Fredrik Thue: Making the Elite Safe for Democracy

Fredrik Thue delivered a lecture in April 2007, on the topic of 'Making the Elite Safe for Democracy'.

Event details

Lecture title: "Making the Elite Safe for Democracy: The Postwar Calls for an Anglo-American Reorientation of Norwegian Academic Life"

Date: 19 April 2007, 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre, Robson Building, George Square, Edinburgh

Lecture abstract

Making the Elite Safe for Democracy...

Shortly after World War II, Norwegian students and faculty members found themselves involved in intense and sometimes fierce discussions about the future of their institution.

Widespread demands for a thorough re-orientation of national academic life were articulated: a more or less German-influenced university system was to be superseded by an academic culture inspired by British and American models.

This would involve curricular-pedagogical as well as administrative reforms. The perspective was ultimately to reinvigorate the university as a genuine cultural community of scholars and students.

This reform program, however, was hardly brought to fruition in the following decades. The new, functionalist university campus which saw the light in the 1950s and 1960s, and which was originally planned as a realization of this program, became instead an architectural halfway house between the old “professor university” and the upcoming “mass university”, with little concern for the more organic and cultural qualities of academic life.

The case of the University of Oslo may thus illustrate some of the structural impediments to transnational “model imports” in the history of universities.

Writing contemporary history...

Universities are extremely demanding objects of historiography because they are loosely coupled "bundle institutions" where the whole often appears to be less than the sum of its parts. This is probably one of the reasons why most histories of universities are organized in two distinct parts: first a comprehensive "institutional" history, then a history of scholarly disciplines.

In Oslo, where we are preparing a six-volume historiography to the university's 200th anniversary in 2011, we have deliberately attempted to break with this tradition. We intend to write an integrated history which specifically emphasizes the interconnections between institutional and scholarly developments.

This program is of course much easier to proclaim than to fulfil. I will reflect on some of the challenges and dilemmas that are inherent to writing such an integrative university history, referring to examples from my own volume which covers the period from 1945 to 1975.