Portraits and Miniatures (32 page)

The three-decade interval makes it clear that I was not and am not a rowing man. But this year I gladly accepted an invitation to go on the Oxford launch and follow a few yards behind the umpire's craft, which was itself accused of being too close behind the Cambridge boat - the Oxford boat, after the first half-mile, being happily outside its reach. The pressure for my presence arose out of the attendance for the first time of the Cambridge Chancellor, Prince Philip. I could hardly be expected to balance him in rank (Oxford, despite its more royalist history, has been consistently faithful to political, non-princely and elected Chancellors since the eighteenth century), but at least I would have prevented the Oxford crew being bereft of any official support in the event of defeat, and in victory was able to commiserate with Prince Philip (who had elided gracefully from Cambridge partisan to independent royal personage) for his having to present the Beefeater Gin Trophy (sponsorship seems unavoidable these days) to the rival crew.

Oxford on this occasion slipped through to victory rather
against the expectations. But as it was the fourteenth Oxford victory over the past fifteen years it could hardly be regarded as an underdog's triumph. Underdoggery is certainly not one of Oxford's characteristics, although it must be said that in this specialized sport of propelling boats through the water, Oxford, in spite of the triumphs of the 1970s and 1980s, has never since the beginning of the event in 1829 been ahead of Cambridge. It has, however, been consistently ahead in other concours, such as producing Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury and Lord Chancellors.

Our traditional role as a repository and guardian of humanistic learning set in an almost unique framework of man-made beauty remains intact. The Bodleian Library, judged by a mix of the three criteria of range of contents, interest of buildings and intensity of use, has no earthly rival. Together with its outstation, Gibbs's domed Radcliffe Camera, which is the centrepiece of the Oxford skyline, the Sheldonian Theatre, which was Wren's first architectural design, the Theatre's near contemporary the Old Ashmo-lean, the Clarendon Building which Hawksmoor did fifty years afterwards, and the late mediaeval Divinity School, it constitutes the most remarkable group of university buildings in the world (the glory of Cambridge is almost all in the individual colleges), and is less spoilt than it was a generation ago because of the substantial exclusion of motor cars from Radcliffe Square.

To set out this list of unmatched physical assets (buttressed of course by all the individual quality of the colleges) sometimes arouses in my mind the fear that we might cease to live up to them and become a British version of a Hofburg without the Habsburgs. That has certainly not happened up to the present. The fame of Oxford alumni has survived at least as well as the fabric of its buildings. In the past hundred years out of a total of twenty-one home Prime Ministers, eleven (from Gladstone to Mrs Thatcher) have been Oxonians, as well as a clutch of overseas ones, including Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and the last two Australians (the second surprisingly buttressed in that almost aggressively independent country by a third of his Cabinet), as well as the King of Norway and the President of the Federal
Republic of Germany. There is as yet no American President, but with five current US Senators, including one or two who are distinctly
papabile,
there is always hope.
¹

Nor, strong though is Oxford's tradition as a nursery of government, need those who dislike politicians feel oppressively isolated at a reassembly of their university. Amongst my electing body of Convocation I could feel as at home in my rather undeserved capacity of President of the Royal Society of Literature as in that of a former government minister. Even with Evelyn Waugh (for my money the greatest English novelist of the mid-twentieth century) several decades dead, the current Oxonian literary roll of Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, William Golding and Vidia Naipaul is not bad.

Alumni are of course necessarily products of the past, and the more distinguished they are, unless athletes, mathematicians or pop singers, the more likely is that past to be fairly remote. What shape is the university in today? Is it a substantially different place from that which most Rhodes scholars, whether of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s or intervening decades, have known? In so far as it is, are the changes for good or ill? And if for good, how is this reconcilable with the fact that Oxford has suddenly had to throw itself much more than ever before upon the generosity of its old members and others who are well disposed?

Compared with the time that I and others up to fifteen years younger were undergraduates, there are three major changes. First, Oxford in the post-war decades created a major new scientific university, alongside yet integrated with the traditional university. Before World War II, while Oxford was a more successful seminary for the young who wished to become famous, Cambridge undoubtedly conducted more vigorous probes on and beyond the frontier of knowledge. That latter difference is no longer so.

Second, there has been the injection of over 3000 graduate students into the Oxford firmament. In my days the University
was made up of undergraduates and dons. When they ceased to be undergraduates a small number of the academically inclined became fellows, a handful at All Souls, rather more of their own colleges, a few elsewhere. The rest went away from Oxford to make their way in the world. To become a graduate student was almost unheard of. Now a D. Phil. is virtually a
sine qua non
for an academic job, and many who are not academically directed take this or a lesser second degree while they are thinking what else to do.

This change has brought at least one substantial benefit to Oxford. It has made it a more international university. Graduate students are frequently not indigenous plants. When I addressed the Christ Church graduate common-room last term I discovered that only a small minority had been undergraduates at the House. Some were from elsewhere in Oxford, a sizeable group were from Cambridge, and a bigger one from overseas, including a number of the 770 Americans currently enrolled in the university.

Nevertheless, Oxford, so far as its student body is concerned, remains predominantly an undergraduate university. One of the things it does best is instil into the young during a first degree course a critical articulateness that makes them outstandingly employable inside or outside the disciplines they have been taught.

The composition of the said ‘young' has of course undergone some considerable change over this span of thirty or so years, but certainly not a greater change, indeed arguably less, than has been the case with the foremost American universities. Women have become 40 per cent of the undergraduate body, although they account for a very much smaller proportion of the dons. None of the former male colleges remains single sex. Oriel, in 1986, was the last to change. Amongst the women's colleges Somerville and St Hilda's have remained exclusively female. One of their arguments, which undoubtedly has some force, is that this helps to keep open channels through which women can become dons. It is the case that in now mixed Lady Margaret Hall, for example, the rush to balance for a time almost closed up female teaching recruitment. In any event there is a widespread view that a university
of thirty-five colleges ought to have room for a little variety.
²

In addition, both the standards demanded for entry and the final examination performance have become higher. At the top end there has not been much change, but the intellectual passengers have, I suppose, been largely eliminated. This applies, I discovered rather to my surprise yesterday, even to the Oxford boat. In the ten years from 1976 to 1985, when Oxford won all ten races and beat the all-time record in 1984, five of its crew members got firsts and two-thirds of the rest got seconds. There were also five who later became D. Phils. The pass-degree blue is a dying species. On the other hand the school (and hence the social) provenance of undergraduates has not changed as much as might have been expected, or as perhaps ought to have happened. The independent (i.e. prep) school proportion in the university as a whole is now at about the same 50 per cent level as it was in Balliol (which was different from the average, but not uniquely or overwhelmingly so) in my day fifty years ago.

How does this picture, which is substantially that of a self-confident and successful university evolving quite fast but without breaking the shell of the more desirable parts of its ancient heritage, square with Oxford's present urgent need for money? I will try to deal with this by answering three questions. First, from and for what does the need arise? Second, cannot the wealth of the colleges solve the problem? Third, what will the money, when raised, pay for, and what guarantee is there that it will not just be a form of concealed subsidy to the British Treasury?

Oxford, which was a wholly privately financed university until 1919 and largely so until 1939, had become by the mid-seventies like other British (and European) universities, overwhelmingly publicly financed. The University, as such, has very little endowment. In the past ten years the government grant in real terms has been steadily squeezed so that it is now down by over 10 per cent. As a result posts (including some of the most

famous ones) have to be left temporarily unfilled, research facilities, the cost of which inevitably escalate much faster than the rate of inflation, become inadequate to attract and retain the best people; and the great collections of the Bodleian, the Ashmolean and the other University museums cannot be maintained in the state they deserve. Oxford, if it is to remain amongst the handful of world-class universities (almost all the rest are American) needs to supplement its government income with an endowment which, while modest by the standards of Harvard or Stanford, is large by traditional European standards.

The thirty-five colleges vary greatly in their assets. Seven or eight are comparatively rich, although none of these has wealth comparable with that of Trinity College, Cambridge. These richer ones already subsidize to some quite considerable extent the poorer colleges. They are also currently helping the university and it is hoped will do more in response to the appeal. The colleges are responsible for housing their students and for much of their teaching, as well as for the often very expensive upkeep of their irreplaceable buildings. They have a great deal more to do than just maintaining their High Tables. It is a complete illusion that they could, if they were so minded, carry the needs of the University on their backs.

It is important to get the balance right. The colleges necessarily have more intimate contact with their members and therefore easier access to their generosity, but for the moment the needs of the University are still more urgent. Furthermore the University is essential to the colleges. It was there before them, and it provides an essential framework for their existence and justification. No college is an island. But nor in relation to the responsibilities are they treasure islands selfishly harbouring their wealth.

Oxford has received the most specific assurances from the government that success in fund-raising will not be used as a reason for providing less public money in the future. This is enshrined not merely in the promises of Cabinet ministers but in the statutory language of the Education Reform Act of 1988. Any alternative government is committed to a policy of somewhat
greater generosity towards universities, although not sufficiently so, in my view, as to render the current appeal in any way unnecessary. The Labour Party has not traditionally been hostile to Oxford's needs and private assets. Too many of its ministers have been educated there.

Whatever the political future, it therefore seems overwhelmingly likely that Oxford will both need the money and be free to spend it for the high purposes of maintaining and developing a university which belongs to the world and not merely to Britain, whose research is of the highest quality, whose alumni leave their mark in as many different countries as in different fields of human endeavour, and which does it around an architectural core which rarely fails to hold a place in the memories and affections of those who have once experienced it.

This piece began life as the Open University's Annual Lecture for 1988, but has been substantially changed over the past five years.

During The past decade I have become more closely engaged with British universities than I ever previously thought likely. I enjoyed my undergraduate time starting nearly fifty-five years ago, but even without the war I do not think it would have occurred to me to do a post-graduate degree. In this I was like most of my contemporaries. After the war I played with the idea of becoming a university teacher but not very seriously, and never did.

I then passed thirty years during which my main contact with universities was to address political meetings in them. Then in the 1970s, I began to collect honorary degrees, partly, I think, because Senates, Vice-Chancellors and Principals thought that when I was President of the European Commission I could unlock the door to Brussels grants and research contracts. But I comfort myself that it cannot have been entirely that, for some of the doctorates came before and some of them came afterwards. But whatever the motives, I found the honours agreeable and the practical result a series of day-long (or sometimes twenty-four hour) excursions to a large number of universities in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, America and the continent of Europe. This honorary degree phase produced a wide but highly superficial perspective of universities.

It was only in the 1980s that I began to replace this with a less bird's eye view. In 1982 I returned to the House of Commons as MP for the Hillhead division of Glasgow, which has a strong
claim to be the most higher-education-dominated constituency in the United Kingdom. Apart from the major and ancient University of Glasgow, Hillhead contains several important teaching hospitals, three units of the Medical Research Council, the biggest College of Education in Scotland, and a number of important specialized institutions, of which the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed Glasgow School of Art is the most famous, with the University of Strathclyde immediately on its eastern border. The socio-geographical shape of Glasgow, or put less pompously the attraction of its West End, is also such that a high proportion of both universities' staff live close to the campuses in a way that is not true of, for example, the universities of Manchester and Sal-ford. The net result was that the Hillhead constituency of 1982 (since then diluted by enlargement) had by the somewhat mechanistic measuring rods of the census the most highly educated population in Britain.