Midlands Industrialists, Liberal Education and the Founding of the University of Warwick

ABSTRACT The University of Warwick has been subjected to two apparently contradictory critiques. The first, associated with social historian EP Thompson, is that the university had been captured by a cabal of industrialists intending to use its faculties to reproduce capitalistic managers. A second, more general critique of universities in Britain since 1945 is that their elite liberal education in the arts and abstract sciences had little contribution to make to meeting the national economic and social needs for technological ‘manpower’. Neither of these accounts satisfactorily explains the early development at Warwick. An alliance between educators and local Midlands’ industrialists at Warwick developed an education in the virtues of liberal capitalism, reinventing the traditional university education in moral character to face the challenges of the mid-twentieth century. In the midst of the Cold War, only with such an education could students help meet the needs of local and national industry.