Journey to an international collaboration on the origins of higher learning

Abstract

This article sets out the context and rationale of a project on which the author is currently engaged in collaboration with Roy Lowe. It records a network of American, European and British scholars, including Lowe, who in the last four decades of the twentieth century developed research on the history of universities. At a personal level it recalls the entry into this research activity of one Japanese historian of higher education, and his encounter with Roy Lowe. The historiography and the relevance of Lowe’s contributions are recounted from a Japanese perspective, leading to a subsequent sharing of research questions and the launch of a project on which both individuals are currently engaged.

Keywords:

• higher education
• origins of universities
• Asia
• Europe
• Japan

Notes

¹Sir James Mountford, Keele: An Historical Critique (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

²H. J. Perkin, New Universities in the United Kingdom (Paris: OECD, 1969), 60.

³Roy Lowe, ‘The Expansion of Higher Education in England’, in The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860–1930: Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening, and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia, and the United States, ed. Konrad Jarausch (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1982; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Roy Lowe, ‘Structural Change in English Higher Education’, in The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870–1920, ed. Detlef Muller, Fritz Ringer and Brian Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

⁴OECD, Reviews of National Policy for Education (Japan) (Paris: OECD), 1971.

⁵Roy Lowe, ‘The Changing Role of the Academic Journal: The Coverage of Higher Education in History of Education as a Case Study, 1972–2011’, History of Education 41, no. 1 (2012): 103–15.

⁶Eric Ashby (in association with Mary Anderson), Universities: British, Indian, African: A Study in the Ecology of Higher Education (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).

⁷Walter Rüegg, ed., Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945), vol. 3 of A History of the University in Europe (4 vols) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2011).

⁸Roy Lowe, ed., The History of Higher Education: Major Themes in Education, 5 vols (London: Routledge, 2009).

⁹David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011) (first pub. 2004).