The only way is Essex University

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand monuments to learning but by the swaggering, leering one-liners of the global plutocracy.

These are thoughts that come to mind on the occasion of Essex University’s 50th birthday, a much more interesting anniversary than it first (rather bleakly) sounds. It is the subject of an engaged and engaging booklet, Something Fierce, and an on-campus exhibition curated by Jules Lubbock, Essex’s emeritus professor of art history.

Lubbock is an inspirational teacher and a contrarian of genius. I know: in an earlier life for both of us, he taught me. I fondly remember a lecture about Fra Angelico where he read explicatory passages from a book about cybernetic theory. This refusal to acknowledge disciplinary boundaries was a founding principle of Essex.

So, too, was it a principle of John Henry, later Cardinal, Newman. In his 1852 book of lectures, talks and articles, The Idea of a University, Newman argued for an academic community arranged on non-denominational lines and with no specialisations other than the noble ‘perfection of the intellect’. He wanted to teach not narrow subjects but strategies for thinking, analysis and discrimination. Helpful, one imagines, in writing today’s all-important code. Additionally, Newman believed that a university should have a soul. Essex has soul in spades, if not quite the sort Newman had in mind.