British Universities: Purpose and Prospects 9781487599430

Table of contents :
Contents
Author’s Preface
1. Recent Basic Developments
2. Nature and Objects of Universities
3. The Part of the University in the Pattern of Education
4. Universities and Research
5. Degrees and Teaching
6. Student Malaise
7. The Government of Universities
8. The Response of Universities to the Changing Situation
9. The Universities and the Government
10. The Criteria of Decision on University Growth
11. Other Ways of Financing the Universities
12. Reflections on Policy
Index

Citation preview

British Universities PURPOSE AND PROSPECTS Since the last war there have been enormous increases in the numbers of universities and of students. Yet it tends to be assumed that the concepts which were valid for the dozen or so universities and the tens of thousands of students of the 1900's are still valid for the fifty universities and the hundreds of thousands of students of today. Sir Sydney Caine was Director of the London School of Economics from 1957-67. Before that he had been for four years Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya and had served for twenty-five years in the Civil Service - in the Colonial Office, in the Colonial Service as Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, and in the Treasury. He is thus equipped to give a balanced assessment of the state of British universities today when their almost complete financial dependence on the state makes the relationship between the universities and the Government one of the central topics in any such discussion. The book examines a number of inter-related questions which are seldom asked. What are the objectives of a university? Is there a proper balance between teaching and research? Is it right that secondary school curricula should be to so great an extent determined by university entrance requirements? With the increase in their numbers are graduates any longer in any sense an élite? What are the underlying causes of the current malaise among students? What is the value of university education to the society which provides it, and should there be a special tax on graduates' earnings? What is the role of universities in relation to other forms of further education? How and to what extent should teachers - and students participate in university government? Can alternative methods of financing universities be found which will give students a greater sense of responsibility and lead to the loosening of wasteful rigidities of organisation - in degree patterns, length of courses etc? Much of the confusion of purpose evident in higher educational policy today has arisen because these and related questions have not been asked. Sir Sydney Caine examines them fairly and thoroughly, weighing the need to respect academic independence against the public interest. The result is a most stimulating discussion on a topic of vital concern for the future of Britain.

This page intentionally left blank

British Universities Purpose and Prospects SIR SIDNEY CAINE K.C.M.G.

University of Toronto Press

© Sir Sydney Caine 1969 First published 1969 in Canada and the United States by University of Toronto Press. Manufactured in Great Britain 8020 1638 3

CONTENTS Author's Preface, 7 1. Recent Basic Developments, 9 2. Nature and Objects of Universities, 24 3. The Part of the University in the Pattern of Education, 41 4. Universities and Research, 54 5. Degrees and Teaching, 72 6. Student Malaise, 103 7. The Government of Universities, 154 8. The Response of Universities to the Changing Situation, 169 9. The Universities and the Government, 182 10. The Criteria of Decision on University Growth, 213 11. Other Ways of Financing the Universities, 228 12. Reflections on Policy, 246 Index, 267

This page intentionally left blank

AUTHOR'S PREFACE To survey the position of United Kingdom Universities is an ambitious, not to say a presumptuous, undertaking. It would be idle to offer an apology for the attempt; as to justification, if there be such it must lie in the work itself. I do, however, offer some explanation of the arrangement of the book. Any general and reasonably comprehensive study of university problems must take account of basic objectives, internal organisation, including administrative structure, teaching methods, and degree patterns, student problems and external relationships, especially with the government. But each of these has some bearing on the others. Hence while each of the topics mentioned - and others - deserves some separate attention, there is bound to be significant overlapping. I can only hope that this does not go beyond what is necessary for an adequate exposition of the relationship between these various aspects of the total complex. The sequence I have sought to follow is first a brief summary of current developments, especially in the growth of the universities, which have highlighted the underlying problems; next a discussion of the traditional objectives of universities, of their position in relation to research and to other forms of post-school education and of teaching and degree patterns, followed by a discussion of recent changes of attitude among students. Then comes an account of the universities' response to the latest demands for action and of relationships with government. Finally, after somewhat more speculative sections on possible developments in the internal government of universities and in alternative possibilities of financing, an attempt is made to bring together the main theses of the analysis with suggestions of possible future policy changes.

7

This page intentionally left blank

1 Recent Basic Developments British Universities, like universities all over the world, have grown enormously in the last generation or two. At the same time the body of knowledge which it is their function to preserve, to enlarge and to spread has itself grown even faster; and their relationship to the community at large has changed in many ways. What are the effects of these and other changes on the concept of the university, on the functions society expects it to perform and on the ways in which universities organise their own internal government, their teaching and their research? Are concepts which were valid for the dozen or so universities and the tens of thousands of students of the 1900's valid for the fifty universities and the hundreds of thousands of students of today ? What is the impact on university structure of developments in other parts of the national education system? What are the consequences for student status and student attitudes of the changed situation? These and many other questions it is the intention to examine if not completely to answer in this essay. First let us look at some of the changes which have taken place. At the end of World War I, there were 16 full Universities in the United Kingdom;* today there are 44. The number of regular students has grown from about 30,000 in 1914 to about 46,000 in 1919/20 50,000 in 1938/39 and 184,800 in 1966/67. Full time academic staff have multiplied even faster, from 3,023 in 1925/26 (the earliest year for which official figures were published) to 3,994 in 1938/39 and 23,609 in 1966/67. * Excluding Southern Ireland. 9

IO

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

This growth of number is, of course, part of a world-wide trend and indeed is much less striking than the growth which has taken place in many other countries. Figures derived from UNESCO reports which were quoted in The Times of May 27, 1968, showed the following changes since 1950:

U.S.A. U.S.S.R.

France W. Germany W.Berlin E. Germany Italy Czechoslovakia Turkey Japan India Colombia United Kingdom

jVb. of Students in 1964 5,000,000 3,600,000 4555ioo 343,000* 12,000 31,000* 27,800 75.500 261,400 191,800 43,800 141,600 28,400 91,000 916,600* 390,800 404,000 1,100,000* 37,000 10,600 133,000 210,900* *ig63 figures.

Mo. of Students in 1950 2,300,000 1,200,000 139,600 123,000

°/ /o Increase 117 200 226 i?9 158 172

35 125 220 135 170 250 59

The United Kingdom figures used by UNESCO are not identical with those for full-time students published by the University Grants Committee and precise comparisons with other countries are not possible; but the general trend is clear. The increase in the United Kingdom, although less rapid than in many other countries, is nonetheless striking. Before 1914 under i % of the relevant age group of young people was attending a university. Today the proportion is about 7 %; and, since the trend of numbers is upwards the proportion is likely to be approaching 10% by the ig8o's. At the same time the numbers in other forms of further education (in technical colleges, training colleges, etc.) already comparable to those in universities, is increasing at a faster rate. In this the U.S.A. may be found to have set the pattern to be followed in this country, as it has done in so many other ways, and we may be moving to a position in which one person in

R E G E N T BASIC D E V E L O P M E N T S

II

two will be continuing in full-time education up to the age of twenty or over. This is a major educational revolution. By the end of the last century a few advanced industrial countries, principally in Western Europe and Western America, were providing basic primary education, enough to give simple literacy, to practically the whole of their populations; a more advanced 'secondary' education to a very considerable minority; and a university or higher education to a quite small elite. Now, when universal primary education has become at least the goal of every country, however far behind in the development table, the advanced countries have moved on to provide some kind of secondary education to virtually all their populations and a higher education to a substantial minority comparable in size to the proportion receiving secondary education two generations ago. Less immediately dramatic, but in many ways as important, is the growth in the academic staffs of universities. Precise statistics on a fully comparable basis are not available for any long time back, but there can be little doubt that over the period under review here the growth of numbers of academic staff has been even more rapid than the growth of numbers of students. The staff-student ratio - the number of students per individual teacher - has actually been falling at the very time that the total of students has been rising. The absolute numbers are small but the percentage change is significant if one bears in mind the character of the university as traditionally conceived in this country, a society of men (and now of women) devoted to the pursuit and spread of knowledge. We need not assume either that all university teachers discharge that function with equal application and success; or on the other hand that nobody outside the university circle is concerned with increasing or spreading knowledge. The fact remains that the body of people who have, so to speak, publicly accepted that function as their primary activity has notably increased. Forty years ago one person in about 7,000 in the age group 25-65 was a university teacher; today the ratio is one in about 1,000. If we think in terms of people of higher I.Q/s the ratio becomes more striking. It is a reasonable presumption that the great majority of university

12

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

teachers come from the top 10 % in the I.Q,. classification, so that today something like i % of that group are to be found in academic posts. And of course the proportion is rising as student numbers continue to grow. Parallel with this growth in the size of the university profession it is possible to distinguish a change in status. First, there can be little doubt that university teachers have, over a period of decades rather than years, improved their relative salary position (by comparison that is with professional rather than manual workers). The most obvious comparison is with the Civil Service. In the interwar period Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge, as Director of the London School of Economics thought that he had achieved notable success when he got £1,000 a year established as the normal salary of a professor. That was then something below the maximum salary of a Principal in the Civil Service (on a scale stabilised in the interwar period at £8oo-£i,ioo). Today the salary of professors ranges from £3,500 to £4,995 with an authorised average of £4,500, i.e. rather above the scale of an Assistant Secretary in the Civil Service, one grade higher than a Principal. Similarly the starting salary for an entrant to the Civil Service was over £300 a year, compared with not more than £250 for the then equivalent of an Assistant Lecturer, whereas now an Assistant Lecturer begins at rather more than an Assistant Principal in the Civil Service. Secondly there has been a real change in the extent of participation by academics in public affairs. Before 1914, it may well have been that great matters of state and public policy were discussed in the common-rooms of Oxford and (perhaps somewhat less) of Cambridge but it is hard to recall any active participation by dons in public affairs either as government servants or as advisers or members of committees of enquiry. Nowadays no Royal Commission or committee of enquiry is complete without a Vice-chancellor or professor at least as member and often as Chairman. As a recruiting ground for chairmen of enquiries, public authorities or permanent tribunals the academic world is perhaps surpassed only by the legal; and the names of Wolfenden, Fulton or Robbins come as readily to mind as that of Radcliffe. There

RECENT BASIC DEVELOPMENTS

13

has, too, been an increasing movement from the universities into temporary government service, beginning on a small scale in the First World War, greatly increasing in the Second and now established as a normal practice in peace-time. Yet another field of public influence where dons have become familiar figures is that of mass communication. Men who, however high their reputations, would formerly have been known only in the more intellectual circles, have become household names through regular articles in the popular press or appearances on television as experts, comperes or participants in brains trust type programmes. Naturally it is the professors and other teachers in the social sciences who figure most prominently in those public activities, economists as temporary civil servants, economists and sociologists alike as advisers and members of committees; but they are followed closely by the natural scientists, and the arts men who participate in such affairs, although fewer, include some of the best known names, such as Franks, Maude or A. J. P. Taylor. A reflection of the change in public estimation is found in current literature. It is hard to think of any novel or play written before 1920 (or even later) which centres on a university community. The only university characters who come readily to mind as characters in nineteenth-century fiction are the Master of Lazarus and Dr Arabin in Trollope's Barchester novels, both of whom play their roles as ecclesiastics rather than as dons, and various other Trollopian characters who are stated to have held College Fellowships in their previous history. In modern fiction one thinks at once of Charles Snow and Kingsley Amis as primarily concerned with university communities but there are dozens of other novels and plays centring on such society and dons at one level or another are entirely familiar as incidental characters in current literature. Substantially the university has taken the place of the Church as a source of literary characters. Indeed the substitution has taken place in a much wider sense. Where the nineteenth century would have turned to the churches for a broad 'philosophical' contribution to debate on public issues or for an expression of humanitarian

14

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

interest, the mid-twentieth century turns more and more to the university. Major changes have also taken place in university finance. At the end of the First World War money for the maintenance and development of universities came overwhelmingly from sources other than the Central Government. Local Government grants were significant in some of the newer institutions but taking the university world as a whole the sources of finance were predominantly private income from endowments, benefactions from individuals and private bodies and fees paid by students. Equally the support of students was overwhelmingly private. The majority were financed wholly by their families or their own efforts; a minority of poorer students, perhaps larger than is sometimes realised today, were enabled to attend universities by scholarship awards but these were principally from private funds, including funds administered by universities themselves, with a certain contribution of small grants from local education authorities. The only systematic scheme of state grants to students in higher education was that under which grants were paid to students at teacher training colleges in return for commitments to teach for prescribed periods after qualifying. Small state grants to universities and university colleges had been made since the middle of the nineteenth century and a University Grants Committee had evolved as the channel for such grants, but it was only from 1919 onwards that the Committee operated in substantially the modern fashion and the scale of grants available began to grow to the stage when state support became a dominant factor in university finance. Today University Grants Committee grants have grown to the point where they completely overshadow-all other sources of finance. Grants for recurrent expenses now run at over £150,000,000 and constitute not far short of 90% of the ordinary income of University institutions as a whole (i.e., exclusive of research grants related to particular projects). The Exchequer is equally dominant in the field of capital grants, running at about £90,000,000 per annum. There is much more to be said in detail about the financial relationship between universities and the Government; it suffices to

R E C E N T BASIC D E V E L O P M E N T S

15

say here that in every University, not excluding Oxford and Cambridge for all their ancient endowments, the University Grants Committee grant dominates the financial picture. Fees, which between 1919 and 1939 covered about a third of recurrent costs, have not been increased even enough to keep pace with the fall in the value of money, let alone the rising real costs of university maintenance, and now constitute no more than 7 or 8% of ordinary income. Equally significant has been the growth of state support to students. Today every boy or girl with a residential qualification in the United Kingdom who secures an offer of a place for undergraduate studies at a United Kingdom University is eligible for a grant for maintenance. The standard grant is adequate to cover fees and maintenance in a University hall of residence or in lodgings during term time; the grant is reduced if the parents' income exceeds a certain minimum, but a considerable majority of undergraduates receive the maximum grant and a minimum of £50 is available to all. A very few young people find themselves ineligible for special reasons and older entrants do not qualify for grants so automatically, but the present system does virtually ensure that no aspirant to a university education is left out by lack of money. There has also been, more recently, a large increase in the provision of state grants for post-graduate studies. These are at a higher rate but are limited in number so that the grant does not follow automatically on admission as with undergraduate grants; but the number provided is enough to have given a very great stimulus to post-graduate studies. The system of state grants to students has many repercussions, on the social composition of the student body, on the geographical distribution of students, on the internal organisation of universities and on many other matters which will be discussed in later chapters. On the purely financial side the cost of the system now runs at about £40,000,000 per annum, making the total State contribution to university education approaching £300,000,000 per annum, representing about 15 % of total expenditure on education and about 0-8% of national income. A third main area of change lies in the field of knowledge

l6

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

itself. The amount to be learned has very greatly increased and is increasing at an ever faster rate. This is perhaps most striking in the natural sciences and in technology but it is true only a little less strikingly of the social sciences and of the humanities too. In language and literature it is not merely that, for the living languages at least, every year sees massive additions to the literature to be studied; every year also sees new discoveries about the language and literature of the pastsometimes dramatic like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the decipherment of the Minoan inscriptions, but more often a series of small discoveries of new texts or new facts about past literary figures. As a result of the slow accretion of such discoveries an undergraduate student has at his command knowledge of the classics beyond the range of the most distinguished medieval scholar and may know more of, say, Greek literature than any Greek ever knew. In history the same phenomenon is even more striking. It is obvious that the history of humanity gets longer every day: but the percentage addition to the era of recorded history is much greater. It is only in the last century or two that really full records have been made for the use, or perhaps the embarassment, of future historians. Froissart and Holinshed had the comfort of having very few records to consult; the historian of the last war, say, is overwhelmed by the mass of official records, statistics, memoirs, newspapers, etc. available not merely in his own country but in every country in the world. In the social sciences we move into a different kind of growth because to a large extent the social sciences as we now know them are a creation of this century. Economics of course is much older, but its complexities and sub-divisions and its attempts to attain mathematical form and precision are largely developments of the last generation. Politics or government is far older still as a subject of study; but the supplementation of the general theories which absorbed political students from fifth-century Athens to nineteenthcentury Europe by the detailed study of specific institutions is again largely a twentieth-century development. Still more is this true of international politics, which only emerged as a distinct field of university study during the inter-war period.

R E C E N T BASIC D E V E L O P M E N T S

17

Sociology and social anthropology are much more obviously modern innovations as recognised disciplines. The former, amorphous in definition but correspondingly wide in potential scope, has lately become the most rapidly growing of all subjects so far as student demand and university provision are concerned. Supplementary to all these developments in the social sciences are of course the growth of statistics from its primitive pre-twentieth century beginnings and the emergence of the new discipline of computational methods. Lastly there is the enormous growth in the natural sciences and technology. Not merely are vastly more detailed observations available in the comparatively long-established fields of straightforward physics, chemistry, zoology and botany. Whole new fields of study have been added in this century. The existence of radio-active elements was just realised sixty years ago; now we know that that activity is far more complicated than at first supposed and discoveries are still being made of more and more varieties of particles emitted in the course of radio-activity. Biochemistry, the whole field of vitamins, the functioning of the endocrine glands - one could make almost endless lists of the new developments in biology. Technology and 'pure' science are constantly reacting on each other. Before 1900 aero-dynamics was perhaps known as a possible minor subject of study but it only became really interesting after the Wright brothers had demonstrated a technical way of making an aeroplane fly. From then on the needs of aeroplane designers stimulated the theoretical study of aero-dynamics while the behaviour of the aircraft furnished the student with a mass of observations previously unavailable. Similarly the study of the behaviour of radio waves has constantly interacted with the practical needs and the practical experience of radio engineers; and examples of such interaction could be found in every branch of science and technology. These developments, most obviously those in the natural sciences, have led to changes which have had and are likely to have profound effects on the practical organisation and habits of universities and, indeed, of the educational structure as a whole. These will be more fully discussed later but the B

l8

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

obvious points are: first the increasing specialisation of subjects; and second the increasing time taken in mastering the known facts about a subject, and the amount of hard grind needed to get near enough to the boundaries of knowledge to be able to venture on new research. The first brings about a situation in which the question is no longer whether the scientist can talk to the non-scientist but whether the practitioners of any one of the scores of scientific specialisms can talk to the practitioners of any other. The second faces the educational system with the constant dilemma of choice between specialising ever earlier and more minutely or continually prolonging the period of full-time study. It also creates the paradox that while it is necessary for the technical operation of modern society to have more and more people familiar with the vast mass of available knowledge the labour of acquiring that knowledge gets ever greater and, there is good reason to suspect, more unattractive. Obviously all these developments have complex reactions on the structure of degrees, the growth of post-graduate study, the organisation of teaching and the choice of subjects by students. One other group of changes is worth mentioning before concluding this rapid survey of general developments, i.e., changes in the comparative position of different types of university. Before the First World War, and until some time after the end of the second the universities of the United Kingdom could be divided into three groups; Oxford and Cambridge; London; and the 'Redbrick' or provincial, with the four Scottish Universities making in formal structure a separate group but being in practice increasingly similar to the Redbrick group.* Oxford and Cambridge dominated in prestige and still, before World War I, in numbers. London enjoyed a special reputation, especially internationally, because on the one side of the facilities offered throughout the country and throughout the world by its system of external degrees and on the other because of its pre-eminence in particular fields, such as medicine, technology (through the * Durham never fitted neatly into any of these categories but I hope it will not be resented if it is thought not worth while making a special class for Durham alone.

R E G E N T BASIC D E V E L O P M E N T S

IQ

Imperial College of Science and Technology) and the social sciences (through the London School of Economics). The Redbrick group had, in the main, still to create their own special reputations in individual academic disciplines. Differences in the student bodies were also marked. Oxford and Cambridge were dominated by the concept of the residential college and the traditional one-to-one tutorial system, not merely in theory but to a greater extent in practice than today. In London, the Redbrick group and Scotland, collegiate or hostel residence was a rare exception and tutorials were completely overshadowed by lectures as the medium of instruction. In the Redbrick group and Scotland the population was predominantly local in origin; this was less true of London because London's specialisms drew students not only from all over the United Kingdom but from all over the world, and in any case the very size of the Greater London area made any local or regional flavour less obtrusive. Both in London and the Redbrick Universities there were more part-time undergraduates than today and, whatever the prestige of Oxbridge, they drew a very fair proportion of high-grade students for the simple reason that the clever but poor boy or girl might well manage to get to his or her local university even though Oxbridge was financially out of reach. Most obvious of the changes of today are the emergence of new types of university in the post-war creations and the converted colleges of advanced technology. The Redbrick universities had emerged by a slow and painful growth, beginning as quite junior institutes and colleges with a strong technical bias, advancing to the stage of preparing a few students for London external degrees and then organising themselves consciously for that purpose and ending finally with the grant of the right to award their own degrees. Some (e.g., Leicester, Hull, Southampton, Exeter) were still in the tutelary stage in 1945, but thereafter it became the practice to create institutions possessing University status from the start, beginning with Keele, originally organised in 1949 as a University College under a shadowy sponsorship of two older Universities, but with its own degrees. In 1961 the full step

2O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of establishing an entirely independent University from scratch was taken with the formation of the University of Sussex at Brighton and Sussex has been followed by seven others, York, East Anglia, Essex, Lancaster, Kent, Warwick, Stirling. The atmosphere of these new creations has been quite different from that of the early years of the Redbrick group. Physically they have enjoyed spacious 'green field' sites instead of congested spots in the centres of industrial cities and have been provided with buildings both far more quickly and on a more generous scale. They aimed from the start at non-local students, though their provision of halls of residence has varied widely. Academically they have been able to experiment at once with new degree patterns and different teaching methods. The combination of these factors has made them attractive to students and staff both within the country and internationally. For example, as a goal for American students Sussex, practically from its start, proved far more attractive than nearly all the old Redbrick and, proportionately to its size, a rival to Oxford, Cambridge and London. Perhaps the history of what are known as the ex-C.A.T.s* is rather more like that of the old Redbrick group. Some had began as technical training institutes in the nineteenth century or even earlier, others had been founded as colleges of advanced technology in the post-war period. All had received special stimulus from the concentrated interest in technology in the last twenty years and after being financed from private and local authority sources had received large direct grants from the Ministry of Education. Like the Redbrick universities in their early stages they taught, inter alia, for London external degrees, mostly began by drawing their students almost wholly from their own localities and had a high proportion of part-time students; but they were already concentrating more on full-timers and building halls of residence to meet the needs of a geographically wider range of students. Their distinctive feature was concentration on science and technology and the decision, following the recom* In addition to the Colleges in Glasgow and Manchester (see p. 21) ten of these had become independent Universities by 1968.

REGENT BASIC DEVELOPMENTS

21

mendation of the Robbins Committee in 1962, to grant full university status to institutions with that limited range was an innovation in British practice - at least in form. In substance it was much less of a novelty because the Imperial College of Science and Technology, with the same limited range, had long been the most self-contained and independent, as well as one of the most academically distinguished, of the great colleges of London University; and the colleges of Science and Technology in Glasgow and Manchester, although both still affiliated to their local universities, had already been recognised as of semi-independent university status. Since the acquisition of university status this group have all shown, not only a continuing development of their fulltime and residential character, but very definite efforts to widen their academic scope by starting departments of arts or general studies and increasing previous small beginnings in the social studies. The practical aspects of economics, business management and sociology have proved particularly attractive. While the distinctive scientific and sociological flavour will no doubt long be maintained it may be taken as certain that the differences between the ex-C.A.T.'s and the older city universities will be substantially reduced. This indeed, is the general trend, the blurring of the distinctions between the different types of university. Nearuniversal maintenance grants to students, acting almost as a positive financial incentive to live away from home, have greatly reduced the 'local student' characteristic of the old Redbrick group. Many of the older group (apart from London) have successfully acquired more spacious sites, are building more modern premises and are meeting the needs of their non-local students by much more generous residential provision. The cmix' of students is therefore much the same everywhere with the exceptions that London still attracts a higher proportion of overseas students than most others (and perhaps also attracts a slightly different, more sophisticated, type of United Kingdom student); and that Oxford and Cambridge, although taking in more students from lowerincome groups than formerly, still take in a larger proportion

22

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of public school boys than the rest of the universities. It is probable, too, though difficult to verify, that Oxford and Cambridge, because of their continuing social prestige, attract if anything a higher proportion than formerly of the most intelligent boys and girls, who are no longer kept out by financial stringency. Academically, the trend is also to reduce the differences in teaching methods and degree patterns between the various groups. In teaching methods the tendency in the older Redbrick group and London is to rely less on the lecture and more on the 'class' or group tutorial discussion; the new foundations have concentrated on the small group discussion from the start; and in Oxford and Gambridge the group as opposed to the individual tutorial has grown in favour, particularly in the natural and social sciences, so that there has been a convergence of pattern. As to degree patterns, it is not the case that these have become more uniform across the board or that every degree in every university is accepted in general estimation as of equal standard, but that it is less easy now to distinguish an 'Oxbridge' or a 'Redbrick' or a 'new foundation' pattern; innovations, variations and excellences - or deficiencies - are to be found in all, though admittedly novelties are most frequent in the 'new foundation' group which inevitably had most scope for experimentation. It may be doubted, too, how far the actual innovations, much publicised as some of them have been, have significantly changed the general character of British university degrees. One other common feature has been the widespread growth of post-graduate work. In discussing the pattern of universities, brief reference must be added to other developments in higher or post-school education; the changing character and status of Teacher Training Colleges; the steady growth and development of the Polytechnics and Colleges of Technology; the experimentation with County Colleges, sixth form colleges and other institutions intermediate between School and university; and the emergence of special institutions in the field of management (the new Graduate Business Schools in London and Manchester and the very large if untidy growth of internal

R E C E N T BASIC D E V E L O P M E N T S

23

training institutions in industry and in government) and in vocational training. To summarise this introduction, the principal changes which have been taking place are the growth in the number of universities and of students; a corresponding growth and consequential change in the general status of university teachers; a transformation of the financial situation of universities replacing private financing by almost complete dependence on the central government; a parallel growth in state support to students which has virtually removed the purely financial barriers to university entrance; and a continuing growth in the volume and complexity of knowledge with all manner of potential effects on degree structures. A change of a secondary or consequential kind is the emergence of over forty independent universities with their individual characteristics but with an increasing basic uniformity, common outlook and common subjection to the control of government through the University Grants Committee, the Research Councils and the Department of Education and Science and with their own co-operative organisation in the ViceChancellors' Committee and various spontaneous common service establishments.

2 Nature and Objects of Universities At first sight a simple-minded person might find something very mysterious in the general repute and status of universities. They are thought of as part of, perhaps the culminating stage of, the general process of education; yet they are regarded as something very different from ordinary schools. They have by tradition been the great source of practitioners of the 'learned professions'; but in modern times their most respected spokesmen have deplored the thought that they should be concerned with vocational training. In Britain they have been especially reluctant to be concerned with the training of teachers, although earlier in its long history the university doctorate could be described as a licence to teach. Great emphasis is laid on the independence of universities, their freedom from outside control; yet in all the countries of the West, and countries which have adopted Western ideas, universities have only come into existence by some act of authority - papal, royal or national - and are governed by the prescriptions of that act, although schools at a lower level and of less dignified status can exist, start and flourish with no such formal authority. The origins of universities lie in the Middle Ages. Nothing really corresponding to the modern university can be found in ancient Greece or Rome. Groups of scholars might gather round famous teachers but they do not seem ever to have created a continuing organisation like that which characterised Bologna, Paris and Oxford. What seems to have happened was that the practice of scholars gathering together in such centres became a permanent habit; the need was felt 24

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

25

to regulate their community life and their relationship to the towns in which they had gathered. Charters were therefore issued by the Pope, as the natural authority since written learning was concentrated in the Church, or by a powerful King, which simultaneously gave these gatherings of scholars and teachers a status, laid down rules by which they were to govern themselves and at the same time gave, in one form or another, a recognition of the qualifications or degrees awarded - a sort of guarantee of standards. The earliest of these acts of authorisation were largely acts of recognition of a state of affairs which had already developed, but as time went on papal or royal or other authorities took the initiative of deliberately calling into existence 'universities' or communities of scholars. Histories of the early universities seem to be full of the 'nations' into which the scholars or students were divided, and this, like the similar frequency of references to disputes between the university and its host city, is symptomatic. What distinguished the medieval university from the ordinary school was that it was not a local institution concerned with the education of local people only. It was an assembly of people from a wide area, perhaps from the whole area of Christendom. From the point of view of the city where they assembled they were intruders, not fitting into any of the recognised categories of citizens - inevitably a problem in the status-dominated atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Hence the need somehow to establish their status, to place upon someone some responsibility for their good order and to regulate both their relationship with the city of their residence and their standing in the world of learning. At the same time the interest of the authorities (like the interest of governments today) did not derive solely from a dispassionate belief in pure learning. Much more practical results were looked for. The universities were expected to be (and were) training grounds for the Church, for medicine and for lawyers. The earliest institution to which the term university is commonly applied was the great medical school of Salerno; Bologna concentrated above all on law; and Paris became the dominating centre in theology, Inevitably, however, studies with less vocational bias grew out of these

26

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

origins, faculties of arts, 'pure' philosophy, the science of logic and the beginnings of natural science. Two other things are to be noted about the earliest universities. They were clearly concerned only with a comparatively small section of the population, the men who were to go into the medical and legal professions and the higher ranks of the Church. Whether or not consciously thinking in terms of an elite training they were in fact concerned with an 61ite group which, again no doubt without deliberate design, was to provide much of the personnel of the public administration of the times through the lawyers and ecclesiastics in whose hands so much of it lay. Secondly, however they might value their freedom from detailed control by external authority they accepted as a moral basis the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. In the post-medieval development of English Universities it is, I think, not an unfair generalisation that their position as centres of vocational training declined (except in the training for the church); that in the main they failed to establish themselves as centres of new ideas or new discoveries; but that they maintained their position as the dominating centres of scholarship and knowledge, above all in the field of the humanities, and strengthened their standing as institutions through which it was normal for the elite, above all the governing elite, to pass. Vocational education for the law passed largely to the control of the Inns of Court and for medical practice to the colleges of Physicians and Surgeons. As to the development of new ideas very little in the fields of philosophy or politics or natural science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be said with confidence to have emerged from the universities as such. Of course many of those responsible for new thinking were university men in the sense that they had taken university degrees and some held university posts for long or short periods, but very few combined active teaching and 'research' simultaneously in the way now regarded as normal. Contributions to experimental science and technology came largely from men with no university background at all; and up to the middle of the nineteenth century the developments

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

27

in economics, political sciences and the embryonic studies in what is now called sociology came mainly from men whose life lay almost wholly outside the university world. During the greater part of the nineteenth century the pattern was not significantly changed. The universities remained the great centres of theological study and education for the Church of England. They continued the academic study of law and medicine but continued also to play little part in the training for those professions. Similarly, as new organised professions emerged, e.g., engineering, architecture, accountancy, surveying, the task of organising the education appropriate to those professions fell in the first place to bodies outside the universities, which only at a later stage began to provide formal degrees or courses of instruction in those fields. It would be as hard in the nineteenth century as in previous centuries to argue that all or most important new ideas or discoveries came out of the universities; but later in the century the universities began to take seriously their task of contribution to new ideas through the deliberate stimulation and organisation of research, largely under the influence of German university practice. In the same period there grew up a more self-conscious attitude to the role of the university in producing an elite of character as well as knowledge, typified by the Balliol of Jowett and the new system of recruitment for the higher government service in India, at home and in the diplomatic and Colonial services, through systems of selection which by formal rule or practical necessity made the possession of a university degree an essential of admission. In this very quick sketch of the development of universities in Britain an attempt has been made to bring out the permanence of four basic elements in the varying pattern of university activity in different historical periods, which may be labelled scholarship, training, research and mind-building; or spelled out a little more fully, the acquisition of existing knowledge for its own sake, study as a preparation for particular professions or vocations, additions to knowledge and the cultivation of habits of logical thought, intellectual curiosity and moral leadership. The emphasis to be placed on these

28

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

elements is by no means universally or permanently agreed; and even from any one point of view the ideal combination of them may be very much affected by the scale of the total university operation and other variable factors. It is noteworthy that Dr Perkins, President of Cornell University, in his lectures on 'The University in Transition' (1966) makes no mention of the fourth function, mind-building. This is doubtless a reflection of the disappearance from the American concept of the University of the elite status of the university graduate. Given the size of the American university population any idea that they are all being trained as leaders has become nonsense. Immediately I propose to look a little more closely at the possible choices between 'learning' and 'mind-training' between the 'academic' and the 'vocational' approach, between emphasis on teaching and emphasis on research and between trying to cater for an elite and trying to cater for the mass of mankind. The distinction between mere factual teaching and mind-training is obvious enough at the extremes but harder to make at the boundary line - if there is a precise boundary line. To take a very simple example there is a world of difference between mastering lists of mountain ranges and mountain peaks and entering into discussion of theories of mountain-building, between knowing the visible position of every star in the heavens and theorising about the characteristics, origin, growth and decline of stars. Every university teacher would no doubt regard it as his duty to introduce his students to the wider aspects of his subject, to encourage them to think about the general as well as the particular, to ask new questions as well as learn old answers. But there are pitfalls and dangers in over-stressing the general. Only rarely does a new (and valid) general theory emerge otherwise than on the basis of a very wide knowledge of particular facts. Even if someone who might be called a factual ignoramus does propound an interesting new generalisation, almost certainly it will need verification by particular observation. In the last few days (I write in March 1968) two examples have been reported. New observations on the sun are currently being made which may contribute to the verification, still not

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

2Q

achieved, of that part of Einstein's theory which relates to the distortion of light rays by the sun's gravitational field; and the source of certain 'pulse-like' radio emanations has been provisionally identified as a particular star with the help of the star-map compiled by detailed labour over many years by the Palomar Observatory. Of course this kind of situation, the alternation of observing and theorising and checking, is familiar to every scientific researcher; but it is still worth emphasising that there need to be people trained not only to do the detailed observing but to know enough of what is already known to recognise novelties in the observations when they see them. The relationship between Tacts' and 'theory' was well put by Arnold Nash in his The University and the Modern World (1945) when he said 'From Morris Ginsberg I learnt that not even the clearest thinking can atone for failure to begin with the facts, while from Professor Karl Mannheim I learnt that the facts are never what they seem to be'. Very much the same need for a wide basis of hard knowledge arises when one is thinking of the encouragement of curiosity and questioning. It is excellent to encourage the asking of new questions, but it is a great fallacy to encourage students in the belief that all the questions which come into their still immature minds are themselves new questions. In the more speculative disciplines, and in the social studies generally, there is much to be learned about the ways in which people in the past have thought and disputed about general issues before going on to propound one's own ideas as novelties. There are of course other more mundane reasons for retaining a pretty solid factual core in most subjects. One, internal to the universities themselves, is that facts are easier to examine and mark than theories; and the more novel the theory the harder it is likely to be for the average examiner to mark it objectively and fairly. The other is that the carrying on of the world's work does require a large number of people with a solid basis of detailed knowledge in particular fields, whether of chemistry or biology or economic and sociological statistics. Inevitably when society at large pays

3O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

most of the bill it will want to see that the product is 'useful* in some obvious sense. In the light of these conflicting pressures there is no simple and permanent answer to the question how far universities ought to lean to one side or the other, to teaching facts or stimulating thought. Some kind of combination of the two is no doubt desirable, but the 'mix' chosen has varied from time to time and from institution to institution. The choice is bound up with the next issue; vocational or academic? My predecessor as Director of the London School of Economics, Sir Alexander Carr Saunders, used to distinguish two kinds of university degrees, the professional and the professorial; the one designed to produce practitioners, the other to produce teachers, the one with a bias to 'applied' knowledge, the other with a bias to 'pure' knowledge. In general university people tend to identify concentration on applied subjects with concentration on routine, factual teaching and concentration on pure or theoretical subjects with concentration on the stimulus of thought. The identification is by no means automatic and will be worth further examination later but it will first be worth looking further at the actual role played by British universities in professional training. It has already been shown that in the post-medieval period there was an effective withdrawal by the universities from vocational teaching, in practice if not in theory, particularly in the cases of law and medicine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and still more in the twentieth century, there has been some move in the other direction but it remains a partial - there is some reason to think, a half-hearted - move. In medicine the universities have completely reestablished their predominance and the university teaching of law has become much more vigorous and important, though the place of the other old vocational subject, theology, has declined; and the universities have moved into teaching connected with newer professions - engineering, accountancy, architecture, etc. - on a substantial scale. But certain qualifications of this trend are notable. First, universities have very rarely been the pioneers in new fields of vocational or professional education. Secondly, where professional quali-

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

3!

fications are formalised by law or convention, it is exceptional for the possession of a university degree or diploma in the subject to be sufficient by itself to secure the qualification. Thirdly, it is normally possible in theory, and common in practice, for the professional qualification to be obtained without study at a university by taking the examinations of a purely professional body; only in medicine among the more important professions is attendance at a university in practice an invariable part of the process of qualification. And fourthly, where, as is common, study in a university goes on side by side with study organised in relation to the requirements of a professional body, the university teaching tends to be of a more theoretical or pure kind and less practical or applied. As to the initiative in relation to the newer professions, the organisation of the Institutions of Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers, of the Royal Institute of British Architects and of the various groups of Accountants all pre-dated the institution of university teaching in their respective fields. One exception to the rule is social administration. The pioneer in the organisation of special courses for workers in that field was the London School of Economics just before the First World War; a number of other universities followed later and the university degree, diploma or certificate has become established as the professional qualification in this field, no professional examining body having been established. In general, however, the pattern is the same as for the leading professions already mentioned. Teaching provides another example; the modern organisation of the education of future school-teachers originated wholly outside the universities and still lies largely outside them. University Institutes of Education, concerned with the more theoretical and general study of education, emerged as a part of the ordinary university pattern a generation or so ago, and through them the numerous Teacher Training Colleges attained a certain indirect relationship with the universities which falls a good deal short of full membership. The Robbins Committee made proposals for bringing the Training Colleges more fully into the university circle but difficulties have been found in

32

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

implementing these and it remains true that the bulk of teacher training is carried on outside the universities. As to the detailed position in other leading professions it may be summarised as follows. In the legal profession, the rules both of the London Inns of Court and of the English Law Society provide for reduction of the period of training for barristers or solicitors respectively in favour of all holders of University degrees and exemption from part of the necessary examinations for those who have taken law in their university degree; and currently about half of those entering each branch of the profession are graduates (but not necessarily graduated in legal studies). In Scotland exemptions for graduates are wider in both branches, holders of Scottish Law degrees being able to obtain exemption from all the examination part of the qualification process; and it is understood that all practising members of the Scottish Bar are graduates and that 98 % of Law Society entrants qualify on the basis of Scottish university examinations. In engineering a university degree in the appropriate branch of engineering exempts from the examination part of the professional qualification, but so do other examinations including those for the Higher National Diploma and for the former Higher National Certificate; and the proportion obtaining the professional qualification on the basis of a university degree, though varying between different branches of the profession, is in general less than half. In accountancy the practice of the Institutes of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and in Scotland and the Association of Certified and Corporate Accountants is to reduce the minimum period of articles for United Kingdom graduates and to give exemption from the intermediate stage of the professional examination to the holders of 'approved' degrees. All these organisations have combined in trying to encourage the intake of university graduates which has been rising somewhat, but in 1967 still represented less than 20% of the total entry. Finally in architecture no exemptions are offered to non-architectural graduates, but architectural schools in the Universities are among the approved schools whose examinations are accepted by the Royal Institute of British Architects as a basis for

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

33

professional qualification. Here also university graduates are only a minority of total entrants but in 1966/67 the proportion of graduates among those successful in the final examinations had risen to over 30 % In all the above (and other professions not discussed in detail) the position remains that not more than half the current entrants, and generally a good deal less, get their professional qualification on the basis of a university degree. It may be noted also that the decision whether to recognise a particular university degree for its professional purposes rests entirely with the professional body concerned; this is clearest in architecture, where the R.I.B.A. recognises only 'approved' schools. It follows that the requirements of the professional body exercise a substantial influence on university curricula in many professional subjects. An apparent exception to the general rule that the universities play only a part, and often a minor part, in education for the professions is medicine. Here, the private medical school which was once prominent has vanished; the oldestablished and highly reputed schools attached to leading hospitals have all come into the university world; and where new Schools of Medicine are established they are nowadays all formed within a university. The most important event in the formal change was of course the incorporation of the London hospital medical schools in the University of London in 1900. Yet it may be argued that the exception is merely formal because the assimilation of the medical student to the university to which he belongs is much less complete than that of students of most other subjects. The medical student in this country follows a course of study which keeps him apart from those who are formally his fellow-students almost from the commencement of his university studies. In London, at least, he also lives apart; his social and other contacts are apt to be with his hospital and with other medical schools, and only rarely and accidentally with those concerned with more general studies. To a large degree he is in the university rather than of it. The very pattern of the medical degree is, too, widely different from that of the general run of degrees, with its almost wholly prescribed list of courses and absence c

34

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of choices of specialisation, its large vocational and practical content in its later stages and its absence of the normal 'honours' approach and honours classifications. Altogether, medicine represents a whole series of exceptions and anomalies in the university pattern. Where universities have moved into the field of vocational training they have not always maintained their interest, as the history of the London School of Economics exemplifies. When it was originally formed the School was advertised as providing 'Commercial' education and gained the support of the London Chamber of Commerce on that basis. Its first list of courses included a high proportion with a commercial flavour and included one on railway economics which was later followed by special arrangements for railway students under a scheme supported by the railway companies. Later initiatives in the field of specific training have included the courses already referred to in social administration; the introduction in 1919 of a Bachelor of Commerce degree; the establishment in 1931 of a post-graduate course in Business Administration; the establishment of various courses in operational research; the organisation of special classes for Trade Union officials; and in the period after World War II, participation in various ways in the training of overseas civil servants and of entrants into the foreign services of former British colonial dependencies. Of these various activities the special provision for railway students ceased in the 1950*8; the Bachelor of Commerce degree ceased its separate existence in 1947 and was absorbed into the more academic Bachelor of Science (Economics); the Business Administration course which had never developed on the scale originally hoped for or secured enthusiastic backing from either the School's own department of economics or the business world, came to an end in 1967, being replaced by more academic provision in the developing M.Sc. courses in economics; most of the activity in training officials for overseas countries has come to an end; and the main activity on the side of social administration, the old certificate or diploma course, is being replaced by a full degree course, part of the Sociology degree, involving again a change to a more academic approach. The

N A T U R E AND OBJECTS OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

35

Trade Union course remains as the only remnant of the School's original willingness to provide organised courses both outside the normal degree pattern and intended primarily for students not possessing the ordinary qualifications for university entrance. It must be said in fairness that, although the net movement of the London School of Economics, over the seventy years of its existence, has been away from the vocational and towards the academic, other institutions have in very recent years been doing a good deal in starting special courses with a 'business' flavour, not only in the broad field of business administration but also in specialities such as operational research and marketing. But it is also significant that when the Government and organised industry jointly decided in 1964 to make a major new move in the field of business studies this was done by creating two new special Schools, one in London outside the formal university structure and the other in Manchester with a semi-independent status inside the University. It still remains to be seen how these various recent developments in business studies will ultimately settle down with relation to the broader university structure. Significant also in this general problem of the relationship of the university world to vocational teaching was the concept of the binary system of higher education promulgated by Mr Anthony Crosland as Secretary for Education and Science in 1965. In the explanations of this concept emphasis was laid on the difference in the responsiveness to public need (as seen by the government) between the 'private' system of the universities and the 'public' system of the Training Colleges, Polytechnics, and Colleges of Technology, etc. The distinction was not explicitly in terms of vocational or academic bias, but the implication was clear that the universities were not as much disposed as the government might wish to undertake teaching with a specific training purpose and that their activities needed to be supplemented more extensively than hitherto by institutions more open to influence in that direction. The third area of uncertainty in the purposes of universities lies in the research component of university activity.

36

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Currently it is taken for granted that universities must be as much concerned with research, the discovery of new knowledge, as with teaching; and the principle tends to get translated into the expectation that every individual member of the academic staff should be as much concerned with (in its simplest expression, spend as much time on) research as teaching, and that his standing and prospects of promotion will depend as much on his research as on his teaching achievement. Much of the underlying assumption is open to challenge. It is perhaps natural enough that men whose function it is to penetrate to the frontiers of knowledge in a particular field will be interested also in pushing those frontiers a little further out, but it need not always happen that way. The man who is keenest to advance the frontier is not always keenest to master as much as possible of existing knowledge : and in particular the pressure to produce an identifiable piece of new research must always act to persuade men to narrow their field of interest, i.e., to encourage still further the tendency to specialise. Ability in personal research does not always go with teaching ability and neither always goes with the capacity to encourage other people to do research. One can think of many examples of teachers who have had an enormous influence on many students, who may be mines of information and yet never have done anything notable in the research field. For the individual teacher there must always be three claims on his time (apart from administrative burdens) - teaching, 'keeping up with his subject' and his own research. 'Keeping up with the subject' means a very considerable amount of reading, attendance at conferences and other personal contacts; marginally it may not be easy to distinguish from original research but in principle it is quite clearly a different activity. It is an activity, too, that competes very obviously with research for working time; and again the desire to keep up with other people's writings but still have time left for teaching and personal research must constitute an incentive to narrow the field of specialisation within which one is trying to 'keep up'. Such questions about the research function arise at any level of university organisation. We shall need to look in more

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

37

detail at the effect on the place of research of at least two of the main changes which are going on, the growth in scale of university activity and the increase in the rate of growth of knowledge. The crucial question is whether the distribution of teaching and research effort ought to be maintained just as it has been in the recent past. Both the increase in university populations and the growth of knowledge create a need for more teaching at the university or post-school level, the first because there are more people demanding to be taught, the second because there is more to teach. The growth in knowledge also creates a demand for research; potential knowledge is unlimited and all experience so far is that the more actual knowledge expands the more frontiers are opened for the exploration of new knowledge. It might therefore seem that the old balance may still be right; but, two things have still to be considered. First resources are limited, but the possibilities of expansion in both teaching and research are not; a choice has to be made how to use the resources and that choice may not be to divide them in just the way they have been traditionally divided. Secondly, the old combination of teaching and research in the person of the individual teacher may not still be the best arrangement; a more explicit division between teachers and researchers may be more appropriate to the new conditions. The fourth area of uncertainty is that of 'elite' or 'mass' education. Until the twentieth century universities everywhere were concerned with the education of a quite small proportion of the population and that small elite was destined to occupy in more or less degree a position of leadership and special influence. Perhaps this was nowhere more clear, and more consciously realised, than in England, where the aristocracy of wealth shared effective political power with the aristocracy of birth and to both alike attendance at a university was the normal final preparation for the responsibilities of adult life. Equally it was the normal (and the only) preparation for the higher civil service and in important university circles the preparation of young men for the responsibilities of government was accepted as a major University function.

38

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Granted that this once was, and may still be, a major function, it is hard to see how it can continue to play proportionately as large a part in the very much larger university world of today. When one per cent or less of the population pass through a university it is reasonable to assume that a fair proportion of that percentage will become leaders in one sense or another and to value university courses as character training accordingly. As already noted, when the percentage approaches fifty per cent of the population, as in America, only a very much smaller proportion can be treated as potential leaders and character training must, if it is to play any part in the education of the average undergraduate, be quite differently conceived. Examination of each of what I have called the areas of uncertainty in the purposes of university education points to the need to re-examine whether in the new conditions of numbers and of general background the old concepts of university courses, teaching methods and general organisation remain valid. Beyond these various areas of uncertainty or of choice between emphasis on one activity or another, there is an issue for consideration in the basic purposes of a university which affects almost all other discussions, the issue of moral purpose or, more basically still, of standards of reference. Up till about a century ago British universities accepted the standards of Christianity as part of their formal basis. For generations after religious tests had been abolished the ethics if not the theology of Christianity could fairly be said to be nearly universally accepted; and in other fields, intellectual and aesthetic, traditional standards were still respected. Increasingly in the last generation standards have been weakened or eroded so much that it seems that no standards any longer exist. Here the universities have participated in, rather than led, a much wider change affecting the world at large. In personal morality, the clear-cut rules of older times have become obscured by the desire to seek explanations of socially aberrant behaviour in social or family background or personal psychological idiosyncracies. The simple 'Thou shall not

N A T U R E AND O B J E C T S OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

39

steal' is replaced by a sociological investigation which leads to the conclusion that society as a whole (that is, no one in particular) is to blame and that nothing can be done about it now, since it all ought to have been done years ago. In aesthetic judgements, similarly, standards have melted away, so that whatever the artist thinks (or rather says) is good must be accepted as good. The passing off of a brown square painted on a larger black one as a work of art is one consequence of this disappearance of objective standards; so is the all too frequent claim of the dramatic producer that he alone, by whatever chance he has become a producer, is the judge of his productions, to the exclusion of critics, audience or anyone else. A connected consequence in the intellectual as well as in the aesthetic world is the worship of novelty. There being no standard inherited from the past to look to, novelty becomes the one easily recognised quality by which to judge. This habit of mind crops up in all kinds of places. In the world of television in which I was for some years involved as a member of the Independent Television Authority I grew accustomed to what appeared to be the first rule of professional television critics, that any programme which had run for more than a few months, however popular with viewers, must be bad. In a more important sphere, many writers on the Civil Service have for years taken it for granted that because its pattern was laid down fifty years ago it must be inappropriate to the conditions of today. In the university world this dissolution of standards and the complementary reverence for apparent novelty has many effects over and above the most central effect of weakening the 'character-building' element in the complex of university purposes. It encourages the speculative as opposed to the factual element in education. It encourages research as against scholarship, that is the discovery of apparently new knowledge rather than the mastery of demonstrably old knowledge. In internal university affairs it has without question contributed to the breakdown of the traditional acceptance of academic authority by students and also to the somewhat less obvious, but possibly more serious, erosion

4O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of the loyalty of academics to the institutions of which they are members. There can be no expectation, and it could not be regarded as a desirable objective, that the universities should revert to the days of Church domination, but they would be in the most general sense more useful institutions if they could once more feel a real sense of moral purpose. Unhappily there is little reason to hope that they will develop such a sense before the nation as a whole does. History strongly suggests that the universities, at least in this country, have never been the originators of successful new waves of moral or political or social ideas; they have incorporated or crystallised such ideas when they were already sufficiently widely accepted. The change must, therefore, come first from outside; we may only pray that the universities will not be too resistant, in the name of academic freedom, to a fresh establishment of better moral ideas and standards if and when it does emerge in general thinking.

3 The Part of the University in the Pattern of Education University education is accepted as the highest level of formal education. It is not by any means the only form of post-school education but it has a far higher repute than any other and is normally regarded as the coping-stone to the general school system. Certainly its forms are intimately related to the forms of school education, at least in the sense that the requirements of the universities very greatly influence the character of seconday school education. Yet the relationship has been the subject of very little systematic study. There have been special committees of enquiry concerned with primary education, with the 16 to 18 age-group, with higher education, i.e., post-school education in universities and certain other institutions; no special committee has enquired into the relationship between these institutions of higher education and the lower levels of education. Equally the relationship between universities and other forms of post-school education has not been a matter of systematic study; and the division between the subjects which are and those which are not studied in universities has not been the subject of official decision, at least in any direct form. The pattern, including the normal age of transition from school to university, the length of university courses, the academic standards of admission, the usual shape and content of courses, has just grown by the decisions of the institutions themselves. Certainly I would not wish to suggest that that is a bad way for things to get settled or that a better pattern could have been expected from a series of government edicts; my point is 41

42

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

simply that the pattern has not been consciously chosen by anyone at all. There is today what might be called a mainstream of education with a number of tributaries or sidestreams. In the main stream primary education lasts from five years old to eleven plus and is then followed by secondary education, which is compulsory to the age of fifteen, usually lasts till a little beyond that age and for many extends to the age of eighteen or nineteen. Within this secondary stage there is a marked differentiation between the Sixth Form and the earlier stages. Boys and girls enter the Sixth Form after passing the 'ordinary leveP of the General Certificate of Education (normally at the age of sixteen but fairly often earlier). In the Sixth Form work is dominated by preparation for the G.C.E. advanced level examinations, in two or three subjects only. Originally the Sixth Form represented the last year of school life; now pupils normally stay in the Sixth for two years and often for three. Work at that stage is generally differently organised than in the lower forms, giving greater scope for individual work; and partly for that reason, partly because of the specialisation and partly because of the standard aimed at, the Sixth Form has come more and more to be a separate entity within the school, sometimes almost as large as all the rest and often with its own distinct staff concerned only with Sixth Form teaching. There have hitherto been two large 'sidestreams' to this mainstream, the private preparatory school-public school system and the secondary modern schools. Scholastically the former runs parallel with the main line of primary school grammar school with the main difference that the break, or entry into the 'Secondary' stage, comes at about fourteen instead of eleven-plus; and a difference of emphasis in that the Sixth Form system is still more fully developed in the public schools. The secondary modern schools have had a different scholastic tradition, with their emphasis on technical rather than academic subjects and with little or no provision at the Sixth Form level; so that the great majority of their pupils left at fifteen or sixteen. Now, however, that the comprehensive secondary school is increasingly replacing

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

43

both secondary moderns and state-provided grammar schools, the sharpness of the distinction is getting blurred. The separate development, still only on a small scale, of Sixth Form Colleges as separate institutions affords another way in which pupils at secondary modern schools, and the weaker grammar schools, can get facilities for advanced work comparable to those at the good grammar schools and public schools. Beyond school level the mainstream for those who continue in full-time education runs undoubtedly through the university. The orthodox next stage for the sixth former is, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, to enter on a full-time university degree course. That course will generally be of three years' duration, although there are important exceptions. Scottish Universities require four years for honours courses but that is related to their practice of admitting undergraduates at a younger age and a rather lower academic standard than English Universities normally do. Certain specialist technical or professional degrees also habitually require longer periods of study - four years for engineering and five for medicine. Less significant in numbers but perhaps more significant as a variant from normal pattern is the four-year degree introduced by Keele with the object of allowing an introductory year of general study before embarking on the normal honours specialisation. Continuing with the 'mainstream', it has become increasingly common for the academically ablest students to stay on after completing a first degree to take a Master's degree* and or a Ph.D. In some institutions the Master's degree is a normal intermediate step to the Ph.D. The doctorate itself is the last stage of the 'mainstream'; and again it has become increasingly common for the academically bright to stay on to that stage, assisted by the more generous provision of graduate studentships. * I use 'Master's degree' to cover all second degrees of a standard higher than the normal Bachelor's degree; it therefore excludes the Master's degrees of Oxford and Cambridge and the Scottish Universities but includes a number of second degrees awarded with such titles as B.Phil., B. Litt., etc.

44

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Alongside this mainstream of post-school education, running through the universities, is a bewildering number and variety of sidestreams of education. First are the non-university forms of full time education, the Training Colleges (alias Colleges of Education), Technical Colleges, Colleges of Art and so on. In 1966 approximately 95,000 men and women were attending colleges of education or other non-university teacher training institutions. The numbers have been growing very rapidly, having more than trebled since 1956. Part of the increase is the result of the substitution in England and Wales since 1960 - of three-year for two-year courses, but total numbers passing through the colleges of education have also increased substantially. Indeed the increase since before the war is nearly eightfold (from 13,000 in 1938/39 to almost 100,000 today). Next are the full-time students in institutions other than colleges of education. In 1966 these numbered approximately 200,000; of these nearly half were under eighteen and, from one point of view, could be regarded as parallel to the children still in Sixth Forms. Over 100,000 were, however, over eighteen, i.e., analogous in age to those going on to universities. The numbers attending Technical Colleges, etc., like those at Colleges of Education, have been increasing rapidly; the totals have more than doubled in the last decade and fulltime students over eighteen have trebled. There has been an even more rapid increase in the number of full-time students (of all ages) taking advanced courses, including university and C.N.A.A. degrees, higher national Diplomas and Certificates and other diplomas - in all 32,000 in 1965/66. In broad terms, therefore, the 200,000 students in universities are balanced by another 200,000 over-eighteens also receiving full-time post-school education, about half in colleges of education and half in other institutions. In addition there are very much larger numbers taking part-time courses in organised institutions operated or assisted by local education authorities or the Department of Education and Science, about 20,000 attending sandwich courses, some 750,000 taking part-time day courses (mainly involving partial release from employment) and over

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

45

1,500,000 taking evening courses. Of course these include every variety of student from those taking full degree courses on a part-time basis or pursuing systematic studies with a view to some professional qualification to those receiving evening tuition in manual skills or attending evening classes of a vaguely cultural kind more or less as a pastime. Nonetheless some 120,000 of these part-time students are listed in the official statistics as taking 'advanced' courses, including full degree courses. Not included in these figures are men and women attending courses organised by individual business concerns, business associations or business consultants, by professional bodies and by public authorities and government departments other than the education authorities. There has been no systematic gathering of information about these activities, which cover a wide variety of in-service training courses, specialist business courses run by firms of consultants and public service training institutes such as the Police Staff College and local police colleges, to say nothing of military training institutions. Various statistics derived from official sources have been quoted above; they indicate a total of full-time or part-time students in publicly operated or publicly assisted institutions of'further' or post-school education of well over 2j millions. If the large, if unknown, number of those pursuing systematic studies at other institutions is added the aggregate must be well over 3 millions. In this very large educational activity the universities, with their 200,000 students, occupy a very special and, judged by any ordinary criteria, a decidedly favoured place. The point of emphasising the complexity of the structure as a whole it to suggest the need to examine more systematically than, I believe, has ever been done in the past just how special the place of the university is and how favoured it needs to be. It is worth noting that pressures are building up to reduce the differences between the university side and the other sides of higher education, e.g., in the suggestion of a 'U.G.C.' for the Colleges of Art and in the attempt by a sit-in at the University of Bristol to enforce the opening of the University's student facilities

46

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

to the students of non-University institutions in Bristol. Specifically I suggest the following questions. Do the universities have the right relationship to their feedinggrounds, the sixth forms of the secondary schools ? Are those schools providing the right kind of preparation not only for children who will be going on to universities but also for the larger numbers who will be undertaking systematic further education, full-time or part-time immediately or soon after leaving school? Is the line between what is taught in a university and what is left to other bodies correctly drawn ? Are the variations in the conditions of study as between university and other students and as between part or fulltime students entirely appropriate and necessary? Beginning with the first question and looking at what I have called the 'mainstream' and 'sidestreams' of school education, the salient feature of both in relation to post-school education is that their final stage is the Sixth Form, a category or class which children enter after taking G.C.E. 'O' levels and where they remain normally for two years and sometimes longer, concentrating on two or three subjects which are themselves generally closely linked. An increasing number of schools do, it is true, permit combinations of widely varying subjects in Sixth Form work, but the normal pattern is still of division into a 'Classics Sixth' a 'Science Sixth' and, less commonly, an 'Economics Sixth'. The prime objective of Sixth Form Work is G.C.E. 'A' or 'S' levels and beyond that, and on the basis of it, the establishment of at any rate a claim to consideration for admission to a university. Not all sixth formers go on to universities or, in fact, wish to when the time comes, but the work of the group as a whole is dominated by the hopes of- and the struggle for - university entrance. The struggle for university entrance is indeed a vital part of the situation. Formally the minimum qualification for admission to a university is generally the achievement of A level passes in two subjects plus O level passes in three others, the O level passes rarely presenting any problem to those who can manage the A levels. In practice, however, because there are fewer places than applicants, there is competition

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

47

for entry and the universities pay very considerable, even though not exclusive, regard to A level results in their selections so that mere passes are not enough; they have to be high-grade passes, generally at grade A or B. Since there are in addition special requirements of passes in specified subjects for admission into at least some Faculties and Departments, 'A levels' dominate Sixth Form work very effectively. There is normally a percentage of boys and girls staying on for a third year in the Sixth because, although they may have secured two or three A level passes, their grades were not high enough to secure a university place and they are resitting in the hope of improving their grades, and their claims. Those pupils in the Sixth Forms who are not in fact aiming at university admission are still subject to the same dominance in that the pattern of teaching is determined by the need to get pupils up to high A level standards. There are many repercussions of this situation, particularly on the young people involved in it, which will need further examination later. One immediately striking thing about it is that, in spite of the enormous influence which university admission requirements have on Sixth Form curricula (and through them on work all the way down in grammar schools), there has been remarkably little consultation between University and school authorities on this very important area of overlapping interest and little attempt at co-ordination except through the 'co-ordination' of school curricula imposed by the need to comply with the requirements imposed by the universities. Still less has there been any wider common investigation of the best form of school preparation for university work or - looking at it from the other side - the best way of continuing at the beginning of the university period the work already started in the schools. One of the features which has attracted most attention in the past has been the tendency to specialise in the last years at school, a tendency dictated by the dual influences of the need to perform well in two or three selected subjects at A level in order to secure entry to a university and the insistence of many university departments on a high standard in specified subjects as a condition of acceptance. Some conscious

48

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

effort has been made of late years to reduce the effect of the second influence by loosening up the faculty or departmental requirements; and there are now more individual faculties or subject departments which follow the long-established practice of the London School of Economics in making no prescription of previous fields of study as a condition of acceptance. There have always been, moreover, some disciplines, notably law, the teachers of which expect their students to start from scratch in the study of their chosen field and therefore can be more liberal in their prescriptions as to previous study. Nevertheless there are other - and more numerous - disciplines where a fairly considerable previous knowledge of the subject is still expected. Nor is this unreasonable. When subjects are commonly taught at school, like the basic physical sciences or the more usual languages, classical or modern, it is reasonable enough that university teachers should expect to be relieved of the necessity of giving their students the basic elementary instruction, more particularly when by its very nature that kind of instruction is highly factual and contains little intellectual appeal. It is then only a step to the demand for high grade A level passes in the intended subjects of university study and to the situation in which, as has often been said, the student in some disciplines needs as great a degree of knowledge to get into a university as would have earned him an honours degree a generation or so ago. Equally the technological or applied science disciplines, including medicine, feel entitled to demand a substantial achievement in the natural sciences as the foundation of their own teaching. Faculty requirements continue, therefore, to be a powerful influence for school specialisation. They are by no means popular with all potential students and it is probable that the swing away from the sciences in favour of the arts and social studies is partly attributable to the reaction of young people against the rigid faculty requirements common in the natural sciences. A certain number have undoubtedly realised when they start their Sixth Form studies that they can retain more freedom of choice by aiming at an arts or social studies degree; others, I am sure from comments made by individual students at the London School of Econo-

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

49

mics, turn to the social studies after natural science specialisation at school because the concentration of study has left them bored with natural science and they therefore seize the opportunity offered by the 'open' policy of economics, sociology, etc. departments to try something different. (It is to be noted that this is largely a one-way traffic; it is much harder for a boy or girl who has done a non-science specialisation at school to switch into science.) I have said that some effort has been made to relax faculty requirements; much less has been done to reduce the pressure in favour of specialisation created by the imperative necessity to get good A level results. Partly because the pressure of greater numbers of places to fill - and far greater numbers of applicants to consider - makes assessment of personal characteristics by interview or similar methods ever more difficult, and partly because of growing scepticism about the validity of such assessments, university admission authorities tend in practice, whatever their theories, to make their selections more and more on the basis of A level results. In practice, also, at the border line, it tends to be the attainment of two high-grade passes which matters. To have taken a third subject at A level may help a bit in a marginal case, but two grade A or B passes count far more than three grade E's; and a fourth pass would not help at all - it would be more likely to be regarded as suspect eccentricity. Accordingly the boy or girl looking ahead from his or her Sixth Form will most likely feel it best to concentrate on two subjects so as to get the best passes, and for the same reasons will tend to choose allied rather than widely different subjects, e.g. two sciences or two languages rather than one science and one language. The existing influences, making for specialisation, are therefore likely to continue, and the situation is likely to be maintained in which British children at the time they leave school are more specialised than children in most other industrialised countries. The degree of specialisation can, of course, be defended. It is at least partly because of it that British university degree courses are normally shorter than those in other countries and the average young man or woman will obtain his bachelor's degree at an earlier age D

5O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

than in other countries. There are therefore prima facie practical advantages in the system. Some would argue, too, that there are intellectual advantages in specialisation in that the best qualities of mind are only developed by concentration in the last years of school life. I am myself persuaded that the existing pressures for specialisation are too great. Of the positive advantages claimed for it, the belief in the value of concentrated study, at least in its extremer form of continued exclusive concentration on a limited field, has been subject to very little investigation or verification; and although it may be true that university students in Britain reach a higher standard at the graduation stage, and at an earlier age, than elsewhere, there has been good reason to believe that that superiority is not maintained in post graduate study. There may also be other reasons for earlier graduation - more favourable staff-student ratios and stricter initial selection of entrants. I am, however, more concerned about the apparent disadvantages of the existing situation. First, it makes it harder to produce all-rounders, men and women with reasonable familiarity with the concepts of the natural sciences and the traditional humanities and the more modern social studies. Not everything that has been written about the two cultures, the scientific and the non-scientific, need be taken as gospel truth; but there is a reality in the danger of different groups of highly educated people lacking any basic understanding of each others fields of expertise. As much is to be feared from the scientist who thinks he can transfer scientific ways of thinking into the political or social arena as from the humanist-trained civil servant who is incapable of understanding the technological implications of decisions he is called upon to make or advise ministers to make. Perhaps even more dangerous than the ignoring of science by the non-scientist is the uncritical acceptance of new technology by humanists who lack the courage to challenge the technical experts. It is perhaps inevitable that at the university level study must be concentrated and specialised though, as I shall argue later, not necessarily so specialised as it has commonly become. But that very inevitability is an

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

51

argument for postponing the onset of specialisation as late as possible, and giving all young people as wide as possible a basis of knowledge of the main subjects which in practice influence the life of the modern world. Specialisation can mean, too, that even the scientists themselves cannot communicate adequately with each other. It is apparent from the report of the Working Group on the Flow into Employment of Scientists, Engineers and Technologists under the chairmanship of Professor Michael Swann (Cmnd. 3760, Sept. 1968) that there is concern in the scientific world about the production of general scientists, capable of bridging the divisions between different specialisations. The Working Group commented that the British system of higher education in science and technology 'errs decidedly on the side of specialisation and fails to develop powers of synthesis and judgement over a broad field5. Here rigid faculty requirements may be much at fault, as young people who have taken one of the newer and broader combinations of subjects at Sixth Form level, such as history, Latin and mathematics, which are happily becoming commoner, are unlikely to be admitted to read for a science degree and are most likely to drift into social studies. Secondly, specialisation often means wasteful overlapping of Sixth Form work with the early stages of University work. One hears of first year undergraduates complaining that they are simply repeating work already done at school. Something of this kind is no doubt inevitable as there cannot be exact equality in the stage of preparation reached by all students entering on a university course, and it may be argued that it is a good thing not to overload undergraduates and to leave them time for reflection and wider reading than that demanded by their special studies. But a real danger exists of waste and frustration, and comparatively little thought has been given to the best ways of linking up advanced school work and elementary university work. A third aspect of the present degree of specialisation in Sixth Forms is that it is even less suited to the needs of those young people who are not going on to universities but either going straight into employment or going on to some form of

52

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

higher education. For many of these the most appropriate form of full-time education up to the age of eighteen may be something far more general than anything which is at present available in any part of the educational system. A proposal was made from the schools side in 1968 for the introduction of yet another level of G.C.E. examinations, an Intermediate or I level, designed to cater for Sixth Formers not planning to go on to a university. It seems very doubtful whether this would help much unless it was linked with much more extensive changes in the content of Sixth Form work. There remain the problems of the relationship of university education to other forms of higher, or post-school, education. What emerges from the total picture is a marked contrast between the universities with their clearly marked limitations on the type of courses offered and the enormous variety of the courses offered and methods followed by the multifarious other institutions. University courses are confined to certain subjects regarded as of university status; overwhelmingly they are precisely set in pattern and duration, so that the student has little freedom either to choose his own combination of subjects or to shorten or lengthen his course to suit his own capacity or opportunity; and study at a university is linked with a special kind of social life which most people find particularly agreeable. The non-university institutions offer a wider choice of subjects of study (including those taught at universities, though not up to the same levels); they offer many more opportunities of study outside a set pattern or of fitting the period of study to individual circumstances; and although some may offer a social life something like that of a university this is exceptional. At this stage I want to do no more than put a number of questions which seem hardly ever to be asked but are nonetheless vital to any rational discussion of the place and scale of university activity in the general educational picture. What determines why some subjects are accepted as worthy to be taught at university level while others are rejected ? Why are universities so much more active in certain kinds of professional education than in others, e.g., why are all medical practitioners university-trained but only a minority of

U N I V E R S I T Y IN THE P A T T E R N OF E D U C A T I O N

53

accountants? Is the still marked difference between education provided in colleges of education and that provided at universities justified? Have the universities been right in largely abandoning part-time education to the other institutions of higher education? More basically, is there real evidence that, for students of equal basic intelligence, fulltime education is always to be preferred to part-time ? In a connected field, are the resources of universities adequately used to provide courses for people fully capable of benefiting by study at the intellectual level of a university but not necessarily wishing to get involved in a long degree course ? And, granted that there may be a special field for studies approximately coinciding with those now undertaken in universities, is it right that those who pursue those studies should be provided - almost entirely at public expense - with amenities superior to those enjoyed by other post-school age students ?

4 Universities and Research In modern thinking, in this country at any rate, it is axiomatic that there must be research carried on in a university if it is to be worthy of the name. It was not always so, and is not so in all countries. Cardinal Newman in his influential writings on universities over a century ago argued quite definitely that research was not the business of a university; it should be entrusted to separate 'academies' (what we would call research institutes) while the university concentrated on teaching, especially teaching of a moral or character-forming kind. In his Discources on University Education (1852) Newman wrote: 'The nature of the case and the history of philosophy combine to recommend to us this division of intellectual labour between Academies and Universities. To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He too who spends his time in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search for truth with seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been too interested in their subject to admit of interruption; they have been men of absent minds and idiosyncratic habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture room and the public school.' Certainly up to that time, and for a generation or two afterwards, it could not be argued that British universities had a great research achievement. Research in the modern sense still hardly existed in 1852; but we can look at three activities which no doubt would today be classified as research: the 54

UNIVERSITIES

AND R E S E A R C H

55

development of original ideas, whether in philosophy, in political and economic ideas or in natural science; experimentation and survey in the natural science field; and technological development. In the area of original ideas it is fair to say that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the universities as institutions contributed little, if anything. Most of those whose names spring to mind were university men, i.e., had attended a university, and some held university appointments at one time or another; but such connections were more in the nature of coincidences than contributory causes to their thinking. Bacon, who may well be regarded as the father of modern experimental science, was a busy lawyer with no connection with a university except as an undergraduate. Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was a physician who incidentally served briefly as Warden of Merton College, Oxford. Locke, the political theorist of the Whig Revolution of 1689, held a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford for many years but spent little time there, living in London or in Holland. Newton might more reasonably be claimed as a university man since he held a College fellowship and lived in Cambridge for many years, but the evidence indicates that he was much more helped and stimulated in his thinking by contact with the Royal Society in London than by any contacts in Cambridge. Berkeley, the philosopher, could also be claimed as a university personage since he held a tutorship at Trinity College Dublin; but that was only for five years, before he moved first into private teaching and then into ecclesiastical appointments. None of these conform at all closely to the modern image of the teacher-researcher. Closer, in some ways, were the group of Scottish writers who worked in close contact with each other in the mideighteenth-century and were to exercise a great influence on later philosophical, political and economic thinking; Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith and Robertson, who were all connected in one way or another with the Universities of Glasgow or Edinburgh and who exercised a considerable influence on each other. But of these Hume never held a

56

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

teaching post, Smith held a chair at Glasgow for a decade but did his most important writing after he had given that up; and Robertson had made his reputation as a historian before receiving any university appointment. The Universities helped both to educate these men and to bring them together but they cannot be fitted into the contemporary picture of the University don who divides his time between systematic teaching and research. A later group of political and economic thinkers, the group known as the Utilitarians, from Bentham through Ricardo, Malthus and James Mill to John Stuart Mill, had no university basis whatever. Similarly the great initiators of evolutionary theory, Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace never held any university post or based their work on any university group or support. The same was true of Marx, whose writings have been so influential in economics and politics. The list could be extended indefinitely; until the latter half of the nineteenth century only a very small number of those whose names spring to mind in the history of thought in this country can be identified as university men in the modern sense. If we turn to systematic experimentation and enquiry in this period, we find the same absence of university connection. The first organisation of people interested in experimentation in the natural sciences, the still highly distinguished Royal Society, though it was first discussed in Oxford, was established and has always remained in London, with no particular university connection. Greenwich Observatory, again, was founded without university connections (the comparison with the development of the radio-telescope at Jodrell Bank under the University of Manchester neatly shows the difference in technique.) When, later, voyages of geographical discovery or expeditions of naturalists came to be systematically organised, the initiative came from Government departments or non-university learned societies. Cook was sent off on his great voyages of discovery by the Admiralty, at the instance of the Royal Society; Darwin made his biological surveys as naturalist on the Admiralty survey ship, the Beagle. Other expeditions were organised and sent out by the British

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

57

Museum or, later, the Royal Geographical Society and similar bodies. Apart from such exploration and survey activities, commissioned research was a rarity; but when a government department did want some research undertaken it did not occur to it, as it naturally would today, to ask a university to do it. In 1713 the British Government decided to make a serious effort to find a means of determining the longitude of a ship at sea (involving, as was expected of the problem, the construction of a chronometer far more reliable than anything previously known). Today a government with a similar problem would either create an independent research institute or enter into a research contract with a university. Then, the government, relying more on private activity and money incentives, offered a prize of £20,000 - notfinallypaid until 1773 when it was awarded to John Harrison, a selftaught carpenter turned clockmaker. This, of course, was clearly in the field of technology which eighteenth-century universities made no pretensions to cover. It was natural therefore that the inventions of the first century or so of the Industrial Revolution, the work of Watt and others on the steam engine, the spinning and weaving machines of Arkwright, Cartwright and others, the steam locomotive of Stephenson, and so on, came from mechanics or private individuals of ingenious mind, not from any university activity. (It is fair to note that Watt was instrumentmaker to the University of Glasgow, had friends among the teachers of the University and was drawn to the examination of the problems of a steam engine by working on a model owned by the University of an earlier type designed by Newcomen). When Newman argued against the association of teaching and research in a university he was doing no more than urge that the universities should not undertake what would then have been an unfamiliar role, his object being to enable them to concentrate more whole-heartedly on the roles of teaching and character-building which he thought more important. But if he was in tune with the past he was quite out of tune with the future as it was just about to develop. Inspired by

58

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

the example of Germany, university opinion was turning to a belief in the virtues, indeed the essential contribution, of research. Yet, for a time, research hardly meant what it has come to mean today. One may draw a distinction between scholarship - the exhaustive study of everything already written about a subject - and research - the discovery of new knowledge or the development of new intellectual ideas. What impressed people in the later nineteenth century about the achievements of the German universities was, as often as not, their scholarship, the extent of their systematic study of past literature, rather than their discoveries of new facts; though the latter was to come, too. The distinction is not unimportant and will need to be looked at again. For a man to be a competent teacher at the highest level he must have as wide as possible a knowledge of the subject he is teaching and what others have written about it; that is, the greater his scholarship in the field the more material he has to teach. It is not so obviously or universally true that the rather special quality which enables a man to make original contributions of fact or theory will guarantee a full knowledge of his subject or make him a good teacher. Continuing with our very sketchy survey of the history of the association of universities with research, we can see how, as the nineteenth century progressed towards its close, it became natural to look in the universities for many, if not all, the leaders of thought. History itself is typical; in the earlier period we have already noted the names of Hume and Robertson, neither of whom held significant university appointments while writing their histories, and we can add the names of Gibbon, Grote and Macaulay. In this century history has not ceased to be written by men and women working outside the universities but it is much more within them that one finds the familiar names - Trevelyan, Tawney, Toynbee, Taylor, to mention only a few. The same change is apparent in the social studies. John Stuart Mill, generally regarded as the last of the classical economists, was also almost the last outstanding economist with no university base. After him came Jevons and Marshall

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

59

and a long succession of other holders of university chairs. Equally in political thought and sociology the university professor has replaced the gifted amateur and the man of letters, Laski and Oakeshott in place of Burke and Carlyle, Hobhouse and Ginsberg in place of Comte and Spencer. The same trend became obvious in the natural sciences. A landmark was the building of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in 1874. It was to become one of the great world centres for the development of physical theory. It was typical that the plans of the laboratory were prepared under the direction of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest names among British physicists, who conformed much more closely than his predecessors to the modern image of the teachercum-researcher, working in a university atmosphere practically all his adult life and holding university chairs from the age of twenty-five. This development in the older universities of attention to theoretical research in the physical sciences was complemented by the growing strength of the newer university colleges in technological research, natural enough in view of the origins of most of them in mechanical or other technological training. My point in giving this very impressionistic sketch of the change in modern times in the attitude of universities to research is to emphasise that it has neither always seemed essential to universities to be closely connected with research nor always inevitable that new discoveries and new ideas should be developed in the universities. We have come to a stage when we expect the leaders of thought in all subjects to be found in the universities; but it is worth asking a number of questions about this situation. First, even in modern times, how large is the actual contribution of universities to new ideas and new inventions; second does the university atmosphere help to produce the original thinkers or does it only attract them; and thirdly is the association of research and teaching wholly or on balance beneficial to either or both ? The answer to the first question must be mixed. Undoubtedly ideas develop in universities, and research institutions associated with them have contributed to the basic concepts of many vast technological developments. Behind an under-

6O

B R I T I S H UNIVERSITIES

standing of electricity, radio-transmission etc., lies the abstract thinking of Clerk Maxwell and many others; similar theoretical studies have underlain the practical work of aircraft designers; university contributions in the field of medicine and biology generally are legion; and modern economics has been very largely developed in university seminars. But even in the field of abstract thought the universities have not had a monopoly. Taking a wider view than just this country, two of the most influential innovators of recent generations have been Freud and Einstein; neither was a university teacher at the time of his great discoveries. Einstein, in particular, is typical of many others in that he was appointed to university positions as a consequence of his achievement instead of being helped towards it by a university base. In practical development and detailed invention, rather than abstract basic theorising, the university contribution becomes merely one of many sources. Two studies may be taken as typical, one of national expenditures on 'research and development' and the other of the source of inventions. The first, a report published in 1967 by O.E.C.D. covering its member countries, showed that in every one of them half to two-thirds of the total expenditure was undertaken directly by business enterprises with government operations coming second overall. Research and development expenditure in institutions of higher education varied widely from country to country, the proportion of total national expenditure being, surprisingly, lowest in the United Kingdom where it was only 7 % (1964/65 figures). Secondly the origins of inventions were studied some years ago by Professor John Jewkes and others and their results were published in The Sources of Invention (Jewkes, Sawers and Stillerman) in 1958. They showed how very varied the sources were; organised research institutes, sometimes but not always associated with universities; the research teams of great industrial companies; individuals working within a university; and, still important, the entirely private activities of individuals working alone or in groups of two or three. Professor Jewkes and his collaborators felt unable to present

UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH

6l

any simple conclusions except that the sources of invention were manifold. Among the many examples they quoted we may note the earliest work on rocket technology, done by a Russian schoolmaster in 1903 (when, Jewkes commented, Russia was further ahead of other countries on rockets than in later times), followed by a Transylvanian mathematics teacher in 1923; the discovery of nylon and other synthetic fibres in the research laboratories of giant chemical firms; the provision of the basis for the growth of use of silicones by discoveries made by a British university scientist; and the invention of the self-winding wrist watch by a British watch repairer. What perhaps does stand out from this and other studies of invention and innovation is that men with great powers of originality are in many ways a race apart. They may be found in almost any occupation, certainly not exclusively in university appointments. They tend to want to work on their own rather than in organised teams. The university may attract such men if it gives them time and scope for individual effort; but it may also repel them if the other responsibilities of university appointments press too hardly on them or the increasing institutionalisation of university life leads to pressure to conduct their researches as part of an organised and 'co-ordinated' (i.e., controlled) activity. My second question is whether the university acts positively as a stimulator of original research or whether it merely attracts into it people who have already done such research. Undoubtedly there are many distinguished writers and original thinkers occupying university chairs who have done their original work (or most of it) before taking their university appointments rather than doing it as part of their activities as the holders already of such appointments. The universities today, in their great phase of expansion, are both wishful and able to draw into their service men and women who have proved their expertise in their special fields, and it is entirely reasonable that such people should be persuaded to pass on their special knowledge as university teachers as well, probably, as writers of books; but theirs is a different position from that of men who have embarked on an academic

62

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

career and done research alongside their teaching. Personal examples are not hard to find. My predecessor as Director of London School of Economics, Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, was invited to fill a chair of Sociology (at Liverpool) on the basis of achievements in sociological research conducted privately. The London School of Economics has over and over again appointed to its staff men with no large previous teaching experience but with high achievements in research - Professor Titmuss, who had made his reputation by his social history of war-time Britain; Professor Wheatcroft, who had established himself after long experience in legal practice as the outstanding master of tax law; Mr Cranston, who had established his position as a political theorist by writings based on private study. A few years ago the Imperial College of Science made a comparable 'catch' when Sir Colin Buchanan, widely recognised as a leading authority on transport, was appointed to a chair. I trust that I shall give no offence to any of those mentioned if I express the personal opinion that the work they have done since their university appointments has not surpassed in quality that which had established their reputations before those appointments. If the universities are successful in drawing into their service people of proved achievement in research and original thought, it is even more probable that, in the conditions of today, they attract into their service much larger numbers of younger people who have aspirations in those directions, even if those aspirations are not always attained. This may seem no more than a statement of the obvious and in the light of the current stereotype of university life, it may seem inevitable and entirely proper that it should attract people with research aspirations. But it is worth pausing to consider why the attraction is so powerful. It is not, I suggest, because research-minded people are always attracted by the idea of teaching - the other half of the normal university commitment. There are two other powerful attractions, comparative leisure and physical facilities. We have seen how the role of the universities has risen in recent generations and the role of other professions which formerly contributed significantly to original thought and

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

63

research has relatively declined. The Church formerly contributed a fair share; White of Selborne, who would undoubtedly have held a chair of Botany today, was a beneficed clergyman; Robertson wrote his histories also as a clergyman; the man who can claim to be the founder of economic history was Archdeacon Cunningham. Government service also made its contribution at a time when the rules about publication of private writing were less restrictive and when office hours were much shorter than they are today. Leisure indeed was the secret. In earlier times it may have been a scandal from the point of view of the Church that many clergymen could enjoy a comfortable income with only minimal duties, and from the point of view of the state that many government officials were nothing like fully employed; but there was some compensation in the use which a minority of the holders of near-sinecures made of their free time. For most people the process of creative thought is possible only in conditions which offer a good deal of idle or uncommitted time. As well as the church and government offices, there were other bases for the necessary conditions of leisure. Adam Smith left his university chair for a private tutorship and wrote the Wealth of Nations largely while holding that comfortable situation; Berkeley, Hume and others less distinguished also spent years in private tutorships. The possession of a private income also offered greater opportunities of leisure in earlier centuries than it does today; it was from that vantage point that Gibbon, Bentham, Ricardo and Henry Cavendish (after whom the great physical research laboratory at Cambridge was named) were able to make their original contributions to history, politics, economics and the physical sciences. Today one of the great attractions of the universities is that they still offer possibilities of leisurely life which formerly they shared with the Church and government. This is not to say that all university teachers are idle any more than all eighteenth-century clergymen or government officials were. Far from it; many of them are badly over-worked; but it cannot be denied that the inescapable obligations of a university teaching post very often make only a small demand on its holder's time and that a man who confines himself to those

64

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

minimum obligations and refuses to get drawn into university administration will have quite a lot of time left over for further study or research and writing. The university of today offers two other things to the would-be researcher, the practical help of facilities of all kinds and opportunities of contact with other researchers. The most obviously significant of the facilities offered are, of course, the laboratories of the chemist and the physicist. Even a modern equivalent of Henry Cavendish (reputed to be one of the richest men of his day) would be daunted by the cost of the cyclotrons and other apparatus needed for atomic research; and for the ordinary man or woman aspiring to research in the natural sciences access to a laboratory is virtually essential. No longer are the few test-tubes in a shed at the bottom of the garden adequate equipment for major discoveries! Moreover it is by no means only in the natural sciences that extensive facilities are important. In the humanities the growth of knowledge means growth of printed matter and research requires access to well-stocked libraries. These are not necessarily confined to universities - the British Museum Library or the Library of Congress in Washington are still major research centres - but more and more a university expects to have and to make available to its members a very extensive library of its own. The same, of course, is true for much research in the social sciences, but today such research is very likely also to involve extensive us of statistics and the availability of computers may be a very great convenience. Less essential, perhaps, but none the less useful, are the secretarial and typing facilities normally provided for university staff, the travel grants which are often given from university funds, the periods of sabbatical leave, and, replacing the private study of the gentleman of means, the private room in which one may read or write away from the pressures of domestic surroundings. Opportunities of contact with other researchers are important, often essential, not perhaps for the truly original ideas but for the vastly greater mass of detailed research. A major university can do much in that way, having on its staff leading experts and innovators in a great many subjects. But univer-

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

65

sities can only rarely cover the whole field of expertise with which a researcher may wish to have contact; nor are they the only institutions where at least part of the range may be available. The researcher is likely to want contacts not only in universities but in research institutes, in the great professional organisations such as the College of Surgeons or the engineering Institutes, in Government Departments and business enterprises and so on. A university post helps not only through its immediate contacts but because it is likely to provide an entry into such other organisations. The extent to which that is true, however, obviously depends on the situation of the University. At one extreme, I remember the Professor of Chemistry in the University of Malaya around 1950 saying to me that the nearest chemist with whom he could have an intelligent conversation about his own research field was in Perth, Western Australia, 1,500 miles away. On the other hand, ancient universities like Oxford and Cambridge have in the course of time attracted to their neighbourhood many semi-independent centres of research or scholarship. Universities situated in great cities, especially capital cities, like London and Paris, will find innumerable contacts of all kinds. Professor Joseph BenDavid, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a report published by O.E.C.D. in 1968 entitled 'Fundamental Research and the Universities', describes as 'ecological centres' the complexes of institutions to be found in the London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle or in the Paris area. No doubt Professor Ben-David would include the other universities within commuting distance of London in his triangle, but given the small size of the country and the ease of communications it is arguable that all the universities and research institutes of England and Wales might be included in one huge 'ecological centre'. On the other side of the Atlantic the same could be argued for the long strip of highly urbanised areas running from Boston to Washington. We need not try to define the geographical limits of the useful area of contact, which are bound to vary from subject to subject. What is important in this particular concept is that on the one hand association with a university opens the door to E

66

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

contacts wider than those to be found within the university itself, but on the other the same contacts may be obtained through other channels, e.g., association with an independent research institute. There are therefore very powerful attractions in a university appointment for anybody with a leaning to research. It not only provides perhaps the only profession which can today offer a not unreasonable salary with a sufficient modicum of leisure; it also provides access to working facilities and physical aids which no individual could command and contacts with other researchers. It is not therefore surprising that a very considerable amount of what might be called routine research is done in the universities, that is research of a systematic kind not involving an extreme degree of originality. The evidence is not conclusive that really original thought is especially stimulated by the university atmosphere; it may arise almost anywhere. But the university is often well fitted to carry out the systematic work of checking and verifying original theories. This third question suggested above remains: is the association of research and teaching beneficial? The orthodox answer is unquestionably that it is, because it is believed that the man or woman who is not interested in extending the corpus of knowledge of his own subject will be a dull teacher and conversely that the pioneer in a subject will be a constant stimulus to his students. There are, however, considerations on the other side. First, it is certainly not invariably true that a teacher who is not also a researcher is a dull teacher. Anybody with any extensive knowledge of universities will know many first-class teachers with very little research achievement. I certainly know well one teacher, the holder of a chair for thirty-five years; a stimulating speaker throughout those years to a crowded hall of first year undergraduates as well as to a seminar of postgraduates, a pioneer in many field of teaching, and a teacher spoken of with gratitude by many former students in high business and academic positions, yet a man who has never published a book or anything which would normally be reckoned as a research monograph. Teachers of

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

67

that quality are not lacking in interest in the advances taking place at the frontiers of knowledge simply because they lack the urge, or the presumption, to take a personal part in the endeavours to make such advance. They may well feel that they are playing as effective a role by encouraging and helping others, higher degree students or independent researchers, to pursue their own enquiries. Nor does it always follow that the man who is most active in the pursuit of new knowledge is best able to communicate it to others. He may not have the gift of personal communication and his work may be passed on much more effectively in writings than in lectures and tutorials. Or he may be too far in advance of the average undergraduate, or for the moment so deeply concentrated on his current research interest, that he is incapable of applying his mind to other topics required by the syllabus. Repeatedly, when I have found out from students who are the teachers from whom they have learned most, it emerges that they are getting most from the not very original lecturer who has the minimum record of publication and least from the bright young man who publishes frequently and is expected by all his seniors to be filling a chair before he is forty. Of course this is not universally true, either for all teachers of either kind or for all students. For the ablest students the distinguished researcher may be a wonderful stimulus; but there are many kinds of students and the most gifted are only a minority. I am doing no more than suggest that research capacity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient qualification to make a man or woman a good teacher of all kinds of students. There is little doubt that there is room in a university for many kinds; certainly for the man who is good all round, a brilliant teacher as well as researcher; for the highly stimulating teacher who does not have the urge to prosecute research; for the merely good but useful teacher; and for the good researcher who is only a moderate teacher. In all that has just been said I have taken for granted that the research involved really is worth-while original work. Unfortunately that may not always be true. In the present atmosphere of university life there is very great pressure on every teacher to undertake research. Most university adminis-

68

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

trations from time to time make protestations denying that promotion depends on research and indeed on publication; and no doubt they are honest in claiming that teaching capacity is given due weight as well. But the impression remains that promotion will be hard for anybody with no record of published research; and the reasons for that are simple enough. A publication is something that can be read and assessed; its impact on other experts in the field can be measured by the kind of reviews it attracts. Teaching capacity is more subtle; it depends on reputation and, in the usual conditions in which no individual teacher is individually responsible for all of a student's work, objective measurement and comparison are difficult. Even within the institution in which a teacher is working - and personal contact and assessment less difficult - it is easier to judge a man by his publications than by his teaching. Far more must that be the case outside the institution; promotions come often by moving to another university and external reputation normally comes from publication, not from teaching successes, the fame of which is unlikely to spread far. Granted, then, the pressure to 'research' and publish, the man who, left to himself, might be quite happy to concentrate on good teaching, will feel compelled to devote part of his time to research which may well not be first-class but will maybe earn him a Ph.D. and anyway get his name rather more widely known. Research can always be a rival to teaching in its claims on the time and the mind of the university professor or lecturer. It is important to remember that it is not only time that is involved. A man may say to himself that he will devote so many hours a week to teaching and so many to research, but they are lucky who can control their thoughts so completely as to keep each activity strictly to its allotted hours. A teacher whose devotion to both teaching and research and whose success in both are unquestioned, has told me how troubled his conscience has often been when in the middle of a tutorial discussion with a student he has found his mind wandering to the article the writing of which has been interrupted by the student's appearance or to the appointment with some fellow researcher for which he must leave in half an hour's

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

69

time. If a man passionately devoted to his subject and to the teaching of it can feel concerned about such a split in his mental interests, how much more must that be a problem with the man who is less of a natural-born researcher and has more or less to force himself to undertake something called research for the sake of professional advancement. A great deal of indignant heat was generated in the university world when the University Grants Committee initiated the enquiry, referred to in a later chapter, into university costs and, inter alia, into the division of the time of academic staff between teaching and research. There was ample reason to criticise the form of the enquiry, but some of the criticism was so extreme that one could not help suspecting something of a guilty conscience. Certainly it is not only educational administrators who have come to feel apprehensive about a possible over-stressing of the research component in the university complex. During recent years the London School of Economics has been able to increase its organised research activities very considerably, thanks to a number of special grants from public funds and private foundations. (Total expenditure on research by the London School of Economics rose from £97,000 in 1961/62 to £258,000 in 1966/67). During 1967 proposals came forward for the creation of further special research units of significant size and the School was forced to consider whether, even with finance assured for the out-of-pocket costs, it could find room for more such units in its structure. The most immediate issue was one of room in the physical sense; given the School's congested situation, could it accommodate another score or so of additional staff? But in the course of the discussion the view was eloquently put by senior members of the academic staff that more than merely finance and physical facilities was involved, that the School was in danger of reaching the point, if it had not already passed it, where additional research activity would involve a serious diversion of interest and energy from teaching. Nobody questioned that at a certain level research is a complement and help to teaching but the danger was seen that it could, if it continued to grow, become a distraction and a rival. The London School of Economics is not of course unique

7O

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

in having consciously recognised the danger. It has presented itself to many institutions in a more precise form, i.e., whether it is financially a good or a bad thing to accept large special research grants. The question arises most directly because grants of that kind rarely cover all the costs. They may cover the salaries of staff employed, purchase of equipment, etc.; but there are also not insignificant overheads provision of accommodation, extra burdens on common services, administrative and accounting costs. Some private foundations are willing to add a percentage to the total of specific items in the budget to cover such overheads, but the normal practice of British Government departments and the Government-financed Research Councils is to make no allowance of that kind. No doubt the refusal can be justified logically by the argument that universities profess in any case to devote a part of their resources to research and if they are contributing something in the form of office or laboratory space or general overheads to a research project whose main expenses are paid by special grant, that is no more than should be expected. This is an argument which is valid up to a certain level of activity. It may well be of great assistance to an institution to get outside help for a project which it wants to undertake but the cost of which it can only partly meet. The danger comes when the institution is tempted by the offer of outside funds to undertake projects which it would not otherwise have thought of starting or towards which it would not, in current financial conditions, have dreamt of providing any financial assistance. Again it is a matter of degree. Beyond a certain point research developments may threaten the other functions of the university, i.e., when the contribution the research makes to the teaching side is outbalanced by the diversion of institutional resources and academic time and energy which are involved. This chapter may be summarised in the following propositions: i. Research, invention and innovation of ideas have not, as a matter of history, always been characteristic of universities; on the contrary for long periods the main sources of innovation have laid outside the universities.

U N I V E R S I T I E S AND R E S E A R C H

*JI

2. Today, however, the universities are clearly among the principal sources of innovation, though not the only ones, perhaps not as pre-eminent as they like to think and certainly not essential, in the sense that there are many other ways in which research could be carried on if it were not done in the universities. 3. In modern times the universities attract the researchminded because they can offer not only physical facilities (which are much more important than they used to be) but also leisure, in a way which other professions have ceased to do. 4. Research activity very often supplements and enlivens teaching but there are serious dangers of going too far in assuming that only good researchers can be good teachers and in undervaluing the conscientious teacher who lacks the research urge, if he has it, nonetheless puts teaching first. 5. Finally, research activity can develop in an institution (or in the case of a particular individual) to such a point that its distraction of time, energy, finance and physical resources from teaching more than offsets the help it may give to the teaching side.

5

Degrees and Teaching Until a few years ago it could reasonably have been said that English Universities (not Scottish) were dedicated to the onesubject 'honours' course as the basis of the first degree. Professional degrees lay apart and there were some other exceptions, but the proposition was broadly true. The professional degrees in medicine, law, engineering or architecture were in a special category. In one sense they were 'one-subject' degrees, i.e., their students were devoted to a very clear field of interest, but - the cynic might say because they had to end up capable of practising a profession, not merely capable of passing an examination - they paid a good deal of attention to other disciplines as bases or complements for their particular studies. So the medical student had to have some competence in physics, chemistry and biology before he started his medical course and retained some contact with more general scientific disciplines through his subsequent studies, e.g., in physiology and bio-chemistry; and the engineer needed a similar background of physics, chemistry and mathematics. For the mass of students in the arts and science faculties, however, first degree work meant concentrated study of a single language, a single period (or sometimes more strictly a single episode) in history or a single science. It is hardly surprising that many students found such degree patterns disappointing. Almost invariably (if they were to satisfy faculty admission requirements) they would have concentrated on their language or their science during their last years at school and would be lucky to find anything 72

D E G R E E S AND TEACHING

73

really stirring to the imagination in another three years of still more concentrated study of the same field. History was a little less likely to suffer to the same degree from that disadvantage but in another way represented the extreme type of the specialist one-subject degree. Degree syllabuses commonly required or invited the student to select one quite brief historical topic from a specified list. In London it might be mediaeval Italian history, in Oxford the history of the U.S.A. in the generation before the Civil War. Such concentration was a far cry from the broad sweep of Toynbee's Study of History or the catholic interest in all periods of Macaulay. 'Not my period' has become the distinguishing cry, and the protection, of the historian. It harmonised well with the widespread rejection of the idea that anything can be 'learned from history'. Maybe Toynbee went too far in the attempt to draw very large conclusions from comparative historical studies; but to me the attempt has always seemed far more admirable and likely ultimately to be more fruitful than the study of isolated sections of history in a sort of void, as an intellectual pastime as pure and free from external significance as the careful study of the biography of Sherlock Holmes or the geography of Barsetshire or the mutual relationships of the Guermantes family or any of the other fictional problems which exercise the minds of their devotees. There were, as has already been said, exceptions to the pattern of close specialisation, beyond that contained in the professional degrees. The University of Cambridge, to its credit, has long permitted its students to take different subjects in the two parts of the Tripos; the student may plan to do that from the start or he may find himself bored with his first choice and try something else after he has taken Part i. In Oxford, 'Greats' (the study of the classics) traditionally opened the way not only to the language and literature of Greece and Rome but to much of their history and their philosophical and political ideas; and 'Modern Greats' (more correctly the degree in philosophy, politics and economics) involved at least some study in more than one subject, although one would be chosen for concentrated study. Indeed faculties of social studies seem generally to have been more

74

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

inclined to multi-subject syllabuses than their confreres in arts and science. London may claim to have set a pattern in its degree of Bachelor of Science (Economics) which not only provided a syllabus covering all branches of the social studies but has always been based on some study of economics, politics and history irrespective of the special field on which the student chose to concentrate most of his energy. Many of the Redbrick universities which began by taking London external degrees have retained this kind of pattern with local variations and other universities which initiated social studies degrees on their own have in practice adopted similarly broad based patterns or combinations of subjects. One may indeed see good reasons for this general character of the social studies degrees. As a matter of internal university politics the social studies group had often something of a fight to get approval of their own special degree against the conservative opposition of Arts Faculties; and they may well have found it politic to band together and seek a combined degree rather than a series of separate ones. More permanently, the social studies are by their nature closely interwoven; it is very reasonably argued that nobody can be a good economist without being something of a political scientist and something of a sociologist (as well as a bit of a historian) and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the political scientist and the sociologist. Thirdly, the social studies degrees partake a little of the professional character of engineering or medicine in that many who take them look forward to careers as professional economists, sociologists, statisticians, etc.; and they are under the same pressures as the more clearly recognised professional degrees to include in their scope a reasonable amount of background or penumbral studies. Such was the position about the time of the publication of the Robbins Report. Since then certain changes have appeared, particularly in the newest group of universities, but also affecting the older institutions. Writing of Sussex, the first of the new group, in a symposium on new universities the then Vice-Chancellor Sir John (now Lord) Fulton emphasised the desire to break away from the one-subject degree and the tyranny of the single department. The new

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

75

University instead built its courses round 'Schools' covering groups of studies, e.g., European Studies, African and Asian Studies, Biological Sciences, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Educational Studies. Within these schools the student can concentrate a considerable proportion of his time on one subject but he is required also to take courses in ancillary or associated subjects. The resultant pattern has some similarities to that of the London B.Sc.(Econ.); but at Sussex and the other new universities which have adopted broadly similar schemes, this more diversified pattern is not confined to the social studies. It extends also to arts subjects and to the sciences, bringing probably substantially greater changes in the pattern of courses on the arts side. What has emerged here might be called the 'central core' pattern of degree, i.e., the taking of one main subject with a group of associated studies chosen from a wider range of alternatives. A different variant from the older patterns which has begun to emerge in London is the 'two-subject' degree. In this, which has taken most definite shape in the language field, the student may take two languages simultaneously or a single language in alliance with linguistics (itself a fairly new entrant into the field of recognised academic disciplines). In the 'two-subject' pattern the student has a narrower range of choice than in the 'central core' pattern since he is confined to his initial choice of two subjects. The 'two-subject' degree is not, of course, a novelty. Both Oxford and Cambridge have had provision for such combinations and have lately developed them further. London itself had had since the mid-fifties an honours degree in Philosophy and Economics. (In practice it proved difficult to keep the theoretically equal balance between the two subjects and in 1966 the alternative was provided of taking philosophy as one of the special subjects in the B.Sc.(Econ.) degree, i.e., the 'central-core' pattern was in this case in the end preferred to the 'two-subject' pattern). It will be apparent that these new alternatives, the centralcore pattern and the two-subject pattern, still impose considerable limits on the breadth of studies a student may choose to take. At present this seems especially true of the

76

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

pairs of subjects which can be taken in two-subject degrees, which sometimes seem to originate only from the fortuitous coincidence of desire for a varied pattern in two heads of departments not otherwise closely connected. No university has yet thrown the doors open widely enough to allow a student to study simultaneously any two subjects on the curriculum which he may choose. The older one-subject pattern was like a menu from which only one dish could be ordered; the new central-core and two-subject patterns offer choices of a variety of set meals; choice from an a la carte menu is still debarred. Other modifications have been introduced to lessen the high degree of specialisation in the older degrees. From its foundation in 1949 the University College of North Staffordshire (now the University of Keele) had instituted a preliminary year of general studies, covering in broad fashion topics in arts, science and social studies. The other newly formed universities, from Sussex onwards, have also made provision for general or survey courses in the early stages of their degree syllabuses. Again there have been sporadic attempts to widen the scope of some of the professional degrees, e.g., the development in London of a special course in economics as one of the optional courses in the engineering degree and similar move to include economics in the London degree in law. In general more experimentation may be expected in London as the result of reforms recently adopted there which will give the individual colleges in London's federal structure greater freedom to develop their own degree patterns instead of being tied to a single pattern laid down centrally. In the past owing to the difficulty of getting the general consent of the large and miscellaneous group made up of the whole academic community of London University, it has been hard to make innovations; but it is expected that the individual colleges will in future be more adventurous. While there has thus been a certain opening up of hitherto narrowly restricted courses, there has been no significant move towards the American 'credit' system, with its much wider choice of options. The emphasis is still on the integrated degree, even if the field to be integrated is somewhat wider.

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

77

The defects of the normal degree pattern, as viewed by a natural scientist, have been clearly and forcefully stated by Professor A. B. Pippard (Professor of Physics, University of Cambridge) in a note submitted in January 1968, to a Working Group on Manpower for Scientific Growth appointed by the Committee on Manpower Resources for Science and Technology (Cmnd. 3760, Annex E). Professor Pippard, after referring to the failure of the university pattern which had 'been evolved by and for the benefit of an elite class' to respond to the new situation of more widespread education, commented, that the system is 'so complex and so cunningly interlocked that further evolution in response to pressures from within is virtually impossible'. He refers to 'the professionalism which has developed all through this century and which in the sciences may take much of the credit for Britain's outstanding achievements' having 'become fossilised to the point where it is almost out of the question for a student to read science as an instrument of general education' and to the absence of any 'substantial body of non-professional scientists who are tolerably well-informed about the significance of science in modern society'. He makes it clear that he would like to see fewer specialists in the narrow fields of science but a great increase in the number of students whose education is based on science. His basic view is illustrated by his opinion that 'the cure for the chronic shortage of science teachers should be sought not in training more, but by making their very existence unnecessary except for a limited amount of advanced teaching'. Much the same criticisms could be made from the point of view of the social scientist or the arts man. Professor Pippard's solution, to which I shall come back later, is to defer the time of narrower specialisation until the third year of university study and to recognise that there are a good many students who do not want to go on to such specialisation and will be content with a more general education by granting a Bachelor's degree after two years of study. This difficulty of the non-availability of sufficient general education and the consequent lack of sufficiently wide diffusion of basic scientific ideas - and basic principles in the social

78

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

studies too - is the first of the defects of the current pattern. There is in addition the problem of the difficulty, only very partially mitigated by recent changes, of the student whose interests change during his undergraduate years in switching to a widely different area of study except at the cost of starting entirely afresh on another three-year course. While there has been a little loosening up here virtually no change has been made, or indeed seriously discussed, which would make it easier for students to move from one university to another within the U.K. system. There never has been any general practice by which British universities give credit for work done at other universities for the purpose of undergraduate studies. Great significance has always been attached to the completion of the period of 'residence' laid down in the regulations (normally a minimum of nine terms for a first degree); and the differences between the detailed syllabuses laid down by different universities for what appear to be closely similar degrees present another major obstacle to exchanges. This is, however, one of the important constructions which make students feel inescapably 'boxed in'. There are all kinds of reasons why a student might wish to change his course; he may conclude that he has chosen the wrong area of specialisation, the risk of that being all the greater as the range of specialisations increases with the expansion of knowledge; he may find the teaching staff uncongenial or the teaching methods inappropriate and may believe, not necessarily rightly but nonetheless strongly, that the teaching somewhere else would suit him better; or he may find living conditions less pleasant than he expected. The latter cause of discontent may perhaps particularly affect students living in lodgings in London or other major cities; while they might well prefer life in a university hall to life in the family home, they might, if given the chance, prefer to return to their local university rather than put up with the trials of commuting from a distant suburb to one of the colleges in the centre of the city. It has, of course, been the traditional practice of German students to move from one university to another, attending such courses as they thought fit and taking their final exami-

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

79

nations when they felt inclined and at whatever university was most convenient. That tradition still continues and a survey made in the 1950*8 showed that 36% of German undergraduates changed their place of study at least once; for arts students the proportion was 88%, the proportions being much lower for technological courses. In principle this German habit provides for a certain important aspect of academic freedom and it is by no means obvious why an approach to it might not be desirable here too. Reference has been made above to the obstacles presented by the 'residence' requirement of British universities and the differing course patterns. 'Residence' of course often means no more than formal registration and probably attendance at a certain minimum of lectures, classes or seminars. Granted the general similarity of conditions in British universities and the comparatively small differences in the quality of academic standards, it is not clear why a year of residence in, say, Liverpool, cannot be accepted as the equivalent of a year in Leeds. The objection of the differences in the course patterns is prima facie more substantial. Courses in the later years of the ordinary undergraduate degree programme are framed on the assumption that the students taking them will have completed certain specific earlier studies already; if they have been attending another university where the pattern, or the chronological order in which subjects are taken, is different they may be at a real disadvantage. Examinations too, are set on the assumption that students have attended certain known courses. There could, of course, be ways of avoiding these objections based on the pattern of courses. Universities might get together to reduce the differences in the patterns. At first sight this looks attractive, because some of the innovations and variations introduced by individual universities wear a certain feverish air of being induced more by the urge to 'be different' than by any conviction of their objective merits, or at best are the result of the idosyncracies of a strong head of department. Nonetheless 'co-ordination' is always in grave danger of leading to stagnation and it would be a sad obstacle to experimentation if all degree syllabuses had to go through

80

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

some kind of central scrutiny so as to keep them within tolerable limits of variation from a norm. The very means taken to facilitate changes of university by a student might make it almost pointless for him to change at all. Perhaps more attractive would be an attack on the problem from the examination end. If, instead of each university constructing its examination on the basis of its own course-pattern, the universities could agree on a broader kind of examination, probably involving much wider choice of questions, based on a number of course-patterns, the student would be able to vary his individual pattern of courses with much less danger to his prospects of examination success. So far as I know, this kind of possibility has not been discussed at all. Indeed there has been surprisingly little discussion of examination techniques or research into the results of different techniques; and it will be appropriate to come back to this in a more general look at the examinations problem. Before leaving this question of the possible migration of students between universities, two other practical aspects must be mentioned. One is the administrative difficulty of providing for such movements within the very tight situation created by the shortage of university places and the necessity all universities are under of rigidly rationing admissions. The other is the loss, which many might regard as serious, of the personal contact between student and teacher which most universities are today making a great effort to improve. We may turn here to a consideration of other aspects of the academic picture, and first of all to teaching methods. As already noted, there has been in all the non-Oxbridge universities a strong trend towards the substitution of tutorials or classes for the formal lecture, which was at one time the mainstay of organised teaching in most universities and colleges. I remember that when I became a student at the London School of Economics in 1919 one of the first things I had to do was to buy a stock of visiting cards because attendance at lectures was compulsory and one recorded that attendance by handing in a card to the porter on duty at the door. In my first year I recall no other form of teaching but lectures, supplemented by reading based on a list of advised

DEGREES AND TEACHING

8l

books and the writing of essays which were returned with written, not oral, comments; in subsequent years I recall participation in a rather small number of discussion groups or classes and actually reading one or two papers to such groups, but the main emphasis was still on lectures. When, many years later, I had access to the School's administrative records I noted that the student files of the time consisted of very little but records of lectures attended. By that time, however, that is in 1957, attendance at lectures had ceased to be compulsory and was no longer recorded. In principle attendance at classes was compulsory; the requirement was somewhat loosely enforced but throughout the time I was Director of the School thought was being given to the improvement of the organisation of classes and a succession of changes were introduced aiming both to make the class-work system more comprehensive and to ensure that every student had contact not only with individual teachers but also with a general or 'moral' tutor to whom he or she could turn for advice on any problem from the general organisation of studies to the resolution of the problems of his or her love life. (These tutorial arrangements came during these years to be further buttressed by the appointment of an adviser to women students, of a panel of advisers for overseas students and of one full-time and one part-time psychiatrist). The change was reflected in student files, the standard contents of which now included regular reports from the half-dozen or more individual teachers who had had responsibility for one or other aspect of the student's studies during the normal threeyear span. I have gone a little into detail about the change over the generations at the London School of Economics but I have no doubt that similar changes were going on in other institutions, made possible by the considerable improvement over the same period in the ratio of teachers to students; and the new universities of the post-Robbins era have emphasised the group tutorial or discussion class from their very start. Pressures are strong, too, for the trend to continue. The great majority of university teachers appear to favour class work as against lectures. Without questioning the element of

82

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

intellectual conviction, one is tempted to speculate on the possible influence of the consideration that the preparation of a coherent series of lectures is a much more rigorous task than handling a discussion class; it is symptomatic that new assistant lecturers are usually put on to class work for a session or two before being asked to lecture. Equally students are disposed to demand more and more individual tuition through tutorials or classes. At least that is the expressed view of the articulate student spokesmen. Not all individual students feel the same. A majority seem still to attach great importance to lectures; at least London School of Economics experience has been that lectures, even if attendance is not compulsory and, being unrecorded, earns no kind of credit, are still well attended. A fair proportion of students, when asked for individual views, will confess that they have got little out of their classes and tutorials; and nearly every year that I was at the London School of Economics I had before me the case of some recalcitrant student who refused ever to attend a class or tutorial because he was convinced he could do better by private reading. The majority of those who felt they got little out of personal teaching tended, however, not to condemn the system itself but to complain of the particular way it was operated or the personality of individual tutors. Accordingly the latest development at the London School of Economics has been the creation of departmental liaison committees of students and teachers to examine difficulties of organisation of teaching and tutorial relationships as they arise. It is ironical, but not untypical, that complaints of deterioration in the frequency and adequacy of personal contacts between students and teachers have multiplied almost in proportion with the intensification of efforts to improve those contacts; and clearly the efforts of the newest universities to establish better standards in this field have not removed student discontents. We may expect, therefore, that the pressures for the development of the personal element in teaching will continue; but there may be some doubt whether in actual fact the trend will continue. It must be emphasised that personalised teaching is only possible with a low ratio of students to

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

83

teachers and if student numbers continue to rise it must be very doubtful, in spite of the experience of recent years, whether the existing ratio can everywhere be maintained, let alone further improved. It must indeed strike any dispassionate observer as odd that, faced with prospective larger numbers, the universities have done virtually nothing to investigate the possibilities of greater productivity, i.e., of adopting techniques which would make possible a raising rather than a lowering of the number of students taken care of by one teacher. It would be wrong to say that nothing has been done in this direction, but equally there has been no systematic attack on the problem. Some of the theoretical possibilities of making greater use of the physical resources of the universities will be looked at later; here we may conveniently examine the possibilities on the side of human resources. Possibilities which suggest themselves are greater use of modern mechanical aids, including closed circuit television; use of systematic programmed teaching at least in the more elementary stages of instruction; increasing the time devoted to teaching by reducing the calls of administration and research; and perhaps contributing to the same end by somehow reducing the time now spent in very wearisome routine examining. The technical novelty of television has fascinated some people and led almost certainly to exaggerated ideas of the help it might give. Basically, closed circuit television is a means of enlarging the audience for lectures and demonstrations by enabling the same lecture or demonstration to be heard and watched in a number of lecture rooms instead of only one. It is most useful when the lecture is to be supplemented by some form of visual aid - diagrams, formulae on a blackboard, maps, pictures, etc. It begins to seem less useful when applied to what may be called the purely literary lecture since inevitably the question must then be asked: if the audiences in the subsidiary lecture halls are not to have the benefit, such as it is, of the physical presence of the lecturer, could they not do just as well with a printed reproduction? There is point in the story of the professor who put

84

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

his lectures on tape to save himself the bother of delivering them, and, out of curiosity, went along one day to see how many students were attending. He found every seat occupied - by a tape recorder. So far in British universities, the most effective use of television seems to be made in the teaching of the natural sciences, especially mathematics and physics, notably at the University of Strathclyde. It is noteworthy, too, that the use of television at Strathclyde has not meant simply a multiplication of the audience for existing lectures; it has been tied in with a reorganisation of the teaching based on moderate-sized class groups. It may be doubted therefore whether it will result in much net saving in demands on staff time. More generally, even if television could be used to facilitate lecturing to larger and larger audiences it would have little effect by way of economy if the trend continues to discard lectures for class-teaching. Maybe there is more to be hoped for from the development of programmed teaching, language laboratories, etc., but so far there is not much evidence that such methods yield net economies in staff time. In principle more could be done by changing the division of staff time between teaching, research and administration. From time to time academic staff complain bitterly of the time taken by administrative chores and say how much they would like to be relieved of them. Some, however, are inextricably linked with the teaching function - the arrangement of classes, tutorials, etc., or the giving of references for former students. Others, covering the general field of participation in the processes of decision on departmental, faculty, college or university policy flow ineluctably from the practice of academic self-government. University teachers en masse could escape from the time-consuming burden of sharing in those processes - and many individual teachers do escape but only at the cost of leaving those decisions to others, whether those others are professional university administrators or smaller groups of teachers who choose to busy themselves with such matters. In universities as elsewhere many schemes for administrative reform assume that major issues of policy can be clearly separated from issues of administration.

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

85

Academics seek a system in which they can keep full control over the decisions of principle without having to be worried about the administrative details. All experience shows the difficulty of realising such hopes. For one thing it is often not clear when a matter of administration is turning into an issue of policy; and by the time it is recognised binding decisions may have been taken. In the academic world, as outside, constant vigilance is the price of freedom; but it takes time to keep a vigilant watch on all aspects of administration. Secondly, even if certain issues - say major allocations of funds between departments - can be distinguished as being issues of policy, experience also shows that those familiar with the details as well as the broad sums of money or other resources involved have a much better chance of getting their way than those who confine their interest to the 'issues of policy'; i.e., the advantage still lies with the man who is immersed in administration. Thirdly, my own experience in a wide range of administrative posts is that it is very easy for a decision of principle or policy somehow to fade into nothing unless somebody in the administrative machine makes it his business to see that it is carried into effect. In a different world of administration I remember, when I was Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong Government, discovering that on three occasions in the past there had been a decision by the Governor of the day that the Government Stores Department should be removed from the control of the Director of Public Works, but since the Public Works Department always wanted the change deferred and nobody in the Secretariat cared much about it, nothing had happened; I got the decision confirmed yet again and made it my business to see that it did become effective. The decisions which can be handed over to professional administrators are in areas where it is possible to reduce the policy considerations to reasonably precise rules. More will be said below about some possibilities of doing that in the universities, but subject to what can be done in that way it remains true that, if academics really want to be in control they have got to spend a lot of time on administrative detail. Moreover the amount of that detail is ever increasing. The

86

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

mere size and complexity of modern universities means a more than proportionate increase in the unavoidable administrative detail; the growing intrusion of outside direction or influence, whether it comes directly from government agencies or from co-ordinating bodies inside the university world like the Vice-Chancellors' Committee or from the conditions laid down by donors of research grants, adds further to the complications. The complex of committees which runs, or as the cynics would say, hampers the running of modern universities with their many faculties, vast laboratories and libraries and thousands of academic and other staff, are a far cry from the periodic meetings of the dozen or so Fellows of an Oxford College of a century ago, concerned with a narrower range of studies and a comparative handful of students. It was then sensible enough to believe that the Fellows could really administer the College without too much intereference with their teaching duties. Today some degree of specialisation on administration is inevitable. A full-time Vice-Chancellor or Principal has long been normal and even Oxford is to have such a functionary in future; the work of the University Registrar is now commonly divided between two or three principal officers with numerous assistants, and faculties and departments more and more commonly have their own secretaries. University administration has in fact become a recognisable profession which a young man or woman may choose as a career, rather than the casual assembly of men who have drifted into it from teaching. It is, however, open to doubt whether enough use is being made of the professional administrator; or, putting it differently, whether teachers would not on balance be wise to yield some of their powers of control and save themselves the time involved in making that control effective. Achieving that end is partly a matter of increasing trust between the teaching staff and the administrators; partly of constantly seeking devices which will genuinely distinguish the 'important' or 'policy' matters in which full academic participation may be appropriate; and partly of deliberating handing over to administrators the right of decision in some areas hitherto

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

87

regarded as necessarily reserved for academic decision. One such area is that of admission of students. Decisions here are normally taken by members of the academic staff and often a good deal of time is taken in examining individual cases, including personal interviews. This work has of late years become particularly onerous because the excess of applications over places has both increased the ratio between the numbers of cases to be considered and the capacity of individual departments and raised difficult problems of choice between border-line candidates. Latterly the centralisation of undergraduate applications through U.C.C.A. (the Universities Central Council for Admissions) has simplified the paper work and somewhat reduced the number of multiple applications. Most universities still have, however, a problem of selection from a number of genuine and qualified applicants which may be several times the number of places available and the choice is made by academic staff on the basis of previous records, school reports and, often, interviews. It is worth serious consideration whether, in the case of undergraduates, the advantages of this continuing personal selection outweigh the cost in academic time and energy. There is increasing scepticism about the efficacy of any of the methods now in use in selecting the 'best' candidates. Even correlation with degree results (not in themselves a very certain measure of quality in any wider sense) is very imperfect and it must often seem that practically as good results would be obtained if the names of all qualified candidates were put into a hat. Even if so drastic an alternative is rejected it is probable that far the greater part of the selection process could be done on the basis of standard rules operated by university administrators rather than by academics. No doubt many departmental representatives would fight hard for their right to choose their own students and to try to get a good share of the best material, but it is doubtful if time and energy spent in that sort of competition contribute anything to the national university effort. The best system would be one in which eligibility to fill one of the limited number of university places available in the country as a whole was settled in the main on a national basis, and the actual univer-

88

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

sity to which a successful candidate went was settled by his or her own choice. Absolute uniformity of the basis of selection is, no doubt, to be avoided; there is advantage in different institutions having different criteria so that the 'odd' candidate may have at least a chance of satisfying one set of criteria. That could be met, however, by leaving to each institution the right to select a percentage of entrants. Such a system would mean a great enlargement of the scope of U.C.C.A., which would not merely process but select the majority, say 90 %, of entrants, notifying the universities of the names of those allotted to them and leaving them to fill the balance of 10 % on their own criteria from the unsuccessful applicants. No doubt such an extension of centralised bureaucracy would horrify many academics, but it is doubtful whether it would make any significant difference to the actual selection and it could make possible important economies of manpower, especially academic manpower. I have been considering here only undergraduate admissions. Entry to post-graduate work is different; the work itself is more individual; it involves a closer relation with the teacher; and where prescribed courses are involved, as they more and more frequently are, they are less similar between one university and another than undergraduate courses and also less stabilised in pattern. At present, certainly, and perhaps always, selection for post-graduate work seems destined to remain a call on academic time. It is tempting, however, to think of some rationalisation of another great call on academic time - the conduct of examinations. University teachers are heavily involved not only in setting papers and marking scripts for their own universities but in sharing in the same task for other universities as external examiners and in similar tasks for non-university examinations - G.C.E. exams, the competitive examinations for the Civil Service and innumerable examinations organised by professional bodies. A special call on the time of teachers in the University of London has always come from the external degree examinations; in future similar and more generalised calls may become important in connection with the awards of the recently established Council for National

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

89

Academic Awards and the examinations of the projected 'University of the Air'. In total all this examining makes enormous calls on the time and energy of the better-educated section of the population and especially of university teachers. The need to mark examination scripts is one of the major reasons why the effective teaching terms of universities have to be kept so short. Is it beyond the wit of man to devise ways of testing intelligence and knowledge which would be less expensive in highly-educated manpower ? The radical student movement of the day is apt to advocate the abolition of examinations, I cannot conceive that as a sensible solution. In an ideal world a certificate of attendance at a university might be acceptable proof that a young man or woman had spent the stated period in serious study and had learned a reasonable amount; in the real world something else is needed as proof that a student's time at the university has not been wasted and that he has acquired an identifiable quantum of knowledge in a specific subject or subjects. That something else does not, however, have to be an examination of the traditional type. It is astonishing that with all the research into education and all the problems of use of resources with which universities are faced very little has been done by way of research into alternative examination techniques, e.g., the sophisticated 'check one' type of questions developed in America as part of the process of selection for graduate and professional schools (though some beginning has been made in the latest foundations). Such techniques are characterised by the need for very great skill in devising the questions but only mechanical reliability in checking the answers, so that a considerable net saving in highly educated manpower could result from their adoption. It is probable that the economies would result, however, only if the technique could be used on a fairly considerable scale, i.e., if a large number of candidates were taking the same examination. A corollary might be, therefore, the holding of joint examinations by two or more universities - a novelty which again would be shocking to most academics. It is, however, something which would be worth investigating on its own merits, especially as it could

90

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

lead to more general savings in overhead costs, and which need not at all involve completely uniform courses of instruction; a wide range of choices of question could cover considerable variation in the actual teaching. And of course a university or department which wanted to experiment more widely could opt out, at the cost of having to run its own examinations. At the minimum a serious effort ought to be put into research into examination techniques, not only in the universities themselves, but in all other examinations which involve the time and energies of university staffs. The last obvious way of making more teaching time available is to reduce the time devoted to the teacher's own studies and research. This is a very delicate subject but it is one which cannot be just put aside. Some of the relevant points have already been made; first, because the community wants more and more provision for post-school teaching it does not automatically want a proportionate increase in the time devoted to research and certainly not uniformly in all subjects; secondly, while being a good teacher at university level does demand continuous study so that the teacher is aware of new developments in his own subject, it is not invariably linked with research in the full sense of the word or with publication; but thirdly the whole atmosphere of university life, and especially the criteria of selection for appointment and promotion, constitute a strong and continuous pressure to devote time to research. Looking at the situation dispassionately two lines of possible change suggest themselves; first that within the university world there should be a clearer division of the research function from the teaching function; and secondly that the pressures on individuals to do research whether they want or not are removed or at least lessened. By the first I mean that instead of assuming that # % of each and every teacher's time and therefore x% of expenditure on teachers' salaries is devoted to research a university should be prepared to devote something like x% of its corporate energies to research but should recognise much more explicitly than is normally done that this may mean employing some people

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

QI

almost wholly on research, others almost wholly on teaching and of course some partly on both as at present. The second line of change involves partly change in the criteria of promotion and partly a change of atmosphere as a result of which reputation will be earned by teaching equally with publication. Neither is easy. Repeatedly institutions have said that they will look to teaching as well as published research in considering internal promotions, but when the critical choice has to be made, the old criteria creep back. The difficulty is added to by the University Grants Committee's rule about the proportion of senior appointments, which means that at that stage there may be acute competition for a limited number of possible promotions. Dealing with such a situation in my own experience I have seen the relevant committee forced to choose, say, three out of six possibles; in each case the man or woman is described by his head of department as an excellent and devoted teacher; the committee has no easy means of measuring the respective excellences and turns inevitably to the record of publication as the deciding factor. In principle, there may be ways of coping with this, inter alia by drastic changes in the system of university salaries. It is not easy to see, even in principle, possible ways of deliberately changing the atmosphere which determines men's status and reputation in the eyes of their colleagues. In some ways surprisingly, it is in Oxford and Cambridge that teaching alone has the best chance of earning high academic reputation. No doubt this is due to the system of College Fellowships. It has been remarked that Fellows are men appointed to do research who spend all their time teaching; and the same paradox appears with lower level appointments - repeatedly I have heard holders of 'Research' appointments in the old Universities explain their reasons for application for a teaching post at the London School of Economics as being that the London post will leave them time for research whereas at Oxbridge they do nothing but teach. Paradoxical or not, the fact is that dons at Oxbridge do manage to put in more actual time in teaching than iheir confreres at other universities and do earn high reputations

92

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

by teaching successes. It is reasonable to suspect that a considerable contributory reason is the habit of appointment to valuable Fellowships at an early age, which has the twofold effect of establishing more or less for ever the individual's reputation for scholarship and making promotion of much less consequence, so that neither prestige nor money acts as a pressure to enhance reputation by publication. No doubt, like almost all other Oxbridge practices, the Fellowship system is almost impossible to imitate elsewhere but its effects may be suggestive for other changes which could be made. Both the lines of action indicated would involve great modifications in present systems of remuneration of academic staff and further examination in detail is best deferred until that subject is tackled more generally. So far this chapter has been wholly about first degrees and undergraduate teaching. The position of higher degrees is less easy to describe because it has latterly been changing rapidly. Taking the end of the last war as the starting point the salient features were: 1. In Oxford, Cambridge and the Scottish Universities the Master's degree had no real significance as a sign of higher academic achievement since in the two ancient English Universities its award was a formality and in Scotland it implied a standard approximating to that of the ordinary English Bachelor's degree at honours level. 2. In the other Universities a small proportion of students went on to take a Master's degree (or at Oxford and Cambridge a B.Phil, or B.Litt.). There were two paths to such a degree, one by pursuing set courses ending with a normal examination by papers, the other by the submission of a thesis or dissertation in combination with a written examination. The second was much the commonest path although in some subjects, e.g., Law and Mathematics, only the first path was available in most universities. 3. A still smaller proportion of graduates went on to take the degree of Ph.D., awarded only on the basis of a thesis. Two years of study under supervision was prescribed as the minimum and a student could proceed direct to the Ph.D. after taking his first degree without being obliged to take a

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

93

Master's degree first. Normally the Ph.D. student was subject to no requirement to pursue any further 'tuition' courses; his formal studies were purely of a research character. In practice only a minority of candidates succeeded in completing the degree in the minimum two-year period. Obviously the standard required for a Ph.D. thesis was higher than that for a Master's degree; but it is not easy to perceive exactly in what the expected superiority consisted. It may perhaps be taken that the thesis for a doctorate was expected to show a clearly higher degree of originality and to be at any rate the foundation for a book while the work done for the Master's degree might lead to no more than a learned paper, but there was no clear boundary. Not uncommonly a student would be registered initially as a candidate for a Master's degree and transferred to Ph.D. registration after a year or so if his work appeared to be developing into the higher level. 4. Beyond the Ph.D. stood the higher doctorates, the D.D., D.Litt., D.Sc., LL.D., etc.; these, though rightly highly prized, were not awarded on the basis of work done specifically in a university but on the basis of publications and the general corpus of the candidate's original work. Basically such a degree was, and is, a recognition by the university of the distinguished work of one of its alumni rather than the fruit of study undertaken within the university. 5. The practical significance of higher degrees, while it varied from faculty to faculty, was generally a good deal less than in most European countries or in America. It was commonly said that in the U.S.A. the Ph.D. was the Trade Union ticket of the University teacher; there, as in Germany or France, the higher degree was almost a sine qua non for appointment to an established university post. Something of the kind was developing in Britain on the science side (and of course in medicine, the M.D. - Doctor of Medicine - and the M.S. - Master of Surgery-were recognised qualifications of the professional specialist) but in Arts and Social Science faculties there was almost a reverse snobbery about higher degrees; the really top-level man, having got his first class honours in his first degree, felt it beneath his dignity to seek a higher degree.

94

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

6. The organisation of Graduate Schools was embryonic. A group of young researchers might gather for a time round a distinguished teacher and a seminar or discussion group would be informally established; but more usually an individual student would work on his own, using the library or laboratory facilities of the university and benefiting in greater or less degree by the advice of his supervisor but often with no contact with any other teachers or research students. A high proportion of full-time graduate students came from outside the United Kingdom; the reasons for this were partly the stronger tradition of graduate work and the higher employment value in many other countries which has already been noted, and partly the small provision of assistance from public funds in the U.K. for graduate students, which often led to United Kingdom graduates who wished to do graduate work going to America where studentships or graduate assistantships were more readily available. This was the picture in the forties and fifties. In more recent years considerable changes have appeared. Graduate schools have become more consciously organised; higher degrees are coming to have a more obvious value in the labour market in the social sciences and arts as well as in the natural sciences; government aid through graduate awards has been greatly increased; and graduate work has taken on something of a new look with the spread of the 'new-style' Master's degree, earned by formal courses and formal examinations instead of by thesis. Undoubtedly there is an element of fashion and 'oneupmanship' in these developments. The close contacts which so many British academics have had with American universities have stimulated emulation of the great Graduate Schools of Transatlantic institutions; and the newly established universities have seen the establishment of vigorous graduate studies as the most obvious way of justifying their claim to full university status. But there is a more basic and a more permanent underlying reason, the great growth of knowledge. Because of the increase in the corpus of knowledge it is becoming recognised in more and more subjects that nothing

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

95

approaching a mastery of the field can be expected to be attained in the normal span of an undergraduate course. There have been discussions of extension of the normal undergraduate course, but so far the solution chosen has tended to be the encouragement of at least the abler students to continue under organised tuition for a further period of one or two years, ending with a Master's degree. Recognition of this need for instruction lasting beyond the undergraduate period is implicit in the extension of government aid in the form of graduate studentships. It is apparent also in the changing attitude of employers. For some considerable time a higher degree has been a near-necessity for employment in at least the higher reaches of the natural science field, particularly in research establishments; this is beginning to be true also for economists and statisticians. In the university world itself the Ph.D. is coming to have much more value than formerly in competition for employment and promotion, assisted perhaps by the consideration already referred to that in the largerscale universities of today it is inevitable that less weight can be given to personal knowledge of a candidate and more reliance has to be placed on formal evidence of scholarly attainment. Another consequence of the growth of knowledge is that more and more research needs to be done as a combined effort; the grouping of research workers in teams led by a senior academic is tending to become as common in the social as in the natural sciences. Finally, in combination, the need for the continuation of organised tuition and the growth of team work greatly encourage the organisation of postgraduate seminars. Some of the changes which have taken place are illustrated by figures from the London School of Economics, which has for long had a proportion of graduate students considerably higher than the average for United Kingdom universities. In 1957/58, out of 2,529 regular students, 813 or 32-1 % were post-graduates, including 25 % engaged in research and 7*1% in tuition courses (nearly all in advanced social administration or other professionally oriented courses). In 1967/68, out of 3,262 regular students, 1,392 or 42'2% were postgraduates including 20-5% engaged in research and 23-7%

96

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

in tuition courses. The new feature was the presence of 528 students taking the new 'taught' degree of M.Sc. In all, new admission to taught Master's degrees (normally taken in one year) numbered 432, compared with 488 for all first degrees. There is thus a virtually new element in the British university world, the post-graduate who is pursuing further studies but is not doing research. I say Virtually' new because there were always a few students taking 'taught' Master's degrees as already explained, but they were too few to be an important element in the community. The incursion of much larger numbers of such students is already beginning to raise problems analogous to those of the undergraduate population. First of all are problems of admission, both the problem of qualification and the problem of selection. As to qualification the position is rather the same as for admission to first degrees; having taken a first degree is not enough, a 'good' honours degree normally being demanded, just as something better than a minimum pass in A levels is necessary for undergraduate admission. Selection is not so universal a problem as for undergraduates because pressure of demand is not yet so great, but it has already begun to be a very vexing problem for institutions like the London School of Economics which have a high proportion of graduate students, and is likely to become of more general concern if the new policy of the University Grants Committee of restraining the growth of graduate admissions is maintained. Since 1965 the London School of Economics has been obliged to attempt a systematic rationing of graduate admissions; the attempt has met with considerable administrative difficulties arising from two factors not significantly affecting undergraduate admissions, i.e., uncertainties about financial support and the international character of the graduate student world, in which a large proportion of applicants come from overseas and in which also both they and United Kingdom applicants are likely simultaneously to be applying for admission in other countries as well as in other universities in the United Kingdom. These two factors combined lead to a large ratio of failures to take up offers of places. In time something analogous to the University Central Council on Admissions might

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

97

develop to act as a clearing-house or central agency for United Kingdom universities but this would not remove all the international complications. As to the criteria of selection, it is probable that reliance on previous examination results is a better guide for 'taught5 Master's degrees than it is for undergraduate admissions because the examinations are much more in the same fields as the post-graduate courses to which admission is being sought. For research degrees, however, the examination criterion is less decisive. It does not necessarily measure capacity for original research and more must depend on the individual judgement of teachers on the personality of the applicant and his own choice of research topic. In the teaching of post-graduates there is no indication that markedly new problems arise. There is more reliance on the seminar and what might be called the intimate lecture, the mass lecture virtually disappearing; but this is no more than an extension of the difference between first and third year undergraduate work. Indeed the similarity of graduate tuition to the more advanced undergraduate work is evidenced by the fact that lectures and seminars are not infrequently advertised as available to final year undergraduates as well as graduates. Inevitably teaching is rather more in the hands of the more senior teachers, the professors and readers, but since there is a strong tendency to encourage every teacher, however junior, to become something of a specialist, even the juniors are quite likely to be called upon to make some contribution in their own special fields. It is a strongly held belief, and one habitually accepted in discussions with the University Grants Committee about staffing needs, that post-graduate students make greater calls on a teacher's time than undergraduates. It is presumably believed that significant factors in the case of 'taught' higher degrees are the greater use of seminars and small discussion groups and the more specialised nature of most of the work which reduces the size of classes, sometimes to no more than one or two students in a given subject, and so removes what the economist calls the economies of scale which result from the much larger undergraduate groups. On the other hand, G

98

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

the post-graduate must be assumed to be well used to university-style work and to need appreciably less guidance or spoon-feeding than the undergraduate. It is harder to assess the appropriate scale of demand on a teacher's time by a research student. In non-laboratory subjects there are those who regard the ideal Ph.D. student as being the one who pays one call on his supervisor to agree the subject of his thesis and a second to deliver the completed thesis. That is not entirely cynical because a Ph.D. thesis is always supposed to be the original and unaided work of the candidate and if frequent and long discussions with a supervisor are needed the cynic may rather wonder whether the 'unaided' character of the work is maintained. The role of the supervisor is indeed notoriously difficult to define and many a teacher must have had qualms of conscience as to how much of his own thinking has gone into some of his supervisees' theses; it is very easy to overstep the lines in discussing material on which a student is working in such a way as to suggest to him the vital conclusion which he might, unaided, have quite overlooked, and equally easy, in explaining to a candidate that his draft thesis is not yet good enough for submission to the examiners, to convey to him unmistakeably just how it needs improvement. It is partly for these reasons that some people in the university field have always been suspicious of the Ph.D. Certainly to the innocent outsider it is not clear why an original researcher is forced to accept a supervisor when all he may need is access to the library and laboratory (and possibly the lecture) facilities of the university. Such an innocent outsider may equally be puzzled why a completely independent researcher, working entirely outside any university, is ineligible for any university recognition of his work, however original and significant, unless he happens to be qualified to be a candidate for an external Ph.D. of London University. As to the actual burden of post-graduate teaching, the convention adopted by the University Grants Committee in calculating staff-student ratios is that in Arts and Social Sciences one post-graduate equals two undergraduates, and in the Sciences one post-graduate equals three under-

D E G R E E S AND T E A C H I N G

99

graduates. Doubt is thrown on these conventions, however, both by a survey made by the Robbins Committee and by the only systematic study of a single graduate school which has been published - the study of the London School of Economics published under the title Graduate School in 1966, by Howard Glennerster of the L.S.E. Unit of Research into the Economic and Statistical Aspects of Higher Education. The Robbins Committee, as quoted by Glennerster, showed (Appendix Three to the Report, Part i, Table 83) that, in their survey, 18% of teaching time was taken by postgraduates, who numbered 17 % of all students; and that only in the Medical faculty was the share of teaching time taken by post-graduates substantially higher that their proportion in the student population. The L.S.E. study, based on information supplied by all concerned with graduate teaching showed the average teaching load for all post-graduates to be appreciably less than for undergraduates although they occupied proportionately more of the time of professors and readers. For the new Master's courses the overall figure was equivalent to 0-7 of one undergraduate and for Ph.D.'s only 0-3. Thus the specific studies whose results have been published do not support the conventional belief in the extra burden of graduate teaching; but general conclusions cannot be based on a partial survey and a study of a single institution concerned only with a restricted field of studies. Moreover the L.S.E. study was made before the main impact of the new 'taught' Master's degrees had been felt. Nonetheless, it seems very desirable that further and wider studies of actual teaching practice in graduate schools should be made. Probably a good deal of information will emerge from studies already initiated, as a result of University Grants Committee initiative, into the distribution of teacher's time. Certainly the existing and prospective growth in the extent of graduate activity constitute a new phenomenon of sufficient novelty to justify a good deal of further study. In all this chapter attention has so far been concentrated on formal degree work. This is certainly not the only teaching activity at universities. Many courses are offered which do not lead to a degree. Most perhaps lead to another type of

IOO

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

award, commonly a diploma obtainable by studies of shorter duration than those leading to a degree and generally of graduate standing; but a few lead to no more formal recognition at all. Nonetheless it remains true that degree work overwhelmingly dominates the university scene. Writings by high University dignitaries of the more traditional kind, especially Oxbridge scholars, commonly expatiate on the great importance of the basic ideas and habits of thought acquired at a university and deprecate the attribution of any great significance to examinations. (A typical example may be found in Professor Butterfield's very graceful, attractive and stimulating Lindsay Memorial Lectures on 'The Universities and Education Today5 given at Keele in 1961). Yet in no part of the education system is the obtaining of a piece of parchment, or paper, affirming that the candidate has successfully undergone a process of formal examination of greater importance. To have been to a famous Public School is always something, even if no A levels resulted; to have been to a university and failed to take a degree is rather worse than never having been at all. One of the many public claims to distinction made on behalf of the University of Sussex has been that it has a lower undergraduate failure rate than any other British university. There were not wanting critics to suggest that the claim was ill-advised because a low rate of failure might reflect a low standard of examination rather than a high standard of teaching; but the important thing was that the claim was thought to be worth making. The seeker after knowledge who comes to drink of the Pierian stream at his own discretion may be honoured in theory but it is the man who follows a prescribed course and performs well in the examination who is acclaimed in practice. Having been in my youth a rather good examinee, I have no personal reason to decry examinations; and they fulfil an essential purpose in a way for which no substitute has yet been found. The world does need a substantial supply of men and women certified to have successfully followed a course of study in a specified field and also to have in a certain degree the qualities of memory, powers of exposition and quickness of mind necessary for success in ordinary examinations. And

DEGREES AND TEACHING

IOI

when both the institutions themselves and the students as individuals are overwhelmingly dependent on state support it becomes more than ever inevitable that the attainment of some reputable qualification will become the best, because it is the most obvious, means of demonstrating that the support has been justified. Yet the doubt must remain whether the universities do enough for the seeker after knowledge who is not also a seeker after that valuable piece of parchment. They can be of many kinds, e.g., the young person who does not, for one reason or another, want to be committed to a normal degree course; the older man or woman who wants to keep his mind alive by study of something outside his own immediate practical interests ; the student from abroad who wants some contact with the great minds of a particular school but has not the time, or perhaps the appropriate qualifications, for a degree course; and the worker in a particular intellectual field who wants to keep up to date in that field. A good deal of notice has been taken in late years of needs of the last kind, of the need in a world of constantly expanding knowledge of the re-education of those who took their degrees at an earlier and less-advanced date. This is most obviously needed by the natural scientists and technologists but it applies also to the social-scientists and arts graduates. It would be wrong to say that the Universities do nothing in these areas. In the field of re-education there are occasional conferences and summer schools; in some more technical subjects more regular and systematic re-training courses are provided; and some of the post-graduate diplomas partake to some extent of re-training. There are, here and there and on a small scale, opportunities of registering as 'casual5 or 'occasional' students. But it is difficult to resist the impression that such opportunities are restricted and little used and that very few people think of universities as places where the seeker after knowledge can go to pick up the knowledge he wants rather than the knowledge prescribed in some degree or diploma syllabus. I remember, shortly after I became a student at the London School of Economics, discovering the headmaster of the school I had lately left going into a lecture

IO2

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

(not incidentally on my prescribed list) which I was attending; he explained that he always registered at the London School of Economics on a basis then open to all comers which enabled him to attend any lecture he chose, so as to keep his mind awake. I wonder how many headmasters have the opportunity of doing that today. Probably many universities would protest that they would like to do more of that kind of thing but as their resources are limited they need to reserve them for 'regular' students. There is something in that, but even the casual students who want only to attend lectures or read books, and would therefore make little claim on teaching capacity are also excluded or limited. Whatever the causes there is little doubt that there is here a field, or whole series of fields, where the universities could play a very large part but which they cultivate very inadequately.

6 Student Malaise The series of student demonstrations, 'sit-ins', etc. which began at the London School of Economics in 1966/67 and was followed by a whole series of incidents in universities and colleges all over England in 1967 and 1968 took most people in Britain by surprise. It had not, however, been entirely unforeseen in the university world. At the London School of Economics, certainly, the administration and senior teachers had become aware of a very marked change in the outlook of at any rate the most articulate students and a rapidly growing gulf between the outlook of official student representatives and that of the internal 'establishment' - what current jargon would describe as a communications gap. I discussed the problem in rather cautious language in my report as Director of the London School of Economics for the session 1965/66 (written during the summer of 1966) and mentioned there the decision taken in the spring of 1966 by the School's Academic Board to set up a special committee to examine the whole problem of the relations of the School with its students. In mentioning these evidences of foreboding I do not claim that we foresaw the explosion which was to occur in the following session; or that we were in advance of others in the university world in perceiving the change which was coming over student attitudes. So far as the latter point is concerned, I recall vividly a meeting which took place in July 1966, at the University of York between members of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals and a very representative and influential group of Presidents of American universities, when the subject which aroused the greatest interest on both 103

IO4

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

sides was that of student affairs. Naturally the Americans had most to say because they had already experienced mass student demonstrations and interruptions of University activity at Berkeley (University of California) and elsewhere; but there was a widespread feeling among the British ViceGhancellors that the same kind of thing could easily happen in their universities. At that meeting I remember a story being told of an American university campus on which a student was marching up and down carrying a board on which was written 'I Protest5. The Dean of Students stopped him and asked him what he was protesting about. 'I don't know,' said the student. 'Well, you can't do it here,' said the Dean. 'Now,' said the student, 'I know what I am protesting about. I am protesting against your interference with my right to protest.' It seemed a comic exaggeration at the time; latterly it has seemed to epitomise many of the actual incidents of 1968. The protest comes first; then somebody thinks of a Cause; and any attempt to deal with the actual process of protesting is seen as infringement of basic human rights and provokes wider protests. Ambitions become wider and what may have begun as a demonstration over a specific grievance quickly becomes a demand for a share, maybe a majority share, in the final control of the institution. So far in this country student demonstrations have not moved on to become serious attempts to unseat the Government. We can hardly count as such the routine chants of 'Wilson Out' which greet the Prime Minister almost every time he visits a university. These are in the long-established tradition of demonstrations and marches by minority groups of students campaigning for nuclear disarmament or peace in Vietnam, more welfare for everybody or higher grants for students. Such demonstrations were not directed against the university authorities, were basically conceived as a means of publicising a point of view rather than coercing some authority into action and were played within a broadly recognised convention limiting the extent of the demonstration and particularly excluding violence of a positive kind. I would digress here for a moment to recall an incident at

STUDENT M A L A I S E

105

the London School of Economics five or six years ago which I think well illustrates the different attitude which then prevailed. The popular subject of student protest at that time was apartheid in South Africa and at various times there were marches on South Africa House and minor clashes with the police. From time to time individual students would be arrested, and some of them fined small sums, for obstructing the police; but no notice was taken of such behaviour by the University of London or the colleges to which the students belonged. At last, after a particularly troublesome demonstration when a score or more of students, mainly from the London School of Economics, were arrested, the police formally reported their names to the University under a longstanding arrangement by which the University undertook to help in preventing its students making an intolerable nuisance of themselves in the streets of the metropolis. The University duly passed on the names of the London School of Economics students to me so that the School might consider whether disciplinary action was appropriate. After consulting the Academic Board (a body in the London School of Economics comprising all permanent teachers) I decided not to initiate disciplinary proceedings but to send a warning to each student named that such action would be taken if further similar complaints were made against him. There was no protest, no resolution in the Students Union; the students' newspaper in its next issue carried an independent item clearly indicating the view that protests on this particular issue had gone on too long; and demonstrations about apartheid died away. In effect it was recognised that there was an established convention imposing limits on demonstrations, that those limits had been overstepped and that the School authorities had been right to call those responsible to order. One of the many things which distinguishes the new situation is that the conventions limiting demonstrations are no longer respected. Fortunately we have still a long way to go before reaching the extent of violence which has recently been so visible in France and Germany and Italy, but already demonstrations largely, if not wholly, of students have indulged in violence of a kind which would previously not have

IO6

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

been contemplated. A second major change is the parallel breakdown of the convention of acceptance of the authority of the governing powers in the university. Formerly a decision of the kind I took over the apartheid episode, even if disliked, was accepted; by 1967 it would have been a reason for agitating for the removal of all power to take such a decision. I turn then to actual events at universities in this country, beginning with the troubles of the London School of Economics in 1966/67. Looking back, the London School of Economics affair of that year may be regarded as transitional in character. There was certainly disregard of authority but the student action fell short of positive violence. The sit-in, though sensational as a piece of publicity, did not bring about the suspension of any of the normal activities of the School. Very wide demands were made for the remodelling of the School's system of internal government but at the end the authority of the existing regime was formally accepted without any counter-commitments to make specific changes. Taken as a whole, however, the affair contained most of the elements which were to figure in later episodes elsewhere: the demand for student power, i.e., the right to full participation in major decisions, the idea of a Tree university', the support given to student views by some of the teaching staff and the intrusion of political doctrines and motives. The affair started with a straightforward challenge to the authority of the Governors of the School. I had two years before intimated my wish to retire in September 1967 and in June 1966 the Governors announced their decision to appoint as my successor Dr Walter Adams, then Principal of the University College of Rhodesia. A committee composed half of lay Governors and half of members of the academic staff had given long thought to the selection and the fact that the committee was deliberating had received a good deal of publicity because of press speculation about the appointment; but no representations had been received suggesting that student views on the appointment should be heard. However, during the ensuing long vacation a group of students got together to produce a pamphlet violently attacking Dr Adams's appointment, primarily on the grounds that he had

STUDENT MALAISE

IO7

5

shown a 'racialist attitude as Principal of the Rhodesian University College but also on grounds of alleged administrative incompetence. This pamphlet was distributed early in the Michaelmas Term, having been communicated a few days earlier to the Press, and its substance was brought before a meeting of the Students Union a few days later. The meeting, after what was reported to be a very onesided debate, decided to demand from Dr Adams an answer to the allegations made in the pamphlet. Clearly a strong wave of feeling had struck the active section of the student body; that the feeling seemed to me then, as it does now, wrong in every sense of the word does not diminish my awareness of its strength. It was composed of many elements. On the immediate issue the essential criticism was that Dr Adams had not sufficiently vigorously opposed the Smith regime after the unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, but instead had laboured to keep the College open as a multi-racial institution. (It still is the only university institution in Africa south of the Sahara with anything approaching equal numbers of black and white students.) There were many in Britain who wished at that time to bring down the College as part of the general attempt to create intolerable conditions in Rhodesia but the United Kingdom Government and the University of London had decided to support it, the one with finance and the other with the countenance of continuation of its sponsorship of the College's work; and Dr Adams's actions had been entirely in line with these policies.* Apart from this specific political issue, in which the critics came mainly but not wholly from the political left, there was a more diffused element of extremist left-wing politics in the agitation, in which leading parts were taken throughout by members of the Socialist Society of the London School of Economics. On the more definitely university side a major * The issue between Dr Adams and his critics among the European staff of the University College was succinctly stated to me at the time by one of the most distinguished living Negro scholars. 'If the College has to close the Europeans will go back to better jobs in England with all the glory of martyrdom and the Africans will go back to the bush.'

IO8

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

source of motivation was unquestionably the growing pressure for student power. Although no demands of the kind later put forward had at that stage been formulated, it can hardly be doubted that the attack on Dr Adams was seen by many as an opportunity to challenge the authority of the Governors in a major decision and to assert the right of the Students Union to a say in the appointment of a Director. Other vaguer but powerful malaises doubtless also contributed - dissatisfaction with the conditions of university life in reality as compared with the rosier pictures of expectation, dissatisfaction with courses and methods of teaching, and the widespread feeling that the world was imperfect and something ought to be done about it. Previous events in American universities gave examples of at least partially successful agitation and the presence of a very large number of American students, mainly post-graduates, added to the force of those examples. In this welter of varied motives it would be idle to seek for clear lines of motivation and responsibility; but whether or not what happened can be labelled a 'plot', there can be no doubt of the deliberate nature of the attack. The care taken in the writing, the reproduction and the circulation of the pamphlet, the prior knowledge of its existence by Student Union leaders and the prompt submission of an appropriate resolution to a Union meeting do not suggest a casual or spontaneous outburst. Accordingly the first clash with the authorities of the School came on the basic issue of principle, of the right of the Students Union to any say in the matter of appointments. Immediately after the Union meeting had demanded an answer from Dr Adams the Governors instructed him to send no reply and they never receded from the position that they were not prepared to have the appointment discussed with Student leaders. A day or two later the Chairman of the Governors wrote to The Times to deplore the attack on Dr Adams and to declare the Governors' support for him. No mention was made in this letter of the Students Union but the President of the Union and the Studems Council decided that they ought to reply to it. There was at the time a regulation in the London School of Economics

STUDENT M A L A I S E

IOQ

forbidding the writing of letters from the School by Students without the Director's permission and the President (Mr David Adelstein) accordingly asked for that permission. I found myself in the embarassing position of having either to ban the writing of a letter which was not in itself offensive or, by giving permission, to support the right of the Students Union to intervene in matters of appointment. After taking time to consider I refused permission on the ground that the matter at issue did not lie within the proper functions of the Students Union. The President was initially disposed to accept this ruling and to write his letter from his private address (which did not require my approval). He was, however, directed by a subsequent meeting of the Students Union to send his letter officially as President and decided to follow that direction. As I did not feel able to accept, in effect, a rule that the Students Union could, by resolution, overrule the Director, disciplinary proceedings were initiated against the President. These were very formally conducted with very full rights of representation; in the upshot Mr Adelstein was found guilty but since it was established that he had received erroneous legal advice (from junior teachers in the School's Law Department) that the School Regulation which he was charged with violating did not apply to the Students Union because it was alleged to be a voluntary organisation, no penalty was imposed. A brief demonstration had been organised by the Students Union when the disciplinary proceedings began and a small group of students had attempted to inconvenience the Board of Discipline by sitting in the corridor leading to the room where they sat, but these activities had neither interrupted the proceedings nor influenced their outcome. Meanwhile the Academic Board of the School (i.e., the teaching staff as a whole) had expressed their support of Dr Adams's appointment. During the rest of the Michaelmas Term the work of the special committee on student matters continued and the committee embarked on general discussions with the Students Council; I also announced the intention to set up a committee composed equally of student and staff representatives to review the School's disciplinary regu-

IIO

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

lations (which were in many ways out of date and difficult to operate, not least in the embarassing rule about communications to the Press). I also spoke to a meeting of the Union and answered questions about various outstanding matters; and during the Christmas Vacation a letter was circulated to all students attempting to 'put them in the picture' on the general problems facing the School and the relations between the School and its students. On the appointment of Dr Adams, no further specific action was taken during that term, but it remained a matter of active discussion among students and was kept fully alive by references in the students' newspaper; and there was ample reason to believe that more positive action would be attempted, probably when Dr Adams returned from Rhodesia to London, as he was due to do in the early Spring. The small-scale demonstration at the time of the disciplinary action against Mr Adelstein had given warning of what might be attempted and the administration began to plan defensive measures. After students reassembled for the Lent Term the opponents of Dr Adams's appointment continued to discuss among themselves what might be done to prevent his taking up office. Finally a meeting was called in the name of the Graduate Students Association and a few hours before it was due to start notices were circulated making it plain that the purpose of the meeting was to consider 'direct action' to prevent the appointment taking effect. I decided that I could not sanction the use of the School's own facilities for such a purpose and cancelled the permission to use the School's main Lecture Theatre for it. An attempt was then made to force entry into the theatre against the efforts of the School's small staff of porters and in defiance of my own reiterated refusal to authorise the use of the Theatre. What might have been the outcome must remain uncertain because all action on that evening was brought to an end by a tragic accident the death from heart failure of one of the School's porters who was not directly involved and had not been attacked by any students, but had joined the confused crowd to see if he could help his colleagues. Naturally it was felt necessary to institute a further enquiry

STUDENT MALAISE

III

into the incidents of that day and the enquiry (by three of the senior Professors of the School) elicited facts which suggested that the attempt to hold the unauthorised meeting and to force entry into the Theatre had been instigated by certain officers of the Students Union and the Graduate Students Association. For the second time in a few months the School's disciplinary machinery was therefore called into action to hear complaints against the President of the Students Union (Mr Adelstein) and four other members of the Students Council and the President of the Graduate Students Association (Mr Bloom). There was no attempt to impose any summary penalties and the proceedings of the Board of Discipline were even more formal and prolonged than on the previous occasion; detailed charges were communicated to each of the students concerned; they were represented by legal advisers (in the upshot three members of the School's Law Department acting for the six defendants) ; the Secretary of the School, as the formal complainant, was also legally represented (by a practising barrister who was also a part-time teacher at the School); and although the proceedings were not open to the general public, representatives of the Students Union were allowed to attend. Witnesses were called, examined and cross-examined in the usual style of an English court. At the close of these elaborate proceedings four of the defendants (the four ordinary members of the Students Council) were found not guilty; Mr Adelstein and Mr Bloom were found guilty on certain of the charges against them and sentenced to suspension for a period of three months, the Board's reasons for their decision being set out in considerable detail in a full judgement. Immediately the decision was announced, on March 13 (when very few, if any, students had read this judgement), a special meeting of the Students Union was held and at its close, in the early evening of March 13, a protest sit-in was begun, students assembling and sitting in the entrance hall to the School's principal building and on the lower steps of the main flight of stairs. Soon after the sit-in began I spoke to the Students in the entrance hall and urged them to leave, warning them that the sit-in could

112

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

have no effect except an adverse one on the appeal which the two suspended students were expected to make to the Standing Committee of the Governors; but at the same time making it clear that I would authorise no action to remove them from the building that night provided there was no interference with the free movement of others who might wish to pass through the hall. Steps had already been taken to close all communications between the main building, where the sit-in was centred, and the immediately adjoining building which contained the administrative offices of the School; and to prevent access to it by any unauthorised persons. The sit-in continued for a little over a week. During that that time the appeal of Messrs Adelstein and Bloom was heard by the Standing Committee who, on March 17, confirmed the main findings of the Board of Discipline but mitigated the penalties by giving me, as Director, discretion to remove the suspensions at the end of May. It was a week of confused events; there was much discussion involving at different stages official and unofficial student leaders, myself and other members of the administration and various groups of the teaching staff who sought to find a basis of compromise; there was a reiteration on the part of the School authorities of their willingness, once the sit-in was over, to discuss student problems and the future means of ensuring that student views were properly heard; on the student side there was a rapid escalation of demands for participation in the government of the School and, separately, for the establishment of an 'open University'; and there was intense and constant publicity by Fleet Street and the broadcasting organisations. It would be unprofitable here to go in detail through all these discussions, claims and manoeuvres. On the immediate issue the School authorities held to the principles that the disciplinary question should be settled by the established processes and that constructive discussions on the future role of students in relation to the government of the School could start only after normal conditions had been restored. As to the effects of the sit-in there were at one time student posters reading 'We closed Berkeley and we will close the

STUDENT MALAISE

113

London School of Economies', and journalists at the time and subsequently have referred to the sit-in 'paralysing' the School. Nothing of the kind happened. Lectures and classes were given as programmed except in a few cases of small classes where no students turned up; the Library (accessible to students only by passing through the entrance hall which was the centre of the sit-in) was if anything better used than usual; the Refectory did record business, especially in late night snacks; and social functions were held as usual, including a dinner of the Law Students' Society attended by the Lord Chancellor. The sitters-in and their supporters from outside congregated continuously in the School's main entrance but passage by other people was blocked only for a few hours on one day and, as the School's congested site has resulted in a group of buildings most of which communicate with each other by bridges across the streets, there were always alternative entrances available (a brief attempt to block all entrances having failed). A critical moment occurred on the third day of the sit-in (March 15) when early in the morning a group of students gained access to the administration building by a ruse; the police were immediately called in and removed the intruders, who offered only passive resistance. There is little doubt that this demonstration of the determination of the authorities to prevent the situation getting really out of control had a sobering effect; and it is very noteworthy, in the light of later events elsewhere, that there was virtually no criticism of the calling in of the police, although there was vociferous criticism of the nominal sentence of suspension* imposed by the School authorities on the 'invaders' of the administration building. My own interpretation of student attitudes over this episode was that the affair was treated as a game in which the School had played within the rules in evicting the intruders; but since the intruders were also believed to be playing within the rules, it was thought unjust to punish as well as to outmanoeuvre them. * This sentence was imposed initially in order to remove any technical claim of a right to be on the School's premises and so to clarify the powers of the police to remove the 'invaders'; and no attempt was ever made later to enforce the suspensions. H

114

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

After the decision on the appeal of Mr Adelstein and Mr Bloom the heart began to go out of the sit-in, especially as the end of the Lent Term was approaching and after a series of long meetings the sit-in was formally 'suspended5 on March 21, with, however, a reservation of the possibility of its restarting in the Summer Term. Meanwhile a student group was appointed to negotiate with the School authorities on proposals for the participation of students in the government of the School and another was left to organise an 'Open University' during the Easter Vacation. Immediately after the suspension of the sit-in the work of the Committee already constituted to review the School's disciplinary regulations was resumed and the Academic Board's Committee met the students appointed to discuss student participation in the School's government. No agreed recommendations emerged from either series of discussions because the student proposals were regarded by the staff representatives as far too extreme and, at that stage, the student representatives were unwilling to compromise. So far as the Open University was concerned, the School authorities raised no objection to meetings being organised during the vacation on an orderly basis (although refusing a request for all-night discussions or seminars); the meetings were poorly attended and it is not unfair to describe the project as a pathetic failure. Much more important was the decision of the full Court of Governors of the School to hear a plea for clemency towards Mr Adelstein and Mr Bloom put forward by the newly elected President of the Students Union, Mr Peter Watherston (Mr Adelstein's term of office having expired during the sit-in). After long deliberation the Court decided to place the sentences of suspension in abeyance during good behaviour and in consideration of statements made by the two 'condemned' students expressing regret for their parts in the disturbances. For practical purposes that was the end of the affair. Rumblings of criticism of Dr Adams went on but he assumed office in the following October without incident. The School in fact remained quiet through the Summer Term of 1967

STUDENT M A L A I S E

115

and throughout the session 1967/68. One attempt was made in May 1968 to organise a sit-in in support of the French students but it attracted virtually no support and faded away in a few hours; and the School later provided a meeting-place for discussions of the student movement in Continental countries, again without any follow-up. The student claim to equal participation in the management of the School was maintained in principle without any progress being made towards its achievement. By coincidence proposals for the remodelling of the School's system of internal government had been put forward by me in 1966 and in the summer of 1967 the committee which was examining these proposals invited student representatives to join them. Their main report, made early in 1968 and signed by two of the four student representatives, recommended student membership, subject to certain qualifications, of all the main controlling committees in the School; it was, however, rejected by a meeting of the Students Union as not going far enough and by the academic staff for more complex reasons; and no action had been taken on it by the end of 1968. Typically, one of the two students who had signed the report was afterwards elected as President of the Students Union but that did not enable him to get the report through the meeting at which it was discussed, since meetings are normally dominated by the more extreme activists. Various other features of the London School of Economics student unrest in 1966/67 and 1967/68 deserve mention. First was the part played by members of the staff. Undoubtedly many of the younger members of staff shared in the general dissatisfaction with the established order which was one factor in student feelings; and there were a significant number, both junior and senior, who disliked the appointment of Dr Adams. In spite of the effective power long exercised in the School by its very widely-based Academic Board, there were many who felt that the academic staff had too little share in major decisions of policy and some of those were tempted to make common cause with the Students (though when the extremer Student proposals came before the Academic Board they received no formal support). At

Il6

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

various critical moments individual staff members expressed support of student action, the most important occasion being on March 13 when there was read out to the students sittingin a statement (also communicated to the Press) by an influential group of teachers strongly condemning the decision of the Board of Discipline. Later, in the stress of anxiety caused by the sit-in, a number of other teachers engaged in discussions of 'compromise' solutions which undoubtedly encouraged student extremists to hope for very extensive concessions to their ever-widening demands. It was only after the atmosphere created by these interventions had dissipated that more realistic discussions could be resumed. Secondly, the publicity accorded to the affair undoubtedly encouraged student activism. In the circumstances intense publicity was inevitable; the London School of Economics has always been 'news' in the way that Oxford is (and Cambridge is not); its geographical situation enabled both reporters and television cameras to get to the spot in minutes; the School has no private courtyards, all its entrances opening straight from public streets; and the tragic death of the porter on the evening of the banned meeting added a crucial element of drama. Once the publicity had started, moreover, it naturally snowballed. Thirdly, the active student leaders included particularly high proportions of overseas students and of post-graduates. Typically, of the six students formally charged with disciplinary offences five were of overseas origin and three had been at American Universities. A perhaps significant factor was that in 1966/67, although the proportion of overseas students to all students was not abnormally high (something under 40 %) the number of American students had shown a very sharp increase and several of them had taken an unusually active part in Student Union affairs. Equally noteworthy was the increased part in student affairs played by post-graduates. Of the six already referred to three were post-graduates and other graduate students were prominent in the numerous debates and negotiations which took place. It had for years previously been a common subject of comment, and complaint from other students, that post-graduates

STUDENT MALAISE

IIJ

took very little interest in student affairs. In 1966 there was a very marked change, which was certainly not a consequence of the 'troubles5 since it was already very noticeable before the incidents related above. It is reasonable to suppose that the change was associated with the very rapid growth in the two or three years before of the number taking the newstyle Master's degree by tuition instead of by thesis. It was from this group, not from the older kind of post-graduates taking Ph.D.'s or Master's degrees by research thesis, that the graduate student leaders came. This group were indeed a new element in the London School of Economics, and in United Kingdom Universities in general; they were still, like undergraduates, under tuition but were of course older than undergraduates and more disposed to feel they ought to have some share in the control of things. They were in their fourth, fifth or sixth years of university work and many of them had studied already in at least one other university. They thus shared to some extent the attitudes of the 'professional student' common in many European countries but hitherto little known in Britain, and at the same time had something of the absence of loyalty to the particular institution in which they were working which has been noted in the past as characteristic of, e.g., the German student with his habit of moving around from university to university even in his undergraduate years. Fourthly the absence of violence was noteworthy at the time and, looked at in the light of later events elsewhere, seems all the more noteworthy now. The 'invasion' of Connaught House (the administration building) was achieved by ruse rather than by force or violence and the eviction of the invaders met with no resistance. Virtually the only action during the sit-in which could be labelled Violent' was the breaking down of doors on one of the bridges from the main building to another part of the School which had been mistakenly locked. There were a few cases of somewhat aggresive 'picketing' of lectures and classes but no serious interference with the large number of students who chose to carry on attending lectures. Inevitably outside sympathisers were drawn in and at one stage (on March 17, the day of the

Il8

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

hearing of the appeal) when a large number of students from other universities assembled to march and attend an open-air meeting in support of their London School of Economics colleagues, there were fears that many of them might join the sit-in and prove less well-behaved. The London School of Economics Union leaders were as worried about this possibility as were the administration and discussed with me what should be done about it; fortunately the visitors, having made their demonstration of sympathy, quickly dispersed and no complications developed. Finally, one phrase very vividly illuminated important differences of attitude. A remark made by me, that we were learning to live with the sit-in, was viewed with horror by some of my academic colleagues. I do not recall in what context I made the remark but I certainly at no time felt any inclination to apologise for it and today, in the light of later events, would claim it as an achievement that we did live with the sit-in, i.e., the London School of Economics carried on in spite of it. To the activist student, 'living with the sit-in' meant defeat. To many of the academic staff the idea of student revolt was so disturbing that 'living with' a sit-in was intolerable and almost any action, whether by way of concession or repression, was worth while to bring it to an end. To me and other more phlegmatic administrators, to whom the achievement of universal and permanent harmony, however attractive, appeared at best uncertain, it was a worthwhile second-best to aim at containing the revolt with the minimum disturbance to other people. I will refer later to the renewed outbreak of student troubles at the L.S.E. in the autumn of 1968. The 1966/67 disturbances have been dealt with in detail both because I am (obviously) most familiar with them and because I believe they illustrate many of the features of the recent wave of student unrest. I do not propose to deal in anything like that detail with later manifestations of that wave in the university session 1967/68. During that year there were in the United Kingdom demonstrations against the university authorities or direct clashes between those authorities and student bodies in a dozen or more universities or other institutions of higher

STUDENT M A L A I S E

Iig

education, including the Universities of Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, Hull, Sussex, East Anglia, Essex, York and Bradford and a number of Colleges of Art. In many of them sit-ins were staged for varying periods; in several the offices of the university or college were occupied; and in some of these, and others, the work of the institution was wholly suspended for a period. Several of the Colleges of Art were for all practical purposes taken over by student organisations. The initiating incidents varied; an attempt by the Vice-Chancellor to discipline students who had broken up a meeting at the University of Essex; an attack on a visiting M.P. and his wife at Leeds; a protest against a probably unwise regulation forbidding the distribution of political pamphlets at Oxford. Whatever the particular incident, wider claims for student participation in the control of their institutions quickly emerged and in some of the Colleges of Art a claim to share in or exercise control was the main issue from the start. In almost every case some degree of active sympathy with student action was declared by members of the academic staff from the start and such attempts as were made to impose anything more than nominal penalties on students involved in the various incidents were unsuccessful. Noteworthy by comparison with the course of events at the London School of Economics was the greater disposition to resort to physical violence. The issues, as already indicated, were varied and confused. At Essex and Leeds the authorities justifiably claimed to be trying to maintain the principles of free speech and free discussion against the attempts of an intolerant minority determined to prevent the expression of views unwelcome to them; at Oxford the Proctors in defending a regulation which was shortly due for review were made to appear to be trying to stop a form of free speech. What was clear was the very general disposition to turn any issue, however small, into an excuse for a major assault on 'the establishment'. Claims to extensive participation in the control of institutions and plans for some variant of the 'open university' have been common. These features, combined with strong opposition to any attempt to impose significant penalties on students guilty of

I2O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

breaking established rules, conform closely to the London School of Economics experience in 1967. Compared with that episode, however, there are to be noted a much greater tendency to active violence, a more confident expression of revolutionary aims, more explicit support from a minority of the academic staff and an apparent absence of any preparation by the administrative authorities in the institutions affected to meet such situations. The new disposition to violence has been exemplified also by the participation of students in the attempted attack on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and other clashes with the police. The lack of defensive preparation by the authorities is apparent from the ease with which administrative offices have been occupied and - in some non-university colleges - whole institutions temporarily taken over. One other point to be noted about student unrest in 1967/68 is that it was on the whole most notable in the newest group of universities and in non-university institutions, especially the Colleges of Art. London University was hardly involved at all, Oxford and Cambridge only marginally and although some of the older Redbrick group - e.g., Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds-had their troubles they were less serious and prolonged than those at some of the most recent creations. Meanwhile student disturbances, often of a more serious nature, were being experienced in many other countries. There is hardly any part of the world from which some form of student unrest has not been reported in the last year ,or so - universities and colleges all over the U.S.A., most countries in Western Europe, some in Eastern Europe, India, Japan and other Asian countries and many in Latin America. The circumstances of the 'Red Guard' movement in China are still obscure, but it is not unreasonable to guess that it was to some extent a canalisation by the Communist regime of the discontents of the student age-group. Elsewhere, some incidents have been concerned with issues purely internal to the institutions, but others have had very wide political objectives; common to all has been the early resort to sit-ins, demonstrations and active violence. During a brief visit to

STUDENT MALAISE

121

America in October 1967 I heard of protests against the draft and the Vietnam war in institutions all over the country; and more domestically, of a sit-in in the New York City University by way of protest against a building scheme which involved some cutting-down of trees in the campus (the scheme incidentally having been agreed with a student committee which the protesters no longer supported). Moving to Japan immediately afterwards, I discovered apparently endemic student riots and clashes with police by way of protest against Japanese association with American international policies. In India in December 1967 I again met student riots, this time over the proposal of the Government of India to extend the period of the use of English as an official language; feeling between the advocates of Hindi and others was running high and the student body was divided, the clashes between the different parties being serious enough to force the University of Delhi and other universities to close. Nearer home, student protests in Rome, partly over examinations and other academic issues but with wider underlying motives, forced the resignation of the Rector of the University. In Berlin, student demonstrations with a strong political flavour mounted to riot proportions when a student leader was shot by, apparently, a political opponent. A special feature of the Berlin incidents was the attack on the largest German newspaper chain for alleged misreporting of events - a prominent example of the intolerance of student militants of the expression of any point of view but their own, which has become more and more a feature of student disturbances. Student protests in Yugoslavia were not suppressed as might once have been expected but listened to with apparent sympathy by President Tito. Even staid and sober Switzerland had its share of student protests. Much the most dramatic episode in the tale of student unrest was, of course, the revolt of the students of the University of Paris. That students there were extremely discontented with conditions at the University had long been known; facilities for accommodation and for study were far below the standards of British Universities. But when the outburst came in May 1968, the immediate complaints about con-

122

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

gestion, inadequate teaching, etc., were quickly lost in wider claims. The main University buildings were occupied by students; clashes with the police grew to the scale of regular street battles with students and police each blaming the other for the rising level of violence. Appeals made for support from the trade unions met a prompt response in the strong underlying discontents in the industrial world and for a week or so France endured something approaching a general strike. Indeed for a few days it looked as if what was happening might well be termed a revolution; the regime itself was in jeopardy as General de Gaulle considered whether to proffer his own resignation. However, the general decided not to resign but instead to seek the support of the public in a general election. The strikers in the factories, having secured large wage concessions, returned to work; neither they nor the organised parties of the Left were prepared to support continued student activity and the authorities began to reassert control over the university. The general election was a triumph for the Gaullists, showing a marked swing to the right, and by mid-July students had been ejected from all the buildings they had occupied. On the face of it they had caused, or at least sparked off, a tremendous upheaval which had ended in everything except the level of wages settling back where it was before. Only time could tell whether there would be any consequential changes in conditions in the University of Paris itself or in French Universities at large. Inevitably these dramatic happenings in France were widely observed in other countries, including the United Kingdom and there were attempts to promote sympathetic student activity elsewhere. All the indications are that these attempts had very little success and within the United Kingdom they were virtually complete failures. Very interesting, too, was the reaction to the organisation by the British Broadcasting Company (which a good many people initially thought misguided) of a television discussion with student 'leaders' from France, Germany and other countries. This, and a large meeting with some of the participants organised at the London School of Economics, made it clear that whatever it was these students were aiming at, it had little appeal

STUDENT MALAISE

123

to even the more radical of British students. While the broad fact of student unrest might be common to a wide range of countries, there was clearly no close agreement on either objectives or methods. In particular the case against violent methods was ably argued in another television programme by the newly elected President of the London School of Economics Students Union. There was in fact by the end of the session in June-July, 1968 a definitive move for the lead in practical discussion to be taken away from the radicals into the hands of the much more establishment-minded National Union of Students. During the long vacation more sober discussions on a general plane took place between the National Union of Students and the Vice-Chancellors' Committee, who had had a special meeting on the subject at Cambridge in late June, and between the National Union of Students and the Secretary for Education and Science. In October the Vice-Chancellors' Committee and the N.U.S. issued a joint statement which stressed the need to bring students into further consultation on matters of concern to them, recommending more extensive student representation on committees concerned with amenities and physical facilities and fuller development of consultative councils but stating clearly the objections to student participation in decisions on academic issues, appointments, etc. and avoiding any recommendation for the addition of student representatives to Senates and governing bodies. The role of the National Union of Students began to appear more and more potentially important under the lead of a 'moderate' President-elect Mr Trevor Fisk (whose election had been strongly challenged by left-wing elements and who was, incidentally, yet another product of London School of Economics, where he had been President of the Union some five years earlier). Perhaps symptomatically when representatives of the 'rebel' Colleges of Art met representatives of the Department of Education and Science to talk about the future organisation of art education, they were led by Mr Fisk. The radical elements were not, however, by any means silenced. After the universities reassembled in the autumn

124

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of 1968, although there was not quite the epidemic of disturbances that had occurred in the spring, various incidents occurred. The process of getting courses started again at one or two Colleges of Art which had been closed earlier in the year went on a little uneasily with accusations of improper termination of some staff appointments and threats of more student protests; political meetings obnoxious to the left wing were forcibly interrupted, e.g., at the University of York, new demands for representation on the key governing organs, e.g., at Birmingham and the City University, London; at Birmingham students occupied the Vice-Chancellor's office for some days; and at Bristol a new demand for the sharing of the University's Union facilities with non-university students in the City led also to occupation of the administrative offices. The London School of Economics was involved in a new form of defiance of authority which again, I think, deserves rather fuller treatment. Widely advertised plans had been made for a large scale demonstration in London on Sunday, October 27, primarily against the Vietnam War or at least against the American participation in it. (The leading organisers were not in the strict sense against the war itself, but they wanted North Vietnam and the National Liberation Force to win it!) A significant minority made no secret of their intention to use and to provoke violence, specifically in an attempt to force their way into the American Embassy. Ten days before the event (on October 17) a left wing group at the London School of Economics launched a proposal to occupy the School buildings over the weekend and to use them as a 'sanctuary' for those involved in the demonstration and especially for those who might get involved in violence. Participants were to be allowed to sleep in the London School of Economics and provision was to be made for first-aid treatment of any who might be injured. Taking advantage of a thinly attended meeting of the Students Union the leftwingers massed their supporters and pushed through an emergency motion approving of the plan. It was opposed by the President and officers of the Union who called a further meeting of the Union for Wednesday, October 23, when

STUDENT MALAISE

125

the decision in favour of occupation was rescinded by a narrow majority. (The meeting was attended by a quite exceptional number of students, occupying not only the School's main lecture theatre but two other large rooms linked to it by loudspeakers and the voting was 612 to 533). Simultaneously a petition against 'occupation9 was being organised and over 1,000 signatures to it were secured. The next day, October 24, further meetings of students took place to discuss the matter. The Director had meanwhile warned members of the staff that the School would need to be completely closed after the normal hour of closing, 6 p.m. on Saturday; and no doubt to forestall any such action a group of some 200 (probably not all students of the London School of Economics) 'slept in' over the night of October 24/25. On arrival at the School early next morning the Director declared the whole School officially closed. This was, and was no doubt expected to be, no more than a formality; the School authorities had not the physical power to evict the intruders and even if they had wished to call in police help, it is unlikely that the police could have spared men for such action at that time. In fact the two principal buildings of the School's complex were 'occupied' throughout Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Considerable efforts were made by the organisers to maintain order and to clean up at the end of the occupation; special purpose rooms such as the Library and the Senior Common Room and the private rooms of staff members were not entered. Although no precise details are available there is no doubt that considerable numbers of participants in the demonstration made use of the School to sleep in or otherwise. The demonstration itself, as is well known, was very orderly and passed off with no more than a small amount of violence in the vicinity of the American Embassy; and very little call can have been made on the medical assistance offered at the School. Normal activities were resumed at the School on Monday, October 28; but the outright defiance of authority in occupying the School premises for completely extraneous and unauthorised purposes could not be ignored. Nor could the action of some members of the teaching staff who had openly

126

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

supported the 'occupation5. The Court of Governors had a meeting scheduled for a few days later, on October 31, and after that meeting issued a statement condemning those responsible and making clear that they could not approve any use of the School's buildings for the kind of purpose envisaged on this occasion. They further made it clear that, although disciplinary action was not contemplated on this occasion, they would regard it as proper to take such action against both students and staff concerned on any similar occasion in the future; and endorsed the authority given to the Director by their Standing (or executive) Committee to close the School in similar circumstances. Naturally this statement provoked a rejoinder from the militants who succeeded in getting a meeting of the Students Union on November i (attended by far fewer members than the previous week's meetings) to pass a motion completely opposing the Governor's views. This motion had been opposed by the President of the Union and he and four of his colleagues on the Student's Council decided to resign rather than continue to represent the Union in the pursuance of policies with which they did not agree and which were decided upon at unrepresentative meetings dominated by the militants. In a public statement ably explaining their point of view they stated their conviction that the policy accepted by the Union was 'deliberately designed to be disastrous for the future of the School'; they condemned the support given to those policies by the 'many students' who 'seem to have come to the College hoping for fun and glamour' and found even more disturbing the countenance given to the extremists by numbers of the academic staff. While deploring the stiff attitude taken by the Governors they urged the need to work out effective ways of safeguarding academic freedom. Some expected the clear 'confrontation' between the militants and the School's Governors to lead quickly to another attempt at a sit-in, but this did not happen, energies being perhaps diverted to the internal crisis of the Students Union created by the resignations of its President and Council. The consequential elections resulted in the return

STUDENT MALAISE 5

127

of 'moderate candidates, but candidates put up by the radical Socialist Society polled over 40 % of the votes. It is relevant - and very symptomatic - that even in such a hotly contested and publicised election only a little over one-third of the London School of Economics student body actually voted. Up to the end of the Michaelmas Term there were no other formal clashes between students and the School's establishment. This episode contained a whole series of points of interest. There is a large air of fantasy about the idea of using the London School of Economics as a 'sanctuary', with all its mediaeval echoes. On the occasion of demonstrations in this country the police rarely pursue offenders beyond the scene of any 'incidents'; they arrest on the spot or not at all. But if on this occasion they had wanted to arrest someone who had gone into the School they would no doubt have done so whether or not it was labelled 'sanctuary'. Equally the idea of special arrangements being needed for medical attention comes from a world of fantasy because there is no evidence that hospital casualty departments make any difficulties about treating demonstrators. All this no doubt was inspired by the desire to emulate the attempt of the Paris students to make the Sorbonne the headquarters of yet another Paris revolution - a concept utterly foreign to British tradition. An air of unreality attached also to the 'closing3 of the School, since the authorities were unable to enforce physical closure. What it meant was that the academic work of the School was suspended, which probably gave very little cause for concern to the militant revolutionaries but was disturbing, and, if long continued, could have been seriously damaging to the non-participating majority. What the episode did was to bring out the basic challenge of the militants to the whole university concept as hitherto accepted in Britain; to make clear that the drastic step of closing down is the only way in which university authorities can directly meet that challenge when it is powerfully made; and to begin the process of forcing the majority to take sides. The militants' objectives are now seen as being not internal to the universities but external. They are not concerned to

128

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

get a share of control of university government in order to make the universities more efficient as institutions of teaching, scholarship and research but to use the institutions as bases for much wider political action. Rightly convinced that any such development is entirely foreign to the existing concept of the university and bound to be destructive of all that the university has stood for, the authorities could leave no doubt of their absolute refusal to countenance it. In disputes about the part to be played by the student voice in university affairs, about rules of discipline or academic regulations, there might always be room for discussion and maybe for compromise. On whether the university should be a home of learning or a base for the organisation of political revolution there is no room for compromise. Whether because of this philosophical difference or because patience was exhausted the London School of Economics authorities put aside any idea of'living with' the unauthorised activities and turned to the only reliable weapon in their hands, the suspension of the School's ordinary activities. Whether that threat would induce the majority who no doubt do prefer the traditional concept of a university's function to establish control over the recalcitrant minority still remained to be seen.* What caused all this ? First, let there be no mistake that the events briefly narrated really were something novel in Britain and the United States and other countries which are democratic in the modern sense. Student riots had certainly not been unknown in the Middle Ages; many of the traditional forms of university life arose out of the devices developed to control hot-headed students and avoid clashes with local secular authorities. In more modern times student demonstrations, strikes, etc. have been common enough in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. At a Commonwealth Universities Conference held in Cambridge in 1953 one Asian delegate remarked that he was surprised to find no reference on the agenda to the handling of student strikes; and when I visited Lima. Peru, in 1962 I was shown the * A further and more violent disturbance and a longer period of closure in January-February, 1969 left the issue still not clearly decided.

STUDENT MALAISE

I2Q

bullet marks on the walls of the principal university which were a memento of the last clash between students and police. But in Britain and the United States it was still reasonable to believe in the dictum attributed to Walter Bagehot that students in authoritarian countries were revolutionary and in democratic countries were conservative. Suddenly this has become quite untrue. A good many explanations have been offered: dissatisfaction with the deterioration of university conditions due to over-rapid expansion; loss of contact between teachers and students; more generally the impersonal atmosphere resulting from the growth in the size of institutions; the alleged breakdown of communications between the 'authorities' and students; the coming into the universities of large numbers of students from homes with no university background; prospective difficulties in finding employment; contrariwise the lack of any feeling of personal responsibility resulting from the basic security provided by the welfare state or, more specifically, from over-generous state support for universities and for students; reaction against the rigidities of the university system, in which the student feels more and more a powerless and depersonalised unit; more widely reaction against society as a whole; and the greater maturity and knowledge of young people which justifies their claiming a real share in the control of the educational institutions they attend. Examining these possible explanations one by one, it is hard to accept unsatisfactory physical conditions, i.e., accommodation for teaching and student amenities, as a general explanation. They may have been a real factor in Paris and have often been quoted as a significant factor at the London School of Economics, but so far as the London School of Economics is concerned, conditions today are actually better than they have been for decades (and certainly far better than they were in the early twenties). Moreover the later incidents of unrest in Britain have occurred at universities with no similar problems of congestion; and the American universities which have suffered from student troubles generally enjoy physical facilities which would be the envy of

1

I3O

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

any European university. If there is anything in the point about physical inadequacies it probably lies in the gap between propaganda and the realities of university life. This gap has been particularly noticeable, as pointed out by Michael Beloff in his Plateglass University (November 1968) in the newest British Universities, largely because of the high hopes built up by their preliminary publicity. Within the general field of physical provision lies also the residential accommodation of students. Viewed in purely material terms it is probable that there has been a net improvement in that area in recent years; certainly the proportion of students accommodated in colleges or halls of residence has increased, if only moderately. There are, however, possible psychological effects of the changes which have been going on in student residence in the wider sense, to which we shall need to return. Equally dubious as a general explanation is the theory of decline in staff-student contact. In the universities of the United Kingdom taken as a whole the ratio of staff to students has shown a steady improvement since the end of World War II and is today more favourable than it has ever been before; and this has gone along, indeed is inextricably bound up with, the simultaneous growth in the use of the class, tutorial or seminar as opposed to the more impersonal lecture. Again, it is the newer universities, which have concentrated on the more personal teaching methods, which have had most trouble. Nonetheless there may be something more in this suggested explanation in that while students may actually have more contact with some teachers, they may have less contact than they may have expected, and perhaps less than their predecessors of earlier times had, with the more senior teachers, the scholars of world renown at whose feet they may have dreamed of sitting. For one thing, as universities and individual departments increase in size it becomes impossible for senior professors to have personal contact with all the students nominally under their care. Beyond that, moreover, world-renowned scholars are apt to spend much less of their time in their own universities than they used to. They are increasingly, especially scholars in the natural sciences and

STUDENT MALAISE

13!

social studies, involved in advisory work for governments; and the ease of modern communications plus the generous provision of travel funds from a variety of sources have made it all too easy for a well-known teacher to spend much of his time on sabbatical leave or special secondments to other institutions. The resultant decline in personal contacts with senior teachers may therefore be a legitimate grievance. At the same time, even if it is not a positive grievance it may remove a certain stabilising influence by leaving staff-student contacts too much in the hands of very junior teachers themselves not far removed from the student atmosphere and with no permanent commitment to the institution in which they are working. There was real point in the story current about a Berkeley department at the time of the original troubles there, that the Professor was away in Washington advising the President; the Assistant Professor was on sabbatical leave; the Associate Professor (Lecturer in British terms) was too busy on the administration of the department to do any teaching; and the only man still expected to teach was a Graduate Assistant whose time was in fact wholly taken up in organising protests against the Vietnam war. Not unreasonably the official enquiry into the student troubles in the University of California concluded that difficulties of contact with senior teachers had contributed significantly to the unrest. Continuing down the list, it seems prima facie reasonable that students may feel a more general lack of personal contact in the huge universities of today, that as they grow from a thousand or so students to approaching ten thousand, students may resent the growing feeling that they are merely units in a vast mass-production machine. Again there is an apt American story, of the student haled before a disciplinary body after a protest demonstration who said triumphantly, 'Well, at last someone knows I'm here.' But the theory does not stand up to critical examination. Universities of ten thousand or more students still seem very large in British eyes, but they have been common in America and elsewhere for decades without acute student unrest emerging. The scale of individual institutions in America had not changed notably

132

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

before the current wave of unrest. On the other side it has on the whole been the smaller, not the largest, institutions in Britain which have experienced the liveliest student activity. It is no doubt true that students feel a lack of personal influence on many events which affect their lives but they feel it no more than ordinary citizens, or at least if they feel it more strongly it is because they are more intellectually alive, not because of any special novelties in their own situations. This is part of a much more widespread feeling of malaise which we shall come back to. Allied with the theory of 'impersonality' is the frequently quoted 'breakdown of communications' between the authorities and the student body. Often as this has been alleged I have never seen a scrap of evidence that less information has been provided to students (or to staff) about university affairs in recent years than was formerly provided. On the contrary there has been a steady, if not spectacular, growth of channels of communication and consultation and the much greater press and broadcasting publicity given to university affairs has almost certainly resulted in the general public students included - being better informed than ever before. Too often 'breakdown of communications' has meant no more than that some university authority, having heard, understood and disagreed with some student proposal, has rejected it, students being at least as prone as other people to assume that no one could disagree with them if he really understood what they were saying. In other cases the phrase has been used with deliberate evil intent; an instance at the London School of Economics was when the student newspaper proclaimed the breakdown of communications because no reply had been received to a letter to the authorities which had not even been delivered when the paper went to press. Of course channels of communication are important and improvements in them are always worth attempting, but they have to be used by both sides to be effective. One aspect of the personal relations of the student with his institution which has figured in specific incidents has been that of the alleged subjection of students to antiquated rules of conduct and disciplinary procedures. Here the roles appear

STUDENT MALAISE

133

reversed; it is the university which is said to claim a close interest in the student's conduct and the student who wishes the university to stand entirely aloof. In fact the in loco parentis relationship has already been greatly weakened; in some of the newest foundations it has been explicitly discarded and in a number of the older institutions regulations relating to general conduct were already becoming virtual dead letters. The more serious incidents, particularly those at the London School of Economics, were not concerned with attempts to regulate private personal behaviour but with attempts deliberately to disrupt or distort the ordinary academic activities of the institution. Moreover, although complaints often refer to arbitrary or summary disciplinary action, the London School of Economics sit-in was a protest against the outcome of a disciplinary procedure of a very elaborate kind in which every endeavour was made to follow the principles of public justice as understood in Britain. The general public has undoubtedly been deceived by the frequent references to old-fashioned discipline. What has been involved has not been the breaking of out-of-date formal rules but deliberate attempts to interfere with the working of institutions together with interference with the ordinary rights, including the right of free speech, of other members of the academic community. To many, the idea that recent discontents are due to the incursion of a new class of students is attractive. It is suggested that in former generations students came overwhelmingly from homes used to the university tradition whereas now most of them are 'first generation' students, i.e., students whose parents had not been at universities. The factual evidence is far from complete, e.g., recent investigations provide some figures of the proportion of 'first generation' students today but there are no comparable figures for former generations. In fact it is ridiculous to suppose that the increase in numbers of university students which has been going on for generations has come wholly from the families of former graduates. Almost certainly the early recruits to the Redbrick universities came from families which had never known a university student before. As I look back to my own

134

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

student days, nearly fifty years ago, I cannot recall one of my fairly large circle of friends who was not a 'first generation' student. (It is noteworthy that the number of students in British universities doubled between 1914 and 1920.) Yet neither in the Redbrick universities nor in the London School of Economics of 1920 was there any sign of student revolt of the kind we are now discussing. Again the evidence on the other side points against the theory; quite as many of the most active 'left-wing' student leaders are from university-educated families as from (educationally) lower-class families. Concern about employment prospects has been said to be a cause of student unrest in France and since the rate of university expansion has been higher there than in Britain there may be reason for such concern as there certainly is in some less developed countries. But there is no reason to believe that there is any general anxiety on this score in Britain; the market for graduates is still good and there is no ground for regarding this as one of the causes of unrest in this country. Some observers indeed would attribute some influence to the opposite consideration that students today feel too little personal responsibility for their future or indeed for their situation as students. For the great majority it is true that the state has enabled them to become students and is maintaining them while they are students, with no question of any consequent liability by way of repayment or obligation to give public service; and it is taken for granted that the community will ensure that, once they have taken their degrees, they will get suitably well-paid employment. Elsewhere, e.g., in the United States of America, where there is no well-organised welfare state to provide university education as well as everything else, it is still not implausible that the general state of affluence makes life too easy and diminishes the sense of individual responsibility. But that cannot be adduced as an explanation of unrest in far poorer countries. Are we right, however, to look for a common thread in all the incidents of student 'revolt' across the world? The ostensible objects have varied widely. Traditionally in authoritarian regimes, whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East,

STUDENT MALAISE

135

Spain or Latin America, student agitation has been broadly for democracy and freedom in the old British liberal sense, the universities being centres of such movements because there seems to linger in many countries a recognition of their 'sanctuary' status; and agitation there, though also largely coloured, particularly in the Middle East, by nationalistic passions, still partakes a good deal of the old liberal fervour. In other countries, e.g., Japan and India, the immediate issues have been more obviously nationalistic or communal anti-Americanism in Japan or internal communal, linguistic or religious differences in India. In the United States specific internal political issues - the Vietnam war and aspects of the colour problem-have often been the immediate occasions of protest; but claims for reform of the system of university government have also been widespread. In Europe, too, general political issues and matters of internal university policy have both been involved, but the political issues have been far less clear in America. Typically in the French university disturbances, the political views of the students seem to have boiled down to a general protest against the Gaullist regime, without any specific issues in mind or any fixed disposition to support any of the existing opposition parties. In Britain the emphasis on purely university matters has been rather greater and the lack of specific political objectives even more notable. Student support for resolutions or demonstrations against the Vietnam war or any other war-like activity by the Western countries or against anything thought to constitute racial discrimination can be confidently relied upon, but since the university authorities have not sought to prevent the expression of such views (which most university teachers and administrators would probably share) it has not been these issues which have been in the forefront of student demands. True, in several cases incidents have begun, as in the London School of Economics, the University of Essex and Leeds, with attempts by the authorities to deal with action going beyond the mere expression of views on racial or defence issues, but these have soon been turned into general discussion of the forms of university government,

136

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

general rights of students, etc., and no attempt has been made to use the university strike or sit-in as a means of securing a change in government policy on such matters. Nonetheless, this lack of specific political objectives is fully compatible with the pursuance by the radical student movement of political objectives of a much broader, if also far vaguer kind. These objectives seem often to consist of no more than a generalised opposition to modern industrial civilisation in any form, including the industrial civilisation of the Russian form of Communism, although inevitably concentrated on Western European capitalism as the more familiar example. In so far as it is Communist in sympathy, it is the Communism of Marcuse rather than of Marx. In 1967 perhaps the remark of mine which the London School of Economics student protesters found most objectionable was a comment that their philosophy was essential anarchist; but anarchism has come to be more and more explicitly adopted as the ideal by the more active student leaders and I understand that at the time of the abortive sit-in in sympathy with the Paris students the anarchist flag was hoisted at the London School of Economics. It is in line with this anarchist approach that every exercise of authority by university administrations is objected to, precisely because it is an exercise of authority. Perhaps the one part of orthodox Marxism which the current student movement would accept is the belief in the withering away of the state (and all other forms of authority) except that whereas Marx saw that withering away as the end result of a long social process, the student extremists see it as the immediate objective. The argument that the disappearance of authority would mean the collapse of society naturally hardly moves them as they are in full reaction against modern industrial society as a whole. What would, or even what should, take its place is apparently immaterial. 'Stop the world, I want to get off' is a fair summary of extremer student philosophy. Of course few would really go this far, even in philosophical discussion, let alone in practical policy. But many are fascinated by the populist ideal of full 'democratic' control, the idea of everybody somehow participating in the making of

STUDENT MALAISE

137

all decisions. Hence the proposals for extensive student participation in university government. Faced with the obvious impossibility of getting thousands of students to take part in detailed decision-making, the London School of Economics leaders in 1967 still sought to get as wide a participation as possible by proposing to entrust powers of administration to an assembly of 60 staff members and 60 students, while reserving large powers of ultimate control on the one side to the Academic Board (the mass meeting of staff) and on the other to the Students Union (the mass meeting of students). These and other, perhaps more practicable, ideas of student participation in university government will be discussed later. Immediately I would turn back to consider what may be the origins of this underlying mentality of revolt from and protest against things at large. The first clue is probably to be found in the disillusion with politics already noted. Compared with earlier generations it is hard for the young idealist to believe in any simple reform which will lead the way to Utopia. Once the Parliamentary franchise or socialism could be seen in that role. Today we in the U.K. have had universal adult franchise for fifty years and we have had a socialist party in office four times and in effective power certainly twice. The most obvious social evils — mass unemployment, poverty as it is now seen only in Asia or Africa, child labour in factories, and so on - have for all practical purposes vanished. Whatever sneers the phrase may provoke, we in Britain, in the United States of America and most of Western Europe do live in an affluent society. Yet there seem to be as many problems as ever. If poverty in the Asian sense has vanished there are still many who are poor in the sense of being noticeably worse off than the majority; but over and above such residual problems of income distribution the social worker of today is more and more preoccupied with more psychological problems - crime which steadily increases and can no longer comfortably be attributed to poverty; drug-taking; broken homes and marriages; and more and more readily diagnosed individual psychological disorders. To none does a simple answer present itself. Beyond these problems within the country lie vastly dis-

138

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

turbing problems on the world scene, above all the problems of potential war and of racial, religious and ideological conflict. These are the issues which have stirred the emotions in the last decade in a way which internal politics have wholly failed to do; nuclear disarmament, South African apartheid, Suez, Hungary, relations between white and coloured in America, biological warfare, Vietnam. Of course the choice of issues on which students choose to take a stand is illogical, concentrating on the forms, rather than the causes of war, on the defensive actions of the more liberal governments which are open to the pressures of public opinion rather than the offensive actions of governments not so responsive and emphasising the comparatively mild racial conflicts to be observed in Western Europe and North America to the exclusion of the far more bitter and disastrous conflicts between Arab and Jew in the Middle East, Hindu and Moslem in India or Negro and Negro in almost every new state in Africa. But at bottom the instinct is right; war and communal hatreds are major threats to the future of the world. The very fact that none of today's student population had any personal contact with the Second World War makes the fear all the greater because it is fear of the unknown. It is, moreover, as true of the international as of the internal situation that the young man or woman of today feels powerless to do anything on his or her own account to improve things. Even if persuaded that nuclear disarmament or the overthrow of the white regimes in Southern Africa are the keys to world harmony there is not much in practice that he or she can do to bring those events about. Happier the young people of earlier generations or other countries, persuaded that their individual efforts to bring about the spread of Christianity or of European rule or of Communism were contributing to the coming of the millenium! At the same time, powerful elements both in the political and the academic worlds have fostered the belief that there must somewhere be a solution to all these problems if only 'They' would allow one access to it. Presumably all political parties in democratic countries must be prone to hold out extravagant hopes of the great benefits which will follow the

STUDENT MALAISE

139

adoption of their politics; and it has been well observed that this is apt to be particularly true where there are two parties with almost equal electoral backing competing for the small marginal vote. But the British Labour Party was particularly successful in creating the myth that it knew all the answers and the now self-evident fact that it does not has only added to the sense of disillusion. On the academic side far too many teachers in the increasingly popular social studies have fallen into the twofold error of, first, teaching their subject in terms of 'problems' rather than analysis of facts, and secondly, confidently diagnosing the ways in which society falls short of perfection - than which nothing is easier - and leaving it to others to find ways of real improvement, than which few things are harder. Underlying all this, no doubt, is the basic change in outlook which has already been noted in discussing the purposes of universities, the decay of standards which removes any presumption of respect for existing authority and institutions, elevates novelty to the level of the principal criterion of values and encourages the tendency of intellectually arrogant young people to believe whatever ideas are currently in their minds to be the last word in human wisdom. As also noted, it is perhaps asking something unprecedented of the universities to expect them to lead a new moral or philosophical movement which would re-establish some kind of standards, but it is nonetheless to be regretted that so many individuals in the university world have so readily fallen in with the trends of the time and that the universities as a whole have so largely abandoned their traditional character-training function and so failed to provide effective opposition to those trends. I believe this feeling of frustration and impatience, based ultimately on the erosion of moral and other standards, which affects young people generally and not only university students, to be the main underlying cause of the outbursts of the last year or two. But there are special factors tending to intensify such feelings among students. It is probable that many of them find 'university' intensely disappointing. I have already remarked on the increase in the reputation and

I4O

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

'glamour' of the universities in recent decades. Young people expect to find in it a great widening of their intellectual interests; they look forward equally to the greater freedom they will have to pursue non-academic interests. As also noted, they have to undergo an intense and anxiety-ridden competitive struggle to secure admittance; and they expect the prize to be worth the effort. Moreover, the fact that there are more applicants than places does not deter the universities from competing for students. The newer institutions, anxious to justify their possibly premature creation and their innovations in organisation and degree structure, have been particularly disposed to publicise their attractions. Having reached the promised land the newly admitted student finds it much less glamorous than he expected. Conditions of work and teaching, access to tutors, etc. are no worse in practice, almost certainly better, than formerly, but they probably still fall a good deal short of what the young men and women have been led to expect. Intellectually the transition to the university is no longer the awakening of the mind which it once was. Sixth Form work will normally already have been an introduction to the habit of individual work and some degree of original thinking; and in any particular subject the students will have attained a level formerly only reached at the university. A large proportion of young people will have travelled abroad, probably not only with their parents but in groups of their own age. Access to libraries is far better than it was; television has added another exceptionally powerful medium for introducing people of all ages to all the newest ideas. Thus the university is no longer to anything like the extent it once was the place where the young first meet great ideas; it has been forestalled by school, press, television and other influences. The letdown is rendered still worse when, as happens in too many subjects, the initial work at the university is no more than a repetition, or at best a continuation on the same lines, of work already done at school. A second factor, allied to the last consideration, is the undue leisure which many students have. In non-scientific and non-professional courses the formal claims on a student's

STUDENT MALAISE

14!

time will probably average no more than two or three hours a day. In theory he should be reading for another five or six hours, but quite a lot get by - and end up with a respectable degree - with very much less. Again in theory, it is admirable that a student should have substantial leisure to pursue his general mental development, and the rosy stories of life in former days at Oxbridge depicted the glories and joys of that leisure. But the students of that golden age had not only leisure, they also had the means to enjoy it. To a student with no other resources than the standard government grant leisure can be merely tantalising. He might well be better off if, like so many students in other countries, he was 'working his way through college' with some kind of part-time job; but that is rendered impossible as a general practice by university rules which strictly forbid it, by trade union rules which impose obstacles to the taking of many possible jobs and by the general climate of opinion. Yet another factor tending to create disappointment is the way most students in fact live. The ideal picture is that of the Oxbridge college, maybe not entirely up to date but full of charm and character and above all the centre of both academic and social life; even for those students at Oxford and Cambridge not actually living in college (nowadays 50 % or more) the college remains a real centre and the most powerful institutional influence on the student. Outside those two universities the student will live either at home, in lodgings or in halls of residence or hostels. Students at London and other big-city universities who live at home or in lodgings will commute like hundreds of thousands of office workers over distances of some miles. Somewhat unexpectedly students in the newest foundations, sited in smaller towns, may have to travel even further because of the scarcity of local lodgings. Even if living in university accommodation the student may have a fair distance to travel. Only in a few of the later Redbrick foundations has he much chance of enjoying the easy proximity of living accommodation, study place and leisure activities which is the ideal he may have dreamed of. At the best the hall of residence is hardly ever as much the centre of his life, an anchor of stability to replace the home

142

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

or boarding school he has left, as it is at Oxford and Cambridge. Very often the modern hall of residence or hostel is no more than a large boarding house. Its residents are not bound together by anything more than the tie of common occupation of a building. The fashion of the times tends to favour the simple provision of bedrooms or flatlets with perhaps some communal services but the minimum of communal life; and customs and observances which build up the sense of 'belonging' - formal meals, or indeed any meals in common, disciplinary rules about hours, visitors, etc. - are frequently disliked by at least the more articulate students and are more and more commonly allowed to lapse. And of course only a minority enjoy even the small degree of integration provided by living in halls; the rest live at home or in lodgings and the larger number in lodgings. Although it is unfashionable to say it, it is arguable that the best off are those who are able to live at home. Much is heard of the difficulties of working amid the normal domestic interruptions of an ordinary household, but my own guess would be that a considerable majority of parents are genuinely anxious to make it possible for their children to study and will often contrive conditions of privacy quite as effective as those prevailing in practice in halls of residence. Allowing, however, for any disadvantages of study for the home-dwellers, I believe they benefit more by retaining contact with their homes as a basis of stability than they would gain by the freedom of living on their own. In any era a mass of young people put together away from home are likely very soon to get their feet off the ground. In a time like the present, when there is so much publicity about 'youth' and the gap between the generations, placing them in a situation in which they mix with few outside their own age group makes them especially liable to be swept into mass movements by their extremer and more vociferous contemporaries. In our rapidly changing and often bewildering world we are, by overvaluing the independence of life away from home, putting too great a burden on still immature young people. Worst off on the average are those who live in lodgings. Rooms are harder and harder to find under the dual pres-

STUDENT MALAISE

143

sures of two effects of affluence - the decline in the number who need to let rooms to eke out a living and the increase in demand from tourists; the standard of comfort in lodgings is apt to be lower than in halls or at home; the conditions of study are unlikely to be better; and there is of course a complete absence of any contribution to corporate life or any centre of stability. It has been a tragedy that government policies have, on the one hand, through the system of maintenance grants, encouraged students to leave their homes and go to far distant universities, and on the other, have left the provision of residential accommodation almost entirely to private benefactions, with the result of forcing a large number of students into poor-standard lodgings. Connected with, or complementary to, the ineffectiveness of residential arrangements as an integrating and stabilising force has been the great growth in recent times in the status of the Students Union. In Oxford and Cambridge the Union Society was, and still is, a distinguished debating society, with a membership comprising only a small proportion of the undergraduate population and with no pretensions to represent that population as a whole; there were college organisations of undergraduates in the Junior Common Rooms, but no body to which all students in the university naturally belonged. In the Redbrick Universities and the London colleges there grew up a new style of student organisation in the Students Unions which all students were expected to join and which were deliberately developed as centres of social life and extra-curricular activities because these otherwise, in the original conditions of those universities, might have been very slow in growth. For many years now students have not merely been encouraged to join their Students Unions but are automatically constituted members upon registration, the subscription, which was formerly collected by the University or college as a matter of convenience, being now treated as part of the normal sessional fee. Entirely supported by funds received through the University, the Union has become not only the main centre of extra-curricular activity and the channel through which other social and recreational societies receive assistance, but

144

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

also very commonly the controlling body for student refectories, common rooms, etc. In many universities 'the Union' means indeed, not a society, but the building in which student activities are carried on. Besides these social activities the Students Union may run a shop or shops for the sale of books, stationery, college ties and scarves and other miscellaneous supplies and concern itself with a variety of welfare services, especially supplementing university or college activities in the finding of lodgings. Above all it will serve as the main channel for communications between the student body as a whole and the university authorities, for the representation of the student body in wide organisations, especially the National Union of Students, and for the expression of student views on any and every subject from the level of student grants to the behaviour of the Government of their own or any other country. Some attempts have been made to canalise the expression of student views on matters of internal administration through Student's Representative Councils or Staff-Student liaison committees, but these have had no more than moderate success. In my own experience at the London School of Economics students made virtually no attempt to utilise the committees of this kind which had been set up many years ago, preferring the technique of the minatory resolution passed by a Students Union meeting. These monolithic, all-comprehending Students Unions have not unnaturally come to play a very important part in the lives of the non-Oxbridge student, doing more than any other organisation to fill the gap left by the absence of any developed centre of non-academic life in the normal university structure. Not surprisingly students develop a loyalty to their Unions rivalling or surpassing their loyalty to their Universities or colleges. A variety of complementary developments has added to the strength of Union feeling. The National Union of Students, itself in effect a federation of individual Students Unions, has been skilfully built up and has benefited greatly from becoming the negotiating body for students over the level and conditions of government grants and the many other practical implications for students of government policies; and it is only through his own Students

STUDENT MALAISE

145

Union that the individual Student can influence the National Union of Students. The University Grants Committee, when it has paid its quinquennial visitations to universities, has followed the practice of devoting part of the visit to private talks with representatives of the Students Union. Where student representatives have been appointed to internal committees or to membership of Governing Bodies, it has normally been taken for granted that they would be either officials of the Union ex-officio or nominees of the Union. It has to be confessed that officials of the Union often devote far more time and energy to impressing the role of the Union on new students than academic staff devote to explaining the role of the University itself. An important difference is that the President of the Union is nearly always bursting with conviction about the importance of his and its role, whereas the teacher is normally painfully aware of, and conscientiously anxious to disclose what the university is unable to do for its students; another is that Union officials can, for a period, put aside everything else to engage in propaganda, while teachers do have to teach. As a result of all these influences the Students Unions have become quite powerful bodies. At the same time their growth in size has had the inevitable effect of destroying any possibility of genuinely democratic control of them. In an institution with a few hundred students it is still possible to get a meeting attended by over half the members. When the student body runs into several thousands that ceases to be physically possible - if it were it would result in a meeting of quite unmanageable size. (At the London School of Economics with a student population of over 3,000, the largest lecture theatre has an official capacity of under 500 and is claimed, at a time of intense interest, to have accommodated a meeting of 750; while the total number of votes cast in even a hotly contested election for the Presidency of the Union has rarely much exceeded 1,000.) As in similar situations in any form of government or administration, the result is that the conduct of affairs falls into the hands of a small group. Most frequently that will be the group who get elected to the Presidency, membership of the Council of the Union, etc; but K

146

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

sometimes, more mischievously, real control may be exercised by a group who avoid the responsibilities of office but effectively dominate the mostly thinly attended meetings which give policy instructions to the officials of the Union. In either case the small group are apt to be motivated above all by the quest for power; and in either case, also, their power is largely irresponsible. In the case of Union officials their terms are fixed and re-election is practically unknown, so that the ordinary democratic sanctions are absent. Making a reputation, i.e., somehow getting into the newspapers or on television, is what matters most, particularly when, as is often the case, the ultimate aim of the Student Union activist is a political career. Granted all the temptations and pressures towards irresponsibility it is on the whole remarkable that Student Union leaders have hitherto been as good as they have been. The tendency for the officers of the Union to become something apart has been strengthened by the spread of the practice of giving the President, and sometimes other officers, what is called a sabbatical year, i.e., to allow him an extra year of study to compensate for his year of office. The arguments for this practice are persuasive - the time absorbed by Union affairs, etc. - but I believe basically mistaken, precisely because it consolidates the separation of Union officer from student and elevates Union office into a prize for the power seeker. This essentially non-democratic, oligarchic control of the Union's activities does not in practice diminish the loyalty to it of the average student. As in the closely parallel case of the Trade Union the ordinary member feels in honour bound to support decisions taken at meetings he has not even attended and with which he may not even agree. Hence the exaggerated claim made at one stage of the London School of Economics affair in 1966/67 that a resolution of the Union absolved an officer from obedience to any other authority. I have no doubt that the creation of the modern type of Student Union was a mistake. The concentration within that single organisation of so many functions has inevitably led to its becoming to a significant degree a rival to the University or College for the loyalty of students. The effective

STUDENT MALAISE

147

management and control of the Union tends to fall into the hands of semi-professionals, nearly always with a strong political bent.* As elsewhere the desire for power grows with the exercise of it and decisions to make certain Union offices full-time posts, based as they have been on the time occupied by Union business, have resulted in still more matters becoming Union business in order to fill the time so made available - yet another instance of Parkinson's Law. The development of the National Union of Students has contributed further to the professionalisation of student organisation. But it is one thing to say that it would have been better if Student Unions (of this type) had never been created; it is a much harder matter to remedy the mistake; and there is no doubt that sufficient vested interests have been built up to offer very strong resistance to major changes. What I believe should be aimed at are reforms in two quite different areas. First the business of student affairs should be divided between various organisations instead of being concentrated in one, and membership of a general Students Union should become voluntary, not compulsory and automatic. Contact with 'the authorities' and representation of student interests and views on the general running of the institution should be the business of a Students Representative Council elected, not on a mass vote of the whole body but by a series of constituencies divided by department or faculty as well as by seniority. Financing of miscellaneous societies should be handled directly by the administration advised by student groups, not delegated to the central Union (another way, incidentally, in which the prestige and reputation for beneficence of the Union have been built up). The organisation of debates might well become the function of a separate society corresponding to the Union Societies of Oxford and Cambridge. And finally the management of student facilities, the Union building, etc. should be made much more a joint function of student representatives and the administration, with the conscious intention to emphasise rather than to conceal the * Not always left-wing political. Even the London School of Economics has had in the last dozen years about as many declared Conservative Presidents of its Union as declared Labour Presidents.

148

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

endeavours of the institution itself to make life pleasant for the student. In so far as any general Students Union continued its members should join it voluntarily and pay subscriptions to it as to other voluntary Societies; this would remove the problem which has repeatedly arisen of individual students disagreeing strongly with the views expressed or action taken by the Students Union but being unable to dissociate themselves from it by resignation. In the important area of the presentation of student views on the running of institutions, I am sure that the important thing is that such views should really become known to the authorities responsible for taking decisions, not that students should share in the decision-making power. There are a variety of very different but equally cogent reasons for not giving such power to the student body as a whole. The first is that it is, as a matter of practical organisation, impossible. Clearly decisions which have to be taken in a large modern university almost every day, involving complex considerations of finance, personalities and academic priorities, cannot be taken by a body of thousands of students. If there is to be student participation in such decision-making, it must be through a quite small number of student members, probably no more than two or three, of the University Senate or Council. Those few could not really represent the very different points of view of students in different faculties and different stages of study; but a much more serious qualification to their representative character is that they would not be responsible representatives in the sense that Members of Parliament are responsible. It is easily forgotten that systems of representative government only work because the representatives, whether M.P.s, members of Congress or deputies in any other legislatures, normally want to be re-elected at the end of their terms; they are professionals whose careers depend not on getting elected once but on getting elected repeatedly, and to do that they must show that they are continuing to serve their constituents. Student representatives, serving probably for no more than a year at a time would be under no such discipline. The second cogent objection to significant participation by

STUDENT MALAISE

149

students in University government is their essential incompetence. All the important decisions in a university, whether on the allocation of resources, the creation of new departments or research units, the modification of degree structures or the appointment of teachers, turn finally on academic priorities and it simply is not good sense to expect sound judgement on such issues from people who are still only at a comparatively early stage of study of the subjects involved. This is an area in which democracy is quite definitely not the best system of government and there has been far too much misleading appeal to democratic principles in the agitation for student participation. There are some areas in which student participation in the process of decision itself may be reasonable, e.g., in matters of general amenities and welfare, but in the essential academic business of a university all that is desirable is that those responsible for taking decisions should be fully aware of any relevant student points of view. There is therefore room for considerable development of consultative machinery at all levels, departmental, faculty, college and university. A third objection is that recent events suggest very strongly that student participation in decision-making would be used primarily for political purposes. In my experience at the London School of Economics the only specific issues of ordinary administration on which any attempt was made to influence decisions by student pressure related to appointments where a political flavour was imported. The most notable of course was the appointment of my successor as Director, but there were several others. Basically, there can be little doubt that student participation in university government would be an influence against, not for, academic freedom. One last point on student representation is worth making. Use is often made of the argument that democratic principles require that students should share in, if not monopolise, control on the ground that they are the people primarily concerned. The argument ignores the fact that the justification of the enormous state support for universities is not the welfare of a small minority of its citizens but the general

150

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

public interest, so that if democratic principles are to apply it is the representatives of the general public who should exercise control, not the fortunate beneficiaries of the system. The other main area where reform is desirable, although perhaps even more difficult, is in the development of more direct personal responsibility on the part of the student. It is a basic defect of the structure into which we have moved in the universities that the student has become a sub-species or larval form of 'organisation man'. He feels part of a vast impersonal machine; his freedom of choice of studies is in practice highly constricted; so is the length of time of his studies (he cannot take an internal degree in less than three, or in some cases four or five, years, but at the same time it is very difficult for him to spread his studies over a longer period); if he decides that he has made a mistake and gives up his course he is permanently branded as a failure; his income is in most cases provided, but also fixed, by the omnipresent state and he can only add to it by illicit subterfuge. Following a normal socio-psychological reaction, he looks for another organisation to counter-balance the organisations with which he feels he is contending and finds it in the Students Union. Without pretending that it would remove all current causes of discontents I believe that the situation would be far easier if the student was conscious of more individual power to alter his personal situation and if, too, he felt more personal stake in his studies. I recall during discussions with London School of Economics students about the claim for student participation in the framing of degree regulations, that I replied that if they did not like a given degree they should do as they might in a restaurant where they did not like the menu, and go elsewhere, not claim to re-write the menu. I was wrong in that argument in the sense that the alternative of going elsewhere is in practice open to only a tiny minority of students. But I was right in the sense that it would be far better if students did have a far bigger chance of 'going elsewhere5 either by shifting to some other area of study in the university where they have started or by moving to another university. Some progress has been made recently towards greater

STUDENT M A L A I S E

15!

freedom of 'switching' from one field to another but much more could be done to make it not merely legally possible within university statutes but academically respectable; that is, a 'joint' degree should in no way be regarded as an inferior degree. Virtually nothing has been done, however, to facilitate switching between universities. The idea of such switching is so foreign to British university practice that it is natural to assume that there are grave objections to it; but what are they? Take first the possibility of switching from one subject to another; if that can be done within one university, why cannot the second subject be taken at a different university? If a student at Cambridge, having taken Part I in Economics, wants to take Part II in Law, why should he not do his law in London? It is the accepted view that the intellectual standards of degrees awarded by any of the universities of the United Kingdom are, within a reasonable margin of tolerance, equivalent and first degrees from any United Kingdom university are treated on terms of equality as basic qualification for postgraduate work in other United Kingdom universities. Why is it not possible to do the same for stages of the first degree? The same arguments apply equally strongly to possible switching of the place of study while keeping to the same subject of study. It is true that at present many degrees are very carefully structured in an integrated fashion so that the later years of study are closely related to the preliminary studies. It is doubtful, however, whether this is really necessary except in some professional degrees, and a number of universities have moved towards a 'course-unit' degree structure, in which the separate units are much less closely integrated and partake much more of the nature of building bricks which can be combined in a large variety of ways. If that principle is accepted, it is not obvious why some of the bricks might not come from University A and some from University B. No doubt it would be felt by many as an objection that a man would, under such a system of interchange, no longer be recognisable as a Cambridge or a London or a Manchester graduate; but would that matter? In so far as a university

152

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

education gives a graduate not merely a certain corpus of knowledge but a habit of thought, more generally an approach to life, is there any adequate ground for assuming that it is better for a student to learn only one such habit or approach, assuming the various universities to be truly distinctive in that way, rather than to have become acquainted with a greater variety of approaches? And is there also any ground for assuming that it invariably needs a three-year period for the student to absorb whatever it is a university has to offer in that way? It may also be felt to be a danger that if the practice of interchange between institutions became generally accepted and widely practised pressures might build up for greater uniformity between courses, to the detriment of the freedom of individual departments and individual teachers. In one way I believe this might be no bad thing, i.e., it might be well that the content of certain well-known, basic and popular courses should be reasonably uniform wherever they were offered, that courses with the same names could be relied upon to mean the same thing. What is important is that departments should be free to offer new and additional courses without regard to the requirements of uniformity and interchangeability. It is not impossible to imagine courses falling into two categories - the one group complying with the requirements of a nationally agreed syllabus and the other related to a clocaP syllabus only; with students equally free to choose from either group. I have earlier suggested that it might be an advantage of some degree of national co-ordination that the process of examination could be more efficiently organised. The main object, however, of any such large reform would be to restore to the student a greater feeling of freedom of choice, a greater sense of responsibility for his line of study. A powerful further contribution to the feeling of responsibility would be a change in the financial basis of student support. It runs counter to the dominant trend of social thinking of recent years, concerned as it has been overwhelmingly with 'social justice' and with the identification of justice with the maximum of equality; but I believe it would be not only

STUDENT MALAISE

153

salutary for the psychology of the individual but socially advantageous and, in a fuller analysis, more equitable, to terminate the present system of student support in favour of one which placed much more financial responsibility on the student. How that would best be done will be considered as part of the whole issue of the future financing of the universities. Here we have been concerned with its relevance to the particular issue of student malaise. To sum up the discussion of that issue, there can be no doubt that the recent wave of student unrest is, so far as the Western countries and particularly the Anglo-Saxon democracies are concerned, a new phenomenon; its causes are complex, including social, political and in the broad sense educational and moral factors outside the direct responsibility or control of the universities; but within the universities, while there are more immediate and more superficial causes of complaint arising from the failure of the universities as actual institutions to live up to the public relations image created by or for them, the more fundamental causes of discontent probably arise from the impersonal and rigid mould which the universities have developed and within which the student finds himself so constricted that revolt against 'the system' in the abstract seems the only answer. Granted the wider changes in outlook in which the student is a participant, especially the erosion of standards in the broad sense, it is unlikely that action within the universities alone can hope to remove the malaise completely. Nevertheless these are changes which might mitigate the effects on students themselves. In particular it is suggested that one reaction to current rigidities has been the building up of a counter to the existing 'system' in the form of organisations of students conceived as a homogeneous mass; and that a better alternative would be the restoration by a variety of means of the sense of individual personality, individual choice and individual responsibility.

7 The Government of Universities Five elements may be said to have played a part at different times in the government of universities: the students; the graduates; the teachers; the government (including local authorities and, in former days, ecclesiastical authorities); and the public at large, including self-constituted bodies of public-spirited persons who set themselves to organise institutions of higher education. In the earliest universities in Italy and France there were apt to be two currently active authorities, the students or their elected representatives and the 'masters' who were simultaneously the holders of masters degrees and the teachers; with the Pope or the King from time to time intervening to resolve disputes or sanction changes in constitutional arrangements. Student organisation may well have preceded the formal organisation of the teachers as a body, understandably enough because to begin with each teacher probably acted as an individual around whom students gathered and the first need which made itself felt was that of organising and regulating the life of these students, coming from many different countries and forming a strange element in cities not used to the incursion of large numbers of strange residents. Organisation of the masters followed soon after. It is customary to speak of Bologna as having been dominated by the students and Paris as having been dominated by the masters. The contrast may not have been all that sharp but in the event it was the 'masters' who emerged as the dominant force in the later middle ages and in modern times. The forms of student participation in university government con154

THE G O V E R N M E N T OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

155

tinued, however, in some institutions, e.g., in the Scottish Universities where Rectors, albeit with very uncertain powers, are still periodically elected by the general body of students. As already noted the 'masters' meant originally those who, having been awarded a master's degree, were fitted to teach; but as time went on a distinction inevitably developed between the whole body of holders of masters' degrees and those who were actually resident and engaged in teaching, between magistri non-regentes and the magistri regentes, to quote the ancient terminology. In practice it was the teachers who came to exercise the effective powers of day-to-day adminisstration; and in Oxford and Cambridge the practical power of the teachers was increased by the importance assumed by the Colleges and the dual role of those who were both Fellows of a College (i.e., automatically constituting the controlling authority in the college) and teachers of the University. But in Oxford and Cambridge the non-resident Masters retain to this day very significant powers when it comes to any change of statutes. Broadly speaking the two ancient Universities can be said today to be controlled by their teachers (or at least the more senior or permanently established of them) subject to the need to get the approval of a large and unpredictable body of M.A.S for constitutional changes at a certain level. When the modern English Universities began to emerge in the nineteenth century their circumstances generally ruled out any attempt to imitate the organisation of Oxbridge. Leaving London and Durham aside, the Redbrick Universities originated, not as spontaneous gatherings of scholars and students but as teaching institutions organised by a group of local people who initially, at least, saw themselves as the prime movers who hired the teachers and gathered in the students. It was natural, therefore, that when they attained university status it was a non-academic group, composed largely of representatives of local government authorities and other local organisations which emerged as the effective executive authority. The standard constitution of the new universities (which has been followed in the latest creations)

156

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

provided for a Council with a majority of such lay members but with some academic representation, controlling finance and, in form at least, appointments; and a Senate, entirely academic in composition, dealing with 'academic' matters. Naturally the Council looked to the Senate for advice on academic priorities - and in some matters was by the terms of the constitution required to consult the Senate before taking action. Over the years the influence of the academics has increased, through the advice given by the Senate and through the part played in the Council by its academic members, inevitably more expert and more continuously involved than the average lay member. All the universities have tended therefore to move, so far as detailed administration is concerned, in the direction of full academic selfgovernment; but significant power or influence is commonly exercised by the Chairman of Council and the Treasurer or Chairman of the Finance Committee (both laymen) and other active lay members of the Council, and while the advice of the Senate or of an academic advisory committee would normally be taken on appointments, positive intervention by the Council in matters of appointments has not yet become unknown. The role of the lay member of university governing bodies has, however, been diminished by other developments. Whatever may have been the initial importance of the laymen in getting most non-Oxbridge universities started, it was natural enough that when a strong and permanent academic body had been brought into existence that body would become the prime source of decisions on such academic matters as the form and content of degrees, methods of teaching, selection of students and staff, but it seemed for a time also reasonable that the mainly lay Council should control finance and 'business' matters. Increasingly the matters which might have seemed prima facie suitable to be dealt with by the Council terms of service of academic and other staff, fees of students, priority in building programmes, standards to be adopted in building construction, etc., have come to be settled in practice at central government level. It was once a very sound idea that the lay Council member played a part ill-provided

THE G O V E R N M E N T OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

157

for in the constitutions of the ancient Universities in representing the general public interest in an institution ever more largely dependent on public support. Today that role of representing the public interest has been very largely taken over by the direct interventions of the central authorities via the Department of Education and Science and the University Grants Committee. It has been a common defence of the role of the lay Council member that his presence gave a guarantee of prudent administration of the large sums of money entrusted to universities. Today, the decision of Parliament that the Comptroller and Auditor-General should have access to university accounts is a significant indication that that is no longer thought to be an adequate safeguard. Another feature of the trend towards centralisation has also weakened the power of the lay Council member, i.e., the development of the Vice-Chancellors' Committee and associated central organs. A shrewd Vice-Chancellor, while he may make play at meetings of the Committee with the difficulties of getting his Council to accept a given line of policy, can be greatly strengthened when facing a reluctant Council if he can say that the policy he is advocating is supported not only by the academics in his own university but by the massed academic wisdom of the Vice-Chancellors' Committee. Council members, having no similar channels of consultation with their own opposite numbers in other institutions, may well find it hard to counter such arguments. Student participation in university government has been negligible for a long time in English universities and little more than a vestigial formality in Scotland. Here and there arrangements might be found for the inclusion of a single student representative (or even more rarely more than one) in one of the senior organs of the University. The most common thing has been to include such a student representative in the University Court where that body is large, dignified and almost powerless. Almost the only university institution in England to include a student in the effective executive authority is Birkbeck College, and that exception is an inheritance of the origins of the College as an evening institute catering for very mature students. Most institutions have

158

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

sought to develop regular means of consulting student opinion through student Representative Councils or staffstudent Liaison Committees, sometimes provided for in Statutes but more usually created informally. These mechanisms of consultation have, as already noted in Chapter 6, had only partial success in providing channels for the expression of student opinion and recently a good deal has been heard about fuller student participation. Very little action has, however, as yet followed. The role of the graduates has also, in most universities, been small. In Oxford and Cambridge the M.A.S retain a real share in the internal legislation of the University if not in dayto-day administration; and in London, through rather different machinery, the graduates play a significant part in such legislative business and even, to some extent, in current administration. Elsewhere the graduates may have a right to elect some members of the University Court and thereby to exert some influence on the conduct of affairs, but their influence is generally quite small compared with that exercised by the 'alumni' in some private American universities. What has been said above has related primarily to the position of the mass of the universities of the country, the old Redbrick or City group and the new creations, whose constitutions are basically similar. Certain special features of Oxford and Cambridge and of the old Scottish Universities have been noted. It remains to say something of London where, although most of the individual Colleges have constitutions bearing considerable likeness in practice if not in legal form to the Redbrick type, the University itself has a pattern of its own. In the University of London there are three main organs of authority, the Court, Senate and Convocation. These represent very broadly the general public interest, the academic interest and the graduates, but both Court and Senate are of mixed composition. Finance is entirely a matter for the Court and academic affairs, including university teaching appointments, entirely a matter for the Senate (subject in each case to the right of Convocation to express its

THE G O V E R N M E N T

OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

159

views on any matter); and it is tempting to equate the Court in London to the Council of a Redbrick institution. In practice the London Court has more power than the Redbrick Council over the main issues of finance with which it deals, that is the sub-allocation of government grants to the Colleges, because it has not been the practice of the Court to seek the advice of the Senate or any other academic body on such allocations. On the other hand the Court has less power than most Councils because it has not even a formal share in the making of teaching appointments. The divorce between the financial authority and the academic authority has therefore been particularly sharp in London. It has been mentioned that neither Court nor Senate is simple in composition. The Court includes the chairman of Convocation, i.e., of the graduate body, and six persons appointed by the Senate in addition to nominees of the Crown and of local authorities in the London area; the Senate nominees are not, however, in any sense instructed delegates of the Senate. The Senate is unusual in including representatives of Convocation as well as of the various Faculties and in addition the administrative heads of a number of the Colleges; it is therefore much less of a purely academic body than most University Senates. The strength of Convocation influence will be noted both in the Senate and the Court, giving the graduate representatives a more effective share in day-to-day administration than is common elsewhere. Lastly the direct representation of the Crown, which nominates four out of the fourteen Court members, is also exceptional. As has been said already, the trend of recent years has been towards an increase in the power of the academic staff at the expense of the lay element within the individual university structure; and this trend is likely to continue. Even in London the net effect of various recent changes, in working arrangements rather than in constitutional provision, is to increase the power of the teachers of the university, including at least some move towards giving them greater influence in broad financial policy. There are, however, several developments which threaten to cut across or complicate the general trend towards increased academic power.

l6o

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

First is the increase in the effective influence of the Central Government based on the overwhelming financial dependence on government grants. This will be examined in more detail in Chapter 9; all that need be said here is that there is nothing to suggest that it is likely to come to an end or that it has yet reached its full development. Secondly a cross-current in the general growth of the academic share in internal power is the division between teachers and administrators. Vice-Chancellors are by tradition the leaders of their academic communities and have commonly emerged from the professoriate. That is still the origin of the great majority but there has been some increase in the number of heads of institutions (including Heads of Colleges in London, Oxford and Cambridge) drawn from the Civil or Diplomatic Services or from the non-university teaching world. In addition, university administrators below the Vice-Chancellor level have become much more a distinctive professional group and the growing strength of the Vice-Chancellors' Committee inevitably enhances the feeling of belonging to a corps of academic administrators rather than to an academic community in the old sense. In the University of London the moves which are being made to strengthen the influence of the Senate include an increase in the effective participation in University decisions by the Heads of Colleges operating through the Collegiate Council (a sub-body of the Senate) as well as the teachers operating through the parallel Academic Council. Thirdly another cross-current in the general growth of 'academic' power arises from a long-standing issue between senior and junior teachers. In the standard Redbrick pattern it was a not unfair generalisation that academic power meant the power of the Professors. It was they who sat automatically on the Senate; and it was the individual Professor who spoke for and dominated the Department which was so important a unit in the academic structure. There might be a small number of non-professorial staff elected to the Senate but the great majority of teachers below professorial rank could reasonably complain that they played no real part in university government. In Oxford, Cambridge and London, the

THE G O V E R N M E N T OF UNIVERSITIES

l6l

position was a little different. In the two ancient universities, the Professor has a much less distinctive position; certainly in College administration and to a considerable extent in university affairs academic control means the democratic control of the general body of teachers, with the qualification that, as in ancient Greece, democracy does not extend below a certain level; that is, the considerable body of persons engaged in teaching who hold neither College Fellowships nor University teaching posts, take no part in the control of university affairs. In the University of London, also, Professors as such have no formal special rights, exercising their influence on the central university administration simply as members of Faculties along with other appointed and recognised teachers; but participation in the main central academic business of the Senate and its Committees by the general body of teachers is minimal, only a small minority even of professors ever getting so far as a seat on the Senate. In the London Colleges the situation varies in detail but in broad features approximates to that in the rest of the nonOxbridge universities. The general picture therefore is one of academic power being in practice concentrated either in the professoriate or in the more senior grades of teachers. Increasingly, however, claims have been put forward - and generally supported by the Association of University Teachers - for more extensive and more effective participation by the junior teachers. Provisions for non-professional membership of Senates has tended to grow and the rigidity of professorial control over Departments has tended to weaken, the latter development being assisted by the breakaway from the older convention of having only one Professor in a department and by the greater degree of interdepartmental working encouraged by the looser degree structures of the newest universities. Fourthly, mention must again be made of the pressure for student participation in the internal government of universities which has already been discussed at some length. In this confusion of cross-currents, which are likely to emerge as the strongest forces in the future ? My guess is that the two poles of force will in the end be the government at L

l62

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

one end and the more senior teaching staff at the other; and I believe that this is not merely what is likely to happen but also what ought to happen. Before looking at the basic reasons for that view let us look at the claims and prospects of the other claimants to a share in power. I have already set out the reasons against any real transference of power to students. The difficulty of representing the diverse views of the many different categories of students through a small number of representatives and the fact that such representatives cannot, because of their necessarily temporary status as students, be made responsible to their constituents in the sense that Members of Parliament are responsible, are strong arguments against a system of elective representation on the main organs of university government. The alternative of giving a direct share of power to a general student assembly in the shape of the Students Union or otherwise is even less attractive since all history and experience show that large assemblies, without some effective system of delegation of authority, can only deal with simple issues and are nearly always ruled by emotion and oratory rather than reason. Equally cogent is the consideration that students are by virtue of their inexperience unqualified to deal with the issues of academic priority which underlie nearly all crucial decisions in a university. Lastly the trend of recent events in the world of student activism suggests a very real danger that student views on appointments and other Council decisions of policy would be politically motivated. All this is not to say that university authorities ought not to make it their business to know as much as possible about the problems which students face, above all their problems in relation to study, and about any ideas students may have about the content and organisation of their studies and their living conditions while at the university. Having facilities for representing such views is not the same thing as sharing in the responsibility for taking decisions on them. Accordingly there is room for much more development of consultative bodies at university, faculty and departmental levels. A device incorporated in the statutes of at least one of the new universities is the establishment of a joint con-

THE G O V E R N M E N T

OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

163

sultative body with the right to see the agenda of the main executive bodies in the university, the Council and Senate and to comment on items in them before they are considered; such 'shadow' consultative organs may well develop in various forms in many institutions. Perhaps more important could be consultative committees at lower levels. A survey made at the London School of Economics in the summer of 1966 showed that most of the problems which were worrying the average student (not the Students Union activists) were concerned with the detailed organisation of teaching and could be best dealt with at departmental level. So far there has been no indication that any of those in authority, whether in the universities or in the government are disposed to accept any of the more extreme proposals for incorporation of student members in the executive authorities of universities. Even when Ministers have made apparently sympathetic pronouncements about student claims their practical proposals have not gone beyond the development of consultative machinery and the inclusion of student representatives in the membership of non-executive bodies such as the Court in most universities. It is, regrettably, probable that under pressure of threats of disturbance and because of the misguided support of much of the 'serious' press; a number of universities will make concessions by way of small student representation on important executive organs; but I would expect that -perhaps after a period of some travail - the essential authority of the existing combination of academic and lay members will prevail. One additional reflection on student participation may be added. The rather shadowy history of early universities such as Bologna, where student control is believed to have been significant, suggests that the students were at the same time the source of financial support, since they paid the 'masters' direct; and it is not too fanciful to speculate that their authority derived from their financial contribution rather than from their tutelary status. If ever a situation developed in this country in which a university dependent primarily on student fees could be created, the student body might begin to be a much more serious contender for power.

164

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Less need be said about the share of graduates in university government. As already explained they play little part in most universities and there has been no movement to give them any larger part. In Oxford, Cambridge and London, where the graduate body does play a larger role in one form or another, it has in the main been a conservative (or as some would say, obstructive) role; and so far as changes are advocated, they are in the direction of reducing the graduates' role. The larger the graduate body, the harder it is to organise and the more the average opinion of graduates becomes merged with the general opinion of the educated population, so that the less is the distinctive contribution the graduates might make. It is most probable that the graduate role in the particular universities mentioned will become more and more an odd anachronism. Next, what of the junior staff? The claim that all teachers, or at least all those on the permanent staff, should take a part in the decision-making process has many attractions. Superficially it can claim the support of the practice of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, where all Fellows have a share in internal decisions. It appeals to the general faith in democracy and is not so clearly open to objections brought against mass student participation that the body of persons concerned is both manifestly too large and too impermanent to take effective part. Nonetheless the size of the teaching body is in practice decisive against any system under which any but the broadest decisions of policy are taken by the teachers as a whole. When the number of teachers is round about a thousand, as it now is in the typical fully developed university, there may still be a vital role for some machinery of consultation with all the teachers, as there is with all the students, but the vast majority of practical decisions must be taken by much smaller bodies and it is inevitable that those much smaller bodies, however nominated, will contain a disproportionate number of more senior teachers. For practical reasons heads of departments must be given a special place in the hierarchy; and apart from that consideration the weight of greater experience and reputation is bound to make itself felt. While, therefore, structures in

THE G O V E R N M E N T

OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

165

which authority and participation in the general administrative processes of the institution are restricted to departmental heads or professors will probably increasingly be liberalised and machinery of wider consultation may become more general, it is unlikely that the general position of concentration of academic authority in the hands of the more senior teachers will change. Lastly what of the representatives of the general public? Valuable as their role has been in the past, above all in the initial foundation of institutions which have grown up to university status, it is unlikely that the trend towards a decrease in the effective influence of the 'lay members' will be reversed unless the whole background is changed. It has already been noted that the initiative for the foundation of new institutions no longer comes from spontaneous groups of individuals but from the decisions of government. Even more is it currently taken for granted that responsibility for finance lies with the government rather than with the fundraising efforts of private individuals. There may continue to be exceptions in which the founding initiative and the financing are shared between a private group and government. The new Business Schools in London and Manchester appear to be such exceptions and the same process may be repeated when a particular group or section of the community has a special interest in the stimulation of a particular type of education; but the fact that even so powerful and wealthy a group as the business community was unwilling to proceed alone is significant and it is to be expected that exceptions of this kind will continue to be rare. These considerations lead indeed to the fundamental reason why it seems natural that effective power of control should be divided between the leaders of the academic staff and the government. Two things are essential to a university - teachers on the one side and money to pay them and provide the necessary physical facilities on the other. Effectively university teachers have always had a large share of power because they are men and women of exceptional ability who in the last resort can transfer their abilities to another place or to another occupation. Today university teachers do not

l66

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

often talk of striking but the early history of universities records threats from time to time by the 'masters' to leave en masse and set themselves up elsewhere if some dispute or other were not settled to their satisfaction; and in modern times the individual teacher who finds conditions in one university unattractive can find alternative possibilities all over the globe. And of course the abler he is, and the greater his reputation, the more easily he can move. These considerations added to the unique expertise which the teaching body inevitably has in relation to the actual subjects of concern to a university, must always ensure that the teachers, through their effective leaders, will play a large part in detailed administration. Part of what has been said earlier might suggest that professional administrators might possibly come to rival the teachers. In fact I believe that to be both undesirable and unlikely precisely because of the ultimate essentiality of the teacher. Administrators can exercise much influence by encouraging one set of ideas or discouraging another and may well step into a vacuum of power on the teaching side. Above all, the Vice-Chancellor of a new university can exert great influence in the initial choice of the institution's fields of activity and in the selection of its initial staff. But the older and larger the institution becomes the less room its head has for individual decision. Administrators can in the end only go as far as the teachers with whom they work are willing to go and while they may have an increasingly important role as mediators between the academics and the government it is likely to remain a mediatory and subordinate role. On the other side the power of the purse needs no elaboration. I have already suggested that students were powerful when they were paymasters and that the same has been true of the private groups who have played a vital part in the early history of so many institutions. Today, however, it is the government which is the universal and overwhelmingly dominant paymaster; and there is no pause yet to be noted in the growth of the effective share of government in the control of university policy.

THE G O V E R N M E N T OF U N I V E R S I T I E S

167

Unless the system of financing is radically altered, we may expect that the government will continue to lay down broad lines of policy. Certainly this is likely to be true in relation to salaries and some terms of service, student fees and standards of accommodation. Very possibly government intervention will spread to terms of service other than salaries, establishment structure and superannuation; it is bound some day to occur to somebody in Whitehall that, just as universities ought to be prevented from mutual competition by creating too many higher posts, they ought to be prevented from competing in the offer of sabbatical leave and other side benefits. On the academic side, also, government intervention is likely to spread, in the shape of more and more detailed 'guidance' from the University Grants Committee about the most desirable lines of development. Given the very strong tradition of university independence in this country it is very unlikely that we shall see introduced the government control of details of administration which exists in some overseas countries. Two incidents come to mind; a French university teacher invited to spend some time in the London School of Economics wrote to say he would very much like to come and would confirm his acceptance as soon as the necessary leave of absence had been approved by the Ministry of Education; and once at the end of a visit to Finland the Rector of the University of Helsinki, who was seeing me off at the airport, suddenly ran to speak to one of a party just leaving, explaining when he returned that this was the Prime Minister and that he could not miss the chance to speak to him because the question of an appointment to the vacant chair of economics was coming before the Cabinet later that day. We hope with some confidence that no British department or government will be drawn to assume authority in such matters and that they will continue to be dealt with by the internal authorities of individual universities. But there is a strong likelihood that such individual discretion will increasingly be exercised within guide-lines laid down by some central organ. As has been suggested earlier, it may well be that as the Committee of Vice-Chancellors grows in activity and authority, as a

l68

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

reaction to the increase of government intervention, the guide-lines may be to a large extent formulated by the cooperative action of the universities themselves and given a covering blessing by government, but some of the guide-lines will no doubt be determined by government direct; and, however determined, they will act as constraints on the discretion of the individual institutions. This is the logic of dependence on government for finance. Universities have accepted very eagerly the new buildings, the better staffing ratios and improved general conditions which have gone with university expansion and must have been very naive if they assumed that these benefits could go on for ever without strings being attached. Many must, at least privately have recognised the risks and perhaps would admit to there being some application to the British situation of a limerick quoted as relevant to certain attitudes in American Universities by President Perkins of Cornell University, in his The University in Transition; it read: 'There was a young lady of Kent Who said that she knew what it meant When men took her to dine, Gave her cocktails and wine, She knew what it meant - but she went.' The only reliable means of escape from the growth of state control lies in the finding of alternative means of financing of universities, especially means which would make them more subject to the needs and demands of private people expressed directly and not through the institutionalised and politically controlled pressures of state organs.

8 The Response of Universities to the Changing Situation We have noted a number of ways in which the factors underlying university education have been, and are, changing; the increase of demand for places; the increased need for high levels of knowledge in special fields in practical affairs; the increase in knowledge itself; and the increase, consequential on all these, in Government support for and interest in university activity. Other things of concern to universities have been changing, too, e.g., the techniques available for teaching (television, teaching machines, etc.) and the attitudes of young people - possibly as a simple consequence of the other changes mentioned but more probably for a variety of reasons of which that is merely one. Broadly the basic changes add up to a demand for more education at what has hitherto been regarded as university level. And broadly the response of the universities has been that this should be provided by a simple expansion of the university world as it is - existing new universities growing larger and more universities of the same basic pattern being created - rather than by the adoption of any new forms or methods. In December 1960, shortly before the most recent wave of university expansion, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, whose name was associated with the report on the education of 16- to 18-year-olds published twelve months earlier, devoted the greater part of an Oration delivered at the London School of Economics to an examination of the need for and the means of achieving a large increase in the number of people receiv-

170

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

ing a university education. At the moment the accepted target of numbers by 'the early yoY was about 175,000. Sir Geoffrey thought this quite inadequate and suggested that we should be planning to increase numbers within a measurable time by three or four times. He assumed that a major bottleneck in any such expansion would be a shortage of teachers and concentrated on examination of how teaching capacity could be economised or made more productive. The occasion was not one for the announcement of a formal programme of reform but he suggested a variety of possible changes. Boldly he challenged both the need to educate all university students up to the high standards for first degrees which have got established in Britain and the maintenance of the existing ratio of teaching to 'research5 time. He asked whether the teaching year (which varies between an effective twenty-two and a theoretical thirty weeks) could not be increased to something more like the working year of most of the world and whether much fuller use of university buildings could not be made by extending the daily hours of teaching, perhaps in conjunction with a shift system. Crowther spoke just before the start of a major Government enquiry by the Committee on Higher Education under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins. When that Committee reported, in October 1963, it recommended an increase in numbers which in Crowther's terms was little more than marginal and, perhaps for that reason, was able to assume that the increase could be attempted by a straightforward expansion of the university system with virtually no modification of its structure. In fact the Committee's recommendations as to student numbers were designed to do no more than maintain the proportion of qualified school leavers who could be found university places at the level of 1962/63. On this basis, and allowing for expected increases in the numbers taking A levels, the Committee foresaw a total of 197,000 students in 1967/68 and 219,000 in 1973/4, compared with Crowther's figure of 175,000. In many university circles doubts had been expressed about the wisdom and/or feasibility of such further increases but when the Universities individually were asked at the end of 1963 what they could,

R E S P O N S E TO THE C H A N G I N G SITUATION

171

given appropriate finance, do towards achieving the Robbins targets, their proposals totalled more than the increases desired and the U.G.C. in fixing individual targets and allotting finance were able to do a certain amount of selection. The belief of the Robbins Committee, and of the various individual universities when faced with practical preparations, that the desired increases could be achieved without disturbance of the existing university pattern has proved justified. In fact, the number of qualified school leavers has been increasing slightly faster than the statistics available to the Robbins Committee suggested. As a result by 1967/68 the Robbins targets had been slightly exceeded and the Secretary for Education, in announcing the scale of financial provision for the universities in the quinquennium 1967-71 raised the target for 1971/72 from 204,000 to between 220,000 and 225,000. These increases so far seem to have been managed without any major difficulty in finding the appropriate increased staff. From time to time spokesmen for the universities have spoken of the efforts they have made to meet the public need for expansion. Their efforts have in fact been confined to the digesting of the additional funds, the additional buildings and equipment and the additional staff with which they have been provided in return for their willingness to take in more students. In the first place the post-Robbins expansion has been covered by at least an equal expansion in the number of staff. The universities have been able to recruit (and to pay for) enough additional staff to maintain the pre-existing overall staff-student ratio; and have therefore not needed to have recourse to any of the devices suggested by Crowther (and others) to economise staff. Between 1962/63 (the last academic year before the Robbins Report) and 1965/66 the number of full-time students increased from 119,000 to 169,500, an increase of 42^%; full-time staff increased from 14,132 to 20,607, an increase of nearly 46%. (All figures are derived from statistics in the Annual Abstract of Statistics but both the figures for 1965/66 have been corrected to allow for changes on the basis of presentation made

172

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

for that year.) Presenting the same trend in another way, the ratio of full-time students to each full-time staff member was 8-45 in 1962/63 and 8-23 in 1965/66, indicating a slight relaxation rather than an intensification of the teaching load. Naturally the increase of staff was rather greater in the junior grades; the percentage increase in senior teachers (professors, readers and senior lecturers) was only just keeping pace with the percentage increase in full-time students; but there appears to have been a tendency to make appointments in the higher levels of the approved salary scales. The U.G.C. calculated (Quinquennial Report, 1962-67) that between 1961/62 and 1966/67 increases in the average salary per academic staff member not accounted for by increases in salary scales amounted to £7,000,000 p.a. This effect, parallel to the 6wage drift5 of the general labour market, represented about £300 per staff member. It is clear that there has been no deterioration in the general staffing position and a significant advance in the material position of individual staff members. This simply continues the trend of recent decades. Over the ten years ending in 1965/66, full-time students increased by 99% and full-time staff by 102%. Going back a generation, student numbers increased rather more than three and a half times between 1938/39 and 1966/67, while full-time teaching staff increased nearly six times. A similar picture emerges with regard to another of the possible means of economising in the use of university resources - greater use of facilities by catering for more parttime students. Between 1962/63 and 1965/66 the proportion of all university students classified as full-time increased from 88 % to 91 %,i.e., the universities are making proportionately less provision for part-timers after the Robbins report than they were before it. This statistical trend is exemplified by what has happened in the London School of Economics which at one time had nearly as many evening or parttime degree students as full timers, but in 1966 ceased completely to take in evening students for first degrees other than the Ll.B.and in 1967 ceased to take part-time Ll.B. students. Other colleges in London which had offered first

R E S P O N S E TO THE C H A N G I N G S I T U A T I O N

173

degree law courses for evening students had dropped these some time before. The London School of Economics, it should be added, did not simply leave potential evening students in the social studies with no provision; the School had been careful to satisfy itself in consultation with the Inner London Education Authority that provision for first degree teaching existed at non-university institutions in the London area which were already preparing students for London external degrees. The significant point for the present discussion is that in spite of the pressure for more university level education an institution like the London School of Economics, situated in the very centre of the largest conurbation in the country, has moved towards a less intensive rather than a more intensive use of its resources of personnel, space and equipment. Thus, far from the universities having sought to meet the special strain of expansion by anything like a shift system in the use of their resources, they have been actually lessening the extent of their evening activities. As will be seen a little later they have been under no pressure to increase effective teaching hours so as to make longer use of their available buildings, because they have in fact enjoyed an improvement in physical facilities more than proportionate to the increase in numbers. The conclusions suggested by comparisons of changes in student and staff members are fully confirmed by the changes which have taken place in university income and expenditure. Between 1962/63 and 1965/66 total university incomes converted to 1958 price levels by applying the same statistical correctives as are used in the official statistics of general consumer expenditure, rose from £79,000,000 to £134,000,000, an increase of nearly 70%; and income from Parliamentary grants (excluding grants for capital purposes) rose from £55,000,000 to £100,000,000, an increase of over 80%. Incomes, and of course expenditures, thus increased very substantially more than in proportion to the growth in numbers. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the current phase of expansion has meant any decline in the physical standards of universities, any increase in congestion. There is no readily

174

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

available statistical test which can be applied here; even the crude measure which might be obtained by figures of the total floor space of university buildings irrespective of quality or suitability cannot be applied as no series of such figures has been compiled. It is possible, however, to form a judgement by ordinary observation and few people who have had many opportunities of visiting universities in recent years can doubt that there has been an improvement in average accommodation - in teaching buildings, staff accommodation and general amenities. Indeed it would be strange if that were not so considering the high level of capital expenditure in old as well as new universities. Again a single example can be quoted in the London School of Economics. It has been very widely suggested that student restlessness there in 1966/67 was at least partly the result of worsening physical conditions as the result of admitting more students into already congested buildings. The facts are that the ratio of superficial area to numbers of students and staff, which had been slowly improving since the immediate post-war period has continued that improvement in the post-Robbins years. Over the ten years from 1957 to 1967 the number of full time regular students increased by about 36% while the total floor space increased by 80%. The improvement affected every main category of spacial requirements - teaching accommodation, teachers' personal rooms, library reading places, refectory and common room amenities. Clearer evidence is available with regard to another aspect of university accommodation, the availability of residential accommodation for students. In 1955/56 27^% of students were living in colleges, halls of residence or hostels; in 1962/63 the proportion had increased to 29 % and in 1965/66 to 33%. Including Students living in lodgings, in 1955/56 72% were living away from their homes, in 1962/63 80% and in 1965/66 82%. Again the expansion has involved no break in the pattern which has resulted in a steady increase in the numbers living in a collegiate or hostel atmosphere and a continuing decline in the numbers going to a university within daily reach of their homes. Turning to internal organisation, there is nothing to

R E S P O N S E TO THE C H A N G I N G S I T U A T I O N

175

indicate that any changes have been introduced with the special purpose of meeting the increase in numbers. If the universities had found themselves under pressure at least two changes suggest themselves. The trend to substitute tutorials, classes and other forms of individual teaching for lectures (which become more economical of staff time as numbers increase) might have been reversed; and following another line of thought mentioned in Crowther's Oration of 1960, a deliberate encouragement could have been given to the taking of ordinary or pass degrees instead of honours degrees. Methods of teaching are not statistically recorded in any published returns but all the indications are that the trend towards more individual teaching has continued uninterrupted. It is easier to measure changes in the type of degrees taken. Returns made to the University Grants Committee showed that in 1955/56 64% of all first degrees awarded by universities in Great Britain were honours degrees. In 1962/63 the proportion of honours degrees had increased to 69 % and by 1965/66 it was 74 %. Again there was no interruption in the previous trend towards greater concentration on honours courses; rather there was an intensification of it. During the time when the Robbins Committee was sitting and after its Report was published the cry 'more means worse' was raised by the critics of expansion, while advocates of expansion (like Crowther) argued that 'more' could be provided by better use of resources without any infringement of standards for the highest category of students. All the evidence so far shows that neither the fears of the critics nor the hopes of the advocates have been realised. Universities are absorbing at least a moderate rate of increase without loss of standards in any measurable way, indeed are probably successfully raising average standards simultaneously with the expansion. Some at least of the advocates of expansion may, however, feel disappointed that the scale of expansion has been kept within comparatively narrow limits and that the resources problem has been met entirely by increase of provision and not at all by more efficient use. From the point of view of the university establishment the outcome has been highly satisfactory. The universities have grown significantly

176

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

in total size, have met a public demand in the sense of continuing to provide places for the same percentage of an increasing number of qualified school leavers, and have done it without modification of the basic university pattern or of the trends towards improvement of physical equipment and the use of more expensive teaching methods. But if this is satisfactory to the universities is it equally satisfactory to the public at large, and to the Government as representative of the public interest? As regards the actual scale of expansion, the criterion adopted by the Robbins Committee and accepted by the Government was that the same proportion of qualified school leavers should be enabled to gain admission to a university as had done so in the immediately preceding years. This has remained the criterion, the slightly higher targets for the next quinquenium announced in 1967 being no more than a reflection of higher estimates of the prospective numbers of qualified school leavers. But, convenient as this criterion is as a basis of arithmetic, is there any ground for thinking it to be the right criterion? Was the proportion of school leavers going to universities in 1963 by some lucky chance the ideal which any rational person would have chosen, given a free choice ? All the evidence indicates that it was not. In the first place 'qualified school leavers' means those who have obtained the two A level passes which the Universities, subject to various qualifications and exceptions, have laid down as an adequate basis for starting on a university course. Not all those who attain that standard actually want to go on to a university, though the proportion is increasing; but enough do so desire to ensure that the applications for admission regularly exceed the places available. And, inevitably applications to 'favoured' universities (no longer only Oxford and Cambridge, since fashion in universities now changes as rapidly as fashion in skirts) show a still larger excess. The statistics show that the great majority of applicants, if they are prepared to persist and maybe wait for a year, do eventually find a place, but a significant number never do get in and meanwhile there is a vast waste of time and energy in the efforts to secure admission and a real accumu-

R E S P O N S E TO THE C H A N G I N G S I T U A T I O N

177

lation of anxiety and frustration in the young people concerned. It would surely be a vast improvement if a boy or girl who attained the standard announced by the universities themselves could feel sure of a place, barring accidents, and was relieved of all the worry and trials of hunting for some university which will take him or her. A generation ago a young person with matriculation qualifications may have had a financial problem to meet in finding his fees and maintenance, but he had little need to worry about admission. Today his financial problems are virtually solved, but he has the more tantalising and perhaps psychologically more damaging problem of finding a place. Rationing of university places by the purse has been replaced by rationing by A level grades and inverviewing boards. It is thus at the very minimum arguable that the criterion for future members should have been the number likely to qualify and to seek admission. But would even that be the ideal ? Is the present basis of minimum qualification quite perfect? Two things are certain; it is a standard of qualification higher than prevailed in Britain itself before the war and higher than the standards in most other countries in the world. It is hard therefore to see it as something sacrosanct, unless it is really intended as a basis of screening designed to preserve the elite or minority character of university education. At present, therefore, the decision of the Establishment, universities and government combined, is that the effort shall not be made to provide enough places to cater for all those coming forward who have, on the universities' own criterion, the basic educational qualifications for a university education. There were a variety of possible courses open when it became clear a decade or more ago that the numbers of qualified young people were expanding faster than the natural growth of the universities. The universities could have modified their practices so as to cater for more students, with a less than proportionate increase in resources of staff, buildings and equipment; the Government could have provided finance for an expansion of university resources adequate to cover the expansion of demand without change in M

178

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

existing practices; the universities could have raised their standards of admission to a level which would have reduced the numbers qualifying to correspond with the places available; the number of qualified candidates actually applying for admission might have been reduced by adopting a policy of less generous financial support to students; or alternative provision could have been made outside the accepted university system for some of the qualified candidates. Of these alternatives the first was firmly, even if never explicitly, rejected by the universities and that rejection was endorsed by the Robbins Committee, the plea being that any change in current practices, staff-student ratios, etc. would mean decline in standards. Alternative number two was clearly objectionable on grounds of cost; Exchequer grants to the universities were already soaring and an underlying restiveness about the University Grants Committee system had been growing in Parliament for some years, so that an open-ended commitment to meet any expansion in demand which might take place was hardly likely to be palatable to the Treasury. Prudently, therefore, the Robbins Committee adopted a basis for future provision which removed apprehensions of an indefinite increase in cost. The third possibility - an open raising of the admission standard - has not, so far as public knowledge extends, been considered by the universities. It would in fact be difficult to justify the exclusion from the universities as now organised of all those who attain merely low grade A level passes and though there possibly is a case for raising the standard it is dependent on a radical reorganisation of higher education in which the whole status of university education would be altered. Nonetheless it remains true that the real standard required for university admission is higher than that formally prescribed and it is quite likely that it will rise still further if demand expands more rapidly than provision of places. The fourth possibility - in effect calling in the price system to check demand - has not yet been advocated quite in that form and no specific move to curtail demand from United Kingdom school leavers in that way can be recorded. One step of that kind

R E S P O N S E TO THE C H A N G I N G SITUATION

179

has, however, been taken - the raising of fees for overseas students; and there has been growing support in various circles for both a general increase of fees and the introduction of a system of student loans which would make the student responsible in the long run for a substantial part of the cost of his university education. Finally there is the fifth possibility, provision or expansion of alternative forms of higher education. Here is the field where action has most obviously been initiated. In the first place, the Robbins Committee envisaged a more rapid rate of increase, in the period up to the early 1970*8, in nonuniversity higher education than in the universities. The projections used in the Report showed a growth in the Universities between 1962/63 and 1973/74 of nearly 70 per cent and a growth in other institutions of higher education (principally the Colleges of Education) of 100 per cent. This differentiation was put forward for other reasons than the provision of a means of catering for the candidates not admitted to universities, but it did provide some alternative for them. In practice experience seems to indicate that the growth of these non-university sectors of higher education has been proceeding even more rapidly than the Robbins projections. Secondly the Committee recommended, here much more clearly as an alternative to the universities, the creation of a new kind of degree, a degree awarded as the basis of work in a non-university institution by a newly constituted Council for National Academic Awards. The C.N.A.A. system has been duly created and its degrees are already attracting some thousands of students, replacing or supplementing the London external degree; but it is too soon to say how far it will go in providing an acceptable alternative to the orthodox university internal degree. Since the Report of the Robbins Committee was presented Government statements of policy have gone a good deal further in the explicit recognition of the need for alternatives to the universities; firstly in the statements regarding what was christened the 'Binary system' by Mr Anthony Crosland, then Secretary of State for Education and Science in his speech to the Woolwich Polytechnic in April 1965 and subsequent

l8o

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

statements, and secondly in the proposals for a 'University of the Air'. The first referred to the need to develop the nonuniversity institutions of higher education in parallel with the universities. Perhaps mistakenly Mr Crosland based the case for this alternative category of higher education not so much on the need to provide for those who could not obtain entry to the universities as on the need for a 'public' system, which would be fully responsive to public needs, alongside the 'private' system of the constitutionally independent universities, which by implication was not so responsive. Not unnaturally the universities took offence at this implication, while the further implication that the non-university institutions might before long be treated as of equal status both gave offence to academic pride and created alarm about the possible effects of competition from that source on the finance which might in future be available to the universities. There seems, therefore, to have been a subsequent tendency to say rather less about the Binary System, although in practice the development of the public system has gone on. The University of the Air (or Free University) project is even more explicitly a scheme to cater for people who do not secure a university place or cannot, for a variety of reasons, follow ordinary university courses. When first put forward, it was presented as likely to make a good deal of use of television to reach such people. Subsequent investigation has no doubt led to a fuller realisation of the severe limits placed on the use of television for the broadcasting of university courses (the great variety and number of such courses needed for a full university programme, the small numbers likely to enrol for each such course, the limited number of channels and hours of broadcasting likely to be available, the problem of access to sets in competition with the claims of other members of a household who want to watch more entertaining programmes, etc.); and now that a practical scheme has been announced, with a Vice-Chancellor in charge of it, it is not unfair to say that it looks much more like a very high level correspondence college than a television operation. It has been announced that the project will have access to 400 hours a year of broadcasting time, radio and television. It

RESPONSE TO THE C H A N G I N G SITUATION

l8l

sounds a lot, but represents rather less than the hours of formal teaching ordinarily provided by a University for students in the three separate years of one single subject degree. It is still far too soon to say what it will contribute to the solution of the problem of the 'excluded candidates'; and its main significance so far is in the clearer recognition it has given of the existence of that problem. One other development may be noted as to some extent a consequence of the failure to provide university places for all qualified candidates. It has been noted that one way by which that failure could have been remedied, or at least mitigated, would have been the adoption by the universities of changes which would have increased their 'productivity', i.e., the number of students they could take with given resources of staff and students. Members of Parliament have for some time been uneasy about the absence of any audit of university accounts by government auditors and the decision, taken in 1967 after much previous discussion, that the Comptroller and Auditor General should have access to the universities' books does at least open the door a little way towards some form of efficiency audit. That possibility is a horrifying one to university opinion but logically it may well flow from the problems of choice which are emerging, whether to maintain existing university practices and therefore, to avoid higher expense to the state, to damp down expansion, or to modify those practices sufficiently to admit larger numbers at a tolerable cost in public subsidy. This is one of the most critical of the issues arising from the complex of relations between the universities and the state which will be examined in the next chapters.

9 The Universities and the Government Universities have always had a special relationship with the state. A simple but highly significant factor which differentiates university education from other forms of education is that a university depends upon 'authority' for its power to confer degrees, and in modern times that authority has normally been the national government (or under federal constitutions the state governments) to whom the general conduct of universities has therefore long been in some degree a matter of concern. There have been times when the principal issue between universities and the state was doctrinal, i.e., what the universities should teach and what their attitude should be to current political issues. In modern times an assumption has become accepted, at least in Britain, that it is the absolute right of universities to have complete freedom in such matters and that the state should never in any way interfere. This is in fact a fairly modern principle and it is only perhaps in the last hundred years, since the disappearance, for instance, of the religious qualification, that British universities have been able to claim full academic freedom in that sense. Moreover this concept of academic freedom developed in a period when the universities had ceased to be directly dependent on state or ecclesiastical funds for their existence and were financed primarily by large private holdings of property and by private donations. The idea of academic freedom was thus closely associated with the general ideas of freedom and private property prevailing in the last century. It is clear from the discussion by Mark Pattison in his Suggestions on Academical Organisa182

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

183

tion (1868) that, in the then topical subject of the reform of the ancient universities, a major issue concerned the circumstances in which the state could properly intervene in the disposal of the private funds of the universities and their colleges. We have now moved into a time when there is again conflict between the universities and the state, but conflict of a very different kind, at least on the surface. Fundamentally this new area of conflict results from radical changes in the system of financing and support of universities. The nature of the conflict relates primarily now to the extent to which public funds can be made available for the creation and development of university institutions and within that to the extent of the influence the state should exercise over the direction as well as the extent of development; and there can be little doubt that the temptation to state organs to exercise such influence will grow as the magnitude of University activity, and of state support for it, continues to grow. State financial interest in the universities has been growing over a long period. There were grants to the Scottish universities from the time of the Union in 1707; London (founded in 1828) also received grants from its earliest years, specifically towards the cost of examinations; and early grants were made to the Welsh university colleges. In 1889 a more formal system emerged, Parliament voting a sum of £15,000 to be distributed between twelve university colleges in England and Scotland. The distributions were made initially on the advice of a series of ad hoc committees, but after a time a more permanent committee was established and in 1919 the University Grants Committee was created, substantially as we now know it. The scale of provision was still, however, comparatively small and the universities' dependence on the Treasury, while significant, was not yet embarassing. In 1919/20 recurrent grants from the Treasury were £692,000 and formed 28'8% of the university income. By 1938/39 the grant income had grown to £2,079,000 but the proportion to total income was only a little higher, at 31 %. Today the position is very different. In 1966/67 the govern-

184

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

ment grants to universities for recurrent expenditure were £139,000,000 and grants for capital expenditure £77,000,000. The figures for 1956/57, ten years ago, were £28,000,000 and £8,000,000; thus there has been a six-fold increase in direct governmental expenditure on the universities in ten years. These are, however, by no means the only channels of state support for university education. Over and above the direct grants to the universities themselves there must be reckoned the cost of support to university students, grants to whom in the same year were expected to amount to about £45,000,000; and universities benefit largely from research grants from public funds. It is to be noted that the contributions from the central government through the University Grants Committee amount now to over 70% of the total income of British universities and to nearly 90 % of their income exclusive of special grants for specified research. The next largest factor in their general income, the fees paid by students, comes in the main indirectly from the state through students' grants and these fees, being fixed 'in agreement' with the University Grants Committee, are in the last resort state-determined. The universities' own endowment income now amounts to hardly more than 2 % of their total expenditure. It is not only, however, because of these large contributions to university finance that the state is vitally interested. It is vital to the concept of the university that it plays a leading part both in education and research. The universities play a main, though not an exclusive, part in 'higher' or postschool education; but they also play a key part in the total education system. Aggregate public expenditure on education amounted in 1965/66 to over £1,750,000,000, and is now running at about £2,000,000,000 per annum. It already rivals defence expenditure in the national budget and may before long surpass it. If private contributions to education (private school fees, etc.), the expenditure by business firms on their own internal educational systems, and the cost of maintaining students over and above the public grants they receive are added in, the total expenditure on education makes it one of the very largest of British industries. In proportion to the national income, the total expenditure is now well over

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

185

6% of gross national product. The state as a source of funds is thus very heavily involved in the whole education system. Within this system the universities play a crucial part. Although they have no formal control over school curricula they exercise an enormous and decisive influence on them. For generations past the standard school-leaving examinations, the goal to which the energies of school children are directed, has been not an examination devised and managed by schools themselves or by the State but an examination or rather a series of examinations because they are several examining bodies which are controlled and run by universities singly or in groups and were in origin and still are in effect the entrance examinations of the universities. The pattern of education laid down by the universities therefore very largely determines the pattern in the top layers of school education and thereby a large part of the structure of all education. Thus not only as the apex of the system, that part of it which produces the most highly educated men and women, but also as a principal determinant of the whole pattern of education, the behaviour of the universities is of the greatest importance to those in the government machine who are concerned with the education system and the public expenditure on its maintenance and growth. The rational justification of the large expenditure on universities is mixed. Partly it is an extension of the principle that every man and woman is 'entitled' to an education; at university level this becomes the principle (accepted by the Robbins Committee) that all 'qualified' persons should be entitled to a university education. The uncertainty of meaning in the word 'qualified' makes this a somewhat shaky criterion of the scale of provision and it is not unnatural that a good deal of emphasis is also laid on the value to society of more graduates. University education is seen as an investment in brains, knowledge and skill; and inevitably those concerned in financing it will want at least a measure of control over both its size and its content. Equally the state is deeply interested in the other side of university activity, the research which is conventionally assumed to occupy nearly as much of the energy of academic staff as teaching.

l86

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

In these conditions it is quite inevitable that the state should in one way or another seek to influence the lines of university development and the financial relationship gives many opportunities of control in detail. In practice the most obvious channels of control or influence are as follows: (i) grants towards recurrent expenditure made through the University Grants Committee which, although normally not tied to particular categories of expenditure, determine the overall rate of growth of universities; (ii) grants for capital expenditure, made also through the University Grants Committee, which not only influence the rate of growth but also directly influence the direction of growth, since the capital grants, unlike those for recurrent expenditure, are made for quite specific purposes, e.g., a laboratory for a science department or a library for an arts department; (iii) salary scales of university teachers are in effect fixed absolutely by the Government through the conditions laid down by the University Grants Committee for the reimbursement of salary costs as part of the scheme of quinquennial grants to universities. In the financial climate of today, with its universal acceptance of a steady erosion of the value of money, it is virtually obligatory on all employers to increase salaries every two or three years at least, and in the case of the universities this is only possible if, when the time comes along for such increases, the University Grants Committee makes ear-marked grants specifically to cover the increased salary costs. Recent salary increases have in practice been negotiated with very little consultation with the universities own administrators and governing bodies. In April 1966 the Government simply decided to increase all academic salaries by exactly 5 %; and on the occasion of the last increase, in December 1968, the Government approved at once a recommendation by the Prices and Incomes Board for increases concentrated mainly in the junior grades; (other recommendations made by the Prices and Incomes Board are commented on later in this chapter);

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

187

(iv) a subsidiary control on the salary position is exercised by the imposition by the University Grants Committee of a condition governing the ratio between different grades of staff. Obviously if there were no such restriction then universities could avoid the consequences of the fixing of particular scales of salaries for particular grades by promoting teachers very freely to higher grades and of course could enter into fierce and expensive competition with each other. The University Grants Committee therefore laid down some years ago a ratio between senior and junior non-professional posts, and as from 1967 has widened this to include professors, the proportion for all senior posts together being fixed at 35%. This ratio control has not hitherto been strictly enforced and at least in some universities there is at present a wide divergence from it. It is, however, apparent from pronouncements by the Estimates Committee of the House of Commons and by the Secretary for Education and Science that it is the intention of the government to enforce it more strictly in future, (v) Government possesses a further organ of control in the student grants system. So far as undergraduate students are concerned no effort seems to be made to use that system either to limit the numbers of would-be students or to control or influence the subjects which undergraduate students may read. A further, and growing, development of the student grant system is, however, the award of postgraduate studentships. These are limited in numbers and government decisions on the scale of provision for graduate studentships have a powerful influence on the scale of graduate study. At the same time these awards are used in a conscious and effective attempt to influence the fields of study. There are separate quotas of grants for science, arts and social studies and the official machine, working through the research councils, exercises a very effective influence on post-graduate courses, through the power of the councils to recognise courses as suitable for attendance by post-graduate students holding national awards, and through the practice of giving precise quotas of awards to individual departments, not to the universities as a whole.

l88

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

(vi) Finally the state exercises a powerful direct influence over research through the Science Research Council, the Social Science Research Council and various other bodies which award research grants. The organs of control through which these various forms of influence are exercised are primarily the University Grants Committee, the Department of Education and Science, the Treasury and Parliament itself. The University Grants Committee has traditionally been thought of as part of the university world rather than part of the Whitehall world. For a brief generation, a time which is looking to the universities more and more like a golden age, it was assumed that the University Grants Committee acted entirely independently of ordinary government departments and could expect the Treasury to accept without serious question its advice concerning the amount of grants for both current and capital purposes. That golden age has passed; the University Grants Committee now reports not to the Treasury direct but to the Department of Education and Science and there is no room for doubt that the department takes seriously its task of advising the Treasury in its turn. The Treasury, however, has by no means lost interest in this very large field of expenditure and on some matters there is every reason to suppose that the final decision is taken still in the Treasury. The relative roles of the University Grants Committee, the Department and the Treasury are at present obscure to the outsider and probably still in process of evolution. What is clear is that the day-to-day management of university finance - and all that goes with it - is no longer a matter just for the University Grants Committee. The Committee must constantly refer to the Department and the Department in turn must act, like any other Department, as an integral part of the whole executive machinery of government, responsible in detail as well as in broad policy to Parliament. The increased interest of Parliament is expressed alike in the more frequent debates on university matters which are taking place in both Houses, and in the steadily growing interest of the Public Accounts Committee, which culminated in 1967 in the decision that the Comp-

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

189

troller and Auditor General should in future have access to the books of the Universities. Parliament's attitude of critical enquiry in relation to university grants is no new thing. The University Grants Committee system was conventionally praised as a typical British invention by which public funds could be made available to universities without in any way endangering their independence; and when I became a university administrator in 1952 I accepted without question this view of the great virtues of this particular administrative device. However, I was made aware by an indirect chance of the doubts which were developing about that system. In 1955 I served as Chairman of a Commission appointed to advise on the financial structure of the then projected Caribbean Federation (which in the upshot, like nearly all the federal structures conscientiously synthesized by the Colonial Office after 1945, turned out to be short-lived). We concluded that some special machinery would be needed to deal with the continuing grants from the U.K. Exchequer which would undoubtedly be needed by some of the smaller island units and our draft report drew an analogy between that machinery and the U.G.C. system. I received a friendly warning from a Treasury official that, given the then current attitude of the House of Commons to the U.G.C., nothing could be more calculated to damn that part of our proposals and we dropped the analogy. I mention this tiny incident only to emphasise how longstanding is Parliamentary suspicion of a system which until recently effectively stifled any discussion in Parliament of the ways in which the Universities are using the large sums of public money made available to them. Substantially, the old attitude was that the University Grants Committee, nearly all of whose members have been university graduates and many of them actively concerned in university teaching or administration, had a complete understanding of the university picture; that their views on both the total assistance to be provided and its division between institutions could be accepted without examination and that any detailed discussion in Parliament would involve an intolerable interference with academic freedom. It became impossible to sustain these

IQO

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

views as the scale of Government grants increased. Expenditure of over £200,000,000 per annum could not be put aside as being of no interest to the House of Commons and, as will be seen later, the very arguments of social benefit which were used by university spokesmen to justify such large subventions inevitably led M.P.S to the thought that they, after all, were the people who ought to be judging whether the social benefit was worth the cost. A succession of developments have brought out the change in atmosphere and have led to clear divergence of view between university spokesmen and the Government as a whole, including Ministers, M.P.s and officials. First there was the issue of Ministerial responsibility for university financing. For long the University Grants Committee was appointed by, and reported directly to, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and it became a cardinal article of faith in the university world that it would be disastrous to permit the Minister responsible for education at large to have any say in the allocation of funds for the highest form of education. It was not wholly flippant to remark that the view of the university experts was that, whatever universities were, they were not educational establishments. However, the Treasury became increasingly uneasy with a system in which there was no 'spending department' able to scrutinise and argue the case for any given scale of expenditure and Parliament became increasingly uneasy at having no Minister other than the Chancellor of the Exchequer who could undertake the normal functions of ministerial responsibility in this field. By the time the Robbins Committee reported, therefore, it was fairly widely accepted that some new arrangement for ministerial responsibility must be made. In a memorandum of comments on a variety of issues which I submitted to the Robbins Committee in 1961,1 took the then unorthodox line that the right solution would be to place the University Grants Committee under the Ministry of Education. When I was examined orally by the Committee it was typical that the main question I was asked on this point was whether I thought the universities would get better treatment (i.e., larger grants) under such an arrangement,

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

IQl

reflecting, I thought at the time, the Committee's desire to protect the universities rather than to ascertain objectively the part they should play in the whole educational system. When the Committee came to report, it recommended (with one dissentient) that the University Grants Committee should be placed under a new Ministry of Higher Education to be created, reflecting again the great concern to keep universities separate from ordinary education. The one dissentient, Mr (later Sir) Harold Shearman, recommended giving the responsibility to the existing Ministry of Education on the grounds I had myself urged of the public advantage in having all problems of education dealt with together. It was soon apparent that that was also the view of all the political Parties and in 1964, in spite of continued lively opposition from nearly all the university Vice-Chancellors, responsibility for Government activity in relation to the universities was transferred to an expanded Ministry of Education, christened the Department of Education and Science. Next, in chronological sequence, came the action of the Estimates Committee of the House of Commons, following their normal practice of examining from time to time the details of a particular field of expenditure, in taking up the scrutiny of university grants. The Committee took up a number of specific issues and heard evidence from a number of university representatives. Two impressions left are that the Committee were perhaps not very well briefed on the details of the matters they were investigating (unlike the Public Accounts Committee the Estimates Committee has no highpowered permanent staff at its own disposal) and that the university representatives who gave evidence very skilfully and successfully parried any attempts to get behind already published figures and to probe into comparative costs. Shortly afterwards however, the University Grants Committee, no doubt with the expressed interest of the Estimates Committe in mind, instituted a project of cost analysis of the universities. As first drafted in 1966 this provoked a great deal of criticism from university staffs, particularly of the attempts to analyse the time devoted by academic staff as between teaching, research and other activities. That particu-

192

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

lar project was undoubtedly imperfect and probably yielded little of immediate value; but improved systems of analysis will certainly be devised. Figures given in the University Grants Committee's Report on University Development 1962-1967 (Cmnd. 3820, Table 22) show interesting variations in average costs per students and staff-student ratios between different faculties, e.g., staff-student ratios of 9-9 for Arts, 12-8 for Social Studies 13-4 for Education Departments and 12-0 for Physical Sciences. These are nationwide averages and figures for individual departments would no doubt show wider variations. Inevitably people will ask why there should be such variations and influential leaders in the universities themselves have recognised the need for much more comparative cost analysis and are anxious to co-operate with government officials in working out schemes of that kind. An inevitable consequence of providing better information in this field will, however, be to make it easier for 'government', officials and politicians alike, to comment upon and seek to influence the course of university affairs. A side-effect of this affair is worth noting. It has been shown how important in the traditional system was the key role of the University Grants Committee in the chain linking the universities with 'Government' via the Exchequer. Composed largely of university characters and presided over by a leading university personality, it was seen by the Universities as clearly part of the University world, as their spokesman and shield. When there was reason, as in 1962, to suspect that the Committee's recommendations on finance had been rejected by the Treasury, the Committee might be blamed for weakness, but it was not suspected of treachery. The cost analysis affair, however, pinpointed the suspicion that the Committee was now on the other side, an instrument of the Government for controlling the universities and no longer an instrument of the universities for persuading the Government. The last development in the machinery of government in relation to universities has caused perhaps the fiercest resistance from university spokesmen. Under the traditional University Grants Committee system, the Exchequer grants

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

193

made to the universities were not subject to government audit. That is, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the head of the Government Audit Department and the principal servant of the Public Accounts Committee, satisfied himself that the grants approved by the University Grants Committee had been paid over to the several universities but made no investigation as to how the recipient institutions had disposed of the money, the theory being that it was sufficient for the University Grants Committee to satisfy itself that the money had been properly spent. The Public Accounts Committee had long been uneasy over this arrangement but earlier efforts to change it had been opposed by the Treasury and rejected by the House of Commons as a whole. In 1966 the Public Accounts Committee again recommended that the Comptroller and Auditor General should be given access to the universities' books. This time the Treasury agreed and Parliament accepted the recommendation. There was eloquent opposition from the universities, but they are now perhaps better represented among the life peers in the House of Lords than in the House of Commons and when the matter came to the crucial debate in the Lower House there was almost unanimous support for the decision of the Government. The general argument was that the new system would open the door to interference in academic policy, and the Principal of the University of London, commenting on the decision in his 1967/68 Report, referred to it as 'at least a very large nail in the coffin of academic freedom3. The Principal expressed doubt whether the Comptroller and Auditor General will be able to keep his hands off what universities regard as academic policy. The Principal went on to quote the following from an address made in July 1967 by Lord Radcliffe on his installation as Chancellor of the University of Warwick. c

As a verbal formula - and verbal formulae are the meat of public life - it may be possible to distinguish between scrutiny of the methods and techniques of University administration, its internal economy, so to speak, and the purposes and proportions which its use of funds subserves. Only the first, it may N

IQ4

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

be said, will be brought under the criticism of the Auditor General and the Parliamentary committee, and how helpful will be their comments and suggestions. Speaking for myself, I do not believe for one moment in the reality of this distinction, and I do not believe that it will or can be observed in practice. There is no line of maintainable frontier between control of use and control of purpose.' In fact almost anything a university does has an academic aspect. Equally, however, almost anything a university does which involves spending money has repercussions on public finance through the large share of public grants in total university income. This is the crux of the issue between the state and the universities; shall he who pays the piper call the academic tune or shall the universities enjoy the special privilege of determining the tune for themselves irrespective of the cost ? So much for the general picture and issues of procedure. We may usefully turn now to look in more detail at particular ways in which the influence of government has been brought to bear on the Universities. First, it was one of the assumed virtues of the University Grants Committee system in the 'golden age' that the universities were given the security of knowing the scale of government grants for five years at a time and could therefore plan that far ahead with confidence. The system of quinquennial grants has, however, become much less systematic in the last decade or so. One factor has been the continuous rise in prices to which the universities, like everyone else, have had to adjust themselves. As with most salaries and wages, the practice has developed of reviewing academic salaries every two or three years and, as already noted, the effective decisions on the main features of new salary scales have been taken by the government, with only minor details left to the discretion of the universities. On the occasion of each increase, additional grants have been authorised to cover the actual increased cost of the new academic salary scales. Increases of cost in this area have not therefore seriously affected long-term planning because universities could rely on being covered by the increased grants. There has, however, been no similar system of automatic reimburs-

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

195

ment for other cost increases - salaries outside the academic and senior administrative area, wages of office and maintenance staff, laboratory and library costs, maintenance of buildings etc. - which in the aggregate greatly exceed academic salary costs. What has been done to meet the rise in these costs has been that from time to time midway through a quinquenium supplementary grants have been made, calculated to cover increases of cost since the last previous general allocation. These mid-quenquennial increases have, however, never been guaranteed in advance, they have been calculated on a broad average basis so that they have not covered actual cost increases with the same precision as the ad hoc grants to cover academic salary increases, and they have of course been made after costs have risen but not with retrospective effect, leaving the universities to cover cost increases between reassessments as best they can. Inevitably long-term planning has suffered. There have been departures from the orthodox quinquennial system for other reasons. Normally the basic grants for a new quinquennium are announced in the middle of the last session of the previous quinquennium, giving the universities at least some months to plan the implementation of any new developments they are able to finance. In the case of the quinquennium 1967-72, however, the University Grants Committee were able to announce during 1966/67 only provisional grants for the first year of the quinquennium, the firm grants for that year and for the remaining four years being announced in the autumn of 1967, after the quinquennium had commenced. There have been sharp changes, too in the programme of grants for capital purposes after that programme had been assumed to have been settled. At the time of the economic crisis of July 1966 a six months deferment was imposed on university capital projects, although school building was unaffected. When further cuts in public expenditure followed early in 1968, after the devaluation of November 1967, it was the turn of the universities to be exempted, but their relief was short-lived. Later in 1968 they were instructed that no further funds could be made available for the time being

196

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

for projects for which tenders had not already been accepted. Another occasion of departure from the quinquennial system was no doubt inevitable; when the Robbins Committee reported in October 1963 and the Government accepted its recommendations for increased university provision it was necessary to place the universities in a position to carry out that policy without awaiting the start of the next quinquennium in 1967. The procedure followed was to ask each university institution what it felt able to do in the way of providing more places, and what additional finance it would need; and having received 'bids' from all its clients the University Grants Committee proceeded to make supplementary allocations of grant, specifically related to precise targets for expansion laid down for each institution. However, the new grants were initially announced only for the first post-Robbins year, 1964/65, grants for the last two years of the then current quinquennium, 1965/66 and 1966/67, being considered more at leisure. Again this hampered the planning of the expansion programme and one institution at least, the London School of Economics, found that although the first year's extra grant substantially covered the increased costs it had reported as necessary to meet its target, the extra grants for the later two years fell considerably short. The school was in consequence compelled to revise its plans and notified the authorities that it must substitute lower targets of expansion. I have emphasised the obstacles to considered planning presented by the breakdown of the quinquennial system in its full form, with which a long-term capital budget is naturally associated. It may be thought that universities ought to be able to work on annual budgets, but they are subject to special problems in the implementation of any new developments. Even for a simple addition of staff to take care of a rise in numbers in an established department fairly long notice is required because recruitment of the highly specialised people university teachers have to be is inevitably slow. For junior staff the process of advertisement and selection needs to start six to nine months before the post is required to be filled; for senior staff, who are likely to be already in teaching posts elsewhere and will need to give long notice the process is

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

IQ7

likely to take more like a year or even longer. Allowing for the fact that decisions as to what new posts should be created can only be taken, in the British university atmosphere, after lengthy internal consultations and that such consultations can only begin realistically when the amount of finance available is known, university administrations need to know their grants at least a year ahead if they are to plan intelligently at all. Where more extensive new developments are in question - the creation of a new degree, say, a longer view ahead is required. If a particular institution decides to start teaching in a new field, say Law, it will probably appoint a Professor anything up to a year before teaching starts, to plan courses and recruit staff; it will appoint one or two more junior teachers to cope with the first intake of students in the next year, one or two more in the third and will not complete the complement of staff needed for undergraduate teaching before the fourth year after the project began. Indeed since undergraduate numbers are likely, in a new degree, to expand for some time after it is first launched and post-graduate students will accumulate still more slowly, a period of expansion of probably five or six years must be envisaged if such a new department is to attain an adequate and economic size. Such considerations were no doubt what led to the original adoption of the quinquennial principle. The hand-to-mouth procedures of today can hardly fail to weaken co-ordinated planning within a university and therefore to cause wastage. But if the more frequent changes in the grant assessments hamper planning within the universities they offer greater opportunity to the University Grants Committee, and behind the Committee the Department of Education and Science and the Treasury, to attempt to bring the universities into line with government planning. It has been noted that the mid-quinquennial reassessments of 1964 and 1965 were very directly related to government policy decisions as to university numbers. The same was true of the quinquennial grants announced in 1967 and these frequent assessments of grants give more and more opportunity for Government plans to influence more detailed academic planning. Universities have not, of course, at any time been entirely free to pursue their

ig8

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

own plans. It has long been the rule for each university, towards the end of each quinquennium, to submit a development programme showing what it would like to do in the coming five-year period, along with estimates of cost. No doubt the University Grants Committee has been influenced in its allocations between institutions by its opinion of the relative merits of these programmes and it has developed a practice of giving some broad indications of its own views on the priority of different parts of the projected developments. Universities are not then held meticulously to their programmes and can depart from them at their discretion; but obviously a major departure would be looked at somewhat askance by the University Grants Committee when the quinquennium was drawing to a close and new grants were being assessed. A university which featured a new medical school in its programme and chose instead to start a school of Oriental languages might very reasonably find its next application for grant received with much less sympathy. Lesser variations were more likely to be passed over. This was no more than a loose control but it had real significance; and if the University Grants Committee is able to take a look at progress in carrying out development plans at shorter intervals than the orthodox five years the effectiveness of the control will be greater. It is indeed clear too that the disposition on the Government side to take advantage of these opportunities to influence university policies is growing. The practice of 'giving guidance5 along with the announcement of new allocations of funds was carried further than ever before in the grant allocations announced in the autumn of 1967. For the first time in quinquennial allocations, specific targets of numbers were laid down; this had only been done before in the special case of the post-Robbins allocations in 1964. A number of other indications of Government views were given, among which one was particularly interesting. Universities were warned to go slow in developing post-graduate studies, the official view being that for the time being resources were better devoted to undergraduate work. This was contrary to the trend of recent years, when government

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE GOVERNMENT

support for graduate studies had been manifest in the increase of graduate awards and the activities of the Research Councils, and clearly marked a turn if not a reversal in policy. The reversal was crystal clear in some cases, e.g., the London School of Economics. For some years previously the actual increase, and plans for future growth, in the School's Graduate side had been noted with apparent favour by the University Grants Committee; repeatedly in discussions of the School's future and especially of its physical needs emphasis had been laid on the inappropriateness of developing a large undergraduate institution in central London and hints had even been dropped that it might be wiser for the School to run down its undergraduate numbers and concentrate on using its special resources, in particular its own library and its access to other great libraries in London, for graduate studies. In 1967 direction was reversed and the University Grants Committee's letter of guidance made quite clear that further expansion on the graduate side at the London School of Economics would be looked on with disfavour. Such sharp changes in policy, especially when made with little or no prior consultation, are both disturbing to orderly planning within institutions and gravely threatening to all the conceptions of academic freedom which had been accepted for many generations. Another episode, also affecting London, illustrates another aspect of the impact of government on universities. It has been clear for some time that the creation of new universities is very much a matter for the Government. This has long been accepted in the sense that universities have been created by governmental action, normally the grant of a Charter, occasionally by the passing of an Act of Parliament. But the initiative, which formally lay with an institution which sought the status of a university, has now passed almost wholly to government. When the Redbrick universities, from the Victoria University onwards, got their Charters they did it by proving that they had, after years of development from humbler origins, attained a level of academic work justifying the award of university status; when Lancaster, Warwick, Essex, etc. came into existence after the Robbins Report it

2OO

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

was because the Government had decided that so many more universities ought to be created and that these were the best places in which to start them. In the older type of procedure the Government acted as it were as a judge or assessor deciding whether an applicant institution came up to standard; in the newer procedure the Government acted as a promoter, offering the status of university and the funds to go with it to favoured localities. At the same time that this last batch of new universities was created from scratch, something resembling the older procedure was followed in the promising of university status to a group of Colleges of Advanced Technology, also on the recommendation of the Robbins Committee; and all but one of that group of colleges have now become independent universities. The exception, the Chelsea College of Technology, was caught by a subsequent change of policy. In 1965 a new Secretary for Education and Science, Mr Crosland, announced that no more new universities were to be created for ten years; Chelsea had not succeeded in getting its own future status confirmed at that time, because of difficulties of physical development, and was told that the ban would apply to it. The Chelsea College was, however, encouraged to apply for admission as a college of the University of London, giving it university status but not independence. London itself had for a number of years past consistently refused to take any additional institutions into its federal structure and had rejected various applications from Colleges in the London area, one ground of objection being the administrative complications of any enlargement of the circle. However, when the strong desire of the authorities that the Chelsea problem should be solved by absorption into the University of London was made clear and when assurances had been given that appropriate financial aid would be given over and above the normal allocations to London, the University agreed to depart from its previous policy and Chelsea was admitted. The wishes of the power which lies somewhere on the line University Grants Committee Department of Education and Science - Treasury had prevailed. Two clearer manifestations of the power of the government

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE GOVERNMENT

201

to impose action on the Universities came in 1966, one of immediate significance only to a single institution, the other more general and much more publicised. As already indicated, it has for some years been the understanding that undergraduate fees are settled in agreement with the University Grants Committee, (whether 'in agreement with' means 'by' need not here detain us) and are basically uniform throughout the universities other than Oxford and Cambridge. A degree of discretion existed, however, with regard to fees for post-graduate students; these varied from institution to institution and had in recent years on occasion been increased by individual institutions without any prior consultation with the University Grants Committee. In 1965 the London School of Economics, faced with growing calls on its resources by its very large body of graduate students, predominantly from overseas, decided to increase its graduate fee from £60 to £100 per annum and gave notice that the increases would be effective from the session 1966/67. There was some ground for suspecting that the action was disliked by the University Grants Committee but no objection was raised until a few days before the opening of the session, when the new fees were already being collected. The School was then told that it must withdraw the increase, not because the University Grants Committee objected but because the Department of Economic Affairs regarded it as conflicting with the Government's prices and incomes policy. Naturally the School protested on the grounds that the increase could have no impact on any other prices, wages or salaries, that most of it would be paid by overseas students, so benefiting the balance of payments, and that allowance had been made for the income (approximately £40,000 p.a.) in the School's calculations of the increased numbers it could take in; but the ban remained and the School lost the income without any recompense. At this stage it looked as if it was official policy not only that all fees must be under government control but that for the time being they must be frozen; but only a few weeks later, in December 1966, it was announced to widespread astonishment that the universities were being invited to put

2O2

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

up fees for all overseas students, undergraduate and postgraduate alike, to a uniform figure of £250 p.a., an average increase of about £170, the invitation being coupled with the notification that the University Grants Committee would assume, in calculating future grants, that the increased fees were being collected. That is, if an institution did not put up fees it would itself suffer the consequent loss of income. This was a powerful sanction; in the London School of Economics, a rather extreme case, the sum of money involved amounted to about 6% of the School's ordinary income. The additional charges were justified by the argument that it was no longer possible for the country to subsidise the overseas students to the extent involved by existing arrangements. A storm of criticism followed; there had been no prior consultation with the universities and they ought not to be either ordered or blackmailed into sudden action of this kind; it was a highly objectionable innovation, and contrary to university practice throughout the world to charge different fees to students of different national origin; the increase would impose great hardship on poor students from overseas and was inconsistent with the policy of aid to less developed countries; if more fee income was desired it should have been obtained by a uniform increase to all students (the recommendation of the Robbins Committee, supported by the Report of the Estimates Committee already mentioned, was that fees should be increased so as to cover 20 % of costs). On the other side it could not be denied that the cost of a place in a British university was at least ten times the normal fee paid and the British taxpayer could not be expected to go on paying that for students from other countries; this had indeed been a matter of private discussion for years previously. There was, too, some weakness in the argument for a general rather than a discriminating increase because it was well known that the fees of the great majority of United Kingdombased students would come out of public funds, so that the true impact would fall on the overseas student very much as under the Government's proposal. The argument of sentiment based on the plight of the student from the lessdeveloped world was weakened when it was realised that a

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

2O3

large and growing section of the overseas student population come from the United States and other 'rich' countries. In the upshot, after vigorous protests by the Vice-Chancellors, resolutions and demonstrations by student bodies and much public argument, the Government stuck to its guns on the main issue but agreed to set up a fund to relieve cases of hardship and to enter into discussions of a more general increase of fees; and the Universities, with the exception of Oxford, Cambridge and Bradford, implemented the increase. There can be little doubt that the Government agencies in this case behaved clumsily in seeking so brusquely to impose a decision, and they are likely to do more by way of prior consultation in any similar affair in future; but the episode emphasises yet again the great weight of the power of the purse when the holder of the purse chooses to use it. At the end of 1968 came what seemed to some academics a still more disturbing indication of the potential power of the purse. Consequent on a reference by the Government, the Prices and Incomes Board recommended increases in university salary scales as already mentioned and proposed, inter alia, the introduction of merit awards to be added to basic salaries in recognition of special teaching ability. Furthermore, appreciating the difficulties of assessing teaching ability the Board suggested that part of the evidence to be taken into account in such assessment should be the views of students. The Department of Education and Science reserved any decision on these proposals pending further consultation but a storm of criticism followed; the idea of merit awards is obnoxious to many academics and so is any idea of recognising a distinction between teaching and research capacity, but the idea of 'students settling teachers' salaries' was most obnoxious of all. The Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool University, taking this as the final indication of what government interference might involve, announced his resignation. The Department quickly made clear that they did not accept the proposal to consult students in any way, so earning the disapproval of the N.U.S. Unhappily the discussion was conducted in terms of extreme excitement and appeals to high principle and the opportunity of looking objectively at means

204

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

of assessing and rewarding teaching ability (which many academics would like to do) was for the moment lost. Nonetheless the episode probably ensured that that problem would, when feelings had calmed down, receive more rational consideration. It also, however, highlighted the suspicions which have developed about government interventions. Faced with these and other indications of the dangers inherent in the Government's financial power, and moved perhaps by the growing doubts of the power of the University Grants Committee to act as the universities' spokesman rather than as part of the government machinery controlling them, the universities have begun to take a new look at their own corporate organisation. The central feature of this is the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, which has existed since the end of the First World War as an organ for consultation and exchange of information between the administrative heads of the universities. Although possessed of no power to speak for its members or to require them to conform to any corporate decisions the Vice-Chancellors' Committee has increasingly become the channel for communication with the University Grants Committee, Government departments and other representative bodies on matters of common interest; and its expressions of view, without being strictly binding on its constituents, have come to have a very great influence. During 1966 the Committee decided to increase its own activities and to remodel its procedures and internal organisation so as to enable it to anticipate enquiries which might otherwise be started by the University Grants Committee or other Government agencies and to formulate general views more promptly and coherently. It is not yet possible to see how this development will work but it is not at all impossible that something like a university corporation embracing all the universities in the country will emerge which will enable the universities as a block to meet with greater strength the growing incursions of government in academic affairs. This tighter organisation has been welcomed by the University Grants Committee in its report on the quinquennium 1962-67 already mentioned. It may well help to pre-

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

205

serve academic freedom in the sense of ensuring that decisions continue to be taken by academics rather than by civil servants or politicians but it represents in itself another danger to the freedom of individual institutions and beyond them to the freedom of individual academics. A crucial decision to be taken in any developing academic society is the decision to create a new department. With the much more rapid growth of recent times and the large number of new institutions, fears have developed that in some disciplines too many small departments may be getting started - too many for the available supply of teachers, too many for the student demand or too many for the social need (so far as that can be estimated) for that particular kind of study. There have emerged, therefore, tentative moves towards some kind of coordination or central control of such new developments, especially at the post-graduate level. Some control has come to be exercised through the awards of graduate studentships by the Research Councils but there have been indications that more direct control might be introduced through the University Grants Committee machinery. As an alternative a more tightly organised Vice-Chancellors' Committee might establish a 'co-operative' or voluntary co-ordination, as a result of which the universities would settle between themselves where new departments might be created. To the individual academic anxious to move into what he feels is an area of intellectual growth it may be immaterial whether he is controlled by Research Council awards or by 'guidance' from the University Grants Committee or by the conclusions of a committee set up by the Vice-Chancellors' Committee; the result could still be that he is held back by an outside body. This particular instance of possible control or co-ordination brings us back to two basic issues which underlie all this discussion. First is the issue of academic freedom in the old sense. Secondly there is the question, still too rarely asked, of what ought to be the general pattern of higher education, that is what in modern times, given the range of modern knowledge and the needs of modern society, ought to be the type or types of education provided beyond the level normally

2O6

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

attained in schools, and what part is to be played in that post-school education by the universities in their traditional form. The two questions can be asked separately but they are in fact closely interlocked and the answers given to them interdependent. Take first the issue of academic freedom. Has the growth of State influence on university activity, the development of which is still by no means at an end, actually threatened academic freedom in the old sense, i.e., the freedom to teach and to express views according to the intellectual conscience of the teacher? Here, happily, it can be said that there is no sign as yet of State influence being used to impinge on academic freedom in that sense. No suggestion has yet been made that the allocation of funds to a university is likely to be influenced by whether its professors of economics or politics are teaching the kind of theories which are in favour with the government in power or on the other hand advocating views obnoxious to it. There have, however, been proposals put to more than one local authority that grants to individual universities should be suspended or reduced as a mark of disapproval of student behaviour; none of these proposals has been carried into effect but they do mark a new tendency to relate finance to specific policies. The other main aspect of academic freedom may appear to be in greater jeopardy, i.e., the freedom to pursue logical lines of thought and discussion where they may lead, which is seen as essential to the growth of knowledge. Here the first danger apprehended is that the controllers of government finance may be too little responsive to demands to provide enough free time for university teachers to pursue new lines of thought. The danger arises not only from Government activity; indeed it may well be that the teacher within a university who wishes to develop a new field of study is, if anything, more likely to be able to persuade a government authority that it is worth pursuing than to persuade his academic colleagues that it is worth while to make sacrifices in their own departments for the sake of his chosen field. Some scepticism may be pardonable whether seminal new thinking is always dependent on expensive provision of equip-

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

2O7

ment, research assistants, etc., and it is not entirely unreasonable to argue that some necessity to prove the prospective value or interest of a new line of study before getting financial support is a salutary discipline, provided the individual remains in a position to pursue his own thinking. However, the problem of ensuring that the teacher has alongside his teaching duties enough time for even his own personal thinking and research is perhaps even more closely upon us. As already said, it is central to the British concept of a university that university staffs should be free to devote a considerable part of their time to independent research. No need arose to challenge this principle while total university provision remained on a fairly modest scale. As, however, the provision of university education or, differently phrased, of education of young people of university age, increases, the proposition can hardly be resisted that it becomes open to question whether a principle which could be applied, say, to a few thousand university teachers ought equally to apply to tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of such teachers. As has been remarked by Mr Carter, Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University, teachers have been offering a joint product, i.e., both teaching and research, in the same way as a sheep farmer offers the joint products of mutton and wool. Just as an increased demand for mutton does not automatically imply an increased demand for wool, so it does not follow that because the country wants more teaching it wants an exactly equal increase in the amount of research. Consequently, as a sheep farmer may need to breed more for mutton and less for wool, the authorities controlling university finance may need to consider the comparative advantages of different breeds of university producing different combinations of the two products. It is here that we link up with the other basic issue, the pattern of higher education. Given the range of modern knowledge and the scope for its practical applications there can be little doubt of the need for much more extensive provision of some forms of post-school education than has ever existed in the world's history before. But it does not have to be in the form provided by the classic university; indeed there

208

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

can be no doubt that it must take a variety of forms. British universities have tended to take for granted far too complacently that expansion of higher education means expansion of university education - and university education of the very peculiar British kind in which the only university course worth pursuing is one which leads after not less than three years rigorously prescribed and predominantly theoretical study to an 'honours', i.e., a narrowly specialised, degree. Post-school studies extending over shorter periods, or having a more practical bias, or covering less intensively a wider field; these have been thought of as not of university standard and therefore not worth serious examination as part of the higher education pattern. We are led on, therefore, to consider more fundamentally possible alternative patterns and forms of organisation, to which we shall return later. Certain general reflections arising from the developments summarised in this chapter reinforce the case for such an examination. In such reflections I want to look at two main questions of policy and one minor one. The first two are: is it in principle a good or a bad thing for the governmental machine, including Parliament, to be more actively and deeply concerned about university policy? and is the way in which the governmental machine has recently exercised its powers in relation to university policy good or bad? The minor question is: was it, in the light of experience, a mistake to reject the Robbins Committee's recommendation to put the Universities under a separate Ministry of Higher Education ? Let us deal with the minor issue first. To those who in 1963 and 1964 opposed the decision to make the Department of Education and Science responsible for university grants, much that has happened since may seem to prove their case. It can be argued that the delay in the settlement of the 1967/72 grants, the cuts in capital grants, the imposition of the fee increase for overseas students and the decision to give the Comptroller and Auditor General power to examine university accounts might all have been avoided if there had been a Minister solely concerned with higher education to argue the case for the universities. It is, however, to be noted

THE U N I V E R S I T I E S AND THE G O V E R N M E N T

2Og

that all these decisions have been financial decisions (and except for the last) all related to wider financial measures of an emergency - some would say of a panic-nature arising out of the overall financial and economic problems of the country. It is not unreasonable to guess that they were largely dictated by the Treasury in conditions in which no individual Minister, particularly a rather junior Minister, as a Minister for Higher Education would be bound to be in political terms, could hope to secure exemption from the austerities demanded by a crisis. The universities were not, on the whole, singled out for specially harsh treatment; as, already noted they were at one stage exempted from cuts in governmentfinanced capital expenditure. What happened was that they received no obviously favourable treatment. There are more speculative reasons for doubting whether the universities would fare better if their ministerial spokesman were a comparatively uninfluential Minister, particularly concerned with universities, than if he were a much stronger Minister with wider responsibilities. I say 'comparatively uninfluentiaP because it was always doubtful whether a Minister for Higher Education would have found a place in the Cabinet and the recent trend to the grouping of allied fields under a single Minister (e.g., Health and Social Security, Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs) makes it all the less likely that such an arrangement would have been acceptable. There is another example of recent changes in departmental structure which has some relevance. Many enthusiasts for aid to under-developed countries welcomed the establishment of the Overseas Development Ministry in 1964 in the belief that it would lead to a substantial increase in the volume of aid and notable innovations in policy in that field. Neither of these things has happened; the independent Minister has not been able to prevent a decline in the real value of overseas aid. Secondly the proposal was not for a Ministry of Universities but for a Ministry of Higher Education; although the universities tend to forget it, other forms of higher education are growing faster than the universities themselves, there are reasons already suggested in earlier chapters why that may appear a desirable thing to encourage, o

2IO

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

and a Minister responsible for the whole field could certainly not be relied upon to give priority to the claims of the universities. Nor, on the issue of accounting responsibility, would be necessarily have thought it wrong to assimilate the treatment of the universities to that of other institutions of higher education which have long had closer relations with the government machine. A final factor to be borne in mind in considering this issue of departmental responsibility is that a Minister charged with concern for higher education only would have comparatively little to do if he merely acted as a channel through which University financial requests went to the Treasury. He would be under strong temptation - and would have the time and energy available - to interfere much more in the details of university affairs than the Secretary for Education and Science, who has innumerable other things to think about. On balance, my personal conclusion is that there is insufficient reason to suppose that the universities have been worse treated than they would have been under the rejected two-Ministry system and that the general arguments of public advantage in having a co-ordinated view of government action in relation to the whole panorama of education still prevail. Turning back to the more basic issues, the crux of the first question posed above is whether the very important issues of policy arising in the exercise of the state's financial power, above all the decisions on the scale and direction of state assistance to the universities, should be settled in public or in private. In the 'golden age' of the University Grants Committee, issues were cosily settled in personal discussions, the details of which were not disclosed, except accidentally and incompletely, to representatives of universities not immediately involved in such discussions. A great deal, probably an unhealthy amount, depended on knowing the right people and having the right informal sources of information. This no doubt suited the majority of university administrators but it was not the ideal system for arriving at the best answers in the public interest. Still less was the general public, whose interest was in question, kept systematically informed of what answers

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE GOVERNMENT

211

were being given or afforded any opportunity, in Parliament or elsewhere, to discuss them. In the long run I feel no doubt that the basic principles of democratic government should prevail; decisions made on behalf of the public, allegedly in the public interest, ought to be explicitly made known in whatever detail is necessary for their proper understanding and should be subject to public discussion by the representatives of the public in Parliament. Twenty-five years of civil service experience, principally before World War II, left me completely convinced of the value of ministerial (and therefore departmental) responsibility to Parliament in checking the influences of personal intrigue and strengthening the influence of logical and impersonal reasoning which in the end could stand up to open discussion. There is, perhaps, reason to fear that the great enlargement of government activity has weakened the feeling of omnipresence of Parliamentary interest, but the continued existence of the Parliamentary Question and the debate on the adjournment, of the enquiries of the Comptroller and Auditor General, of the possible special enquiry (as in the Crichel Down case) and most recently the possible intervention of the 'Ombudsman' still preserve much of the old respect for the ultimate need to explain decisions in public. Between the exercise of vast state patronage in private and its exercise under the final supervision of Parliament there can surely be no question of the right choice; and if Parliament is effectively to supervise on behalf of the public, of whose resources it is disposing, the need for clear ministerial responsibility and accounting responsibility follow. Behind this, of course, lies a still deeper question. In principle the choice of system in disposing of the large resources needed for university maintenance and growth does not lie only between what may be called the private and the open systems of state financing. There is another choice, a system in which finance would be provided to a much larger extent (as it was before World War II) through individual channels by payment of fees, private donations, etc. and in which the public interest could be brought to bear perhaps even more effectively, though in more diffused fashion, through a large

212

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

number of individual decisions. Certainly the experience of the U.S.A. and other countries shows that a higher proportion of the population than in this country can be provided with a university education, and the research and scholarship functions of universities can flourish, under a system which leaves much more to private decisions. The possibility of returning to such a freer system remains to be examined. What we are concerned with here is that, if we are to continue to have a system dominated by state finance, its operation ought to be open to public examination and discussion and not dealt with as a private matter between experts, however exalted and supposedly well-meaning. Turning finally to the second of the major issues referred to above, the above defence of the basic soundness of the developments of procedure which have taken place does not imply an acceptance of the wisdom of the practical decisions of policy. Many of those have been the product of the handto-mouth economic and financial policies of a government which has hardly yet recovered from the enormous miscalculation it made of the economic possibilities when it came into power in 1964 and which has, because of that miscalculation, staggered from one emergency action to another. As in much else in life, the attempt to do too much has marred the prospects of achieving even a little. The reaction from the failure of initial attempts at over-ambitious planning has drastically cut down the scope for smaller-scale planning by the universities themselves. At the same time the refusal to face slightly thorny issues such as that of a general increase in student fees has resulted in brusque and inadequately thought out decisions like the increase of oversea student fees. The lessons of the actual history of government decisions over the last four years are first that we need more, not less, public discussion of them; second that we need a much clearer concept of the criteria which ought to guide the large scale decisions of Government; and third, and even more important, that we should make every effort to reduce the total dependence of the universities on state financing. The second of these matters will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, and the third in a subsequent one.

10 The Criteria of Decision on University Growth An attempt has already been made to describe the purposes which university education is intended to serve. It is because these purposes include social as well as merely private or individual benefits that society in the broad sense has thought it right to devote resources to the support of universities, formerly through the benefactions and endowments provided by the monarch, by the Church and by wealthy individuals, in modern times more and more by that universal dispenser of favours, the national exchequer. Presumably when the state began to provide money out of the annual Budget for the support of universities some kind of calculation was made, consciously or unconsciously, of how much it was worth providing, of what social benefits might be forthcoming. But it is only in recent years that attempts have been made to quantify the benefits and calculate systematically what it is worth paying. At least three lines of approach have been followed in attempts to achieve this quantification: the approach through the measurement of additional earning power of university graduates, the approach through the estimation of future needs of particular kinds of graduates, and the approach through international comparisons. The first approach has been most developed in America, e.g., in the work of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker. They have compared the earnings of people who have passed through particular stages of education with those of people of a lower level of education and then, relating the additional earnings to the costs of the extra education (including income 213

214

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

forgone during the period of education) have worked out a rate of return on the capital investment. For example Becker estimated (on 1939 figures) that for white urban workers the return on the cost of a high school education was 14-3 % and between 1940 and 1955 the return for college education was 12'5%. No similar calculations have been made for this country but there is no reason to question that the same kind of results would emerge. There are, however, a number of difficulties about this approach, particularly if it were to be used as the basis of precise calculations of social benefit. One is that the calculations so far made lump together all kinds of university or college education and draw no distinction between different kinds of university education, e.g., between arts and science graduates. No doubt more complicated studies could produce figures of the return on the attainment of at least the main categories of degrees, but at present the available results give no guide to the comparative value of different courses, still less of different types of degree ('honours', 'special', 'general', etc.). Supposing that this objection could be removed by sufficiently complex further investigations, there remain difficulties much less easily removable even in theory. All these studies are necessarily spread over a long period; the extra earning power of a university graduate cannot be judged by the experience of the first few years after graduation and strictly can only be fully assessed over a lifetime. At the best such calculations will be related to conditions over perhaps the last two decades. In a rapidly changing world can it be assumed that the earnings differentials of the last twenty years will prevail over the next twenty? A medical education brought a very definite extra earning power over the years 1920 to 1950; it probably brings rather less today and who can say what it will, in this sense, be worth between 1975 (when a young man now starting on a medical education would qualify) and 2000? These doubts about the applicability to the future of conclusions from the past are particularly relevant when the university scene is changing so fast and particularly when the number of graduates is increasing

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON GROWTH

215

rapidly. When 5 % of the population were getting a university education they acquired skills and knowledge which commanded a premium (theoretically ascertainable) in the labour market; it cannot be assumed that those skills will command the same premium when they come to be possessed by 10% or 20% or even more of the population. This leads on to the difficulty of what might be called the disappearing differential. The calculations under discussion measure not the increase in absolute productive power engendered by a given level of education but the comparative earning power engendered by it. Inevitably the more people who attain a particular level of education the less will be the differential or extra earning power attached to it; yet the extra productive power will still be there. When we get to the stage at which everybody has attained a particular level the differential simply vanishes. When only a minority of the population were educated even up to the level of simple literacy, the ability to read and write commanded a premium and clerks figured some way up the income scale; today when literacy is practically universal, it is the cheapest of all skills and routine office workers earn less than average factory workers. Accordingly the type of calculation we are examining would show a nil value for primary education, although no one would doubt that it still has as much value as ever from the national point of view. We are still a long way off universal university education but it could well be that the earnings differential for university graduates will get down to a very low figure long before graduates approach 100% of the adult population. A further difficulty of the calculation of differential earnings is that there is no obvious means of distinguishing between higher earnings due to better education and higher earnings due to superior ability or more favourable social position. Do graduates earn more because they are graduates or because they are clever enough to become graduates? Alternatively do they earn more because they are still drawn from the 'higher' social classes which also still have better than average chances of entry into higher paid occupation ? There is not much doubt that university graduates have, on the average,

2l6

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

higher intelligence quotients than non-graduates; and it may be that this is more true today than ever now that university entry depends to a much greater extent on academic achievement rather than on money. But who can tell whether the university man who does well in the way of earnings does so because of his innate ability and better social contacts and would have done just as well without a university education? At the very least we must allow something for the higher I.Q,. and probably for the social position, so that not all the extra earning power can safely be attributed to higher education. Finally, the calculations we have been discussing assess the extra personal earning power resulting from a university education; can we assume that that is also a measure of social benefit, of the additional contribution to general welfare resulting from that education? In a perfect labour market the market price (wages or salary) of any particular skill will be a true measure of the value of that skill in contributing to production or welfare; but the labour market in this country is far from perfect. There are a great variety of conventional understandings about the relationship between the remuneration of different occupations (the 'differentials' of any established wage structure) and conventional obstacles to mobility between occupations; and it is probable that these rigidities in the wage and salary structure are increasing, or at least getting more powerful, not least as the result of Governmental policies of wage-fixing. Barbara Wootton (Lady Wootton of Abinger) has argued persuasively that wages and salaries today are much more a reflection of status conventions than the result of assessment (through the market or otherwise) of social or economic value. If then, as is probable, the occupations normally followed by graduates are occupations with better-than-average conventional status, the salaries they enjoy may significantly overstate their social or economic contribution. In fact, while conceding something to this objection, my own judgement - intuitive rather than calculated - is that it does no more than reduce the precision of the earnings-differential calculations. That is, the extra earnings of the graduate do represent extra social contributions as well as extra personal earning power,

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

217

even if the latter on occasion somewhat exaggerates the social contribution. Professor Alan Day (Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics) has expressed a less favourable conclusion. In an article in the Observer of June 16, 1968 he said, 'All the calculations suggest that the private rate of return to the individual from higher education is considerably higher than the social rate of return.' There is, however, another problem in this relationship between personal earning power and social contribution to which it is less easy to see an answer. The purpose of these calculations of 'return' on the capital invested in the costs of higher education is, in the end, to reach a conclusion as to how much it is worth investing in that way. Suppose all the difficulties recited above can be removed and we satisfy ourselves that as the result of spending a given sum next year on the university education of one young man or woman that man or woman's earnings over the next generation will increase by an aggregate amount which will produce a satisfactory yield on the investment; does that constitute a justification for the state spending the money bearing in mind that it is the individual and not the state who will receive the extra income? The justification for state expenditure is general social benefit; it is by no means self-evidently right that expenditure should be paid for out of taxes raised from the public at large in order that a small minority of selected citizens shall be better off. At the lower level of education this problem does not arise as the benefits of education are available to all - actually at primary level and at least notionally at secondary level. We are, however, and are likely to remain for a long time, a considerable distance away from higher education for everybody and a real issue of social policy and social justice is involved, though it has only recently begun to be raised. Professor Day, in the article already quoted concluded, after taking into account the higher taxes paid by people who earn higher incomes, that the Tacts reinforce the conclusion that there is no justification for the view that students are being put through an educational mill for the sake of society rather than for themselves'. The same feeling that it is inequitable that the favoured few who receive

2l8

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

university education at public expense should enjoy the whole benefit from it appears in an article by Glennerster, Merrett and Wilson in the Higher Education Review (summarised in The Times of October 19, 1968). State expenditure on university education would be justified by the economic calculation if there were reason to believe that personal earnings substantially underestimate the social contribution of the university graduate, but if they merely correspond, and still more if the social benefit falls short of the private benefit, we are led back to the contemplation of some scheme of financing which would be based on personal rather than state liability for the initial costs, or which would ensure a subsequent repayment to the state. Loan schemes and other possible financing will be examined in much more detail later. At this stage we can only note that the calculations on the basis of personal earnings differentials afford hardly any justification for higher state expenditures on universities and give only shadowy guidance as to the optimum level of university expenditure, however financed. Can we then get better guidance from the second line of approach, the estimation of future needs of highly trained manpower? Various attempts of this kind have been made in this country and elsewhere. The Harbison report on Nigeria boldly attempted to make such estimates for all categories of highly trained people. That has not been attempted for the United Kingdom; but estimates have been prepared for scientific manpower as a whole and there have been a successions of estimates of the need for medical graduates. The story of these medical estimates is interesting and a pointer to some of the difficulties of this approach. It is a story of oscillation. The first estimate, made during the last war, pointed to a need for a considerable increase in medical manpower. The second, a few years after the end of the war, concluded that needs had been overestimated and resulted in a cutting back of the intake into medical schools. The last has swung back towards higher estimates and has resulted in a recommendation for much larger admissions to medical schools. Quite apart from difficulties of estimating future needs, dependent in turn on estimates of population growth

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

2IQ

(which have notoriously proved extremely difficult), liability of the population to illness and changes in methods and standards of treatment, the estimates of the number of doctors needing to be trained have been bedevilled by the inconvenient propensity of doctors to move about the world. On the one side doctors trained in the United Kingdom have emigrated in significant numbers to the United States of America, Canada and Australia. On the other students from less developed countries who have come here to study at British Medical Schools or to take higher qualifications after obtaining a basic qualification elsewhere have stayed on to work in this country. The 'balance of trade' in medical graduates has latterly shown an excess of emigrants, i.e., a loss of trained manpower. Such movements introduce an incalculable element which can falsify the most careful estimates and so far the only way of preventing this happening - restricting the freedom of the individuals concerned to leave the country - has not been seriously advocated. There have not been the same dramatic swings in estimates of scientific manpower in the more general sense and the fact that such estimates as have been made in this field are less restricted to a precisely defined category of professional training makes them less likely to suffer from such obvious inaccuracies. Errors in relation to particular specialisations may be expected to offset each other to some extent. But the fact that such estimates are more generalised makes them also less useful. As a practical guide it is doubtful whether 'scientist' is today much more useful than 'educated man'. The old day of the general scientist is gone and it is no use assuming there is some magic of scientific training which will enable a man to be equally useful as a molecular biologist, a crystallographer or an astronomer - or any other of the scores of specialisms of modern science. Still more is this true, of course, of applied science. This same tendency of'science' to divide itself up into more and more separate fields of study adds other difficulties to forward estimating. We cannot be sure that what we now mean by any particular description will retain its significance a decade or a generation hence; or rather we can be sure that

220

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

it will not. Nor is it reasonable to hope that we can predict the technological needs for different sorts of specialisms with any great accuracy. What official body, governmental or university, would have been likely to foresee, say sixty years ago, the number of radio engineers who would be needed in the modern world? Change today is more rapid than ever and he would be a bold man who would deny the possibility of some new discovery which could create new needs for technological manpower on a scale comparable to the developments in the radio field. A more fundamental problem in all such estimating is a problem which strikes the economist much more than the scientist. To the economist the idea of some absolute quantity of demand for anything, whether a commodity or a service or a particular kind of skill, is nonsense; he thinks in terms of a demand schedule, that is a set of quantities demanded at different prices. We are all familiar with this in everyday life; every greengrocer knows that the demand for tomatoes at 2S a pound will be very different from the demand at 45 a pound. Just the same is true of demand for scientists or engineers or any other highly trained specialists; there will be more offers of employment for them if their salaries are lower. Of course there is some demand for such skills which is not likely to be affected by any probable variation in relative salaries, but at some point a manufacturing concern, say, will wonder whether taking on an extra mechanical engineer or analytical chemist is worth the cost. In the aggregate the cheaper highly trained manpower is, the greater will be the demand for it. To a significant extent, therefore, demand in this field depends on supply since since the greater the supply the lower is likely to be the salary demanded. Errors of estimating may therefore be to some extent self-eliminating; if we over-assess the probable demand at current rates of pay and produce more scientific graduates accordingly, the extra scientists will very likely get employment in jobs bearing some kind of scientific label; but at lower salaries. Moreover, since there is no sharp line of distinction between those jobs which must be filled by a scientist and those where scientific expertise is

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

221

immaterial, but rather an infinite gradation of jobs in which it is more or less advantageous to have them filled by scientists, such an expansion of demand means that some of the new jobs are jobs which the employers would have been content to fill with non-scientists if the cost facts had been different. That is, we cannot assume that every 'scientific' post is one which must be filled by a 'scientist' or that the holder's scientific qualifications are always being fully used. Indeed it is one of the general problems of the employment of specialised manpower, how far the special skill is being used or allowed to run to waste. The third line of approach to the estimating of how much it is worth spending on university education is that of international comparison. Can it be shown that the economic progress of different countries is at all precisely related to their numbers of university graduates? One simple relationship is obvious at the start; the highly industrialised countries (the 'rich' countries) of the world do have a markedly higher proportion of graduates than the less-developed or poorer countries. It is not, however, equally obvious that this is cause rather than effect of the more advanced stage of development. It has long ago been remarked that the fact that rich men smoke more cigars than poor men does not mean that one will become rich by smoking cigars. Rich countries have more universities and more graduates partly, at least, because they already are rich and can afford it. Whether the universities are then a luxury or an investment remains for investigation. Writers on university development have often quoted German university developments in the nineteenth-century as an example of the influence of university development on economic growth. German universities were pioneers in the modern emphasis on research and, to a less extent, in the development of technological education; and this may have contributed to the rapid development of German industry in the late nineteenth century. There were, however, many other causes, e.g., the centuries-long commercial, industrial and technical traditions of much of Germany, which was able to absorb and in due course surpass the technical developments of the English industrial revolution; probably

222

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

the advantages, later demonstrated by Japan and other new industrial countries, of coming into industrial development a little after the pioneers so that the most up-to-date methods could be adopted at once; the advantages of the growing protected market created by the economic and political unification of Germany from the time of the Zollverein onwards; and technological discoveries which made easier the exploitation of the iron and coal of Alsace-Lorraine and neighbouring territories. If German universities had a contribution to make to economic growth greater than that of contemporary British universities it was not so much because of size but rather of bias of studies, especially the greater emphasis on technology; and the example may be more relevant for decisions on the best type of university (for economic purposes) than for decisions on the magnitude of the total university effort. It could indeed be argued - and would make a fascinating subject of special study - that it was the strength of the influence of British universities, not their lack of influence, which handicapped British industry from the last decades of the nineteenth century in competition with German industry. It has often been remarked how much greater has been the status of the scientist, the engineer or the chemist in the hierarchy of German industry compared with Britain where the 'arts man' tended to retain in business, as he did in government, the superior prestige he enjoyed in the universities. The significant thing is not always the number of technologists in a business or in a country but rather the effective influence they exercise. More up-to-date comparisons have been attempted of the number of university graduates in the more industrialised countries and of the relationship of such numbers to the rate of economic growth. Such comparisons are very difficult because the level of education implied by a university degree can vary a good deal, as can the significance of other forms of education not counted as in the university category. On the other side there are many other complex factors bearing on comparative rates of economic growth and it is difficult to distinguish any clear conclusions about the economic justi-

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

223

fication for any particular level of participation in university education. It is in some ways easier to examine such comparisons in the relative positions of less developed countries. Here the conclusions must be regarded as negative; that is, there is very little obvious correlation between the number of university graduates and the rate of level of economic growth. Especially perhaps is this true of industrial development. Among socalled developing countries two outstanding examples of remarkable industrial growth are Israel and Hong Kong; Israel has a high proportion of its population receiving higher education, Hong Kong a rather low one, compared with many of its neighbours. Indeed a phenomenon which has caused considerable concern is the emergence in some less-developed countries of substantial surplus production of graduates, shown by the difficulties of graduates in obtaining employment. A study of the 'world educational crisis' prepared for an international conference at Williamsburg, Virginia, in October 1967, by the International Institute of Education Planning instanced India, the Philippines, the United Arab Republic and various South American countries as having already embarassing problems of that kind. In the Philippines by 1961 only twothirds of university graduates had full-time jobs; in India in 1962 over 63,000 graduates were on the live registers of employment exchanges; and most of Latin America had heavy unemployment and underemployment among university graduates. It is relevant that these countries where there is evidence of excess production of graduates include some where both the existing low level of economic development and the low rate of growth are perennial problems They lend little support to any belief in an automatic connection between expansion of university numbers and economic growth. The report just quoted goes on to point out that the industrialised countries are mostly not suffering from any problem of 'educated unemployment' but warns that the seller's market for educated manpower which has existed since the end of the last war could very well soften quickly and that unemployment of the newly-educated could appear. (It has

224

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

been suggested that one of the causes of the explosive outburst of discontent among French university students in 1968 was the emergence of difficulties in obtaining employment for all the graduates from France's vastly swollen universities.) What has been attempted in this analysis of various methods of approach to the question 'how much university education?' is to show how hard it is to arrive at any rational overall planning conclusion, how hard it is to demonstrate the justification for any particular level of government expenditure in this field. The pessimistic conclusion reached on the possibilities of a calculated econometric approach is by no means peculiar; in essence the Robbins Committee, after similarly examining various lines of approach, arrived at a similar conclusion and, abandoning any attempt to prove a case in terms of the economic calculus, based its recommendations for expansion on a broad belief in the general advantages of a university education for more people. After discussing some of the difficulties of precise measurement the Committee said (para. 625): 'There is a further return in the shape of general adaptability and increased capacity for technological advance which, in the last analysis, is probably more important than what is measured within the system of relative prices'; and the concluding paragraph of this section (para. 630) read: 'Considered, therefore, as an investment, there seems a strong presumption in favour of a substantially increased expenditure on higher education. Even if we cannot produce detailed computations of comparative yield, there is a strong probability that the country would have to go to a good deal beyond what is contemplated in our recommendations before the return in terms of social net product could be said to suggest general over-investment in this sector.' With the conclusion that, at the time of the Report in 1963, further expenditure to finance the university education of a larger proportion of the population was a good socioeconomic investment I have no desire to quarrel. But some reservations have to be made. First, the conclusion quoted expresses the belief that no 'general' over-investment would

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

225

be involved in the Committee's proposals; one inevitably wonders what lay behind that qualification. Did the Committee fear that there might nonetheless be over-investment in particular aspects of higher education? Certainly the arguments which led up to the conclusion do not suggest equal support for an increase in graduates in every academic discipline taught in the universities; or for every variety of teaching technique or other aspect of the total university provision; or for university activity at every level — undergraduate, graduate, doctoral or post-doctoral. In fact since 1963 it is clear that the responsible state organs have begun, as it were, to pick and choose between disciplines and between levels of activity, as in the line taken by the University Grants Committee in its letters of guidance on the 196772 grant allocations over post-graduate studies, already quoted in an earlier chapter. Secondly, granted that the Committee's 'hunch' about an increase from around 150,000 students to around 200,000 was right and that the same could be true of an increase to 300,000 or 400,000, a point must come when general or nonquantitative arguments will no longer seen convincing. Again there is some reason to suspect that that point has, in a sense, already been reached and that one of the reasons for the disappointing grant allocations of the current quinquennium is that the view is being taken that any extra money that can be found for education can be used to better national advantage in other forms of education than those provided by the universities. This leads back to the more general question: how does the government decide how much to spend on the universities? Clearly there could be no permanence for the world in which the universities once almost persuaded themselves they were living, a world in which the university community, crystallised in and represented by the University Grants Committee, had only to state a figure and the money would be forthcoming. Any government adjudicating between the various demands on its resources is bound to look for some criterion of decision. It would be very convenient if a criterion could have been found in a demonstrated rate of return on investp

226

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

ment, as in the case of the nationalised industries. If, as this discussion has sought to show, no such rate of return can be calculated (which is not the same thing as saying that it does not exist) those responsible for allocations are thrown back upon less exact criteria, their own hunches and the pressures of various groups in the community. In a democratic country decisions will be most influenced by the greatest of all pressure groups, the electorate - entirely rightly from the point of view of democratic principle and anyway inevitably when political parties are looking for votes. There is here a real danger that since schools interest everybody and universities still only concern a minority, provision for schools will be given too much weight and expansion of universities too little. University dons remain a powerful pressure group and some decisions will no doubt continue to be swayed by what is said in college common rooms and in the Athenaeum; but the school-teachers are a far more numerous pressure group and with far more influence on the mass of the electorate. With university finance so entirely in the hands of the government, and in the absence of any criterion of decision demonstrably superior to political judgement, universities are in danger of being brought into politics in a way which all its spokesmen have always deplored. And of course other aspects of university activity, in particular student attitudes, are independently tending to bring university affairs into politics. The net effect of the considerations discussed in this chapter is to give yet further emphasis to the need to examine whether any other way can be found of reaching decisions on university expansion alternative to centralised economic calculation and political pressure, i.e., one in which an effective part in the decision-making process is played by private decisions instead of all the real decisions on the scale of university activity being taken by one organ or another of the central government. It has been urged here that those central decisions are in effect arbitrary because no reliable method of calculating the general value to society of higher education has been developed or appears likely to be developed in the near future. The advantages often claimed for

C R I T E R I A OF D E C I S I O N ON G R O W T H

227

centralised decisions, i.e., that they can be based on better information and a wider view than private decisions, are greatly reduced, perhaps to vanishing point. Indeed it is very reasonable to think that the net advantage lies on the other side and that the sum total of a multitude of private decisions by the individuals involved on the advantages to them of a higher education and the price worth paying for it would be a far better guide than the arbitrary reactions of government to political pressures, special pleading and its own hunches.

11 Other Ways of Financing the Universities There are three main possibilities of finding finance for universities, with a fourth which could hardly become more than a supplementary source of income. They can, of course, be relied upon singly or in any form of combination. The three main sources are payment of fees by students; donations from private sources (including business corporations, and including also income from accumulated past donations, i.e., endowments); and grants from the state, including local authorities. The fourth, subsidiary, possibility is the undertaking of non-teaching services on a basis of payment which yields a surplus over outgoings which is then available to finance teaching. In most cases this fourth possibility has proved a dangerous illusion; many universities have undertaken 'contract' research in the comfortable expectation that it would strengthen their financial position only to find that the true costs of the research exceeded the payment made for it. One has heard stories of professional schools, e.g., a school of architecture, which earned enough in fees to pay the whole cost of the teaching of the school; but such cases are at the best very rare. In any case there are many university departments, especially on the arts side, with very little chance of earnings of this kind. Research contracts have a very real importance as a means of providing the research opportunities which are necessary to attract and retain high-grade staff, but can be disregarded as a source of funds available for general purposes. As already show, the other three sources of finance have all been used in the past and all play some part today, but 228

OTHER WAYS OF FINANCING U N I V E R S I T I E S

22g

grants from the state have become completely dominant. Most people would agree that this is an undesirable situation in that it constitutes a threat to the freedom of operation of the universities. But no serious attempt has yet been made to reverse the process in this country and there are tremendous obstacles to the development of either of the alternative bases of finance. Before considering the nature of those obstacles and how they might be surmounted, it will be well to consider in general principle how far the various alternative bases are calculated to serve the purposes of universities. I suggest that the criteria to be applied in considering each of the theoretically alternative possibilities are, first, whether it is likely to produce the 'right' amount of finance in total (something more will need to be said about what is meant by 'right'); second, whether it leaves adequate freedom to the universities, and more particularly freedom for individual teachers, to pursue their own line of study, and freedom to innovate, experiment and change; and, third, whether it is likely to encourage students to pursue the 'right' kind of courses, again with a need to define further what is meant by 'right'. As to producing the 'right' total of financial support I fear that too many university representatives take it for granted that the right figure is the highest figure attainable; and because, in recent decades, it has almost always looked to be possible to get more from the state than from the alternative sources, they have turned more and more to the state. From the point of view of the community as a whole, however, the 'right' figure is not likely to be the highest. Somehow a judgement must be reached about how much of the ultimately insatiable demands of the universities should be met in the general interest. Is the most nearly correct judgement likely to be made by the government - in the last report by the Cabinet and its immediate advisers; or by private individuals, groups and corporations deciding which institutions and which developments they think it worth supporting; or by the aggregate of hundreds of thousands of students each deciding whether it is worth his or her while to pay the cost of a university education ?

230

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

It is a natural assumption, in the current climate of opinion, that the state, taking a general view both of the whole field of education and of the national economic position, is in a better position to judge the general scale of university provision which is on balance best suited to the needs and resources of the country than either potential private donors or potential students acting without co-ordination and with less complete information about the future, whether in terms of 'social need' or employment prospects. The logic of this approach points clearly to the position which we seem very nearly to have reached, in which the total scale of university provision, i.e., the total number of students to be admitted, is determined, within quite narrow margins, by government decision; and finance both for the maintenance of the universities and for the support of the students is provided accordingly. There are, however, a good many reasons for doubting the necessary advantages of this situation. In the first place, it is of course only in the last generation that state finance has become dominant and only in the last decade that government views about the size of the university population have become so all-important. The British university system up to the inter-war period, of which there is certainly no need to be ashamed, had been built up on a combined basis of private benefaction, student fees and government support which, though growing, was still only supplementary. If it be objected that modern times demand a scale of provision which could never have been attained under such a system, regard should be had to the enormous scale of expansion which has taken place in the United States of America, for surpassing anything yet planned for the United Kingdom and based on a similar combination of fees, private benefactions and support from public funds. Nobody in the States is responsible for taking an overall view of the needs for university education or even for determining the total support to be provided from public funds, which comes largely from State rather than Federal sources; but this has not prevented the great expansion. Secondly, reasons have been given in an earlier chapter for doubting the capacity of any central authority to assess the

O T H E R WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

231

proper scale of university provision by any process of calculation, and for concluding that the decision must always be one of judgement and - having regard to the scale of the finance demanded and the certainty of its being in competition with other demands - a political rather than an administrative judgement. It is by no means axiomatic that such a political judgement will be superior to the aggregate of the judgements of a large number of private persons which might result from an alternative system. It is commonly the case that judgements by a single authority, even if they have statistically a better chance of being right than the aggregate of private judgements, have a greater chance of being really badly wrong, precisely because they are single not aggregated decisions; and are harder to put right because 'the State' has to be persuaded to change its single corporate mind instead of change being brought about by changes of mind among merely a proportion of the private individuals involved in the alternative system. Thirdly, it may be suspected that many people tend to assume something like the present system to be right because of a confusion with other forms of public service provided by the state. In fact, the provision of university education, viewed as a public service, has many oddities. It is characteristic of nearly all public services that, whether they are provided free or on payment of charges which cover part or all the cost, they are available to all comers. Everybody can claim the protection of the armed forces or the police, the services of the hospitals or the use of publicly provided roads. Primary education is available to all, and compulsory for all; so is secondary education up to the compulsory age of fifteen. Beyond that age the practice, whatever the legal obligation, of education authorities is to provide - in one form or another -for all children who desire to stay at school and are not clearly incapable of benefiting by further education. It is only at the university level that the state says that its public service (given through the universities which for this purpose are its agents) is available only to a predetermined number of citizens. Yet - to make the contrast the more marked - the chosen few, unlike those young people who elect to stay at

232

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

school after the minimum leaving age, are not merely provided with the education free of charge, they are eligible for maintenance grants which for most of them cover all their expenses. We have thus drifted into a situation in which state decisions determine that only x % of the relevant age group can have a university education. That x % then gets it, for practical purposes, for nothing. The rest, however much they might wish for such an education, are debarred from it altogether (leaving aside the marginal possibilities of surmounting the barriers of different qualifications, language and exchange control and getting it in another country). This is an extra-ordinary rigidity and a very strange kind of public service. At the minimum it is therefore possible that an alternative basis of financing would produce as good or better results. Looking to the alternative of private financing, there has perhaps never been a time, and certainly not in recent generations, when a university of any size and distinction has been able to finance itself entirely by private donations. The great private universities of America, like Oxford and Cambridge until recent times, have depended on a combination of endowment income, current donations and substantial fees paid by students, somewhat dubiously supplemented in America by receipts from government research contracts. If there is a genuine alternative to near-100% state financing it lies probably in a combination of private donations and fees rather than either alone. It is nonetheless worth looking at the two separately. The first thing to note about private financing is its great decline in this century. Gone are the days when a single wealthy individual could found a college like Owens College, the origin of the University of Manchester, or Royal Holloway College, one of the colleges of the University of London; the nearest parallel in the last generation has been Nuffield College at Oxford, a research institution rather than a general teaching establishment. Today the wealthiest benefactors, including the great business corporations, may figure as the leading benefactors to a particular institution, as with

OTHER WAYS OF FINANCING

UNIVERSITIES

Boots and the University of Nottingham or the Wills family and the University of Bristol, or may finance a particular building - a hall of residence or a library or a laboratory; but they no longer aspire to be the founders of a college of general education. Several reasons have contributed to this change. First is the increased scale of finance required, both because of the greater complexity of the physical equipment conventionally required and the changed ideas about the number of students appropriate to a full-scale university institution. It was one thing to found a college to cater for a few hundred students and requiring no more than classrooms, a library and some simple laboratories; it is another to provide for thousands of students, largely residential, requiring not only more complex teaching accommodation and a far more extensive library but also very expensive laboratory equipment and, in all probability, still more expensive computer facilities. A striking example of the change is to be found in the background of the foundation of the London School of Economics in 1895 and the London Graduate School of Business Studies seventy years later. They are properly comparable because they are concerned with the same kind of studies, not involving the expensive equipment of the natural sciences; and each aimed initially at a student body of no more than a few hundred. Sidney Webb and his associates embarked on the creation of the London School of Economics on the basis of a capital sum of £10,000 (subject to other calls upon it which ultimately absorbed nearly half of the total); taking the most extreme view of the toll of inflation that meant less than £100,000 in modern terms. When the Business School was promoted by the combined efforts of government and big business it was decided that the project could not go forward unless the business side could raise a fund of £1,500,000 with the Government contributing an equal sum. The sum required was thus three hundred times as large, or at least thirty times after allowing for the fall in the real value of money. A second factor is of course the effect of high direct taxation. With surtax rising to over 90 % nobody, however rich, can command the disposable income available to the very

234

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

wealthy a century or so ago. The one loophole available, the one way of acquiring large disposal funds was, until recently, capital gains which were not subject to tax. Recent tax changes have gone far to close that loophole. It is true that private donations to educational institutions with charitable status can, if made in appropriate form, reduce the donor's tax liability by being counted as deductions from his taxable income, but the deduction is not complete and the conditions to be fulfilled tend to reduce the usefulness of the donations. There is nothing like the generous 'tax-deductible' concessions of the American Income Tax system which have undoubtedly helped tremendously in maintaining the flow of private benefactions to education in the States. There is no indication of any tendency to a more liberal attitude in this country; rather, as has emerged from recent discussions of the public schools, there may be a move towards abolishing the right to claim donations as a tax deduction by abolishing the charitable status of privately financed educational bodies. The same basic difficulty applies to donations by business companies, with the added complications that a donation of a purely general kind, not related to the furtherance of the company's business, is liable to challenge both by the tax authorities as not being a proper deduction in assessing profits and by the shareholders as not being a proper use of the company's income. Thirdly, the growth of state financial support has itself a powerful discouraging effect on private generosity. When the state is finding 90 % of a university's income it is very natural for a potential benefactor to suspect that if he gives anything substantial the state will simply give so much less. Only too often, given the increasingly tight control of the state's contributions, such suspicions are entirely well founded. Even when they are not, they serve as a deterrent to generosity or, at the lowest as an excuse for meanness. One minor but significant indication of the small interest taken by private benefactors in education is the rarity of important bequests to educational institutions. Whitaker's Almanac publishes a list of the principal charitable bequests each year. The 1968 volume listed 58, of which only three

OTHER WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

235

were educational, two to Universities and one to Churchill College, Cambridge. It is very unlikely that private donations could ever provide all the finance needed for university education on the scale expected today, or have indeed ever done so in the past. But if some of the obstacles and deterrents to private benefactions referred to above could be reduced it is not in the least impossible that private support could again become a very significant element in university finance. It is not unreasonable to hope that at least one independent university could be financed by a combination of private support and student fees. What then of the third main possibility, reliance on student fees? Let us take the extreme hypothesis of reliance on fees as the sole source of income. Setting aside for the moment the question whether anything like the 'right' amount of income could be raised (though it is an enormous question) what would be the effect on academic freedoms, on selection of courses and on university education ? The academic world would be freer in the sense of being relieved of the fear of dictation by the state but would be subject to the disciplines of the market. The individual department would be free to offer what courses it choose - provided they attracted enough students. Within the individual university courses not actually or potentially paying their way would obviously be looked at askance and financially successful departments would tend to regard as parasitic other departments which were less successful. Almost certainly there would be greater costconsciousness all round - a salutary thing bearing in mind the wide variations in cost already referred to in an earlier chapter. Equally probable there would be different levels of fees for different faculties (which again might serve to restrain what some feel to be the extravagant habits of certain faculties, notably the natural sciences). On the student side, a student paying full fees, especially if he were 'working his way through college' or operating on a loan basis, would have a much keener eye to the market value of the degree for which he was studying, so that selection of courses would be determined much more by estimates of the earnings potentials of

236

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

different degrees. There would be what some would describe as a more rational basis, others as a more materialistic basis, for the distribution of courses. Even assuming that the future demand for employment is the right basis for the determination of the pattern of university courses many would question whether the choices of students, based on current demand from business firms and current general opinion about future trends, would be any less imperfect than the predictions of government planners. In other words, such an alternative system, while it would bring about some salutary changes of attitude, would also introduce dangers of new errors. Let us leave aside for the moment the question of balance of advantage in these changes and turn to a consideration of what would be the scale of fees required. In 1965/66 there were 187,000 students at universities in the United Kingdom; and the total expenditures of universities (excluding the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge) were £167,000,000. Various adjustments would be necessary to arrive at an average cost per head, for undergraduate students, e.g., inclusion of the Oxbridge college expenditure, exclusion of non-teaching expenditure (principally on research) by the universities and adjustments of costs as between undergraduates and post-graduates; and to arrive at the true economic cost a substantial sum would have to be added to cover capital charges on the very extensive capital equipment of the universities. No precise figures are available for these adjustments but it can be taken as certain, after allowing for rises in costs since 1965, that the full cost per student today averages over £1,000 p.a. That does not include the living costs of students, covered in the majority of cases by grants currently fixed at about £450 p.a. In all therefore, the annual cost per undergraduate student may be taken to be not less than £1,500. The total cost of taking a degree for the student who successfully completes the course in these years is thus £4,500 or more; but that is not the same thing as the cost of producing a graduate since allowance must be made for those courses which extend to four or five years, for those who take longer than the standard time because of failures in intermediate examinations, illness, etc., and for the 10% who fail

OTHER WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G UNIVERSITIES

237

altogether after occupying a place for at least part of the standard period. In all the cost per graduate must be between £5,000 and £6,000. If we can imagine a switch to complete reliance on student fees it appears obvious that the number of students would be sharply reduced. Only a strictly limited number of families could find fees and maintenance of the order of £1,500 p.a. for their children from current resources. The number who could find the money would, of course, be increased, if such a system were permanently established, by insurance schemes such as those now used to pay over a long period of years for public school education, probably by economising on school fees and reserving resources for the university stage,* and by the development of loan schemes such as exist in a number of other countries. It may also be assumed that there would be a considerable revival of demand for evening or other parttime courses from students paying their own way. Nonetheless, if fees on a scale sufficient to cover full cost had to be found from personal resources (current income of parents or students themselves, past accumulations through insurance or other forms of saving or future income pledged through loans) it is certain that a very substantial proportion of students now attending universities would be excluded, and overwhelmingly students from the poorer homes: socially such a result would, in modern thinking, be intolerable; and on other grounds even those who believe that the universities have recently been over-expanded would hardly wish to see as large a cut-back in total numbers as would be likely. So extreme a solution as 100 % reliance on student fees paid from private resources, a basis of finance which hardly any university has ever adopted, is not therefore a reasonable objective. At this stage it may well be thought that the discussion seems to lead to the negative and barren conclusion that every possibility is open to serious objection on one ground or * It is one of the oddities of the present situation that parents can afford to spend up to the hilt on school fees at exclusive non-state schools because they can assume that the state will take over all or most of the burden when their children move on to universities whose actual expenses of operation are even higher.

238

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

another. This is indeed true if one takes each of the various possibilities in an extreme and exclusive form. It is, however, a very different matter if ways of combining the various possibilities are examined. First, there are ways in which the advantages of basing income to a large extent directly on student numbers can be combined with massive state support. The state already gives a small percentage of its total support in this way by paying the fees of a high proportion of students as part of their maintenance grants. If fees were raised so as to form a much larger proportion of total university income, a correspondingly larger proportion of state assistance would be channelled that way. It would be possible to go further and provide the whole of the assistance the state is prepared to give to university education in the form of grants to students, adjusted to personal and family circumstances. Payments to students at rates of £1,500 a year or more might be too startling for the public to stand, admirable as it no doubt is that the public should realise the true cost of providing university education; and an alternative which might be less disturbing would be to short-circuit the business of paying a grant to a student in order that he might pay it over to a university in the shape of fees and to make grants to the universities based on a strict per capita calculation. In fact ideas have already been formulated and discussed between the Vice-Chancellors and government authorities for a 'formula-based' system of grants, in which the formula for the calculation of each university's grant would be more complicated than a simple per capita grant but would nonetheless include a large 'per capita' element by giving very substantial weight to the actual number of students currently attending the university. There is, of course, no reason why this should not be combined with an increase in the actual level of fees paid. Replacement of the present grant system by the payment of 'full-cost' fees via grants to students or the assessment of grants on some form of per capita basis would do nothing to achieve two other advantages many would like to obtain from a greater use of the fee system, i.e., the giving to the student

OTHER WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

239

himself (and no doubt his parents and advisers) of a vital share in the decision about the direction of higher education and what it is worth paying for it; and the placing of greater responsibility on the student himself for the cost of his privileged position as the recipient of a university education. This latter point is as much an underlying objective of the opinion which has developed in favour of student loans as the desire to see an alternative source of university income. There are several variants of the student loan idea which have been advocated. The simplest envisages that the whole or part of any assistance received by a student would be repayable by regular instalments over a period of years. This could be made more complicated by providing that if the student, after graduation, takes a particular category of employment (e.g., school-teaching) for some minimum period he would be exempted from repayment. Another variation suggested is that repayment might be made, not in the form of a fixed annual sum, but as a percentage addition to the graduate's income tax liability; this has the attraction of relating the liability directly to the increased earning capacity presumed to result from university education but suffers the disadvantage of possibly reducing the incentive to extra earnings. Looked at from the point of view of social justice the case for some system of repayment is that the university graduate is placed in a position of privilege, enjoyed by only a small minority of the population, largely at the cost of the state, i.e., the general taxpayer, and as a result of being in that privileged position is able to secure higher earnings than he would otherwise have done. In fairness to others less privileged he ought, therefore, to make some repayment out of his increased earnings. But there is also a case in terms of social justice against any such system, in that the burden of repayment would be a great deal heavier for the graduate from a low-income background than for the more fortunate graduate with wealthier parents who could either dispense with a loan altogether or make the repayments with family help at no personal sacrifice. The one view looks at the way in which the graduate from a poor home is over-privileged

24O

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

compared with others with similar backgrounds who have not had the good fortune to go to a university; the other looks at the way in which he is underprivileged by comparison with graduates from better-off homes. Opinions on issues of social justice are perhaps more emotional than rational; my own feeling is that in the modern world in which all manner of other things are done to correct or offset basic inequalities of income, there is a stronger case for correcting the injustice as between graduate and non-graduate than for further correction of the difference getween 'rich' and 'poor' graduate, and therefore that a student loan system would on balance promote social justice. An additional reason for that view is that the effect of a system of higher fees based on a loan scheme would probably be to substitute payments from private resources for payments from the state in the case of the betteroff students. Social justice is of course by no means the only consideration in taking a view about a student loan scheme. Two other factors are very relevant. A loan scheme would make easier the introduction of substantially increased fees which, as already argued, are one of the ways in which the growing power of the state over the universities could be reduced. Secondly, to many it would seem to present the advantage of leading to an increased sense of responsibility among students both in the selection of their courses and in the prosecution of their studies. If it led some to drop the idea of going to a university at all that might be no bad thing in the existing state of excess demand for university places. It would seem therefore that the balance of advantage would lie clearly with the introduction of a loan scheme, provided it could be administered without too many complications. Some problems of repayment immediately spring to mind. Would a woman graduate's liability continue after marriage, constituting a minus dowry and possibly acting as an even greater financial disincentive to marriage than present income tax arrangements ? Or if the liability lapsed on marriage, would it revive if the wife took employment, so discouraging her from taking paid work? How would illness or disability be treated? If any concessions were made to

OTHER WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

24!

graduates taking specified kinds of employment, what would happen if they later left such employment ? This is no place to set out answers to these and other inevitable problems. We can only make some guess as to whether reasonably equitable and workable answers would be likely to be found. Again, as a personal opinion, I should expect that acceptable arrangements could be worked out. One problem which looks particularly difficult is that of recovery of a loan from a graduate who emigrates before completing (maybe before even starting) his loan repayments. Unquestionably a proportion of graduates will continue in the future, as in the recent past, to find employment, temporarily or permanently, overseas; and legal enforcement of repayment claims against them would be difficult if not impossible. (We can, I think, rule out the possibility of a ban on emigration by any graduate without state approval.) Galling as it might be to see the participants in the 'brain drain' secure the additional advantage of bilking the state, we should not make too much of this. Many, one would hope most, graduates are honest people and would meet their commitments even though living abroad. The difficulty is one which has applied in principle to private indebtedness of all kinds for a very long time without resulting in any general unwillingness to grant credit without guarantees that the debtor will not escape payment by emigrating. The occasional bad debt on this account, like bad debts for other reasons, would have to be accepted as part of the costs of any loan scheme. An alternative scheme for recovery of the cost of university education is the levying of an extra tax on the incomes of graduates not just as a means of recovering a loan but as a way of getting for the state a share of the extra earning power presumed to be possessed by graduates. This idea has been most fully worked out by Howard Glennerster, Stephen Merrett and Gail Wilson in an article in the new Higher Education Review, summarised in The Times of October 19, 1968. It envisages the levying of a graduate tax as a percentage of income throughout the graduate's earning career, the rates being approximately related to the estimated costs of Q

242

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

first degrees of various kinds. (No account is taken of higher degrees; are they supposed not to generate any additional earning power?) Alternative rates are suggested according to whether it is thought proper to charge interest on the original 'investment' in the cost of the education when calculating the target sum to be recovered eventually from the graduate. The special tax would, apparently, be levied on all earnings throughout the lifetime of the graduate. It would vary according to the kind of degree taken, e.g., as science degrees cost more than arts degrees, science graduates would pay more than arts graduates. It is suggested that the rates should be graduated, with low rates at the beginning of a man's career and higher at the end. The authors show that the total sum which might be collected could come near enough to paying the true costs of the education received. A good many difficulties come quickly to mind. Social justice suggests that since graduates are themselves the principal beneficiaries of their university education, they should bear the ultimate burden of the cost; and this scheme could be so operated that the cost is borne by all graduates taken together as a single group. It is not, however, necessarily equitable between individuals. One graduate would be paying more than another with an identical degree because he earns a higher income by working harder or using a talent quite unrelated to his university education. Why, for instance, should a successful pop singer with a B.A. pay more tax than an equally successful singer who left school at fifteen ? Although average graduate earnings may be higher than the average earnings of all employed persons quite a few graduates (probably most of those engaged in school teaching) earn little if anything more than the average factory worker. As compared with a loan scheme, the liability of the individual would apparently be unlimited, not restricted to the actual costs of fees and maintenance at the university (in whole or in part) so that instead of feeling a special incentive to earn in order to get rid of a liability, the graduate would be under a life-long disincentive to increase his earnings because the more he did so the more he would pay in the aggregate. For parallel reasons the incentive to escape all liability by emi-

O T H E R WAYS OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

243

grating would be greater. Finally the 'drop-out', the student who fails to complete his course, would apparently pay nothing toward the cost of his teaching; and is it too fanciful to envisage the really calculating student deciding that it is the knowledge, not the qualification, that matters and therefore deciding not to graduate in the formal sense and so escape the tax? These are objections from the point of view of the effect on the individual graduate. There are also objections from the side of the university. It has been explained already that a system of higher fees financed at least partly by loans would both help to restore the freedom of universities from the growing state control and make them more cost-conscious. No such results would flow from the graduate tax system, which would not of itself change in any way the relationship between the state and the universities but merely provide the state with a fresh source of funds from which to meet the grants to the universities. Taking all the facts into account there seems little doubt that a system of more realistic fees coupled with student loans would be both better in its general effects on the universities and more equitable in relation to students than a graduate tax scheme. After this digression let us turn back to consider what might be an ideal basis of financing in the future. Two things stand out about the present system. The universities are overwhelmingly dependent on government grants, hence are sensitive to government pressures at any and every point of their activities. On the other side, because the grants are, with rare exceptions*, general and not ear-marked for particular purposes, the government is paying for a package of research and teaching, of activity in every possible intellectual field, instead of paying for activities which it has itself selected. There is muddle at both ends; because they have so few alternative sources of income the universities are restricted in their choices of activity without knowing just how much they are restricted, while the government, in endeavouring to * Principally grants for individual research projects, for the support of administrative training schemes and for assistance to studies in nonWestern European languages.

244

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

secure the kind of developments it thinks best, is reduced to a general policy of 'guidance' - nudges, nods and winks given, sometimes publicly and sometimes privately, by the University Grants Committee - with the occasional heavy-handed direct order or pressure as in the case of the increase of oversea students fees. The universities would, I suggest be better off with more alternative sources of income and the government with more use of earmarked grants. Generally, I believe that the universities today suffer from a lack of clarity of purpose and that that clarity would be improved if more of their income were clearly seen to be received in return for services rendered. Undoubtedly it would be disastrous if all their income were so tied to specific activities and some assurance of a hard core of unallocated income would be essential. A possible general basis would be as follows: A. I N C O M E F R O M G O V E R N M E N T

1. Capital grants from government to continue substantially as at present; 2. General recurrent grants from government to cover a proportion not exceeding one-half and preferably not more than a third of recurrent costs: to be fixed quinquennially on the basis of a predetermined formula related to the level of activity at the beginning of the quinquennium and, it is to be hoped, not varied at all during the quinquennium. 3. Ad hoc grants to be made for research projects and for new development including both specific new courses and general development of new universities. B. I N C O M E F R O M FEES

4. The greater part of income to be derived from fees, with universities left free to fix them as they think fit. 5. Assistance to students to be provided on part grant and part loan basis; grants covering about half the total of fees and maintenance, and in any event not less than the equivalent of present grants, and to be assessed on family income basis as at present; loans for the balance to be available without means test. C. I N C O M E F R O M B E N E F A C T I O N S

6. Income from private donations cannot, of its nature,

O T H E R W A Y S OF F I N A N C I N G U N I V E R S I T I E S

245

be organised and determined in advance; but if the basic government grant were not, as at present, calculated as a deficiency grant covering the expected gap between expenditure and other income but based on an objective formula, universities would have much more incentive to seek, and private individuals and business concerns much more incentive to make, private donations since they would not automatically be offset by cuts in government grant. If also the Treasury could be persuaded to more generous Income Tax and Surtax treatment of such donations (the loss of revenue from which could reasonably be set against the decline in government expenditure on the universities under such a system) the flow of private assistance might be built up to something more comparable with that customary in America. There is no reason why all universities should depend on the same proportions of support from the state, private sources and student fees and it would be an excellent thing, by facilitating variety and experimentation if, as in America there were institutions primarily dependent on private support running alongside and vying with state-financed universities. Obviously it would be absurd to try single-handed to work out all the details of such a scheme of financing. It must look revolutionary and would no doubt be stoutly opposed by the National Union of Students. Yet it is not, apart from the student loan element, very different from the actual system existing before the last war, when government grants covered only about a third of recurrent costs and fee income played a much more important role than it does today. No doubt all kinds of consequences would flow from it - greater costconsciousness in the universities, probably a revival of parttime study and, if possible a change in systems of payment of academic staff so as to relate income more clearly to services rendered whether on the teaching or the research side. The advantages to be obtained would be greater freedom for the universities, less net expenditure by the government and greater responsibility and realism in the choice of courses on the part of students.

12 Reflections on Policy What emerges from the previous chapters is inevitably confusing. There are great elements of diversity but significant uniformities; many cross-currents but some main trends. In trying to distinguish the most important features the risk must be run of apparent inaccuracy through the ignoring of exceptions and shades of emphasis. We began by noting how in modern times, the vast extension of the range of knowledge had widened the scope of university activity and lengthened the time needed to master a subject; how the same extension of knowledge had increased the need for highly educated people if full advantage was to be taken of it for technical purposes; and how the increase of affluence had made it possible for society to maintain far more people in full-time education up to university level. We noted further the consequential increase both in number and in social prestige of the academic profession. We went on to examine the various purposes traditionally attributed to university activity: the simple maintenance and dissemination of knowledge, mind and character training; preparation for the 'learned' professions; and research; and we particularly noted certain continuing ambiguities about the issues of *&ite' versus 'general' education, 'academic' versus Vocational' and teaching versus research. Among other things it has been shown that the universities have a somewhat varying and unsystematic relationship to the various professions; the claim of the universities to be the dominant centres of research and sources of new discoveries has been critically discussed; and the wide extent of higher or post-school educational 246

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

247

activities outside the universities has been emphasised. Of all the changes in ideas about the purpose of a university, the most important if the least discussed is the decline in the significance attached to character training. In a sense this began with the release of universities from dominance by the church, whether one dates that from the final abolition of religious tests in Oxford and Cambridge in 1871 or the forming of the 'atheist' University College in London in 1828; but for some generations the universities continued to be inspired by inherited ideas of morality and ethical purpose, if not by theological dogma. Today such moral and ethical standards are very largely eroded; attempts to enforce traditional standards are condemned as intolerable interference with freedom; even the mention of such standards is derided and opposed by members of staff as well as students; and increasingly in the more speculative branches of knowledge, especially in the social sciences and philosophy the criterion of approval of ideas tends more and more to be simply their novelty, because there is no other standard by which they can be judged. In this final development character-training merges with mind-training and the latter also is in danger of being dangerously softened by the tendency of so much modern philosophy to fight shy of any criterion other than the most formal of logical rules by which the validity of thought-processes may be judged. There is need to lay less emphasis on bright ideas and facile 'solutions' of intricate social problems and far more on the testing of ideas against facts and experience and simultaneously the testing of one set of facts against another. The right approach is still that indicated in the quotation already made (Chapter 2) from Arnold Nash in which he said how he had learned from Morris Ginsberg that 'not even the clearest thinking can atone for failure to begin with the facts' and from Karl Mannheim that 'the facts are never what they seem to be'. In all this the universities are no more than participants in a far wider social process involving in a much deeper sense a loss of real purpose; and we cannot expect any full reestablishment of what must, however abhorrent the term to progressive thought, be called a moral sense in the universi-

248

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

ties if it cannot also be re-established in society at large. Nonetheless anything which helps the universities to a clearer view of their own purposes and helps individual members of universities to a clearer view of their own functions should contribute to making the universities leaders in the process of moral regeneration. And the restoration of intellectual standards is something central to the essential purposes of the universities themselves and something in which they should be the natural leaders. The tendency of British universities, despite their very different origins to move towards a common pattern of activity and organisation has been noted and the present pattern of degree structure and teaching organisation has been summarised, emphasis being placed on the rigidities which are still so much a feature of the pattern. Great stress has been laid on the extent of the financial dependence of the universities on the state; on the powers that puts in the hands of state organs to direct or influence university activity; and on the way those powers are increasingly used, adding substantially on balance to the forces making for uniformity. Reference has been made in several connections to the problems arising from the gap between the number of university places and the number of'qualified' candidates; to the failure of the universities to do anything substantial to narrow that gap by modification of their traditional practices; and to the anxieties and frustrations of school-leavers hunting for places and assisted in the hunt by a system of state grants whose generosity is not adequately matched by the level of state assistance to the running costs of the universities or the provision of student residences. These frustrations and the necessarily impersonal relationship in the large universities of today have been noted among the causes of the very obvious malaise of the student population. Nonetheless, it would seem that much the most important cause of that malaise is the widespread intellectual dissatisfaction with modern society which has grown so rapidly among young people and which is intimately connected with the erosion of the sense of moral purpose already noted. It has been suggested that some changes in the university world,

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

249

especially changes encouraging a feeling of personal responsibility in the individual student, could help to meet this malaise, but little faith has been indicated in any good which might result from concessions to demands for student participation in fundamental university decisions. So far as the effective government of the universities is concerned, it has been suggested that the balance is likely to lie between the providers of finance (at present the state) and the teachers who are the most essential of all the resources needed by a university. Looking to the universities proper, not to higher education in total, I suggest that in spite of the great variety in the detailed practice of individual institutions, the crucial characteristics are rigidity in structure on the one hand and confusion of purpose on the other. Let us look first at the rigidities. Perhaps the first rigidity is the one least often commented on, that is the fixed time-scheme of undergraduate courses still overwhelmingly the main item of university activity. It is, for practical purposes, impossible for anyone to get a first degree in less than three years, in some subjects four or five. The speed at which men and women can learn varies very widely; so does the previous preparation, the degree of knowledge from which they start. But for university purposes all are treated as equal and as capable of proceeding at the same pace, the quick learner who might master the course in two years and the slower of apprehension who would feel more comfortable if allowed four. At school level it is common enough for the brighter pupils to be pushed on and be taking their O levels at 15, but it is not impossible and not counted as failure if they are not ready till 16 or 17. That a university course must be of fixed duration is so universally accepted that one feels very strange in asking the question 'Why?' The only answer which readily occurs is that it is an inheritance from the tradition of apprenticeship; and that does not help very much in the case of non-professional degrees. The most obvious and more rational alternative is that, granted the fallibility of examinations in ascertaining the extent of a candidate's knowledge, the fixed term of study is useful as giving a supplementary guarantee that the candidate has

25°

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

really learned something. Yet this explanation is difficult to reconcile on the one side with the inadequacy of arrangements to ensure that the prescribed period genuinely is spent in study and on the other with the almost exclusive reliance on the terminal examination as the test of achievement. A second clear aspect of rigidity is the firm tying of students to one place of study, which has already been discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. This rigidity of place is, in fact, closely linked with the rigidity of time because of the normal requirement of a fixed period of study in the university which awards a student's degree, and has been just as little discussed. Associated with it also is the difficulty of changing the subject of study which we may call the rigidity of subject. And fourthly there is still widely prevalent rigidity of form in the still overwhelmingly common specialised honours degree. It is true that real efforts are being made to breach the uniformities of subject and of form but they are as yet only marginally effective. In the main it remains true that a young man or woman entering a university as an undergraduate is embarking on a course from which little deviation is possible. He, or she, will almost certainly have to remain in the university where he starts for precisely three years and to stick to the limited field which he has initially chosen. It will be impossible to shorten the course and very difficult to lengthen it; and if for any reason he fails to complete it, he will be stamped as a failure and any time he has spent on the course will, so far as formal qualifications or conventional reputation are concerned, have been wasted. The causes of these rigidities are partly the rules of the universities and partly the working of the system of public financial support. It is the university rules which determine the minimum time to be spent in working for a first degree and the pattern of the degree, but reliance on public support would, apart from any other reasons, make it difficult for a student to prolong that minimum period except in case of illness or other acceptable excuse. In the final analysis it is also public policy which has created the situation of pressure on university accommodation which itself leads to the reluc-

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

25!

tance of university authorities to let students stay beyond their standard periods of study. Public policy on the one hand encourages many more young people to seek university entry by holding out the promise of a maintenance grant if admission is secured and on the other effectively limits the number of admissions by rationing the financial grants to universities. Unquestionably rigidity is also encouraged by the growing control of the University Grants Committee and the Department of Education and Science. The imposed uniformity of salary scales, the common standards of building provision, the common level of fees and other specific limitations on freedom of action have already been discussed; but in more intangible ways the growth of central government interest slows up innovation and experimentation, as does the parallel and still more intangible growth in the mechanisms of voluntary co-operation between the universities through the Vice-Chancellors' Committee and other common organs. The constant watchfulness of the Association of University Teachers and the National Union of Students add further weight to the trend towards uniformity of practice and the difficulties of breaking away from it. The second main characteristic mentioned was confusion of purpose. It is appropriate here to refer back to what has been said about the varieties of higher education. Statistics quoted in Chapter 3 show that the universities account for only a fraction of those receiving post-school or 'higher' education, full-time or part-time. Of course that includes a great deal of study at an intellectual level clearly below that normally associated with universities; but it also includes a fair amount of study at first degree level or not markedly different from it. Professional training in particular is very mixed; some is done very largely within the universities, e.g., medicine, social administration and engineering; some in institutions similar to and associated with universities but not fully assimilated, e.g., teaching; other professional training may be done in universities but is more commonly done outside, e.g., in law, accountancy and architecture. There is certainly no clear set of criteria as to what is proper to university study and what is not.

252

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

There are those who would solve the problem of the border-line by moving it so as to include as wide as possible a range of activities. Dr Clark Kerr, the former head of the University of California, in his book on The Uses of the University has christened the new form of omni-competent institution the 'multiversity' and has written with apparent approval of the many centres of the University of California, its extension work and numerous research centres, its '10,000 courses', its 'contact with nearly every industry, nearly every level of government, nearly every person in its region', the variation in age, marital status, etc., of its students, the variety of its staff and so on. Kerr accepts that a 'multiversity' may provide at the same time the most advanced research facilities and opportunities for purely scholarly research and courses of instruction both severely practical and pretty elementary. He quotes as illustrative of the opposite view what another distinguished American, Abraham Flexner, wrote of the 'genuine university': 'The heart of a university is the graduate school of arts and sciences, the solidly professional schools and certain research institutes'; and adds that that concept was already dead when Flexner wrote, in 1938. Kerr goes on further to quote from Allan Nevins: 'Observers of higher education can now foresee the inexorable emergence of an entirely new landscape. It will no longer show us a nation dotted by high academic peaks with lesser hills between; it will be a landscape dominated by mountain ranges.' One such mountain range runs from Boston to Washington and contains nearly half of the American Nobel Prize winners. Another is to be found on the Pacific Coast. (The significance of the two combined is emphasised by Lord Snow's estimate that 80 % of the pure science in western countries is to be found in the U.S.A.) What Clark Kerr sees for the future is a 'City of Intellect', a university city with its satellite suburbs which may be viewed as 'encompassing all the intellectual resources of a society' or, wider still, its soul. This is a glorious conception but we must not be blinded by its glory. The concepts of the multiversity and of the city of the intellect are not by any means identical. It is by no means certain that an institution which attempts to comprise

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

253

everything within itself will give preference to what is intellectually highest; Flexner might equally well, and perhaps more justifiably, have claimed that his 'genuine university' was the true seed of the City of Intellect. Furthermore any attempt to bring into one organisation 'all the intellectual resources of a society' must raise the spectre of illiberal exclusivity, because that concept leads easily to the idea that whatever is not included in the single organisation is unworthy of intellectual consideration. It is the process which leads logically from the idealism of Plato to the rigid thoughtmoulds of the Politbureau. Clark Kerr himself writes: 'The external view is that the University is radical; the internal reality is that it is conservative'. Administratively, the attempt to bring every kind of intellectual activity under one cover must lead to enormous and growing difficulties. An institution which covers education in every field from the narrowly vocational to the most abstract academic and at levels varying from what in Britain would be pre-University instruction to post-doctoral research must be faced with almost insoluble problems of allocation of resources; its staff and students must be constantly troubled by uncertainties of loyalty. If the institution is to retain a minimum sense of unity there must be some co-ordination of its multifarious activities. Given California's ten thousand courses, there must be some machinery for deciding whether or not to lay on the ten thousand and first, some authority which directs which teachers provide it and some system of organisation which fits the students who attend it into a a general structure. The machinery of decision can be either authoritarian, concentrated in the hands of professional administrators, or democratic, providing for more or less participation by the whole academic body. So far as it leans to the authoritarian, the sense of community is lessened as the teachers feel more and more a 'We-They' relationship with the administration. So far as it leans to the democratic, the attempt to involve large numbers of academics in every decision must lead both to great slowness and conservatism and to the absorption in committee work of a great deal of academic time which could be better devoted to teaching or

254

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

research. As to students, we have already seen that the size and impersonality of institutions is a probable contributary cause of current student discontents; widening the area of activity can only increase the feeling of lack of contact by making it more difficult for the individual student to identify the particular unit to which he can feel himself to belong. The multiversity is likely to meet internally many of the difficulties which have already been noted as affecting United Kingdom universities in their relations with government. Indeed the multiversity is more like an attempt to bring within one system nearly all the varieties of higher education which were referred to in Chapter 3. It is tempting, from the point of view of one popular school of thought, to think that 'co-ordination' of all those activities by a single authority, whether the state Department of Education, as could happen in the United Kingdom, or a 'multiversity', is the best way of resolving their differences and conflicting claims on resources. The great difficulty in any such resolution by some overall decision-making apparatus is the absence of any obvious criteria of decision. We have seen in Chapter 10, how hard it is to find calculable criteria for decisions about allocation of resources to and within universities of the British pattern; the task would be harder still in institutions of even wider and more varied scope and functions. In practice still more would tend to be left to the pulls and pushes of pressure groups and the private consultations of administrators. The desirability of catering somehow for a wide range of aspects of higher education is not for a moment disputed; nor is the enormous advantage of contact between people working in different institutions on facets of the same intellectual problems - the City of Intellect of Nevins and Kerr or the 'ecological centre' of Ben David which was referred to in Chapter 4. What is suggested is that it would be better to attempt this variety of tasks through a corresponding variety of genuinely independent institutions rather than trying to deal with them all as integral parts of very large multipurpose institutions. It is pertinent to note that in the fundamental re-examination of the French University system now in process, following the disturbances of May 1968, very

R E F L E C T I O N S ON POLICY

255

serious thought is being given to the breaking up of the University of Paris and other large units. We have to provide for traditional university courses leading to straightforward first degrees in arts and sciences, for high level professional courses, for post-school technical education partly at, and partly ranking below, professional standard and for post-graduate courses; for opportunities of individual research of the Ph.D. type, and for higher level or more systematic research in organised units or institutes; for full-time students and for part-timers, including both parttime study aiming at a degree or diploma and part-time study of a less formal kind; in other words for all the variety of studies and researches contained within the statistics which were summarised in Chapter 3. British Universities have gone less far than some American in the extent of their activities within this range. Some previous passages of this essay may have appeared to argue that they ought to go further in broadening their activities. The point of the previous discussion has, however, rather been that the boundary lines at present drawn seem to have little logical basis. On balance I would conclude that while some of the boundary lines between the U (what is appropriate to a university) and the non-U (what is not) are too sharp, the solution does not lie in developing institutions which, as individual organs will cover everything, U and non-U, but rather in giving narrower definitions to the spheres of action of individual institutions while at the same time seeking to bring about a redistribution of functions between institutions and-in certain respects - reducing the differences of prestige between the U and the non-U. The same general conclusion emerges from another line of approach. In Chapter 3, reference was made to the 'mainstream' of education, comprising a series of stages: primary or preparatory; secondary up to O level standards; Sixth Form; undergraduate; post-graduate; and post-doctoral. Of these stages, the last three are all at present assumed to lie within the sphere of the University, and I suspect that the attempt to cater for all those three stages in one institution is responsible for a good many current difficulties. Traditionally

256

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

the university has provided the final stage of formal education or tuition as well as providing opportunities for the first steps in individual discovery or research. Until a few decades ago the last stage of systematic education for the vast majority of students was the undergraduate course. That is no longer true; increasingly the final stages of tuition take place at the post-graduate level. It therefore becomes questionable whether all that is now contained in undergraduate work ought still to be included in the university range and linked with post-graduate work as it is today. The tradition of British universities has leaned very definitely to the 'elite' concept of the university rather than to the 'general'; that is to the view that a university is a place of study for the very best, not a place to which anyone may claim admission. That tradition has been somewhat eroded by the current expansionist mood and by both the greatly enlarged demand and the apparent social need for education at the traditional university level; but basically it is the right tradition. Universities have been and should continue to be concerned first of all with excellence not with universality in the sense of providing something for everyone. But excellence is now to be sought at a higher level. What the elite tradition needs now is reinterpretation in the modern conditions of knowledge in which the highest level, to which the elite concept is fully applicable, has acquired a different meaning. It is no longer acceptable to treat everything which has formerly fallen within the scope of universities as reserved to an elite; but it is an even worse mistake to assume that therefore everything which now falls within the scope of a university ought to be available to everyone. Clark Kerr's multiversity would need to provide special high-level institutes for the elite, as indeed is so successfully done in the University of California and other large American universities. What is argued here is that, organisationally it is better to recognise the need for such provision in separate institutions rather than confusing them with more general provision. There is yet another strand of thought to add to this general discussion. A great many people in Britain have come to believe that, at secondary level, the old practice of providing

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

257

different types of education in separate institutions sought to be replaced by a 'comprehensive' system in which all types of secondary education are grouped in unified institutions. Much of the argument about this has been political and inspired by somewhat naive expectations about the effects of such a change on class structure; but there are academic and wider social arguments for it also which I believe to be convincing. It is natural then to ask why the objective should not be to extend the comprehensive principle into the higher education sphere as well. More pointedly, there seems to be a prima facie case for a charge of inconsistency against the government which, while pressing its policy of comprehensive secondary education almost brutally on reluctant local education authorities, has explicitly proposed a 'Binary* policy in higher education. Maturer consideration may, however, persuade us that the inconsistency is only superficial. An essential difference between the secondary and tertiary levels is that secondary education is now as near as makes no difference a universal service, compulsory for everyone up to the age of 15 and de facto available for everyone who chooses to take it up to much higher ages, whereas tertiary or higher education is still provided, in any of its varied forms, for only a minority. It is not implausible that just as primary education, once it became a universal public service, acquired a common pattern, so secondary education should now move in the same direction at least to the extent of being provided in institutions of common pattern, whereas tertiary education, precisely because it is nothing like a universal service, can maintain a far more varied pattern. This is not an argument to be pressed to extremes; certainly it is not in the least urged that the actual content of secondary education should be wholly uniform. It is a matter of balance of advantage and what is suggested is that the modern developments both in the growth of knowledge and the enlargement of the general provision of education tilt the balance at secondary level against specialisation and towards comprehensive institutions, but that at the tertiary level the balance remain in favour of greater specialisation both in curricula and in institutions. The clearest practical outcome of all this so far as univerR

258

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

sities are concerned is that we need a new look at the point where pre-university work ends and full university work starts. It is right for that break still to come normally at the age of 18 or 19? In times past it was common for boys to matriculate at the age of 14 or so (Cardinal Wolsey is said to have graduated B.A. at 15). Nearly fifty years ago, in 1919, I went up to the university when I was just turned 17 and felt nothing strange about it. Today it is still possible under university statutes for a student to enter at 17 but it is a rare occurrence. The age of entry has gradually risen, not, I imagine, because people mature intellectually later and later but because, with the growth of knowledge, the period over which systematic education can usefully extend has constantly lengthened and the age at which the last stage of that systematic education should start has correspondingly receded. The student who follows the mainstream all the way is likely to end his full-time organised education at least with a Master's degree, and probably with a Ph.D., at the age of 23 or 24. It would thus be more reasonable that he should start on his final stage at 20 than at 18. At the same time the present structure offers inadequate opportunity to the young man or woman who may want to go on with an academic-type education beyond the standard of A level but may not really be anxious to stay in full-time education to the age of 21 or 22 or to take the still normal specialised honours degree type of course. Looking purely to the resources problem we might be able to provide a post A level education for appreciably more young people if we did not insist that they must go on for a further three years or not at all. The best use of our resources might be to provide an education falling short of honours level for a larger number than at present get to a university, plus an education up to post-graduate level for a good many more than now get it, rather than to fall between two stools by struggling to get the current numbers up to honours level and then being short of resources to take a sufficient number to the post-graduate level. If therefore we were now starting from scratch and design-

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

259

ing an educational structure related to the present range of knowledge and the present scale of available resources the best structure might well be seen to be secondary schools ending normally with one year of Sixth Form work, i.e., at about age 17; colleges offering two and three year courses which would take over the top layer of current Sixth Form work but extend into what is now done in the first year or two of undergraduate work; and universities which would admit students at about the level normally now attained at the commencement of the final undergraduate year and take them up to and beyond the level now aimed at in the 'taught* master's degrees. This would largely be a systematisation of the situation which effectively prevails in the U.S.A., where children leave the High Schools with a standard of attainment probably a year behind that of good English secondary schools, where the Junior Colleges or Liberal Arts Colleges and many indeed of the lesser-known universities perform the function envisaged for the second stage without aspiring to post-graduate and research activity, and where that activity is in the main concentrated in a minority of universities, including of course those with international reputations, which normally have highly organised separate Graduate Schools and in some cases undertake only graduate activity. Many of the colleges at the second level maintain, at their appropriate level, a very high standard. A powerful additional argument for such a structure is that it would facilitate the postponement of specialisation and leave more time for much more general education in basic science in combination with literary subjects. It would thus serve the purposes in mind in Professor Pippard's proposal (see Chapter 5) to remodel science degrees more thoroughly and, I venture to think, more effectively. It would also, I believe, afford a better means of giving students a wider view of current affairs combined with real depth of study of special disciplines than the somewhat artificially grouped combinations of the joint first degrees developed in the newer universities. Obviously there are many side issues to any such radical transformation. If Liberal Arts Colleges come into existence,

260

BRITISH U N I V E R S I T I E S

how far should they be residential? (I would hope that they would not, for reasons already given, fall into the mistake of encouraging students to leave home unless they were going into a genuinely collegiate atmosphere.) How would they be related to existing Colleges of Education, and to Technical Colleges, etc? (It might be hoped that a new structure would help to lessen the distinctions now drawn between university and non-university institutions at the lower age levels). Would entry to a full university be possible only after completing a 'College' course or would promising students be able to make the transition earlier? Professional degrees would presumably become in a sense post-graduate, as they are in America, by being provided only at Universities after completion of appropriate preliminary studies at a 'Junior College'. Unfortunately we are not starting from scratch but from a very firmly based and rigid system. British undergraduate education and British first degrees can properly be claimed as among the best in the world - for the conditions in which they attained their present form, a generation or so ago. Their virtues and high quality have given them a very precise form and a very firm hold. Because the hold of the present pattern is so firm and so universally established in British universities it is particularly difficult to see how any process of gradual change can be brought about. They appear now, like other organisms which have developed a high degree of adaptation to particular circumstances, to have lost the power of further evolution. This may, however, be too pessimistic a conclusion. It is clearly not sensible to think of a new pattern being created by a grand decision by the common will of the universities or by a single edict of the state. But there may still be ways of moving by gradual and partial steps to a different pattern, a different way of breaking up the time-states of higher education. Two lines of development immediately suggest themselves. First, 'Liberal Arts Colleges' overlapping both the most advanced work of secondary schools and the earlier years of undergraduate work as now conceived at the universities could emerge from the growth of Sixth Form Colleges and

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

26l

County Colleges and from the development of work in the humanities and pure science at Colleges of Technology. Bases already exist for such developments and the more deliberate creation of 'Liberal Arts Colleges' could follow experiments in such existing institutions. Secondly existing university institutions might initiate new kinds of degrees designed deliberately for the age-group 20 to 23 rather than the agegroup 18 to 21. This would be a more radical and deliberate innovation; but it is something which might suit particularly well the resources and circumstances of certain of the more specialised institutions of the University of London such as the Imperial College of Science and Technology, the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies. As has been noted earlier the London School of Economics in late years has repeatedly felt uneasy about its present distribution of effort between undergraduate and post-graduate work, at times being tempted to abandon undergraduate activity altogether because its facilities are more appropriate to more advanced work but at the same time feeling reluctant to commit itself wholly to post-graduate work of the older pattern. Traditions and present conventions apart, the logical answer for the London School of Economics would be to offer as is its normal 'first' course a course starting at about the level of the present third year student and going on to at least the level of the present taught Master's degree; and the same might equally suit some other colleges and schools in London and more embryonic units which might develop as semi-independent schools in other universities. It is a pattern, too, which might well prove on examination more attractive than the present two-year Master's degree to the new Business Schools in London and Manchester. Of course there would be many problems. One would be nomenclature; should the holder of such a new degree be called a Bachelor or a Master ? Granted the acceptance of the basic idea there can be little doubt that academic ingenuity would find an answer to that. More difficult might be the basis of admission of students. Some might be taken direct from 'Liberal Arts Colleges' if they develop as suggested but initially most must come from university students of the

262

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

current type, especially if intellectual quality is to be maintained. Institutions offering the new kind of degrees might be prepared to take students on the basis of their performance at some half-way stage of orthodox university courses, but would students be content to abandon such courses without attaining the degrees they had originally had in mind, and would other universities be happy about the loss of possibly their more enterprising students at that half-way stage ? I do not pretend to see all the answers to these and other problems with any precision but I do believe that they could be worked out in process of time if the experiment could once be initiated. Perhaps the greatest single obstacle to such experimentation is the difficulty of any institution initiating such an experiment within the present rigid pattern of financial and other controls. One thing that might be necessary if the London institutions mentioned were to be free to make such experiments would be the removal of the remaining controls of the University of London over the form of degree for which the constituent Colleges teach; and perhaps their complete independence of the University. Most important of all, however, is likely to be freedom from the restrictions imposed by the whole existing structure of state financing of university education, both direct and via student grants. Three kinds of change are needed to put institutions of higher education in a freer position to experiment; the reduction of the part played in university finance by direct grants from the state and particularly an increase in the part played by fees paid by students, even if a substantial part of the fees are paid in the first place out of state-provided assistance; the introduction of a loan scheme to cover at least part of the fees and maintenance payable by students so as to give them a stronger individual interest in the value of courses of study; and a reversal of the discouragement, through taxation, of private benefactions. The advantages of establishing a more varied basis for the main finance of universities have been discussed in Chapter 11 and need not be repeated here except to emphasise the openings which that would give to more varied kinds of development. As to the possibility of such

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

263

changes, it has already been noted that student loan schemes have come increasingly under discussion in recent years; it is more and more realised that the principal direct beneficiary from the provision of higher education is the individual who receives it and that, so long as it is not feasible to provide it for everyone or even for all who have the intelligence and basic education to benefit from it, social justice points rather to some system of ultimate payment by the beneficiaries than towards the provision of higher education as a (nearly) free service. Reviving the habit of private benefactions is a good deal more difficult because it depends largely on both the reduction of the general burden of direct taxation (which, desirable as it is, must depend on wider considerations than policy with regard to university finance) and greater generosity in the allowance of deductions for charitable, etc., gifts. The mere substitution on a significant scale of fee income for direct state grants might, however, have some effect in persuading potential donors that private gifts would not automatically be offset by reduction in state assistance. Looking again at the situation which would be created if the developments sketched above were undertaken, it would not merely provide more varied opportunities for those who want to go on to a stage beyond G.C.E. 'A* levels but not necessarily to full honours degree standard and a better dividing up of the stages of higher education; it might do several other things. First it might meet in a more satisfactory way the dissatisfactions which led Mr Crosland to make his famous 'Binary System' proposal. That suffered from the defect of appearing to envisage two rival systems running in parallel with different purposes and different systems of control and, by their very grouping into two systems, to exaggerate their rivalry and potential opposition. The ideas suggested here envisage rather a multiple system, with not merely two but many varieties of institution, but with no break in the essential unity of purpose of the academically most advanced institutions, the post-graduate schools. Within such a varied system, there would still be room for individual institutions to change their character, to develop and, as in the past, to move up in the academic scale; but those that

264

BRITISH

UNIVERSITIES

remained concerned with levels below the highest could still feel, as good secondary schools do today, that they were discharging an essential task in the total educational structure without any suggestion of inferiority because they belonged to the wrong half of a 'Binary' system. Secondly, such a new system would perhaps help to solve some of the present unease about the relation of teaching and research. Inevitably the present assumption of a natural interest by every university teacher in research would be transferred far more to the Tull university' or post-graduate school than to the 'Liberal Arts College'. Teachers in the former would be dealing with students either at or near the borders of knowledge and approaching the stage of original research; those in the latter with students still some way off it. This would not mean that teachers at the college level would be debarred from personal research activities; many might do very valuable work just as teachers at school level have done in the past. But they would not be expected automatically to be involved in research. That alone would go some way to meet the difficulty already referred to that, under the present system, it is difficult to buy more teaching (if the community wants it) without automatically buying more research (which it may not want so much or in the same subjects). This would not however be the whole answer to the problems arising from the confusion of the teaching and the research function. A further contribution to that would be made if funds for the assistance of research were more explicitly separated from the general grants to universities and ifcontrary to general practice today - academic staff were paid specifically both for participation in organised research and for teaching over and above a basic minimum so that a personal choice could be made on a more explicitly calculated basis. This would, I believe be better than the proposal of the Prices and Incomes Board in 1968, that extra awards should be made to teachers of special competence. Initially it might be even more shocking to some academic opinion because it would involve an even more thorough recognition of the distinctness of the teaching and the research functions. It

R E F L E C T I O N S ON P O L I C Y

265

would not, however carry any implication, such as was in the P.I.B. proposal, that teaching was to be preferred to research and on further thought I hope it might be recognised that both better teaching and better research could result if each were explicitly rewarded. Whatever academic idealists may dream of, academic behaviour is still greatly influenced by material incentives, as was the impression formed long ago by Adam Smith which led him to his famous exposition, in The Wealth of Nations (Book V, Chapter i.), of the advantages of paying university teachers according to the amount of teaching they did rather than on a basis of fixed emoluments. Adam Smith expressed the essence of his view in the sentence: 'The proper performance of every service seems to require that its pay or recompense should be as exactly as possible proportional to the nature of the service'. I do not suggest a general reversion to the older practice, existing in Scottish universities until a generation or two ago and still to be found in Germany, in which Professors enjoyed a life-term tenure with a stipend assured irrespective of any duties, and collected fees from every student who attended any lectures they chose to give (though such an arrangement has something to commend it on a strictly limited scale as a means of attracting distinguished scholars in the closing years of their active life). It would however be possible to devise various intermediate salary structures in which remuneration depended in part on the actual amount of teaching given. A third advantage of a more varied structure would be that it would make it easier to make experiments in other directions which have been suggested in earlier chapters, including more 'open' degree structures, great possibilities of transfers from institution to institution, new kinds of examination technique, etc. Most important of all, however, is the possibility that a real shake-up in the university system seems to be the only way in which openings could be created for the revival of a sense of moral purpose, with which one might expect to see the revival in the strength of real scholarship as opposed to sophisticated theorising. Superficially it might be supposed that the

266

BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

increasing influence exercised by the state might be used to reintroduce the fading sense of purpose; but, given the political structure of this country, it is highly unlikely that state interventions will be inspired by anything deeper than efficiency, economy and the serving of short-term political ends. Universities have best served their most basic purposes of being, as in Clark Kerr's description, the 'soul' of the country and when they have been independent of government and inspired by some vital and independent philosophy. One cannot synthesise a new philosophy which might again make the university world the true soul of the country but one can seek to change the system on which it operates so as to restore its independence and at least give a soil in which a new philosophy might grow.

Index Academic Board (of L.S.E.), 105,109, 114-15,137 Academic freedom, 182—3, 193, 197— 9, 203-7: see also Universities and the state, and the Government. Accountancy, training catered for in Universities, 27, 30, 251 Adams, Dr Walter, 106-10, 114-15, 149 Adelstein, David, 108-12, 114 Architects, Royal Institute of British, 31-2 Architecture, training catered for in Universities, 27,30, 72, 228, 251 Art Colleges, 44, 45, 119, 120, 123-4 Association of University Teachers, 161,251 Bachelor's Degree, 49, 92 B.Litt., 92-3 B.Phil., 92-3 B.Sc.(Econ), 34, 74, 75 Bagehot, Walter, 129 Becker, Gary, 213, 214 Beloff, Michael, 130 Ben David, Professor, 65, 254 Berlin, student riots in, 121 Beveridge, Lord, 12 'Binary System5, The, 179-80, 257, 263-4 Birkbeck College, 157 Birmingham University, 121, 124 Bloom, Mr, 111-12, 114 Bologna University, 24-5, 154 Boots (Company), 233 Bradford University, 119, 203 BBC, The, 122

Bristol University, 45-6, 124, 233 British Museum Library, The, 64 Butterfield, Professor Herbert, 100 California, University of, 252, 256 Cambridge University, long-standing prestige of, 18-22, 176, 232 and Cavendish Laboratory, 59,63 and research, 59, 65 and diversification of syllabus, 73, TS^S1*161 and status of teaching staff, 91-2 and Fellows, 91-2, 155, 158, 161, 164 and higher degrees, 92 and student unrest, 120 and Commonwealth Universities Conference 1953, 128 and student accomodation, 141 and The Union, 143, 147 administration of, 151, 160-1, 164 and increase of fees, 203 and finance, 232, 236 Caribbean Federation, 189 Carr-Saunders, Sir Alexander, 30, 62 Carter, C. F., Vice-Chancellor of University of Lancaster, 207 C.A.T.s, 20-1,200 Cavendish Laboratory, 59 Chartered Accountants, Institute of, 32 Chelsea College of Technology, 200 Churchill College, 235 Civil Service, The, 12, 39 Colleges of Technology, 35, 44, 200, 260-1 Colonial Service, The, 27 267

268

INDEX

Committee on Manpower and Resources for Science and Technology, 77 G.N.A.A. (Council for National Academic Awards), 44, 179 Crosland, Anthony (Minister of Education and Science), 35, 179, 200, 263 Crowther, Sir Geoffrey, 169-71, 175 Day, Professor Alan, 217 Delhi University, 121 Demonstrations of Students, 103-6, 116, 118-21, 123-4, 128-45, 149-50,153 in USA, 104, 113, 120-1, 129, 131, 134-5 abroad, 120-1, 134-5, 138 in Paris, 121-2, 127, 134-6 D.D.,93 D.Litt., 93 D.Sc., 93 Durham University, 18, 155 East Anglia, University of, 20, 119 Edinburgh University, 55 Education and Science, Ministry of, and direct grants to ex-C.A.T.s, 20 and control over Universities, 23, 167, 187, 190-1, 197, 200, 210, 251,254 and assistance to part-time courses, 44 representing the interests of the public in Universities, 157 and Robbins, 171, 190 and Prices and Incomes Board recommendations, 203-4 and Ministry of Higher Education, 191, 208-10 Engineering, 27, 30, 72, 220, 251 Engineers, Institute of Civil,Mechanical and Electrical, 31 Essex, University of, 20, 119, 135, 199 Examinations, need for research into, 89-90,100-1,265 Exeter University, 19 Exchequer, Chancellor of, 190 Fisk, Trevor, 123 Flexner, Abraham, 252-3

Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Ministry of, 209 France, 105, 122, 134-5, 154, 224, 255 Fulton, Lord, 12, 74 G.C.E., 42, 46-9, 52, 170, 176, 178, 258,263 German Universities, 27, 78, 105, 117, 122 Ginsberg, Morris, 29, 247 Glasgow University, 21, 55-6,57 Glennerster, Howard, 99, 218, 241 Government, the, financial dependence of Universities on, 160, 166-8, 177, 183-92, 206, 242-5 and student agitation, 163, 206 initiative in founding new Universities, 165, 195, 199-200, 226-7 representing the public interest, 157, 168,210-12 and expansion of Universities, 70, 178, 187-8,230-1 and state interference with Universities, i60, 182-6, 194-203, 204-5, 208-12, 226-7, 254, 266 and expenditure, 184-92, 217-8, 224, 233, 244-5, 262 and quinquennial grants, 194-7 and Prices and Incomes Policy, 201-3 and Prices and Incomes Board recommendation, 203-4 and Robbins Report, 224-5 and student fees, 233-5 Graduates, and the U.G.C., 96-7, 199*205 earning power of status, 214-8, 220-1, 223, 236, 239-41, 263 social advantage of status, 216-18, 222-4, 263 relation to national economies, 221-3 and loan repayment scheme, 239-42 Harbison Report, the, 218, 241 Health and Social Security, Ministry of, 208-9 Helsinki, University of, 167 Higher Education, Minister of (notional), 191, 208-10

INDEX Higher Education Review, The, 218 History (as subject), 58, 72-3 Hong Kong, 85, 223 Hull University, 19, 119 Imperial College of Science and Technology, 19, 21, 62, 261 Independent Television Authority, 39 India, 121, 135,223 I.L.E.A. (Inner London Education Authority), 173 Inns of Court, 32 International Institute of Educational Planning, 223 Israel, 223 Italy, 105,121, 154 Japan, 120-1, 135,222 Jerusalem, University of, 65 Jewkes, Professor John, 60-1 Jodrell Bank, 56 Keele University, 19, 43, 76, 100 Kent, University of, 20 Kerr, Dr Clark, 252-4, 256, 266 Lancaster, University of, 20, 199, 207 Law (as a subject), 32, 72, 251 The Law Society, 32 Leeds University, 79, 119, 120, 135 Leicester University, 19 Library of Congress, 64 Lima, 128-9 Ll.B., 172 London Business School, 165, 233, 261 London Chamber of Commerce, 34 London School of Economics, Lord Beveridge as Director, 12 and Social Science courses, 19, 34, 49 Carr-Saunders as Director, 30 and special courses for workers, 31, 34 and business courses, 34-5, 233 and conditions of entry, 48-9 teaching/research balance, 62, 69, 9i author's own student career at, 80i, 101-2 and methods of teaching, 82

269

and graduates, 95-6, 99 author's experience as Director, 103, 149, 'SO,167 and demonstrations, 105, 132-7, 149-50 and troubles of 1966/7, 106-20,133, 135-7,14^174 and Student's Union, 105,106,1089, i n , 114-15 and Graduate Students, no-n, 199, 201-2, 261 and Socialist Society, 107, 127 and staffattitudes to protest, 114-16, 125-6 and political motives of protest, 128, 135 and troubles of 1968, 124-8 and part-time students, 172-3 and improvement of facilities, 174 and grants, 196 and Sidney Webb, 233 London University, 18, 20, 21, 33, 35, 73, 74, 75, 76, 88, 98, 105, 107, 120, 124, 143, 151, 154,158,160i, 164, 173, 183, 193, 200, 232, 247,261 Court of, 158-9 Senate of, 158-9, 161 Malaya, University of, 65 Manchester University, 21, 35, 56, 119, 120, 151, 232 Manchester Business School, 165, 261 Mannheim, Dr Karl, 29, 247 Marcuse, 136 Marx, Karl, 56, 136 Master's Degree, 43, 92-5, 99, 117, 158, 258-9,261 M.Sc., 34, 96 M.D., 93 M.S., 93 Maxwell, James Clerk, 59-60 Medicine, 30-1, 33-4, 72, 218-9, 251 Merrett, Stephen, 218, 241 'Moral Tutors', 81-2 'Multiversity', idea of, 252-4 Nash, Arnold, 29, 247 N.L.F., 124 N.U.S., 123, 144-5,147, 203, 245,251 Nevins, Allan, 252, 254 Newman, Cardinal, 54-5,57-8

27O

INDEX

Nottingham University, 233 Nuffield College, 232 O.E.C.D. reports, 60, 65 Ombudsman, The, 211 Oxbridge, 19,91-2, 100, 141, £54 Oxford, long-standing prestige of, 18, 22,24-5 and natural science research, 56 and research, 65 and diversifications of syllabus, 73, 75 and Fellows and their authority, 86, 9i-2, i55>'58 and student unrest, 119, 120 and accomodation, 142-3 and junior academics, 164-5 and demand for entry, 176 and increase in fees, 203 and finance, 232, 236 Owens College, Manchester, 232 Paris University, 24-5, 121-2, 127, 129,136,154,255,258 Perkins, Dr, President of Cornell University, 28, 168 Philippines, 223 Ph.D., 43, 68, 92-5, 98, 117, 255, 258 Pippard, Professor A.B., 77 Police Staff College, 45 Polytechnics, 35 Postgraduates, work and courses, 50, 88,92-8, 154, 186-7,256 Prices and Incomes Board, 186, 203, 264-5 Public Accounts Committee, 188-9,

IQJ-S

Quinquennial Grants, 172, 176, 186, 194-8 Radcliffe, Lord, 12, 193-4 'Redbrick Universities', 18-20, 22, 74, 80, 133-4, H3, 155, 158 Council of, 155—9 'Red Guards', 1 20 Research Council, 23, 199, 205 Research, 28-30, 35-7, 54-9, 61-71, 84, 90-1, 185, 203, 212, 243, 247, 264-5 Rhodesia, University College of, 1067

Robbins Committee, and Training Colleges, 31 and syllabuses, 74 and teaching methods, 81, 99 and expansion of Universities, 170i, 174-6, 178, 224-5 and alternative Higher Education, 179 and 'right* to Higher Education,

i85

and the Government, 190-1 and Government grants (1964), 196,198 and increase in fees, 202 and Ministry of Higher Education, 224-5 Royal Holloway College, 232 Salerno, Medical School of, 25 Science Research Council, 188 School of Oriental and African Studies, 261 Schultz, Theodore, 213 Scottish bar, The, 32 Scottish Universities, 19, 43, 72, 92, *54» '57* 158, 183, 265 Secondary Education, n, 40-1, 4652,257-3,260-1,264 Shearman, Sir Harold, 191 Sixth Form Education, 42-52 Smith, Adam, 265 Snow, Lord, 13, 252 Social Science Research Council, 188 Southampton University, 19 Staff of Universities, growth in numbers, 9-12, 169-71, 174-5, 206-7 staff/student ratios, n, 50, 172, 192 improvements in status/pay, 12, 23, 186-7, I94> 203, 246 and research, 28-30, 36-7, 56, 5767, 90-1, 105-7, 207, 246, 264-5 as teachers, 30, 36-7, 48, 62, 66-7, 81, 90-1, 97-8, 130, 175, 206-7, 264-5 research/teaching balance, 62, 6671,84,90-1,206-7,264-5 desiderata for promotion, 68-9,91 -2 methods of teaching, 81-3, 97, 130i, 140, 169, 175, 248 and administrative responsibilities, 85-8, 154-9, 160-6

INDEX Staff of Universities—cont. staff/student contact, 130-2, 147, 154, 157-8*203 assessment of ability 'row', 203-4, 264

Stirling University, 20 Students, University, growth in numbers in U.K., 9-11, 23, 169, 171, 175-6,220-5,233 growth in numbers abroad, 10 state support for, 14-15,153,177-8, 183-4, 201-2, 234-40, 244, 247, 262 and the professions, 30-33,2 14-15, 246

and commerce, 34, 214-15 and demonstrations, 45-6, 103-6, 116, 118-21, 123-4, I28-45, H9~ 5°, '53 see also under L.S.E. in U.S.A., 104, 113, 120-1, 129, 131, 134-5 abroad, 120-1, 134-5, J38 in Paris, 121-2, 127, 134-6 admission to Universities, 46-50, 72-3, 87-90, 96-7, 163, 176-8, 216,249 and degree syllabuses, 72-9, 151-3, 265 post-graduates, 50, 88, 92-8, 154, 164, 187, 199, 205, 256 and exams, 88-9, 100-1, 249, 265 and changes of attitude before recent troubles, 103-6, 108 reasons for 'malaise' of, 104, 108, 128-40,148-9,248-9 and the police, 105, 113, 125 and attitude to authority, 106, 108, 132-3, 135-6, 154 and political motivations, 128, 13540, 147, 162 and concern about 'participation,' 131-4, 136-7, 147, 148-9, 150, 153, 157-8, 162-5, 203 student/staff contacts, 130-2, 147, 154,157-8, 203 *first generation' students, 133-4 concern about employment, 134 conditions of residence, 129-30, 139-42,173-4,248 and Student Unions, 143-7

271 and N.U.S., 123, 144-5, 147, 203, 245,251 overseas, 202-3, 219 and fees, 152-3, 184, 228-31, 23545,262

loan repayment scheme, 239—42 Sussex University, 74-6, 100, 119 Teacher Training Colleges, 31-2, 35, 44,179,260 Television, close circuit, 83-4, 169, 180 Theology (as a subject), 26-7, 30 Times, The, 108, 218, 241 Tito, President, 121 Treasury, the, 178, 183, 188, 189, 197, 200, 201, 209, 210, 245 Trinity College, Dublin, 55 U.C.C.A., 87-8, 96 Universities, growth during this century, 9-23, 169-71, 175^9, 205, 207, 214-5, 224-5, 233» 246 finance of, through Central Governmentgrants, 14-15,181, 182-227, 228-231, 233-5, 238, 243-5, 250i, 262 at London University, 158 and consequent influence of Government, 160, 166-8, 177, 183-92, 206,242-5 totals of incomes, 172-3 for the student, 14-15,153, 177-8, 183-4, 201-2, 234-40, 244, 247, 262 through student fees, 184, 228— 31,235-45,262 through private donations, 228— 34, 244, 245, 263 through 'contract research', 228, 232 the 'right' figure to be granted, 229-235 quantification of grants, 213-27, 254 historical development of, 24-8, 54-9, 70, 128, 154-5, 182-3 and connections with the church, 25~7> 38, 40, 63, 247 not 'productive of ideas', 26-7, 40, 55-6>58> 59, 61, 70

272

INDEX

Universities—cont. this trend more recently reversed, 61-3,70,247 and vocational education, 26, 30-5, 37, 247 object of in modern society, 24-40, 213,251 and purely academic training, 28, 30, 35, 247 and research, 28-30, 35-7, 54, 578, 59, 61-71, 84, 90-1, 185, 203, 212,243,247,264-5 and teaching, 30, 36-7, 62, 66, 814> 90-1, i3°> I52-3, 208, 212, 243, 264-5 and moral standards, 38-40, 247-8 place in the educational system, 403,46,51-3,207-10 qualifications for entry, 46-53, 723, 87-90, 96-7, 163, 176-8, 216, 249 and postgraduate study, 50, 88, 928,154,186-7,256 and specialisation, 72-9, 208, 257, 259 and social life, 52, 140—1 and the humanities, 64, 72-4, 214, 222, 242, 255 and the sciences, 63-4, 214, 219, 220, 235, 242, 255, 259 research/teaching balance, 62, 6671,84, 90-1, 206-7, 264-5 facilities for transfer, 78-80, 150-2, 250,265 and teaching methods, 81-4, 97, 130-2, 140, 169, 175, 248 administration of, by academics, 85-88, 154-168, 205 by professionals, 156,160-1,165-6 role of graduates in, 116-17, !55» 158, 164-5 and academic freedom, 182-3, 193,197-9,203-7 and the state, 160, 165, 167-8, 1767, 182-94, 194-203, 204-5, 206, 208-12, 226-32, 233-5, 240-5, 254,262,266 and party politics, 225-7 and rigidity of system, 78-80, 2548, 260, 262 as adaptations of 'Liberal Arts Colleges', 259-64

University Institutes of Education, 31 University of the Air, 180 University Grants Committee, statistics of, 10, 175, 192 as Channel for State grants, 14—15, 184,197,244 and Government control, 23, 157, 167, 188, 192, 200, 210, 251 restraining graduate growth, 96-7, 199,205 research into teachers' time, 99 Robbins Committee targets, 171 Quinquennial Reports, 172, 194-8, 204 feeling of Parliament towards, 178 salary scales, 186-7 status vis-a-vis Treasury, 188, 191-2 and Ministry of Higher Education, 191

increase of fees for overseas students, 241, 244 and Vice Chancellors' Committee, 204 U.S.A., universities set a pattern for U.K., 10, 212, 213-14, 232, 234, 252, 255, 259, 260 Vice Chancellors' Committee, 23, 86, 103, 123, 157, 160, 167, 205, 251 Victoria University, 199 Vietnam, 104, 121, 135, 138 Violence in demonstrations, 117, 119-20, 123 Warwick University, 20, 193/199 Watherston, Peter, 114 Webb, Sidney, 233 Welsh Universities, 183 Wills family, 233 Wilson, Gail, 218, 241 Wilson, Harold, 104 Wolfenden, Lord, 12 Wootton, Baroness, 216 Working Group on the Flow into Employment of Scientists, Engineers and Technologists, 51 Working Group on Manpower for Scientific Growth, 77 York University, 20, 103, 119, 124 Yugoslavia, student protests in, 121