Portraits and Miniatures

by Roy Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The British University Pattern

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

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

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

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

  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.