution, tracing the two centuries from its founding as the London Mechanics’ Institution. In her account she is as attentive to the staff serving dinners in the college canteen as she is to the ideas debated in classrooms. She covers, with almost equal assurance, the development of disciplines as various as chemical crystallography, computing, and classics. She even finds space for a fascinating chapter on the paranormal sciences and how the spoon-bending Uri Geller caused ructions in the Birkbeck of the 1970s.
This is no small achievement, and it is all the more impressive by the difficulty of characterizing this particular college over time. Now a distinctive part of London's higher education ecology, combining part-time evening classes with a serious tradition of full-time academic research, Birkbeck has evolved almost unrecognizably from its origins as part of the wider movement of mechanics’ institutes founded in the first part of the nineteenth century. Like many other nineteenth-century educational enterprises, it has survived “chameleon fashion,” in Rothblatt's words (The Modern University and Its Discontents, 301). Its leadership has repeatedly adapted the institution to its environment, including several changes of name, significant changes in function, and—as Bourke makes clear—several periods of real and existential crisis.
Bourke is incapable of writing badly or being boring, and the text is a joy to read. Sensibly eschewing straight chronology, she employs a series of thematic chapters. This is of course a challenging approach. Holding together all these themes and all that change is no easy thing for an author, and there are some repetitions and other ambiguities. Former master Tessa Blackstone's closure of the Senior Common Room still evidently rankles (it is mentioned a couple of times). The Research Assessment Exercise appears suddenly on page 451 and is finally elucidated on page 547. More problematically, the thematic structure sometimes makes it hard for Bourke to tie together the life stories of people such as A. G. Hines, the first Black professor appointed at Birkbeck. His importance in that respect is covered in a chapter titled “Minoritized Communities.” Yet a later chapter that mentions the dismissal of a professor and the blaze of legal action that ensued confines to a footnote the fact that the professor was Hines. To make matters worse, the only reference to him in the index directs the reader solely to Bourke's mention of an intervention he made in economic theory. This is perhaps a small matter. It does mean, however, that scholars will have to read carefully if they are to get the most out of the text.
But read it they will—and with enjoyment. Moreover, Bourke has a wider set of messages for contemporary academics and their paymasters. Among the conclusions she draws from her history is that “Knowledge flourishes in egalitarian, collaborative environments” (425). Another is that “There would be no university community without effective governance” (95). The tensions between those who would privilege what she calls “skilled management” (95) and those who foreground egalitarian collaboration run throughout Bourke's account. They are also being played out in contemporary Birkbeck. As I write, the college has announced plans to lay off 140 staff—including a quarter of the English Department. How this is will be resolved, only time will tell. Readers can only hope that future historians of Birkbeck will prove as creative and penetrating as Bourke as they seek to make sense of our present.
