ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at five individual voices – Bruce Truscot's Red Brick University, Walter Moberly's The Crisis in the University, the writings of Michael Oakeshott, F. R. Leavis's Education and the University, as well as Eric Ashby's Technology and the Academics – and explores common themes and topics in the debate on the university with a particular focus on issues such as student power, expansion, and student life. Written from the distinct perspective of the civic universities, which Truscot termed Redbricks, it was primarily a critique of the unevenness between Oxbridge and the Redbricks. According to Oakeshott, the whole discussion about the university's purpose and function was misguided as it misrecognised what a university actually was. For Oakeshott, a university was "not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result" but "a manner of human activity".
