Towards a Genealogy of the Concept of "Plate Glass Universities"

David M. Berry

When we talk about the plateglass universities it has become commonplace to make a seemingly straightforward attribution of the term "plateglass universities" to Michael Beloff's 1968 book, itself titled Plateglass Universities. He describes the book as being researched during "two grand tours to the new campuses in the summer of 1966 and in the spring of 1967" (Beloff 1968: 10). He wrote, in 1968,

I had at the start to decide upon a generic term for the new universities—they will not be new for ever. None of the various caps so far tried have fitted. 'Greenfields' describes only a transient phase. 'Whitebrick', 'Whitestone', and 'Pinktile' hardly conjure up the grey or biscuit concrete massiveness of most of their buildings, and certainly not the black towers of Essex. ‘Newbridge’ is fine as far as the novelty goes, but where on earth are the bridges? Sir Edward Boyle more felicitously suggested 'Shakespeare'. But I have chosen to call them the Plateglass Universities. It is architecturally evocative; but more important, it is metaphorically accurate (Beloff 1968: 11-12).[1]

Beloff identifies seven universities as strictly-speaking the plateglass universities, distinguishing them from the Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) and others. The list he compiles are the universities of Sussex, York, East Anglia, Essex, Lancaster, Kent at Canterbury, and Warwick. As Beloff notes, "plateglass wants to produce people not to fit into existing society but flexible enough to change in a changing world" (Beloff 1968: 45). 

However, I now believe that there is a more complex genealogy of intellectual circulation of the use of the term "plateglass" during the early 1960s. Indeed, in an interview I conducted with Beloff in 2024 he commented that a similar term was already in the air during the mid-1960s and that he was merely responsible for popularising it (Beloff 2024).[2] 

This suggestive comment eventually led me to an obscure paper by A.J.W. Taylor who in 1965 writes of "glass universities" in his paper on student counselling at Victoria University of Wellington. Writing about suicide rates, Taylor casually compares New Zealand statistics "with the red brick and glass universities in England" (Taylor 1965: 116). This indicates that the terminology of "glass universities," at least, was sufficiently established to require no explanation for his academic audience. So far in my research this represents the earliest documented usage, predating Beloff's use by three years. Indeed, Beloff could well have picked up this coinage at Oxford as he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College (1960) and his father Max Beloff was at this time a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who himself grew concerned about academic life and wrote about the university in 1967 and 1968.[3] 

Taylor's 1965 usage may therefore be a kind of archaeological trace of broader processes of conceptual formation that have sadly left few documentary texts. The apparent isolation of his usage perhaps confirms the circulation of the term "glass universities" that Beloff retrospectively acknowledged, a circulation sufficiently established to enable casual use but insufficiently formalised to generate an extensive textual record.

Diagrams of spatial/social relationships
for "new model communities" from York University’s
early development (McKean 2007: 213)

Such an account aligns with Friedrich Kittler's media archaeological idea that concepts emerge through material and technological conditions rather than purely intellectual means. The architectural reality of post-war modernist construction, which in some of the new universities of the time was characterised by extensive use of plate glass in steel and concrete frames, was certainly noted as a new material for both buildings and as a metaphor for thinking. Indeed, W. B. Gallie, remarked in 1960, that universities needed "windows on the world,"

Good big windows, bay windows, within which one could walk about, change one's position, take up and combine together successive or even spatially separated panaromas. That is, windows of the kind that are seldom to be had unless one is willing to knock down a few partitions and room walls in order to get them (Gallie 1960). 

This genealogy remains necessarily tentative, opening rather than closing questions about the emergence of academic concepts, such as "plateglass universities" within networks of intellectual circulation. More research for additional evidence is needed, particularly in the newspaper and magazines of the era, but Taylor's usage already demonstrates that the conventional attribution to Beloff requires careful attribution to take account of contemporary usage, formal and vernacular, that contributed to the concept's emergence.

Notes

[1] The notion of Sussex, York, East Anglia (Norfolk), Essex, Lancaster, Kent at Canterbury, and Warwick being called the Shakespeare Universities is attributed by Beloff to Sir Edward Boyle, Minister of Education from 1962 to 1964 and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds (Beloff 1968: 11-12). However, Boyle actually is said to have coined the term the "Shakespearean Seven" rather than Shakespeare universities (See Patel 2021). In contrast, Lord Fulton, former Vice Chancellor of Sussex, attributes the term to Lord Wolfenden, who was a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Reading, noting in the House of Lords, "that has to be compared with the figures for the new universities—what the noble Lord, Lord Wolfenden, would call the 'Shakespeare Universities'—of York, Lancaster, Warwick, Sussex and so on" (Fulton quoted in HL Deb 1976). Interestingly, Birks attributes the term to the UGC, stating "of the seven centres—the Shakespearian Seven, as they are known to the University Grants Committee because of the ring of their names—all had made a previous attempt to get themselves a university, apart from Essex" (Birks 1973: 15). 

[2] I do however think it highly likely that Beloff coined the term "Plateglassian." Although, sadly, that term does not seem to have caught on. 

[3] Max Beloff was concerned by student dissent and growing iconoclasm in the 1960s. Though the experiences at Oxford were "relatively tame compared with those experienced elsewhere even in Britain," they significantly upset traditionally minded senior members like Beloff and John Sparrow (Warden of All Souls). All Souls College, perhaps because it had no students, became "an easy target for the Young Turks who denounced it as a reactionary bastion of privilege." Beloff and Sparrow "reacted adamantly and did not conceal their feelings of outrage." Notably, Beloff was sometimes "the object of personal vilification" during this period. These experiences significantly disillusioned Beloff and stimulated his broader concerns about British universities. In 1967, he wrote an influential article in the journal Minerva titled British Universities and the Public Purse, which offered "restrained and sensible comments" on the threat of government audit access to university accounts. More importantly, Beloff focused on "the much more diffuse challenges to the autonomy of universities stemming from their increasing dependence on public funds and the tendency of the bodies providing them to foist their priorities on the universities." His plea was for British universities to seek private funding, emulating their American counterparts. In 1974, at age 61, Beloff resigned from his Oxford chair to become founding Principal of University College at Buckingham (Johnson 2003). 

Bibliography

Beloff, M. (1968) The plateglass universities. Secker.

Beloff, M. (2022) Personal Interview with David M. Berry, Trinity College, Oxford, 02/07/2024. 

Birks, T. (1972) Building the new universities. Newton Abbot: David and Charles (The New Environment).

Gallie, W.B. (1960) A new university: A.D.Lindsay and the Keele experiment. First Edition. London: Chatto & Windus.

HL Deb (1976) The Universities, HL Deb 31 March 1976 vol 369 cc1074-243. Available at: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1976/mar/31/the-universities (Accessed: 13 August 2025).

Johnson, N. (2003) Max Beloff 1913–1999, Proceedings of the British Academy, The British Academy, 120, pp. 21-40.

McKean, J. (2007) ‘The English university of the 1960s: Built community, model universe’, in I.B. Whyte (ed.) Man-Made Future: Planning, education and design in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Routledge.

Patel, J. (2021) Utopian Universities, History Workshop Journal, Volume 92, Autumn 2021, Pages 264–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab029

Taylor, A.J.W. (1965) ‘Aspects of Student Counselling’, Applied Psychology, 14(1), pp. 112–119. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.1965.tb00570.x.