A Time to Remember

by Alexander Todd

  Such diversity in our institutions should be encouraged. Why should there not be some differentiation between those who teach and those who pursue research? Even if by proceeding along these lines it should turn out that some of our universities become concerned essentially with undergraduate education of a more practical and vocational type than they now seek to provide, that would not be the end of the world.

  Unfortunately the present machinery for the support of higher education and research in the United Kingdom was not devised for the encouragement of diversity. For all its undoubted virtues the University Grants Committee system does require that universities should compete within what is increasingly a common framework of objectives. These may be laudable enough as far as they go but with grants being geared to undergraduate numbers individual universities are not necessarily rewarded for doing well what they are best able to do.

  The result is that competition between British universities is almost always competition on familiar terms - increasingly and unhappily competition at the margin for the increased tuition fees with which students are endowed by local authorities. Preliminary (and anecdotal) evidence suggests that in this competition Oxbridge and the older civic universities are winning out. If this be the case and the trend continues then we will end up with a hierarchy in which the universities lower in the pecking order will be trying to do the same things as the others but doing them with students who are not suited to them and would do better and become more useful citizens with a more vocational type of education such as is - or should be -provided by our polytechnics. Rather than let things drift slowly and painfully towards such an arid pattern why should we not seek boldly to alter patterns and develop diversity in our institutions now? At a time when a major effort is required to remain competitive in the technological revolution that is now occurring the idea that our traditional type of university education should be universally applied for reasons of social prestige is dangerous as well as foolish.

  If we are to change our present university pattern the mechanisms by which we support research in academic institutions may also have to undergo some changes. Project grant applications will no longer be assessed simply on their merits alone without reference to the circumstances under which the research is to be carried out. Research projects in a given field will tend to be concentrated in one, or in only a very few, centres with considerably larger research groups than are usual today. It may well become necessary for the research councils to be more selective in the way in which postgraduate studentships are allocated to university departments; more radically, they may even have to think of making the grants to students of exceptional promise rather than to their potential supervisors. Another convention that may have to go is that every reasonably able Ph.D. graduate can expect as of right to have two or three years of postdoctoral research during which he can establish a claim on a tenured research post.

  The frequent frustration of this expectation is one of the saddest of the current symptoms of malaise in our university research. Many postdoctoral fellows, many of them skilled and imaginative people, have discovered that there are more of them than of permanent jobs in what they have come to think of as their own field of research and must turn to something quite different. Nobody will deny that this entails a sad waste of skill; unhappily it is a circumstance that will not naturally go away until the British economy is once again buoyant. And the vigour of our research enterprise would surely suffer if all those concerned were now provided with a formal tenured career structure as many of them are now asking despite the current staff structure in our universities.

  And so I come back to the over-rapid expansion of our universities in the 1960s and to the disastrous age-distribution in our university staffs which has resulted from the way in which it was carried out. The unfortunate circumstance that we have since then entered upon a period of acute economic recession has entailed severe restraint on the money available for teaching and research and led to resources being spread too thinly over too many centres. I have indicated in the course of my Address where I believe our problems lie and have only posed some of the questions which could be asked about research in our universities and the ways in which it is promoted. But in the last analysis it is difficult to see any real progress being made unless we can do something about our ageing university staffs and the lack of openings for our brightest young academic scientists.

  Unfortunately there is no quick or easy answer. From their own resources universities themselves can probably do little and the breakdown of the quinquennial government-grant system makes forward planning well-nigh impossible for them. I believe that the efforts being made by the Society to support future leaders in research and the Science Research Council's scheme of advanced fellowships are valuable but in the aggregate they can provide only a small contribution to the solution of a very large problem. A reduction in the university retiring age to sixty without any reduction in pension would undoubtedly speed up return to a normal age-distribution, but whether in present circumstances government would be willing or indeed able to face the very large expenditure which would be necessary is doubtful. Encouragement of voluntary retirement at fifty-five with generous financial compensation has also been suggested but would probably not be welcomed by more than a few individuals, and even if it were generally acceptable it would be altogether too costly. Nevertheless I believe the problem must be tackled and that some of the unpalatable things I have said in this Address may help to point the way. For example, if we accept that there should be a kind of hierarchy in universities and that some of them will be much more devoted to vocational teaching and less to research than others, then only in a proportion of our universities need the situation be treated as urgent. These urgent cases could well have a retiring age of sixty (with full pension) introduced even if only temporarily so that a more normal flow of young academics could be reintroduced in them. This would certainly cost money but a great deal less than any blanket procedure applied to the academic system as a whole. I have not attempted a detailed calculation but I believe the overall cost would be tolerable. But it would involve the introduction of much more diversity into our university system than we now have, and this alone would make it worth while.

  To do anything like this with our dual support system in its present form would be difficult and it is not surprising that under present circumstances many academics are beginning to ask whether the present system can continue. The more successful universities are probably right in thinking that they would secure a greater share of the resources available if they were able to compete within a more flexible framework and suggestions for change will certainly increase if the prediction of a decline in student numbers in the 1980s proves well founded. Perhaps it is not too soon to be thinking of the best form such a change should take.

  APPENDIX VI. Extract from Anniversary Address 1 December 1980

  Reprinted from Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A. 211, 6-13 (1980)

  In four previous Anniversary Addresses I have touched on a variety of problems of current interest and importance which, although matters of public concern, were in some of their facets of peculiar moment to scientists. Today in delivering my fifth and final Address to the Society as its President it is perhaps natural that I should look back not simply on my period of office but also on the thirty-eight years that have passed since I was elected to the Fellowship and reflect on some of the changes which have occurred and on our situation today. For changes have certainly taken place in the Society as in the world outside it! At the time of my election in 1942 there were 460 Fellows and 48 Foreign Members; the number of Sectional Committees was 8, of National Committees 9 and the total staff numbered 15. Today we have 900 Fellows and 85 Foreign Members with 12 Sectional Committees, 27 National Committees and our staff numbers approximately 100. In the same period the number of Fellows elected annually has risen from 20 to 40. This enormous growth is of course a reflexion of the increasing fragmentation of science and th
e large increase which has occurred in the number and importance of scientists and technologists in this and other industrialised countries since the last war. With the recent increase in annual admissions to 40 it is clear that for good or ill the size of the Fellowship will be considerably larger than it now is before anything like a steady state is reached. One obvious result of all this has been that the Society has become more impersonal, and Fellows living in areas remote from London have felt increasingly isolated from its activities. In efforts to mitigate this Council has introduced the Royal Society News and is now considering the possibility of holding Discussion Meetings outside London. But other changes, some of them relating to the Society's concern with national policy, have occurred and it is perhaps instructive to look back at their origin.

  When I was elected to the Fellowship in 1942 we were in the midst of a world war, and many of the activities in which the body of Fellows normally participated were either in abeyance or severely restricted. I had, as it happened, some basis for comparison because as a young research chemist in the thirties I had become much more aware of the Royal Society and its activities than most of my contemporaries through my father-in-law Sir Henry Dale. Sir Henry, who had been Biological Secretary from 1925 to 1935 and was to be President from 1940 to 1945, was, like many of his friends and colleagues on the biological side - men like Sherrington, Adrian, Hopkins, Mellanby, Barcroft and others - devoted to the ideals and traditions of the Society. To me in those days the Royal Society seemed like a rather exclusive gentlemen's club where occasional rather ill-attended meetings were held at which short scientific papers were read and after which the Fellows dined together at the Royal Society Club. In other words, it still had much of its original character after nearly three centuries of existence in London. In 1939 its main source of income was from private sources and the Parliamentary Grant-in-aid was £15 500. (For the current year the Grant-in-aid is £3.72 million and far outweighs our private income.) The Society had a few statutory involvements with government but these were not onerous and did not interfere with its essential independence. Even in those days it was recognised as the country's national academy of science, and as such acted as adhering body to the various international scientific unions which were in the early stages of their development in the decade or so before the last war. Its concern with public policy was limited until the exigencies of war thrust responsibility upon it.

  The role which science should play in determining national policy has been the subject of almost continuous debate during the past thirty-five years and it is, in my view, relevant to any discussion of the position of the Royal Society today. The term 'science policy' which is widely used nowadays is, of course, a misnomer, but it is used umbrella-fashion to cover a variety of things which really fall under three headings - policy for science, scientifically based policy, and public policy determined in the light of available scientific information. Let me first try to exemplify them.

  Science in its pure form, i.e. the improvement of natural knowledge as described in our Charter is, of course, a branch of culture just as much as music or the arts and to it as to these other branches government stands as a patron. In the case of science, however, it is not a wholly disinterested patron. For government is about power, and from science, or rather from scientific research, come discoveries in which lie the seeds of future power. Moreover, in a technological age the promotion of science is necessary in order that trained scientific manpower will be available to meet the country's needs. Government therefore is and must be prepared to devote substantial sums to the promotion of science. Of course, no government has unlimited resources at its disposal so that although it cannot - and must not attempt to - control the direction of scientific research it clearly must control the scale of expenditure and the weight of effort to be made in its various branches. A policy for science is therefore necessary. The second heading - that of scientifically based policy - is perhaps the one in which government involvement is of longest standing. It covers the promotion of activities involving scientific research which are essential to the national interest. In Britain the first example of this was the foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 by Charles II (although it was so grossly neglected by government in its early years that it would not have survived if the Royal Society had not taken it under its wing). The Observatory owed its creation to the manifest need for improvements in navigation which could only come through scientific research. Later examples are to be found in, for example, the Meteorological Office and the National Physical Laboratory. The third interface at which science and government come together, is where it is necessary to choose a policy or course of action from several alternatives among which choice involves not merely political and economic considerations but also a knowledge of scientific facts and their implications. Decision as to whether an energy policy should depend on nuclear power, on coal, on solar energy or on some other source of power is an example which is being widely discussed at the present time.

  To understand the position of the Royal Society in such matters it is necessary to look back for a brief space at the changes which have occurred in the relationship between science and government during this century. The crucial factor in the enormous development of our material civilisation since about the middle of the nineteenth century has been science-based technology. Its growing importance naturally brought in its train an increasing demand for research and for trained scientific manpower. Universities and other institutions of tertiary education burgeoned and in them research, both pure and applied, grew in amount and became one of their standard features. Why the infusion of the new science-based technology into British industry should have lagged behind its introduction in some other countries during this period has been much discussed. I believe that an important factor in it was the feather-bedding effect of the enormous input of wealth from the Empire which concealed the growing obsolescence of our industry and our educational system and encouraged a false complacency. However, this is not the occasion to debate that topic interesting and important though it is. Whatever the reason, Britain was brought up with a shock on the outbreak of the First World War when it was found that she had become dependent on her enemy, Germany, for many of her needs - including, I have been told, even the dyestuff used for the khaki uniforms of her troops! Clearly action was called for and government set up a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) to promote science in industry at large. During the latter part of the war, too, in preparation for the post-war reconstruction of the economy, a committee on the machinery of government was set up under Lord Haldane - the Haldane Committee - and its recommendations set the pattern for government relations with science in Britain until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

  Briefly put, Haldane recognised that executive departments of government should have within them scientific organisations to ensure that research directly relevant to their needs would be carried out. However, because such organisations would inevitably be largely preoccupied with day to day requirements it would be necessary to have some other body or bodies which would be free from this and could promote scientific research of a longer term character. Initially these bodies were to be the D.S.I.R., the newly formed Medical Research Council (M.R.C.) and to them were added the Agricultural Research Council (A.R.C.) and much later the Nature Conservancy. Each of these was set up with its own laboratories and was charged also with the support of research in universities by means of student awards, creation of associated units and the support of researches 'of timeliness and promise'. These supplemented resources made available to universities through their general grant from the University Grants Committee and they really represent the origin of the dual support system for university research. In addition, D.S.I.R. was charged with the added duty of promoting research in British industry; one of the more interesting ways in which it sought to do this was by the creation of the Industrial Research Associations. In order to safeg
uard their independence and freedom from departmental influence or control D.S.I.R. and the Research Councils were placed under the Privy Council and their executive heads as well as members of their councils were appointed by the Lord President only after consultation with the President of the Royal Society. The position of the Royal Society as the country's national academy of science was recognised in this way but apart from occasional informal contacts between its President and Ministers it represented the sole involvement of the Society with the policies of government.

  At the time of the Haldane Report and in the early years of the Research Councils it seemed that a fruitful relationship between science, industry and government was almost within sight. But that hope was not fulfilled; although matters were a great deal better than before, they still fell far short of expectations. Civil executive departments soon forgot about the desirability of having an active scientific organisation. Why, for example, should a Ministry of Transport bother about road research when the D.S.I.R. was there? If any awkward questions were ever asked it could use D.S.I.R. as a screen. Some of the more backward industries, far from being stimulated to do research, simply took the line that there was no need to spend much money on it since D.S.I.R. and the Research Associations would take care of it for them. Finally, the setting up of some government research establishments under D.S.I.R. with permanent staffs but no challenging economic objectives to attain proved to be then, as it is today, a recipe for disaster. Despite such weaknesses, however, progress was indeed achieved during the inter-war period and even if the country was ill-prepared for war in 1939, its outbreak found Britain comparatively well supplied with operative scientific organisations which could be and did indeed become the basis for the enormous development of science as applied to the manifold problems of war between 1939 and 1945. The story of science in Britain during the last war is well known and need not be repeated here. Government, university and industrial research laboratories both jointly and separately made vital contributions -radar, penicillin, operational analysis and nuclear energy to name but a few. All aspects of science and public policy were involved and the central body which served as both the link with and adviser to government was the Scientific Advisory Committee to the War Cabinet. That committee consisted of the President and two Secretaries (A and B) of the Royal Society, and the executive Heads of the Research Councils under the chairmanship of the Lord President of the Council representing the government of the day.