A Social History of Student Volunteering

Britain and Beyond, 1880-1980

G. Brewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137363770
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Using a wide range of student testimony and oral history, Georgina Brewis sets in international, comparative context a one-hundred year history of student voluntarism and social action at UK colleges and universities, including such causes as relief for victims of fascism in the 1930s and international development in the 1960s.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction

University students have been a significant cultural force in modern Britain. Popular culture abounds with student stereotypes, from the gown-wearing nineteenth-century scholar to the undergraduates of the Brideshead era and the bearded radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet our understanding of what it was like to be a student over the period 1880–1980 remains limited. The eminent historian of education Harold Silver recently repeated his call for academic work to pay greater attention to the student experience.¹ Although new studies have begun to address students’ lives, interest in the more overtly political activities of universities and colleges has meant other forms of student social action have been neglected. A closer look at extracurricular activities reveals that participation in voluntary action—ranging from support for university settlements in the 1880s to antifascist relief in the 1930s and Student Community Action (SCA) in the 1970s—was a common experience for successive generations of higher education students. Indeed the very emergence of a distinct student movement in twentieth-century Britain can be ascribed to the unifying force of social service and social action across a higher education system otherwise noted for its heterogeneity.

This book is not a history of any one voluntary or student organization or any one cause or campaign. Rather, it is an attempt to synthesize a wide body of secondary work and published and unpublished primary sources on student voluntary action over a hundred-year period, in the belief that this will make an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the histories of both higher education and voluntary action. The focus is largely on activities at universities and university colleges in England, Wales and Scotland (and to a lesser extent in Ireland and Northern Ireland after 1922), but it is by no means only a study of developments in Britain. British students have always looked outward for causes to support and have played a leading role in the creation of international student networks. At different periods of history they have worked closely with American, Commonwealth or European peers in what has been often been called “international student friendship.”² The book sets developments in international comparative perspective by giving center stage to important though often neglected student networks including the Student Christian Movement (SCM), the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF), and International Student Service (ISS). While successive generations of students sought to distance their models and methods of voluntary action from those of earlier cohorts, there is value in a long view because it reveals that the outcomes of involvement in voluntary activity have often been remarkably similar across time and place.

The book uses student voluntary action as a lens through which to examine some central themes of modern history in Britain and beyond. First, it takes the rich story of voluntary service, fundraising, campaigning and protest at universities and colleges as a means to explore the changing experience of being a higher education student across the period 1880–1980. Unlike the United States, where there is a longer tradition linking civic engagement and higher education, it was largely in the absence of formal citizenship instruction that students and tutors in Britain developed a wide array of voluntary associations to bring them into contact with communities outside colleges and universities. The book relates developments in student voluntarism to wider changes in access to higher education, student funding and patterns of residence, and considers the gendered nature of voluntary action across a hundred-year period. It situates student voluntary action in the context of the ongoing development of a wider associational culture at universities and colleges. Although undergraduates at the older universities of Oxford and Cambridge did not readily identify themselves as “students” for much of the period under study, those at other universities and colleges in Britain and elsewhere did, and this term is used throughout the book. Uniting student voluntarism at different periods are several strands that will weave across the story. For instance, a strong strain of seriousness and earnestness in student discussion of social and political questions was tempered by the tendency to imbue social action with high-spirited delight in larks and pranks and with carnivalesque features. Student voluntarism also drew strongly on the Platonic notion of “guardianship,” of educated talent in the service of society, as students across the generations sought to demonstrate the special contributions they could make to communities and good causes.

Second, the book argues that voluntary social service was core to the emergence of a distinct “student estate” in twentieth-century Britain and central in the development of an international student movement. Although much rhetoric emphasized voluntary action as a means to break down barriers between students and communities outside colleges and universities, participation in voluntary action and the emergence of coordinating national and international student associations served to strengthen student identity and reinforce bonds between students. This was in part because of a strong desire to be seen to be undertaking social service, relief or campaigning as students—and indeed often to target aid at students elsewhere. With roots dating back before the First World War, by the late 1930s a broad-based student movement—which explicitly adopted a “popular front” approach to coordinate activities—had been forged through student social and political action on domestic and international issues.

Third, arguing that developments in student voluntarism have repeatedly set the pace for the wider volunteering movement, the book considers the evolution of volunteering in Britain since the late nineteenth century through detailed study of students’ activities. It details student-led innovations in social service, social study and social action and shows that the contributions of students and universities to such causes as post–First World War reconstruction and famine relief, voluntary projects in the Depression and international development aid in the 1960s and 1970s are more significant to these wider movements than has hitherto been recognized. By the second half of the twentieth century, British students were seen as a reliable constituency of support and finance for a range of voluntary associations, causes and campaigns. A key feature of student voluntarism over time was the shift from “service” to “action” in practical activities as well as a change from participation in ameliorative measures to more wholesale questioning of the underlying causes of poverty and inequality. The book dates important changes in student attitudes and activities to a social service craze in the 1910s, the rise of a student social consciousness in the 1930s, and a shift to more politicized forms of community action in the 1970s.

SILENCES: LITERATURE ON VOLUNTARISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In his contribution to the new Oxford History of England, Brian Harrison identifies “the vitality of voluntarism” as one of five major themes of British history.³ Although there has been renewed academic interest in the work of specific voluntary organizations since the 1990s, there are fewer accounts that explore volunteering as a phenomenon in its own right. Furthermore, despite recent research and policy interest in student volunteering as well as in the broader topic of how higher education institutions can improve their public engagement, the history of these related movements remain unexplored. In their 1997 book on students, Harold Silver and Pamela Silver called attention to the “silence” around student voluntarism and community action.⁴ The experience of higher education students is still not yet a well-developed area of social or educational history, although it is a growing area of research.⁵ In her 1994 book Reba Soffer noted that the informal side of student learning, and especially the role of student subcultures, had been almost entirely neglected by historians.⁶ Scores of institutional accounts of universities, colleges and halls of residence have been consulted for this study, although such traditional histories are usually “commissioned, commemorative studies” with particular purposes to serve.⁷ Only rarely do they reflect on wider social trends. However, newer institutional histories are beginning to place students center stage and to explore their experiences using oral history methods, notably in recent studies of the universities of Strathclyde and Winchester.⁸

Carol Dyhouse’s research has added considerably to our knowledge of what it was like to attend university in England in the mid-twentieth century as has Keith Vernon’s work on topics such as student health. Mike Day’s ninetieth anniversary study of the National Union of Students (NUS) provides welcome insights into the changing lives of British students between 1922 and 2012, though it is primarily an institutional history of one organization.⁹ While such studies have begun to address the student experience more broadly, the place of volunteering, social service or community action in students’ lives remains under-researched. The excellent chapter on rags in Dyhouse’s Students: A Gendered History is a notable exception and a recent journal article by Catriona Macdonald considers charitable fundraising as one activity among many through which students explored what it meant to be a citizen in early twentieth-century Scotland.¹⁰ John Field looks at a hitherto neglected aspect of 1930s student voluntarism—student workcamps with unemployed men—as part of a wider study of the workcamp movement.¹¹ Jodi Burkett’s book on post-Imperial Britain touches on the student contribution to radical causes including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the antiapartheid movement.¹² A number of histories of student organizations and networks including the SCM, European Student Relief and the WSCF were written in the first half of the twentieth century, usually by insiders who were themselves closely involved in these stories.¹³ Internationally, scholars have begun to show new interest in such movements, and particularly in the intersection of gender, service and higher education, although there is as yet no academic history of the British Student Christian Movement.¹⁴

Historians’ keen interest in student politics has meant other forms of student social action have been neglected. International student protest in the late 1960s, for instance, produced works seeking to shed light on the phenomenon through consideration of British students’ social and political activities in earlier periods.¹⁵ Of these, the fullest exposition is Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson’s Rise of the Student Estate, which charts the growth of student representation in Britain.¹⁶ The interwar period is the focus of historical work on students by Brian Simon, Arthur Marwick and more recently by David Fowler in his book Youth Culture in Modern Britain.¹⁷ However, both Ashby and Anderson’s book and Simon’s 1987 paper underplay the importance of charitable activities in the forging of a broad-based student movement in the 1930s and neglect the coordinating role of groups like the SCM and ISS. The activities of left-wing and pacifist Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates during the 1930s have long exerted a strong pull for many scholars, while historians are now turning in larger numbers to the involvement of students in postwar New Left politics.¹⁸ The Cambridge University Press’s History of the University in Europe considers student engagement with social and political questions through a study of student movements and political activism on a European stage.¹⁹ It understandably relies solely on the existing secondary studies—namely Simon, Marwick, Ashby and Anderson—to tell the story of student social action in Britain between the wars.

The one area that has received the most historical attention is the university-sponsored settlements, founded from the late nineteenth century in cities in Britain and elsewhere.²⁰ The focus of many of the books and PhD theses on the settlement movement has primarily been on the evolution of these institutions and the services provided to local communities, with graduate residents and paid staff members in the foreground overshadowing the student volunteers who supported settlements from a distance. Moreover, there has been a tendency of such histories to focus on the movement before 1939—and in many cases before 1914. Kate Bradley’s 2009 book on London settlements does offer a much fuller picture of how settlements evolved in the post–Second World War period, but, apart from a useful chapter on living and volunteering at settlements, her focus is not on the student supporters of settlements.²¹ In general historians have considered the provision of voluntary associations or activities for young people rather than volunteering undertaken by young people, with a strong focus on working-class youth as the recipients of philanthropic or statutory services.²²

The focus on settlements, and the high-profile alumni they spawned, has arguably contributed to a skewed understanding of student engagement with local communities over time. Student groups themselves have contributed to this dislocation. Student memories are short and successive generations have sought to distance themselves from the models and methods of service undertaken by their predecessors. For example, in his 1943 indictment of the 1930s university system, former NUS president Brian Simo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• 2   A New Era in Social Service? Student Associational Culture and the Settlement Movement
• 3   Christian Internationalism, Social Study and the Universities Before 1914
• 4   The Student Chapter in Postwar Reconstruction, 1920–1926
• 5   No Longer the Privilege of the Well-to-Do? Student Culture, Strikes and Self-Help, 1926–1932
• 6   Digging with the Unemployed: The Rise of a Student Social Consciousness? 1932–1939
• 7   Students in Action: Students and Antifascist Relief Efforts, 1933–1939
• 8   The Students’ Contribution to Victory: Voluntary Work in the Second World War and After
• 9   Experiments in Living: Student Social Service and Social Action, 1950–1965
• 10   From Service to Action? Rethinking Student Voluntarism, 1965–1980
• 11   Conclusion: Students and Social Change, 1880–1980
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index