Portraits and Miniatures (33 page)

The more relevant result for the purposes of this lecture is that my five years there greatly concentrated my mind upon the problems of universities. This was compounded by my being elected Chancellor of Oxford in March 1987. The Chancellor of Oxford has traditionally been more a supernumerary great officer of state - from Cromwell through Wellington, Salisbury and Curzon to Macmillan - than a bearer of a banner of educational knowledge and reform. Even so, it gave me a remarkable brace of university vantage points to be Chancellor of the ‘dreaming spires' and MP for the West End of Glasgow.

It was too good to last. In the strictest sense I never occupied them both at the same time. There was an overlap of three months between victory on the banks of the Thames and defeat on the banks of the Clyde. But Oxford installation takes place on a leisurely time-scale. In 1925 Lord Milner died in the interval. I merely suffered the lesser fate of being defeated in Hillhead by Mr George Galloway. Twelve days before I was given the statutes, keys and seal of Oxford, I had lost the Glasgow travel warrants and rights of admission to the House of Commons. It was a good lesson in the even-handedness of fate. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition gave me an exceptional opportunity to see the
problems of British universities in the 1980s from north to south of the Scottish border, through the eyes of what some would regard as the proud peacock of Oxford strutting on its over manicured lawns, past the 441-year-old eagle of Glasgow sitting in its Gilmorehill eyrie, to the enthusiastic young pouter pigeon of Strathclyde, hatched thirty years ago out of a college of science and technology.

They are as different as any three universities to be found within the British university spectrum, but they all suffered in the 1980s from a decade of debilitating financial restriction, with cut imposed upon cut and squeeze upon squeeze. The government policies of the 1980s towards universities were, I believe, the most shortsighted that Britain has had the misfortune to encounter. Nearly every previous administration of whatever party had been responsible for some major advance - some creative act - in our academic framework. That one alone was distinguished for creating nothing and for inflicting great damage on teaching, research, morale and students.

The charitable view is that it simply stemmed from penny-pinching and an inability to grasp how much long-term damage may be done by the short-term saving of very limited sums of money. But the determination never to let the patient recover from a squeeze before inflicting a fresh one, the willingness to impose redundancies in the way that cost as much money as they saved, and the accompaniment of financial restrictions with increased control from the centre for its own sake, made one fear that there was an admixture of less material and more ideological motives: an anti-intellectualism; a disapproval of the universities as not being willing to embrace every excess of the enterprise culture; and a dislike of them as bastions of independent thought and potential allies of such dangerously radical institutions as the Church and the BBC and even the House of Lords.

For the moment, however, I shall not pursue such subversive thoughts, but merely abstract from them the conclusion that the restriction of public money made a major impact on all our universities during the 1980s, and that this is unlikely to be sufficiently or quickly reversed for these not to be major
considerations in any view of the position and prospect of British universities today.

Before dealing with that prospect, however, I turn for a time to the past. In England, although not of course in Scotland, the Oxford and Cambridge duopoly was complete until
circa
1830, when University College, London, King's College, London, and Durham were all established within four years. Oxford and Cambridge had been there in some form since the twelfth century, and were unchallenged in Britain until the eighteenth century when they began to slip badly down the European league for knowledge and enquiry. At the end of the eighteenth century Edinburgh University, founded in 1583, was of higher intellectual repute. Edinburgh, although it had become a fashionable magnet by the end of the eighteenth century, attracting such metropolitan Whigs as Palmerston and Lord John Russell, and was the main centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, was the youngest of the Scottish universities until the twentieth-century wave of Dundee, Stirling, Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt. St Andrews (founded in 1411), Glasgow (1451) and Aberdeen (1494) were all earlier. And Glasgow could claim at least a share of the Scottish Enlightenment. It was in the cloisters there, and not in Edinburgh, that Adam Smith, even though he had been an East of Scotland boy, paced up and down when evolving the theory of the division of labour for
The Wealth of Nations.
Trinity College, Dublin, founded in 1592, completed the pre-Victorian Britannic university constellation. There had nearly been a third English university at Stamford in the fourteenth century and at Warrington, of all surprising places, in the eighteenth century, but they did not quite come off.

In the nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge recovered their British pre-eminence, even if it took them substantially longer to remount the European intellectual ladder. Meanwhile, and particularly between 1870 and 1914, the English university scene was being modified, although not exactly transformed, by the modest beginning of the civic universities, the majority in the northern half of the country. Before 1870 the most significant developments were the decision of London University in 1858 to
make eligible for its degrees those who were not members of its affiliated colleges, and the foundation of Owen's College, Manchester, in 1851. The first event made possible the gradual proliferation throughout the country of university colleges (almost all of which are now full universities), whose students were able to obtain degrees even though the institutions themselves could not grant them.

The second provided the nucleus out of which sprang Manchester University, the senior and still in many ways the preeminent English provincial one. The evolution here was a little complicated. In 1880 Victoria University was created. It was in Manchester but it over-arched colleges in Leeds and Liverpool. In 1903 this empire split up, Liverpool and Leeds became independent universities, and Manchester, retaining the title of the Victoria University was reconstituted. By 1914 they each had about 1000 students, Manchester rather more.

Another typical evolution was that at Birmingham, where Mason College was founded in 1870 and became a university in 1900. This was very much the creation of Joseph Chamberlain, the father of both Austen and Neville Chamberlain but a more striking politician than either, one of the great destructive geniuses of British politics (he first put the Liberal Party out of effective power for twenty years and then the Conservative Party out for seventeen years), who became its first Chancellor and very firmly appointed its first Principal. He gave Birmingham a workaday ‘Brummagem' approach, by which it has not subsequently been bound, concentrating on science, particularly engineering and mining, as well as brewing and commerce. It too had about 1000 students by World War I.

Bristol had a university college from 1876 and became a university in 1909. It was intellectually more widely based and pre-1914 had rather more students than Birmingham. Sheffield evolved from Firth College, founded in 1879, to a university in 1905. The University of Wales was created in 1902, a federation of the University Colleges of Aberystwyth (1872), Cardiff (1883) and Bangor (1885); Swansea was added in 1920. Lampeter, although an Anglican seminary from 1822, and UWIST, which is the only
university institution to have brought off a take-over bid for another, came after the last war. The pattern of dates is a remarkably regular one: a college created by local endeavour and subscription in the high period of civic pride and industrial prosperity which burgeoned forth in the brighter plumage of a university when Victorian self-help gave way to more opulent Edwardian display. But of course the numerical impact of this string of seven new universities was very limited. Their total intake in 1914 was barely more than 2000 a year - perhaps a quarter of 1 per cent of the population of relevant age.

There was a second wave of civic universities, which mostly remained as university colleges under the aegis of London University until after World War II: Southampton (which grew out of the Hartley Institute and became a University in 1952), Nottingham, Leicester, Exeter, Hull. Reading was half in this category, but a double exception because it was sponsored by Oxford not London, and because it became a full university in 1929, the only institution to receive such a charter between the wars. Newcastle, whose Armstrong College had been part of the University of Durham following its foundation in 1871, split from its older (but not ancient, contrary to frequent popular supposition) parent in 1963 and became an independent university, as did Dundee from St Andrews in 1966. By this time, however, the second wave of civic universities, and the fifth wave of British universities as a whole (the first wave being Oxford and Cambridge, the second the four old Scottish universities, the third Durham and London, and the fourth the Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol group plus Wales) was being overtaken by the sixth and post-the 1963 Robbins Report wave, which was half made up of Colleges of Advanced Technology turned from pumpkins into coaches by a touch of the Secretary of State's wand and half of ‘green field' universities mostly established outside historic cities.

To recapitulate the late pre-Robbins position, however, there were then twenty-two universities in Great Britain (or twenty-three with Northern Ireland), of which the only one not so far mentioned is Keele, which was set up as an Oxford-inspired liberal arts college in North Staffordshire in 1947, with the then
Master of Balliol becoming the first Principal, and which became a university on the eve of Robbins in 1962.

The 1960s took the number of universities up from twenty-three to forty-six, the proportion of admissions to 7.5 per cent of the population of relevant age, and provided a decade and more of vastly expanding employment and promotion prospects for the university teacher. This period now seems almost infinitely remote from the restrictive financial climate in which all British universities have lived for the past ten years.

Apart from the major broadening of the gate of entry to which this period of expansion led, it also produced a desirable loosening of the British university hierarchy. Oxford and Cambridge in their differing ways maintained their near duopoly of assumed English excellence for the first half of this century. There was of course major work done elsewhere, particularly perhaps in London, with its specialized schools of which the London School of Economics on the arts side was matched by a number of others in science and medicine. But, broadly speaking, the civic, provincial or red-brick universities were then seen by themselves and others alike as no more than subsidiary hills in a mountain complex of which the twin peaks were Oxford and Cambridge. Most undergraduates, certainly on the arts side, would have preferred to go to these latter two had not lack of money, or connection, or confidence, without exceptional scholarship-winning ability, put these institutions just outside their reach. And there followed from this limitation of reach a subsequent exclusion, with very few exceptions, from the highest ranks in the law, the public service, the Church, and perhaps less strongly a range of other occupations. There were notable professorial spans at Manchester, at Birmingham, in London and elsewhere. But a high proportion of those who achieved them either came from Oxford or Cambridge and went back to them, or went on to them, or both.

The American position (admittedly in a much bigger country) where the general pre-eminence of a few great universities existed alongside a patchwork made up of differing clusters of particular quality, seemed to me to be much better balanced. Over the
twenty-five years, from, say, 1955, the English experience moved to some quite considerable extent in this direction, with apart from the continuing independent tradition of the Scottish constellation, universities like Manchester and Bristol, Warwick and Newcastle achieving very distinct styles, qualities, and pulls of their own, with no degradation of Oxford and Cambridge but a consequent and healthy dilution of their monopoly. But that era is, I fear, over. I at once accept and half regret that the beginning of my Chancellorship should have coincided almost exactly with the return of Oxford to major fund-raising. I accept it because there is no other way in which we can keep Oxford as one of the handful of world-class universities. Neither the present government (and maybe no future government) is going to enable us to compete with the vast and continuing endowments of Harvard and Stanford. And in our case we have the additional burden of keeping up matchless collections of books and manuscripts as well as expensive but irreplaceable buildings.

If Oxford were to fail to stay in that league I do not think that any other British university would do so. It is now the biggest British university except for the federated ones of London and Wales. While more may not be worse, bigness is clearly not in itself excellence, but it is nevertheless remarkable that Oxford, which pre-war was barely two-thirds the size of Cambridge, should now be marginally bigger. It is largely the result of the grafting on of what is virtually a new scientific university in the past fifty years. I do not think that any other European university would do so either, in spite of the ancient fame of Bologna, or the central intellectual position of Paris, or the traditional teutonic authority of Heidelberg, Göttingen or Tübingen: maybe Tokyo, maybe Toronto, maybe more doubtfully Sydney might compete, but if Oxford were to withdraw I doubt if there would be anywhere outside the United States that could claim to be in the first six or eight. I think that would be bad not merely for Oxford, but for Britain and indeed for the whole world balance.

I am therefore a resolute fund-raiser. But I am not a wholly joyous one for three reasons: it over-elevates the position of the rich. They have been far more courted and cultivated - this is no
doubt part of the purpose of the enterprise - in Thatcherite Britain than they were in Churchillian or Wilsonite or Heathite Britain. There is also a danger of making universities and colleges too money-centred with fund-raising ability too much of a qualification for appointment to high academic office. There is the additional danger that it may reverse the highly desirable trend towards competing and more dispersed poles of excellence which I noted earlier. Ths concept of making universities more dependent on private fund-raising is certainly not a radical or an iconoclastic one. It is a deeply conservative (with a small 'c') one for it underpins the existing hierarchy. The competitive ability of universities and/or colleges to raise money from their alumni is an almost direct function of the rich undergraduate-attracting status of the various institutions a generation or two ago.