Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

4. Law School Culture: A Visit to Rutland
ACADEMIC TRIBES AND TERRITORIES
When I was at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, I was
reminded each time I arrived at the campus of a dictum commonly
attributed to Robert Maynard Hutchins when he was President of
the University of Chicago, to the effect that a university is "an
aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common heating
plant." 1 At the time Warwick was a "new university" and our
administrators had so arranged the one-way system that almost the'
first building that greeted the visitor was the boiler-house—an
assurance that, despite appearances, this was a real university.
Most modern universities are too large to have only one centralheating
system. Hutchins, as a university administrator, was complaining
about the rugged independence of academic departments
that strongly resisted both central bureaucratic rule and the
breaking down of disciplinary boundaries. The departmental
system in English universities may be as strong as it ever was, but in
other respects this complaint may seem out-dated here as academic
autonomy is being steadily eroded by government encroachment
on higher education, line management, performance indicators,
external auditors, quality assessors and other signs of the movement
towards bureaucratic standardisation.
Yet the dictum retains an important core of truth about the distinctiveness
of academic cultures. Wander through a modern university
from History to Engineering to Spanish to Physics to Social
Studies to Philosophy to Medicine to the Business School to
Women's Studies, and one seems to enter a series of small worlds,
with academic tribes, as Becher calls them, occupying and
defending separate territories. 2 Each seems to have its own quite
distinctive culture. Even the external signs tell you something: the
notice boards, the marks of hierarchy, the conventions of dress, the
relative lavishness or penury of the furnishings, the noise levels,
staff office hours, the image presented in the departmental pro-
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