The Atlantic and Its Enemies

summed up the problem: that the spending of money on the second rate would destroy the first rate. At least the American system was mixed, public and private of various sorts, the tax system encouraging towards the private side. If a Cornell collapsed in chest-beating self-righteousness, a San Diego would manage its affairs differently. The world’s young wanted to go to American universities, and European ones, easily within living memory a target for bright Americans, no longer attracted them. As Kedourie showed, in the thirties and forties British universities had been very good; the ‘boffins’ of the Second World War had worked wonders, with radar, jet engines, penicillin, nuclear physics and much else to their credit. Such facts were then misinterpreted, and the problem, as ever, went back to the later 1950s. Back then, national decline had had to be addressed. The spending of money on universities looked like an obvious start, the more so as universities always complained about money. A great man, Lionel Robbins, was commissioned to write a report, which doubled universities, created thirty-two polytechnics, and asserted that there must be ‘parity of esteem’. Architects made (ugly) whoopee, concrete went up and, as Noel Annan said, ‘all students could be given a Rolls-Royce higher education’, modelled on Oxford. In fact British education was set to be the beggar’s Oxford. It was a variant — on a small and therefore potentially rescuable — scale of the Continent’s experience, which had led to 1968. The fact was that Robbins’s report had set up ‘financially unviable arrangements’ after 1958 that ‘no country could afford’. The Thatcher government continued this, without embracing an alternative and creative course. In due course it made the problem even worse, by upgrading polytechnics, and thus doubling the number of universities.

Here again at work was the vociferous irrelevance — or downright humbug — of the critics. They went on as if the universities were wonderful, and as if there were a straight line between higher education and national prosperity, an argument easily defeated by the instance of Romania, which produced more graduates in the natural sciences than anywhere else, and where the lights frequently went out. Such thinking, in England, had caused provision for women students to take places in the natural sciences which, at considerable cost, they then failed to take up. Oxford ‘dons’ were especially pleased with themselves, whereas the conversation at their high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating.

In the early 1980s there was a cut in public grants, of 5-8 per cent, and teacher-student ratios did rise, because of the overall attempt to control government spending and inflation. This had started under Labour, and, with Mrs Thatcher, it did not last for very long. Private money easily made up the gap, and the number of dons did not decline: it rose, from 43,000 in 1981 to 47,000 in 1987. Even by the somewhat questionable measure of published papers, the British were producing a third more of them per capita than the French and Germans, and twice as many as the Japanese (even then the index of such papers did not include periodicals started after 1973). This did not stop a wave of hysteria: Sir Denis Noble at Oxford started a campaign, ‘Save British Science’. Nature and New Scientist produced endless doom and gloom. A Sussex ‘unit’ referred solemnly to the ‘catastrophe that we face as a scientific and educational nation’, and there were loud references to a ‘brain drain’. A Times letter signed by over a thousand people in 1993 claimed that civilian research and development had declined as a proportion of the GDP, but that ignored the fact that the GDP had gone up considerably in the meantime: one thing that was very obvious all around in the 1980s. These claims simply did not square with obvious evidence. The Royal Society itself showed that, apart from some very high-profile moves to the USA, there was not even much movement abroad among the 300,000 people whom it surveyed: only about twenty-four per annum, easily made up for by immigration. ‘Save British Science’ was just the usual euphemism, verging on hypocrisy, of an older complaint. Academic salaries were going down relative to others, and especially in terms of housing costs. Junior pay was less than in the police or even the National Health Service. A professor earned three quarters of a medium-grade civil servant’s pay in 1979, and half in 1996, but the problem predated the Thatcher government, academics’ pay having been arbitrarily held back in the early and middle seventies. A distinguished American applied for the Drummond Chair in Economics at Oxford, and was accepted. He received his first month’s salary and enquired whether it was intended to cover removal costs. When informed that it was the salary, he realized he had made a mistake, having assumed that the figure quoted in the job advertisement had been a monthly rather than an annual salary. Such nonsense had to do with inflation and, more broadly, the attempt to fund too many universities on a sort of watering-can principle, Oxford professors having the same salary as sages of the sticks; and British students, like Continental ones, were hardly expected to pay anything at all for their higher education. As Kedourie said, it would have made sense to give each university an endowment of ?50m and then let them sink or swim. Instead, by the end of the decade, ‘managerialism’ was being applied to the universities, and the principle was introduced of student loans. For students able to do summer jobs these were pocket money, for others, not enough to live on. The Treasury put on a ceiling of ?420m, and the banks refused to operate the scheme as collecting the debts might alienate customers. Eventually a loan company was established (in Glasgow) but in 1995 the Brezhnevite results were plain to all — an eighth of the loans irrecoverable, a backlog of 17,000 unanswered applications, only one in twenty-seven telephone calls answered, and an assessor appointed who managed to adjust all of seven cases in five years. Meanwhile, in pursuit of student numbers, the universities abandoned entrance qualifications and adulterated their courses, with ‘modules’ to be picked and chosen. Did this contribute towards graduate employment? No. Only two thirds of graduates got a job or professional training within months and at Sussex one quarter of the graduates seem simply to have chosen unemployment in preference to some job as a receptionist or stacking shelves.

Meanwhile, the Thatcher governments responded with greater doses of managerialism, as with the schools; costs were held down arbitrarily: small, possibly creative, departments were closed down, for minuscule savings that turned out to be costly, such that Middle Eastern or Balkan studies imploded, much to the country’s loss when both areas turned out to make for great international crises later on. A White Paper even asserted that ‘If evidence of student or employer demand suggests subsequently that graduate output will not be in line with the economy’s needs government will consider whether the planning framework should be adjusted’ — meaning, no money. In 1987 one Lord Croham reported in business-schoolese, and a fake ‘market’ was set up, in which the universities were to ‘compete’ for funds. This meant encouraging them to produce publications, which could be totted up. The overwhelming majority went unread. The ‘bidding’ system was of course dominated by a single ‘buyer’, the government, which held down fees. Even clinical medicine was paid for at just over ?5,000, and politics rated ?2,200 per student, roughly what might be demanded by a decent infants’ school for a term. Even then, the fees were supposed to include ‘research’. As Simon Jenkins remarked, ‘What is so strange about [these] higher education reforms is how little headway was made by the Right.’ Government cack-handedness was such that it mismanaged a scheme for early retirement. In principle there was something to be said for clearing dead wood and promoting the young. However, academic salaries were already so low that even a three-quarter pension was not to be lived on. What happened was that the dead wood stayed, whereas men who could find another job took the pension and then moved on — 4,500 of them in 1985, generally from departments that were specially favoured, such that 800 new posts had to be set up. There was a puzzle at the heart of it all. British universities had produced brilliant results at a time when nuclear physicists had to go through a committee to get higher-quality box-wood for an experiment, and had to break in to the Cavendish Laboratory after 6 p.m. to see how their experiments were going. By the 1980s they had a level of money that could be described in the words of the Habsburg prime minister a hundred years before as ‘supportably unsatisfactory’. Where were their split atoms and radar and penicillin? There are imponderables in the world of academe, and quantification — box-ticking — could drive them out. The world, at any rate, voted with its feet and preferred America, warts and all.

The disintegration of the Thatcher government can be dated from the early months of 1986. Triumphalism reigned, and for the most part deservedly so. However, there was no strategy to deal with longer-term problems, and, almost casually, an expedient was found for a shorter-term one: the Poll Tax, which, by 1989, was causing great numbers of the MPs to think that they would be vastly defeated at the next election. Local government in Great Britain had once worked remarkably well, in an apparently messy way: the great Victorian cities had led the world in prevention of epidemics, in provision of transport and even as regards schools, where the half-dozen semi-public institutions of each, such as Glasgow High School or Manchester Grammar, were of legendary quality. The local owners of property paid the bills, and controlled the results. Then came votes for all, industrial decline, inflation and sixties grandiosity. Great cities put up concrete housing estates — soon hideous and crime-ridden — and local government descended often enough into corrupt stagnation, most voters not bothering, and the rest supporting a system by which absurdly cheap rents made it unprofitable to look elsewhere for employment. Meanwhile, property-owners paid. In London, 75 per cent of the income came from voteless businesses. Of 35 million local voters, only half paid rates. As a matter of principle, the rates were both inadequate and provocative of much anger, because they could be unjust: an elderly widow paying the same as a working family next door, on the