F. R. Leavis ― The Creative University

This is a critical introduction to the educational thought of F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), the greatest English literary critic of the twentieth century, providing the first in-depth examination of Leavis’s ideas in relation to contemporary mass higher education. During the course of a long, prolific and controversial academic career, which saw him take issue with figures such as Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot and C. P. Snow, Leavis became one of the most articulate advocates for the idea of the university as ‘a centre of consciousness and human responsibility’ in the face of what he saw as the relentless technological drive of civilisation. With the journal Scrutiny which he co-founded, as well as his critical writings, Leavis became a decisive influence on generations of teachers in Britain and overseas. Widely misrepresented as narrowly elitist, his ideas about ‘the creative university’, with their radical, student-centred approach to teaching, constitute a powerful resource for a higher education system grappling with the contradictory demands of continuity and change. Based on original research, the study provides an overview of Leavis’s life, work and heritage and his educational world view, and a comprehensive exploration of Leavis’s pedagogy from theoretical and practical perspectives. It also includes a first-hand account by the author of being taught by Leavis in person.

Steven Cranfield first went in search of F. R. Leavis more than four decades ago when as a schoolboy in London’s East End his headmaster suggested he might do worse than head north to study English with a certain literary critic, then teaching at the University of York after Cambridge. He thus counted himself among the last generation of students to be taught by Leavis, in a period of socio-political ferment that occasioned some of Leavis’s most adventurous thinking. After postgraduate research on Dante and Langland he moved into clinical healthcare and professional education and training, establishing himself in the early 1990s as an independent consultant. Working with UK universities as well as bodies such as the European Commission and the World Health Organization, he co-researched and developed numerous publications and resources on healthcare, higher and professional education and leadership, notably Developing Change Management Skills (2004, with Valerie Iles) for the UK’s National Health Service. In 2006 he completed a PhD on Leavis at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is Senior Lecturer in Pedagogic Research in the Department of Leadership and Professional Development at the University of Westminster. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he has contributed a chapter to Enhancing Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Eds. Pokorny and Warren, Sage, due 2015). He is also a literary translator and his co-translation, with Claudio Tedesco, of the first collection in English of the eminent Spanish poet Francisco Brines, Of Purest Blue (Get A Grip), appeared in 2010. Steven is a founder member of the Leavis Society.