reshaping higher education in britain

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAINAuthor(s): JOHN M. ASHWORTHSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 130, No. 5315 (OCTOBER 1982), pp. 713-729Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41373460 .

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RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION

IN BRITAIN

I

The Edmund Rich

*

Memorial Lecture I

*

I

PROFESSOR

PhD, JOHN

D Se у

M. FIBiol

ASH WORTH, I I PhD, D Se у FIBiol I

Vice-Chancellory University of Salf ord, delivered to the Society on Wednesday 19th May 1982,

with Edward Parkes , ScD, Chairman, University Grants Committee , in the Chair

THE CHAIRMAN: Higher education in Britain has been growing monotonically and often rapidly for decades, and this growth has taken place in spite of rather than because of any great public concern for its provision. Although primary and secondary education, which touch the great majority of the population, have always excited some interest in the press and in Parlia- ment, tertiary education has remained a relatively obscure subject, obscure that is, until the events of last summer. It was then that the present Government decided to reverse decades of growth in our universities and public sector tertiary institutions, and MPs who had spent most of their parliamentary lives more or less unaware that they had a university or polytechnic in their constituency suddenly found that this was another convenient vehicle, in common with health care and agricultural prices, with which to support or belabour the Government. The media, inspired by articulate dons anxious about their jobs, also found much to say. Whether this sudden general public interest in higher education will abide seems improbable, but it is essential that we keep alive some public consciousness, not just of the present difficulties of our universities and colleges but also of the new and possibly rather different future rôle which awaits them. It is this theme to which Professor John Ashworth is to address himself tonight in this biennial Edmund Rich Memorial Lecture. Edmund Rich was Chief Education Officer of the

LCC in the 1930s and was for many years a Vice- President of this Society. The Lecture was founded in

1960 by an endowment from Mrs. Rich. John Ashworth, tonight's Lecturer, was educated at Oxford and Leicester, where I first met him as one of the young stars of the new department of biochemistry begun by Hans (now Sir Hans) Romberg. After a distinguished career at Leicester, Dr. Ashworth became Professor of Biology at Essex in 1974, but after two years went first on secondment and later on permanent appointment as Chief Scientist of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS). He became a Fellow of this Society five years ago and is now a Member of its Council. From the CPRS Dr. Ashworth moved at the beginning of the present academic year to become Vice-Chancellor of Salford University. This year has possibly been the most difficult in

university history in which to become a vice-chancellor, and to become Vice-Chancellor of Salford, which has suffered severely in this period of sudden retrenchment, has presented Dr. Ashworth with a formidable task. He has clearly had to think very hard about the future rôle and the fiiture shape of his own university, but he has found time to extend that consideration to more general questions such as the nature of the University Grants Committee and its possible uneasy stance between advice and administration. As the current Chairman of the UGC I am naturally interested in what he has to say about us, but as the very recent Vice- Chancellor of another so-called technological university I shall be even more interested to hear what he has to say about Salford and the more general theme of the reshaping of higher education in Britain.

713



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS PROCEEDINGS The following lecture was then delivered.

WH ranging hoped EN I

to agreed

title be able

I

to

agreed to give

do this justice with

lecture to the

the I

RSA

had far- hoped to be able to do justice to the far-

ranging title I agreed with the RSA Programme Committee, but so much has happened both in the universities and in the maintained or public sector since then that I will have to limit myself more than I had initially intended. What I want to do is to examine the nature of the changes happening in the university sector, comment in some detail on the constitu- tional position of the University Grants Com- mittee (UGC) because I think this is central to the disillusion evident with the results of the university expansion in the past decade, and suggest ways in which the administrative tasks of that Committee might be made more accountable and effective. Having dealt with the macroscopic aspects of the university scene, as it were, I then want to give you some sense of what the microscopic picture looks like by describing some of the innovations being undertaken in my own University. Where relevant, I will refer to the public sector institutions (polytechnics and colleges or institutes of higher education) but I cannot pretend that I will be able to give them the attention they deserve.

So first, let me set the scene. The recent White Paper on public expenditure plans and ministerial pronouncements portend the following developments between 1981-2 and 1984-5: (i) expenditure on higher education (universi-

ties, public sector institutions and student awards) will rise in cash terms from £2.75 billion in fiscal 1981-2 to £3.1 billion in fiscal 1984-5 - this represents a probable drop in resources of about 10 per cent in real terms;

(ii) about 10,000 teaching posts will be lost in higher education over this period (1 in 6 of the total);

(iii) by 1984-5 there will be at least 30,000 fewer undergraduates and postgraduate students than in 1981-2 and the annual undergraduate intake will have been reduced by 18,000;

(iv) the age participation rate will have fallen from the current 12.9 per cent to 1 1.2 per cent - a drop of 1 2.5 per cent which means 1 in 8 being excluded who would have been admitted to higher education in 1981-2.

714

The Government has clearly embarked upon a programme of substantial reduction in higher education in terms both of gross expenditure and number of students. It is interesting to note that despite protests from the opposition parties there have been no binding commitments to restoring these cuts which can be seen, I think correctly, as a logical continuation of an effectively bipartisan policy which began in 1969 when Mrs. Shirley Williams asked the universities to consider her (now notorious) thirteen points. The universities' cavalier and profoundly ill- advised rejection of all those points marked the beginning of the end of that coalition of interests which had been responsible for the post- Robbins expansion of the university system in the 1960s. By lowering an already low (by inter- national standards) age participation rate at a time when the relevant age group is still increasing, the Government is denying higher education to approximately 25,000 eighteen-year olds who might reasonably have expected such opportunities in 1984-5. Yet there is no general groundswell of protest in the country at large about the ravages being visited upon our higher education institutions, their staff* and their present and potential students. Indeed, in some quarters there seems to be some satisfaction, or even glee, that higher education is, with the housing programme, bearing the brunt of the economies in the public sector. Politicians know that there are not many votes to be won in championing students and their institutions when there are three million unemployed. There is a widespread belief that the expansion, especially but not exclusively, of the universities, in the 1960s and 1970s, has not brought a commensurate economic return to the nation. In order to discover how the universities have arrived at this sorry pass I will be examining how this general Government policy has been implemented by the University Grants Committee in this past year. Stress is often very revealing, for institutions as well as for individuals, and I believe we have seen, in these past few months, aspects of the UGC and its activities which account in large measure for this loss of the universities' constituency. But first, we need to look at these 'universities' that I have been talking about, rather glibly, as if they were a homogeneous set.

I have taught in the Universities of Oxford,



OCTOBER 1982 RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

FIGURE 1. Universities in England, 1983-4 UGC targets , home and European Community full-time students (excluding medicine): graph expressing the number studying science and engineering as a function

of the number studying arts and social science subjects

Leicester, Essex and now Salford (as well as a number abroad) and what has impressed me above all else about these English universities has been the similarity in their academic standards (achieved through the external examiner system) and the differences in the atmosphere or institutional ethos which characterizes them. Quite why there should be these differences in institutional 'feel' I am not sure - although I suspect that the English predilection for evolu- tionary change which results in the retention and adaptation of practices which initially arose for purposes quite other than those for which they are currently used has a lot to do with it. The difficulty is to find a parameter which is strongly correlated with this institutional 'feel' or ethos.

The one that I believe expresses it best is the ratio of the number of students of science and engineering to those studying the arts or social sciences. Medical schools are very much special cases and so, leaving medical students on one side, if the number of science and engineering students are expressed as a function of the

number of arts and social science students a graph of the following kind results (Figure 1). You will see that the universities form three clear clusters, which centre about the ratios 2: 1, 1:1 and 1:2 (note that these figures relate to the situation in 1983-4 after the UGC cuts have been implemented). There are some surprises, as you might expect. Loughborough, although clearly falling into the 1 : 1 'large general university' set, calls itself, and is often regarded as, a technological university. This shift along the abscissa is largely due to its merger with a teacher training college and it will be fascinating to see how this University develops in the years to come. I have omitted London University as it is a very special case, and Oxford, too, is something of an odd-man-out, but I do not claim this as an original discovery on my part! I should very much like to have treated the polytechnics similarly - I suspect that some might have been revealed as polyartnics - but the data are simply not available in a form which makes comparison possible.

There are, of course, other ways of classifying, or ranking, institutions. Attention has recently

715



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS been focused on the percentage of a university's PhD students who submit their theses within five or six years of beginning their studies - the so-called postgraduate completion rate. Univer- sities differ by up to a factor of two in such completion rates, 1 and similar differences have been recorded in the extent to which a University's graduates are unemployed six months after graduation.2 I believe that such indicators - which have the great merit of being objective - are also reflections of what I have called 'institutional ethos'. Interestingly, there are hints that these three measures may be positively correlated; but it is only fair for me to point out that surprisingly little research has been done in this field and the variation between universities, especially amongst the arts-orientated ones, is high. What is clear from this graph is that the distribution of UGC cuts is highly selective, with the technological university set bearing a disproportionate share of the total cut.

What can we deduce from this? First, and most important, that the English university system is surprisingly diverse. Second, that to treat it as a homogeneous set of institutions is bound to lead to gross errors. Third, that if administrative justice is going to be seen to be done, then the committee that administers this system had best reflect this diversity if it is to be credible and effective.

Unfortunately, for reasons which will appear obvious later, the UGC is not structured to reflect this institutional diversity. Rather, it is organized on a subject basis with sub-committees dealing with sets of academic disciplines reporting to the main committee. This structure, and the pro- cedures that go with it, have tended to favour the convergence of the separate universities over the past fifteen years so that institutional diversity, both in subject range and, I suspect, 'ethos' has diminished in that time. Let us, therefore, now turn to the UGC itself and look , in some detail, at this Committee and how it functions.

The UGC consists of about twenty members, of whom only one - the Chairman - has a full- time appointment. The Chairman has, tradi- tionally, been an academic with experience of administration - the present Chairman was a Vice-Chancellor before he took up his present task. He has a civil service grade and is, whilst Chairman of the UGC, effectively the second Permanent Secretary in the Department of Education and Science. As one might expect, 716

PROCEEDINGS Older Universities Civic Universities Cambridge 5 Sheffield 1 Oxford 5 Leeds 1 London 3 Glasgow 1 Durham 2 Manchester _1

11 Л FIGURE 2. Educational background of members of the

University Grants Committee

Older Universities Civic Universities Cambridge 1 Manchester 1 Oxford 1 Glasgow 1 London 3 Nottingham 1 Durham 1 Dundee 1

_6 _4 Other University College, Cardiff - 1 East Anglia - 1 Heriot-Watt - 1

FIGURE 3. Employment pattern of members of the Uni- versity Grants Committee employed by universities in

July 1981

the part-time membership of the Committee is constantly changing but if one concentrates attention on the Committee as it was in July 1981 then the first thing that strikes one is how homogeneous a set the members are. Of the eighteen members the Committee then had, six- teen were educationalists (thirteen in university posts, two head teachers and one director of education) and the remaining two members industrialists (one a consulting engineer, the other a managing director of an engineering company). The educational background of the Committee members was even more homogeneous (see Figure 2), since more than half went either to Oxford or Cambridge, and the employment pattern of the thirteen who were then employed in universities follows a similar pattern (see Figure 3).

What we have then, is a committee sitting part- time under the chairmanship of an expert seconded to the civil service. This is what we would expect for an advisory committee. Sir Kenneth Wheare in his book Government by Committed says of advisory committees (p. 43): ' . . the charac- teristic of committees to advise ... is that their members offer their advice from the resources of their own special knowledge and experience. They are chosen to sit upon committees of this kind because they are supposed to know about



OCTOBER 1982 the subject-matter; they can speak with authority'; and later (pp. 60-61): 'On the whole the layman is a comparatively rare bird on committees to advise ... it is almost inevitable that the expert and the interested party should play the biggest part'.4 1 will be quoting quite extensively from the late Sir Kenneth's book, not only because it is one of the classics in its field and embodies the wit and wisdom of a very wise and experienced public administrator (who was, in his time, both Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chancellor of the University of Liverpool as well as being a member of the UGC for several years) but also because it is required reading for all junior civil servants; as I discovered once to my embarrassment when I revealed my ignorance of it whilst on a course at Sunningdale. The terms of reference of the UGC (as amended in 1946) are 'to enquire into the financial needs of university education in Great Britain; to advise the Government as to the application of any grants made by Parliament towards meeting them; to collect, examine and make available information relating to university education throughout the United Kingdom and to assist, in consultation with the universities and other bodies concerned, the preparation and execution of such plans for the development of the universities as may, from time to time, be required in order to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs'.

This is clearly the remit of a committee to advise - and to advise, what is more, on the expansion ('development ... to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs') of the university system and such, I am sure, was the rôle of the Committee for most of its existence until the mid-1960s (a time which interestingly in- cludes Sir Kenneth Wheare's period of service, 1959-63). From the mid-1960s, however, we find the Committee taking on an increasing range of administrative functions. Initially, these were associated with the post-Robbins expansion when 'the preparation and execution of such plans for development' expanded beyond what were, I am sure, the wildest expecta- tions of those Treasury officials who drafted the Committee's remit in 1946. As the Committee's administrative duties increased and became more onerous, so did the frequency of its meetings (in the 1920s years went by without the need for a meeting of the Committee at all) and (a sure sign) so did the number of its staff. I

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN am sure that a harassed Department of Education and Science, feeling somewhat out of its administrative depth in this area of policy, welcomed this transformation and the individual universities, anxious not to offend the fount from which their money flowed, were generally not disposed to question what was going on. What was going on was ver}7 odd, however, as any junior civil servant struggling through Govern- ment by Committee would have born witness. For, as Sir Kenneth Wheare points out, committees to administer are very different animals indeed from committees to advise - 'In the sphere of administration it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the rôle of the expert is advisory; he should not be on the [administrative] committee but by its side ... the place of the expert is on committees to advise, not on committees to administer'.5 The reasons for this are well- known, and have been well-known for centuries. Lord Salisbury, as Secretary of State for India, writing to Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, on 15th June 1877 put it thus: 'No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a large admixture of insipid common sense.'6 Or, as Walter Bagehot put it more prosaically in his English Constitution (World Classics ed., p. 174): '. . . one of the most sure principles is that success [in administration] depends on a due mix- ture of special and non-special minds - of minds which attend to the means and of minds which attend to the end'.7 Good administration, in Bagehot's opinion, is thus the product of cooperation between laymen and experts. My five years' experience in the Central Policy Review Staff when, from the vantage point of the Cabinet Office, I was privileged to watch laymen and experts collaborating in administrative affairs, would lead me to endorse these conclu- sions and I find it sad that a fellow former member of the Central Policy Review Staff, Mr. William Waldegrave, now Minister at the Depart- ment of Education and Science responsible for higher education, should have so forgotten his experience from that self-same vantage point as to say, when challenged recently on this Govern- ment's policy towards higher education, that '. . . we have not sought to diminish the autonomy of

717



JOURNAL OF ТНК ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS the UGC and that self-denying ordinance is crucially a policy'. K A policy it may be, but I doubt whether Walter Bagehot, Lord Salisbury or Sir Kenneth Wheare would have approved, for the actions of the UGC last July were those of a stern, not to say tyrannical, bureaucracy. Salford University was, for example, told that it should have 2,750 (note the three significant figures) students by 1983-4, that its recurrent grant would then be £8.59 million and then, in a letter of 'guidance', reference was made to every faculty and just about every department in the University. As incoming Vice-Chancellor I felt distinctly redundant until I noticed that almost the only positive 'advice' the letter contained was a suggestion that Salford University should go ahead with the establishment of an English Degree and afford special protection to Econo- mics and Geography - in a technological university; in the middle of the worst recession to hit the country for half a century? How wise Lord Salisbury was to warn us of experts and to ask for . . their strong wine to be diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense'! I could go on to give further examples but time is short so let me content myself with just one.

If the universities are listed in order of their cut in income resulting from the UGC's decisions of July 1981 and the expected result of their loss of fee income from overseas students, then the following rank order (Figure 4) results on which I have indicated the 'average cut' and the data from Figures 2 and 3. 1 have found that it is usually considered somewhat improper to refer to data of this kind in polite academic company - as Margaret Canovan put it in the Times Higher Education Supplement: 'In public people meet not merely as carriers of arguments: they also encounter one another as individuals whose vulnerability needs to be protected by the courteous fictions of civilized intercourse, the invisible barriers of what cannot decently be said.'4 Let me hasten to make it clear that it is not my intention to imply that the members of the UGC acted in any way improperly in July; I do not believe that they consciously favoured institutions that educated them or employed them when they were coming to the judgements Ministers asked them to take. Rather, I want to draw attention to the exquisite embarrassment that seems to surround this topic. Academics are not, in my experience, characteristically back- ward in the cut and thrust of debate on scholarly 718

PROCEEDINGS matters. I have been involved in a number of such debates in my time and they are charac- terized, in my recollection, by a certain rumbus- tiousness; a willingness to call a spade a spade even, from time to time, a misguided fellow scholar a b~y idiot. Civilized intercourse between scholars, indeed, often strikes the unscholarly bystander as markedly uncivilized. No, the reason for the sensitivity here is not I think the need to protect vulnerable individuals but the tension between the conventions that have come to govern the way in which advisory committees go about their business on the one hand and the way administrative committees are expected to conduct their business on the other. Let me remind you of some of the differences.

Committees that advise Ministers give their advice in confidence and are protected, rightly, by thé conventions both of Ministerial accountability and the Official Secrets Act. Administrative committees (think of all those in local government or of Cabinet committees) are either accountable in a collective sense or are composed of individuals who are themselves personally accountable for their actions. These actions are always, therefore, exposed to public knowledge and comment and a variety of customs and practices have grown up to define what is proper behaviour for such committees and what 'accountable' means in this sense. Administrative committees have power in a way and of a kind that advisory committees do not and many of these customs and practices are designed to offset what John Stuart Mill called 'the evil effect pro- duced upon the mind of any holder of power, whether an individual or an assembly, by the consciousness of having only themselves to con- sult'. 10 But things go further than this; let me quote Sir Kenneth Wheare again, discussing the position of a member of an administrative committee who may have 'a financial interest, direct or indirect, in the business transacted by the committee. In such cases', he writes, 'special rules apply to him ... [he is] required to disclose his interest and forbidden to take part in the discussion or in the voting.' 1 1 It is also, of course, partly for this reason that, as I have said before, the place of the expert and the interested party is on an advisory committee and not an administrative one. We can now see why the data in this figure are felt to be so embarrassing - we have caught an advisory committee properly constituted and properly advising, in flagrante, in



OCTOBER 1982 RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

University with a University where Members of Approx. % Change Member of staff UGC studied in Grant on UGC

Salford§ - 44 Keele - 34 Bradford§ - 33 Aston § -31 UMISTS - 30 Stirling - 27 Surrey § - 26 Manchester Business School - 24 Aberdeen -23 Kent -21 Sussex -21 Exeter -21 Hull -20 CityS -20 Essex - 20 St. Andrews - 19 Brunel§ - 19 Strathclyde§ - 18

*** London -17 ** Birmingham -17 University of Wales -17 * Dundee -17 * Lancaster - 16 Reading - 16 Bristol - 16

* Manchester - 16 * Liverpool -16

* Leeds - 1 5 Warwick - 1 5 Nottingham - 14 *

* Sheffield - 14 Heriot-Watt§ -13 * Newcastle - 1 3

***** Oxford -13 * Southampton -12 * Glasgow - 1 1 * Edinburgh - 1 1 ** Durham - 10 *

***** Cambridge - 10 * East Anglia - 9 * Leicester - 9 Loughborough - 8 Bath§ - 7 York - 6 Lon. Grad. Sch. of Bus. Studies +11 *

Average % loss 17% § technological' University (former CAT)

FIGURE 4. How the grants are to be trimmed

719



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS the act of administering - something that is known to be quite inappropriate for such a body. Administrative committees should be representative of those being administered and should consist of accountable persons or bodies - this one is not. Again the admixture of a little insipid common sense between the receipt of the expert advice and the formulation of the administrative decisions summarized on this list would have spared us all a great deal of anguish and, I suspect, the Government a great deal of money - was it wise to single out Salford University; to keep the time for implementation constant (3 years); and so on? But I think I have made my point.

Let me, however, before I leave this topic, again make it clear that I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the individuals who found themselves on the UGC last July. It was not their fault that they found themselves in what I regard as an impossible position, but the fault of the Government and the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Committees are, after all, subordinate entities, the very word carries with it the idea of a body that is in some manner or degree responsible or subordinate or answer- able in the last resort to the body or person who set it up and committed a power or duty to it. Mr. Waldegrave and Sir Keith Joseph might wish to evade their responsibilities for the UGC's actions but they are surely culpable if those actions are unwise. As Sir Kenneth Wheare puts it when discussing the conditions necessary for committees to reach good decisions, in phrases which should be engraved on every politician's desk, '. . . In the first place they [committees] should not be asked to decide a matter which is not proper for a committee's decision. In the second place, and the two points are connected, they must be so composed that they are fit to decide the matters referred to them ... we have to ask of certain committees whether the task given to them was a proper task to give to a committee and whether, even if it was, the committee was properly composed to give a wise decision on it.' 12 Those questions have to be asked, in this instance, not of the UGC but of Ministers. To will the end without having to hand the means whereby that end can be achieved in a way that attracts support and assent is the mark of political incompetence and no amount of high-faluting nonsense about the desirability of autonomy for the UGC or the sanctity of academic freedom should be allowed to obscure that. In fact, of 720

PROCEEDINGS

course, Ministers are rarely as foolish as they sometimes seem to be and the arrangements they are currently making for the administration of public sector higher education and for obtain- ing advice on the issues that arise in that context seem to me to be inherently sounder in principle (it is too early to judge the practice) than those that apply to the universities. I think we can consequently and confidently expect to see the conventions that govern the UGC being modified so that they conform to those expected of administrative committees. I regard the reports that the Prime Minister has released the Chairman of the UGC from some of the constraints of the Official Secrets Act13 and that Sir Keith Joseph accepts that the Secretary of State for Education and Science should give greater direction to the UGC 14 as necessary first steps in that direction. I also suspect that the need to bring the UGC into some sort of relationship with the structures being set up to deal with the public sector will also work in this direction. I see these likely developments as meaning that the subject sub-committees of the UGC will retain - as they must - the expert advisory function whilst the main committee evolves into a properly constituted administrative committee that reflects the institutional diversity of the University system. It is thus possible to see how the specific administrative problem posed by the UGC can have a specific and particular solution.

I hope that this is not the only outcome of the stresses and strains of the past few months, however. For I do not believe that the UGC is in any way unique. On the contrary, I believe it is representative of a class of committees which are constituted as, and operate under the conventions governing, advisory committees but have either acquired or had thrust upon them de facto administrative responsibilities. Such committees have come to be called quasi-autonomous-non-govern- mental organizations or - hideous word - 'quangos'. If I am right in seeing in the tension between the advisory and the administrative rôles the root cause of the current dislike in Parliament and elsewhere of 'quangos' and if I am also correct in seeing in the evolution of the UGC since the Robbins Committee reported a classic example of how 'quangos' arise, then we need to look, not for a specific and particular solution, but for a general solution. Any such solution must acknowledge that some 'quangos' are here to stay - the most determined attempts



OCTOBER 1982 of the present government have so far led to the abolition of less than a third of such bodies and even they have created new ones - and in whatever form I would put the UGC amongst those that will survive. A general solution must also satisfy the demands (particularly but not exclusively of the political right) for greater accountability to Parliament at the same time as recog- nizing the unease (particularly but not exclusively of the political left) at the extension of Ministerial patronage that results from the large number of such bodies that have to be serviced. Since it is unlikely that the House of Commons will find it any more possible in the future than it has in the past to supervise the activities of 'quangos' or to call Ministers to account for their activities - MPs, after all, have only 24 hours in their day like the rest of us - I think we need to look to that sadly underused Parliamentary resource, the House of Lords, as the key part of any general solution.

The House of Lords has a long and honourable record as guardian and supervisor of such continuing aspects of our national life as the Church (the original 'quango'?) and the Law and, more recently, it has played an invaluable and, I believe, much under-rated rôle in supervising, on behalf of Parliament, much of the purely administrative activity of the EEC. I was amused, but not surprised, to discover, when I was UK titulaire on CREST (Comité de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique, the committee that advises the Council of Ministers and the Commission on the expenditure of the EEC's R&D budget) that the officials in the Commission regarded a visit from a House of Lords Select Committee with more apprehension than any such visit from any other legislature in the Community. The reason is obvious; the House of Lords numbers amongst its members former senior civil servants, diplomats, eminent scientists, Nobel Laureates, distinguished industrialists and men of affairs as well as experienced politicians. It is not difficult to select from their number a delegation that is demonstrably more profes- sionally qualified and experienced than any con- ceivable team of officials from the Community. Indeed, I know exactly how they feel since the reorganization of the Select Committee system of the House of Commons has meant the disap- pearance of the House of Commons Select Com- mittee on Science and Technology and has thus created a niche which the House of Lords Select

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN Committee on Science and Technology has promptly filled. In my capacity as Chief Scientist, CPRS, I was once called before them and I cannot remember a time I felt more nervous since I had my PhD viva. The point is that the membership of the House of Lords is complementary to that of the House of Commons. It is rare to find in the Commons (and thus amongst Ministers) those who have a good, first hand knowledge of the managerial problems of large organizations. Life peers, by contrast, are often drawn from such persons and it is just this experience and these skills which are needed for a body to supervise the administrative behaviour of 'quangos'. It is always difficult, of course to draw a clear line between administration and policy and thus although policy for any 'quango' must, and should, remain the concern of Ministers and of the Commons, the existence, in the Lords, of party political life in an avirulent and attenuated form should usefully provide the needed policy perspective.

Having in this way met the problem of Parlia- mentary accountability I think the vexed problem of Ministerial patronage could be usefully dealt with by adopting a convention introduced by the Americans. There is in the USA a require- ment for a number of Presidential appointments to be made only 'on the advice and with the consent' of the US Senate. In the same way I should like to see Ministers only appoint the Chairman of 'quangos' on the advice and with the consent of the House of Lords - which would surely mean in practice of the appropriate Select Com- mittee. This would provide an opportunity for the activities and policies of the 'quango' in question to be reviewed and for differences about its policies to be aired. I should like to see such hearings televised as they are in the USA, for I was fascinated when I lived there - as I know many British people are - by the educative effects of such public seminars on policy issues. In particular this would provide a forum in which it would be possible to debate issues which are of vital importance to the activities of the 'quango' in question but which do not fit into the party debate within which most House of Commons business is necessarily conducted. Let me give you an example of what I have in mind.

For several years now there has been a debate going on about the best way of educating engineers. Professor Douglas Lewin, for example,

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS

stood before this Society last September and argued, in a paper entitled 'Engineering Philo- sophy - the Third culture',15 for an education based on design and problem solving. The RSA's Education for Capability Manifesto has argued on similar lines and the Finniston Report made a case for major changes in university engineering courses. There are those who believe - to take just one aspect - that 'a compulsory Praktikum (period in industry), either before or during the undergraduate course (or both), is to be recommended for its own sake46 and there are those who argue the exact opposite, namely that in the ideal situation 'engineering education in a university is . . . not integrated with . . . the practice of engineering which will follow it'.17 Consequently the view that one takes about the effect of the UGC's decisions of last July on engineering education in the universities will depend on what view is taken of issues of this kind. There is no forum, however, in which it is possible to argue out the relative merits of engineering courses based on a philosophy of integrating academic education with professional practice (which have been preferentially cut by the UGC) and those based on a concept of academic excellence (which have been protected by the UGC). I would hope and expect that under the arrangements I have proposed public hearings before the relevant House of Lords Select Committee could provide just such a forum.

I would, therefore, look forward to a time when the House of Lords will take it upon itself to review the administrative activities of those 'quangos' which play an important part in a number of aspects of our national life - effectively controlling the universities, the research councils, the arts, our national heritage of ancient monuments and treasures, aspects of the country- side and sport and so on - things which will continue, one hopes, whatever the nature of the government and which Ministers and the House of Commons have proved unwilling or unable to supervise and control in any useful, administrative sense.

Let me now turn from these concerns of public policy and administration and for the last quarter of an hour try and give you some idea of how one university - my own - is trying to cope with the problems of restructuring given it by the UGC.

The UGC decisions of last July imply that the

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UGC-funded part of Salford University must shrink by some 44 per cent overall and that we must take approximately one-third fewer students than we had planned by 1984-5 (many of our students are on four-year courses in which twelve months of industrial experience is integrated into their academic programmes so our student number target can only be reached in four years; our financial target year remains 1983-4).* The University was, of course, shocked by these decisions since they were seen as a very unfavourable assessment, on the part of the UGC, of its activities. I should like to pretend that we reacted according to a carefully thought out and coherent master plan but the truth is that in those hot and humid July days after receiving the letter we simply reacted to a crisis. My five years in the Cabinet Office had taught me a little about crisis management; the first thing that always happens is that the future is discounted and so I was less alarmed at this than my (at that stage) colleagues-to-be.

The first step was to see if those whom the University saw itself as serving agreed with this harsh assessment by the UGC. I took a week's emergency leave from the Civil Service and with an action committee of Senate, together with two very competent young men from a local advertising agency, put together the Campaign for the Promotion of the University of Salford (CAMPUS). The response to our advertisement in The Times , the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph on 23rd July 1981 was unexpected and not a little overwhelming. By the time I took up the post of Vice-Chancellor on 1st September 1981 hundreds of firms and individuals had written in pledging their support and help and, not unimportantly, donating sufficient money to pay our advertising costs. It was clear that CAMPUS had tapped a concern, or an unease, with UGC policy as expressed towards the University of Salford that deserved a response from us that was more serious and more considered than we had initially intended. On 27th November 1981 the CAMPUS Charitable T rust was set up to provide a mechanism whereby we can keep in touch with this new-found constituency of ours. Most importantly the trustees of CAMPUS have provided, and I hope will continue to provide, invaluable help and guidance as we respond to the challenge posed *The UGC has subsequently given Salford University an extra year to meet its financial target.



OCTOBER 1982 us by the UGC.

For it is a challenge and we have accepted it as such. Salford University has the opportunity to differentiate itself from other English universities, to adapt so that it can take advantage of the opportunities of the next decades and to make sure that it is never again caught in so exposed a financial position as it was last July. The early enthusiasm that CAMPUS both generated and tapped carried us through the first stage of this process - the construction of an academic plan and the endorsement of this plan by the Univer- sity Senate and Council. Just before Christmas I wrote formally to the Chairman of the UGC giving him our response to his July letter - the first Vice-Chancellor to be able to do so, I believe.

The second stage has had to involve the expansion of the non-UGC-funded activities of the University. This has already yielded some very satisfactory results as can be seen in Figure 5. Not shown on this diagram are the results of a number of initiatives which were taken last autumn and which are only just beginning to bear fruit: the establishment (in cooperation with Ferranti Ltd., the City of Salford, the Man- power Services Commission and the Department of Industry) of Salford Information Technology Education Centre Ltd.; the successful negotiation (in collaboration with our affiliated institute the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education and in competition with others in Europe) of a contract with the University of Yarmouk in Jordan to supply educational services worth nearly half a million pounds in the first instance; the award of a one million pound contract to our Industrial Centre to provide a Manufacturing Advisory Service in the North West region, and so on; this will mean that the next six month's histograms will be even higher than those shown in Figure 5. 1 doubt, however, whether we can continue at this rate for much longer. Indeed extrapolations of the last year's figures suggest that at the present rate the UGC will fund less than half of the University of Salford's activities by 1984-5 - which is both inherently improbable and, even if we could achieve it, undesirable since it would imply that the traditional educational activities of the University had become a minor part of its overall activities.

The breathing space we have obtained by suc- cessfully increasing the non-UGC-funded areas of our activities, by agreeing an academic plan so quickly and by the success of our CAMPUS

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN initiatives has meant that we can now afford the luxury of not discounting the future quite so strongly as we had to back in July. Indeed we now must begin to think very seriously about our longer term aims and objectives. This will be the third stage in our adaptation process. I wrote to all members of the University initiating such a debate earlier this week and suggested that we start by defining ourselves in terms of those attributes or capacities which we expect to see amongst our graduates. These I see as: (a) the capacity to acquire and manipulate

knowledge and thereby to develop what the Robbins Committee called 'the general powers of the mind';

(b) the capacity to appreciate, to value and to make judgements - of what is beautiful, of good repute and fit for its purpose. This in- volves the education and training of feelings and emotions as well as implying a moral and ethical framework within which (a) above is done.

(c) the capacity to identify, formulate and solve concrete problems and to make, design, organize, produce or construct useful objects and services;

(d) the capacity to co-operate with others; to value communion as well as competition with one's peers.

While I suppose all universities would sub- scribe to these objectives the essence of what I believe Salford University should become is contained in (c) and (d) above. These problem- solving and organizing skills are what should characterize us - the ability to cope, to do and to deliver. We shall see whether my University agrees with me. I look forward to an interesting debate over the next few weeks.

Universities do other things, of course, besides educate students. Research is often said to characterize universities because, it is held, only those teachers whose teaching is enriched and informed by their personal research can be said to teach at the frontiers of knowledge or at the highest intellectual levels. I find this a little facile because 'research' is such an ill-defined concept. There is a kind of Research' which I would link very much with (a) and (b) above and which consists of the re-evaluation of old knowledge; of putting known truths in new combina- tions; of transmitting rather than creating an intellectual culture. This kind of research I would term scholarly, and those who practise it I

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FIGURE 5. Research grants and contract income , University of Salford, Aug. 1979 - Jan. 1982 724



OCTOBER 1982 would term scholars and the activity itself I would call scholarship. Scholarship and teaching at the highest levels are, I believe, connected in the sense that the one enriches the other. Ideally only scholars should teach in a university and all university teachers should be scholars.

There is, however, another kind of 'research' which has to do with the discovery, invention or definition of genuinely new facts or truths. This kind of research - if it is to be well done (and there is no point in doing it badly) - demands an emotional and intellectual commitment from the researcher that can be (I would say sometimes is) inimical to the best undergraduate teaching. I would wish to distinguish between research in this sense and scholarship. Post- graduate (PhD) education and training is often indistinguishable from research in this sense since the PhD is usually a licence to practice this kind of research.

I would hope that we at Salford would also recognize a third sense in which 'research' can be defined - as either underpinning or consti- tuting a development or technology transfer activity. Again I see little reason why this should be necessarily associated with undergraduate teaching - although I would accept that there might often be a link between teaching in an MSc programme and this kind of research.

I see us carrying out, therefore, one major function - which, to use a term familiar to the RSA, I would term 'Educating for Capability', associated with scholarly research - and two minor functions. These would be respectively research leading to substantial contributions to knowledge (associated with PhD programmes) and research associated with a development and/or technology transfer function (which may be associated with Masters' Programmes).

Each function demands of us a parity of esteem but, I would have thought, separate management. Most important we will need to ensure that those with the aptitude and ability can innovate in all or any of these three func- tional areas and have the resources to do so.

Having thus arrived at a consensus view of what our objectives are and what we mean our University to become, we will then need to go

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN on to manage the various initiatives we have taken to ensure that these objectives are attained. I thus see Salford University adapting over the next few years in ways which will probably make it less like other universities and thus add- ing to that institutional diversity which I believe to be a strength, and not a weakness, of the English university system. I hope the UGC will also share in this adaptation process - as I have indicated - so that it becomes both more tolerant of diversity and more supportive of various different kinds of excellence and more open and accountable in its administrative behaviour. In this way I hope to see us use this present Government's woefully misguided policy of retrenchment as an opportunity to pre-adapt the university system to the stresses and strains of the decades ahead which I fear will be every bit as demanding as those of these past few months.

I am grateful to Sir Toby Weaver for in- troducing me to 'Education for Capability'; to Dr. Frederick Crawford of Aston University for Figure 1; to my colleagues at Salford for their help and support over these past months and for their comments on this paper which, never- theless, remains my own personal responsibility and in no way necessarily reflects the official position of Salford University.

REFERENCES 1 . Report of the Working Party on Postgraduate Education, Advisory Board for the Research Councils, HMSO, Cmnd 8537, 1982,

p30. 2. Michael Dixon, Financial Times, 21st Jan. 1982. 3. K. C. Wheare, Government by Committee, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968, p43. 4. Ibid., d. 60. 5. Ibid., p. 191. 6. Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Lord Salisbury, Vol. 2, p. 153. 7. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, World's Classics ed.,

p. 174. 8. William Waldegrave, University of Edinburgh Bulletin, 2nd March 1982. 9. Margaret Canovan, Times Higher Education Supplement, 23rd

April 1982, p. 14. 10. John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, Everyman ed., p. 325. 11. K. C. Wheare, op. cit., p. 168. 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. The Times, 12th March 1982. 14. The Times Hisher Education SuùtolemenL 26th March 1982. 15. Professor D. Lewin, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. CXXIX (September 1981), p. 653. 16. Hutton and Lawrence, German Engineers, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 135. 17. Dr. E. W. Parkes, The Education of an Engineer, An Inaugural Lecture, Leicester University Press, 1962.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS PROCEEDINGS DISCUSSION

MR. CECIL ROBINSON (Lecturer, South Kent College of Technology; Vice-President, NATFHE): It is quite clear from what the Lecturer has said that the Government undervalues higher education, and, I suspect, all education. I wonder whether we could consider the relationship between the undervaluing of the university sector and the consequential effects on other sectors of education. The schools are suffering, of course, from falling rolls and consequent financial problems. The first stage of the tertiary sector, the non-advanced further education colleges and so on, are equally suffering the sort of battering which the universities have experienced in the last nine months. We have been suffering that sort ofbattering for something like four years, and it arises largely from a lack of sympathy at government levels and very often at the local authority level. The people who are responsible for policy in local authority areas have all been at school, so they all talk as Experts' about what schools are about, but most of them have no real experience of public sector further and higher education.

THE LECTURER: You say that the Government undervalues education. It is not, perhaps, for me to comment on that, but I don't think they do. What I think has irritated Ministers is the feeling that the system has become a little rigid and ossified; unable to adapt with the speed with which they wish other sectors of society, manufacturing industry or whatever, to adapt. I don't actually believe that they ?re book burners or Red Guards or perverse anti-intellectuals. Some of them might be, but I don't think they are in general. They are just very irritáted at what they see as a stodgy, somewhat rigid system, slow to evolve and adapt, and they are poking it. In a sense Mrs. Williams began the poking in 1969 and successively larger pokes have led, as they see it, to very little change. So they have now taken an axe to see if that works.

MR. DONALD A. warren (Keynes College, University of Kent): In my own institution two of my colleagues have been forced (and the word is not too strong) into premature retirement. The range of courses we taught on the period up to 1800 once employed five people; it now has two. My personal research field is the interaction of Western Europe and Islam up to the early nineteenth century. I used to offer as a special subject French society and politics, and then popular literature in Italy, France and England. Because of the retirement of these two colleagues I have been forced by circumstances to take over a major course on the seventeenth century. It is largely a literature course, not an historical one. Therefore the material that I have written" for the past seventeen years cannot be used by my students because it does not fit into the literary course that I am now obliged to teach by what 726

is termed 'restructuring.' 'Islam and the Wesť has also had to be scrapped. The other subject on which I had done a modular course at the request of my university and on which I had written a textbook, Trench society and politics from Louis XIII to the Revolution,' can no longer be taught. From the start of next session I will be doing Corneille (Le Cid), Molière, Racine, etc. I don't mind th$t, they are marvellous writers, and I have written on some of them. But the material which is basic to the research interests of my students is in the dustbin, and that is what restructuring means to me.

the lecturer: The only thing I can say in reply is to quote Dr. Parkes who pointed out to Ministers that there were (and I hope I have got this right) some 'diseconomies' in what they were proceeding to do. You have effectively pointed out a particular dis- economy, and I believe it results from the politicians' intense irritation with rigidity. Of course they are not silly. They know if you kick somebody very hard indeed and take an axe to them and expect them to change very rapidly there will be diseconomies. Mrs. Thatcher has made no secret of that.

DR. D. A. HOWELL (University of London, Institute of Education, Department of Educational Administra- tion): I used to think that the UGC was one of the seven administrative wonders of the world. I am not sure whether that is still the case, largely because of the impossible job which it has been forced to do over the last few years. Your analysis, Sir, suggests that there is scope for taking a fresh look at its composition and functions. I should like to put three points. First, I think that if

the UGC is charged with an administrative function, then its membership needs to be much more representative of all the interests served, perhaps with representatives of university teachers who are not heads of department or heads of faculty, and with more representatives of other educational spheres than the token secondary school headmaster and so forth. The second point is that the House of Commons Selea Committee on Education and Science pointed out the lack of an effective planning and advisory board covering the whole of higher education in this country. This means university interests offer advice to ministers not know- ing officially what advice the polys and other interests are offering and there is a certain discontinuity which has results with which some of us are only too familiar. The final point concerns the Committee of Vice-

Chancellors and Principals, which lacks assertiveness. Is not this body uniquely equipped to offer advice con- cerning the university sector as a whole? The vice- chancellors have the business of their respective universities at their fingertips and are in the saddle for



OCTOBER 1982

a much longer time than professors serving on the UGC. This is a function which the CVCP might over a period of time take over from the UGC.

THE LECTURER: I believe that the membership of the UGC will have to be looked at very carefully because the job it is now being asked to do is different from that foreseen when it was set up. Whether or not one would want to go along the path you outline will be for ministers to decide. As an alternative it would be quite possible for them to say, 'We like the UGC as an advisory body, let's keep it as that.' It was very effective in that rôle until relatively recently. It is after all the civil service's job to do the administration. On the second point, I entirely agree that one does

need some very much more coherent planning system than we have had hitherto that covers all of higher education. I think to be fair to ministers they are attempting to set that up, starting initially in the public sector. Thirdly, you would encourage the Committee of

Vice-Chancellors and Principals to be more assertive and effective. There are forty-four of them, or even more. It is very difficult to get such an essentially heterogeneous body to be coherent and effective in the sense in which you mean them to be. I think that it is almost inevitable that they will work by the lowest common denominator, and for much of the time (I hope I am not being rude to any fellow vice-chancellors in the audience) that is pretty low.

MR. MICHAEL DIXON (Education Correspondent and Jobs Columnist, Financial Times): The process of the universities' losing their constituency began before 1969. Early realization that the universities were essentially unchangeable led Crosland to try to bypass them and do something else by separating out polytechnics in 1965. Now polytechnics have generally adhered to the same sort of activities as the universities, and more recently an attempt has been made to bypass them with training provided through the Manpower Services Commission. If training has any sensible definition it must be 'instruction in specific skills,' and as such must be fundamental to and inseparable from the process of education. But because of its separation under the MSC we are now getting two camps. Training has become something done to 16-year-olds or older people who have previously failed in education. In view of the things you said about one of Salford's objects being to train people to organize, construct, etc., something which works, I would have thought you would require your institution to take into your courses and your research a lot of activities that could more properly be classed as training. Since that does not seem the sort of thing that universities have ever been prepared to accept as part of their true and proper function, I just wondered how that would affect you?

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

THE LECTURER: One of the troubles I have with the kind of dichotomy you draw between education and training and institutionalizing it in those terms is that such semantic debates often radiate more heat than light, particularly in education. But I agree with much of what you say. One of the interesting things to note about those in public sector higher education (and I was sorry not to be able to deal with it as I had hoped initially) is that they are in fact looking increasingly to the Manpower Services Commission, which is becoming very much a source of funds, almost as important to them as the local authorities and the Department of Education and Science. Although what you say about the universities might be generally true, it is curiously not my experience at Salford, which has had a history which goes back to 1896 when it was a mechanics' institute. There never has been, in Salford at least, and I suspect in a number of the other so-called technological universities which have shared a similar history, the feeling of antipathy that you commented on between education in a rather narrow sense and training in the Manpower Services Commission sense. It has been central to the ethos of the Astons, Bradfords and Salfords of this world that indeed education and training are inseparable, which is why one has integrated courses and sandwich courses and so forth in such universities. If I could infer from what you say that you would like to see the university system becoming more diverse, then indeed I would share that view and I suspect that it will certainly happen.

NAOMI E. S. MclNTOSH (Channel 4 Television): If I may ask a question as a member of the Advisory Council for Adults in Continuing Education, I was disappointed that you did not make any reference to the development of higher educational opportunities for adults. At the request of the Secretary of State the Advisory Council has recently published a report on its work on Continuing Education: from Policies and Practice , based on its remit of looking at education as a process continuing throughout life. I wonder if you could speculate for a moment on what you think should be the rôle of universities in relation to continuing education, or whether indeed you see them continuing to concentrate on initial education as they clearly are more interested in doing at the moment?

THE LECTURER: I am sorry that in such a short lecture there were many things that I had to miss out. That was one of them. If I can pick up from my earlier remarks it always was a feature of Salford University to have an interest in continuing education for professional people, and indeed we have been encouraged by the UGC to think very seriously about expanding our activities in this area. We are doing so in conjunction with the Open University and others. But I must say that one of the inhibitory factors at

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the moment is the very large fees which we are obliged to charge for this purpose and the fact that alone among Western European countries our Inland Revenue does not allow such fees to be tax-deductible, so that the true cost to an adult who wishes to have continuing education at a university is very high indeed. The Government should look very seriously at the fees structure, and I would suggest that the simplest thing it can do in the immediate future is to make sums thus spent out of personal income tax-deductible as they are in every other country.

DAME ELIZABETH ACKROYD, DBE: Does Pro- fessor Ashworth think that tenure is one of the rigidities which could usefully be abolished in the interests of the future of higher education?

THE LECTURER: Yes, although neither I nor, I suspect, anyone else is really sure what 'tenure' means in the legal sense. It could be that many institutions whose employees think they have it, don't. What I should like to see is a clarification of a very uncertain and confused legal situation but, like all vice- chancellors, I am not anxious for my university to be the 'test case' that has to bear the brunt of the legal battles.

PROFESSOR P. c. PARKS (Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham): To me the astonishing thing about these cuts has been that the technical universities, which seem to be producing scientists and engineers which we need to keep up with'the Germans, or Russians or whoever it is - moreover, scientists and engineers in close touch with industry through their sandwich courses - have been cut.

the LECTURER: It was not my decision. It was a decision to which I am reacting, but to which I am not a party.

PROFESSOR PARKS: It seems to me your university and others have been doing just what the country needs and now you have been 'clobbered.' This is incomprehensible.

PROFESSOR J. c. LEVY (Department of Mechanical Engineering, The City University): The main burden of your complaints about the way the UGC conducted its business seems to be on the criteria that it used in distributing what I suppose must be regarded as a definite sized packet of money. Perhaps by broadening the membership of the UGC one might introduce more acceptable criteria. You suggested, I think, that the pattern of course and the type of course, - for example, whether engineering or arts - might come into it. But here one is into extraordinarily difficult areas because in the end you have to make a value judgement about, let us say, Electrical Engineering against English, and you also are in the game of how 728

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particular courses with the same titles rate for excellence against one another in various universities. I wonder whether I could tempt you to enlarge a little on the sort of public debate that you would like to encourage in going about replacing the Robbins principle, so that the future UGC, or whatever might suc- ceed it, can set about its work in what we might consider a more sensible way, and whether you would like actually to see that body publish the criteria that it uses? There may after all be dangers in that too!

the LECTURER: Yes. You said that the main tenor of my speech was that the criteria were wrong. I did not mean to say that necessarily. Rather, I said that the criteria are unknown and not subject to public debate. That is what is really wrong. They are so, not because Dr. Parkes is a secretive man, but because of the conventions that govern advisory committees. I think there is a great need to have explicit objectives, and I tried to give you some sense of what I feel my university's aims and objectives should be. I do not believe that all universities should necessarily have the same objectives; what is right for Salford is almost certainly wrong for Oxford. There is a very great need for a public debate on explicit criteria and objectives, because if you do not have them you cannot manage. One of the things which I am sure is irritating ministers is that the system has been in free-wheel and it will remain so until those trying to steer it know where they are going and what they are attempting to achieve. For example, if I don't embarrass him, Mr. Dixon

has been carrying on a long and lonely debate for some time in the Financial Times trying to work out suitable criteria. His most recent attempt entitled 'Value Added Indices' was statistically somewhat suspect and it can no doubt be improved upon. What is sad is that the challenge which he poses has not been taken up - not been taken up, I might say, by the universities amongst others. You would have thought that that above all was a suitable topic for their much maligned social science departments.

DR. BARBARA MARSH: Dr. Ashworth, your title was 'Reshaping Higher Education in Britain'. You barely mentioned the polytechnics, and I wonder what you think should be the relationship between the universities and the polytechnics, and in particular (as much of your talk was on finance) what should be the relationship between the UGC and NAB, the body that is looking at the financing of polytechnics?

the LECTURER: To answer the second point first, yes there has to be. We really do need a better planning mechanism that looks at the higher education system as a whole. That I think would be common ground between all of us now. I am sorry I was not able to deal with the polytechnics in the way that I should have liked. In part it was that I felt a certain



OCTOBER 1982

diffidence when writing this lecture because things are moving so fast that it is actually very difficult for some- one who is not part of that system to comment in any intelligent way.

What the relationship between the polytechnics and the universities should be is an interesting question which we are bound to debate quite seriously for some years to come. In my own view the University of Salford should develop what amount to memoranda of under- standing and agreements with adjacent institutions the other side of the binary line. I did mention, for example, that, in collaboration with the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, we have offered what amounts to a turnkey software package to the Government of Jordan who want to establish a new university which is untouched by the British notion of a binary line. There does not seem to be any point in our exporting that to them, and indeed they do not want to buy it. So arrangements like that, where we agree to collaborate to do specific things, are, I think, at this juncture the best way forward. In principle I should love to be able to speculate about things such as two-plus-two degrees but at the moment the boundary conditions for such debates have just not been set and without them it is difficult to be constructive.

DR. WILLIAM J. SUPPLE (Department of Civil Engineering, University of Surrey): The University of Surrey, like Salford, is a technological university,

RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN

and like one of the previous questioners and our speaker tonight, I am very surprised that the cuts in universities fall very heavily on technology. I have never really had an explanation as to why this was allowed to happen. I may have found a clue in The Times newspaper of yesterday, if I may quote from Frank Johnson's column on the House of Commons. He began his article like this: 'On the Order Paper yesterday was a debate on a subject all members agree to be of the utmost importance, the need for more advanced technology, especially computers and new information systems. The place was, therefore, all but deserted.'

THE LECTURER: I really have no comment. One of the points I made was that it would be very nice if the Commons and the Lords could be seen to be what they are, which is complementary. If you had a debate of that kind in the Lords, and I can remember two very clearly in my time because I listened to them when I was in the CPRS, you do in fact get extremely good debates.

THE CHAIRMAN: The last speaker's comments bring us back full circle to what I said at the beginning of my introduction to Dr. Ashworth's lecture, that although the present interest in tertiary education is I hope not going to be sustained by a series of further traumatic events, we must retain that interest in other ways, and one of them is through lectures of the quality and fascination which we have received tonight.

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