Since then there have been two developments. First the war ran down Cambridge, England, in a way that was unreflected in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard (and MIT) was fortified by the great bonus of its post-1940 ingestion of European refugee scholars and by the stimulating effects, both psychologically and materially, of the post-war economic and political pre-eminence of the United States. Just as an Oxonian should not deny that the flame of intellectual enquiry burned most brightly beside the Cam in the inter-war years, so I do not think that either of us, Oxonians or Cantabrigians, should deny that in the forties and fifties it had substantially migrated, for reasons outside our control, to the banks of the Charles River and the purlieus of Harvard Yard. Quite where it is today is more difficult to decide. Still in the United States, I think, but more disseminated in accordance with the westward tilt in the balance of the country, and with Berkeley and Stanford able to claim at least a piece of the true cross.
The second more domestic development has been Oxford’s success from the late 1950s onwards in grafting on to its humanistic core a major new research capacity in the natural and applied sciences, including medicine. Its facilities in this respect now equal, possibly slightly exceed, those of Cambridge. And, having first been generous the other way I think it can now be said that a break-through would be at least as likely to occur in Oxford as in Cambridge.
Per contra Oxford has become somewhat less dominant politically. For the first time for many years there are more Cambridge alumni than Oxford ones in the present Cabinet, although there are not a great number of either. And it might I suppose be held that on power as opposed to numbers the edge was still with Oxford, even if dependent upon a not very enthusiastic member of that university.1 Oxford’s influence on the present-day Labour Party is hardly comparable with that in the first Wilson Government when it reached the extraordinary peak of fourteen Cabinet members out of twenty-one. And the new leader of the Liberal Democrats is not likely to be one of ours - or one of yours; this despite the fact that when we started out with the Gang of Four it was three-quarters Oxonian.
So perhaps the two universities are becoming more like each other, rather as old married couples, unless they go violently in the other direction, are sometimes said to get to look alike, or (which would be depressing) as modern cities become less individual, with the same hotels, the same shops, the same banks, the same traffic jams, the same food. I hope that will not go too far and that visually Cambridge will remain grander and Oxford more intimate, Cambridge more on show (even though the Oxford character is more exhibitionist), Oxford more hidden, Cambridge more like Paris, Oxford more like Rome amongst European capitals, Cambridge more like Venice, Oxford more like Florence amongst Italian cities.
We must not, however, become prisoners of our architecture, valuable a possession and formative an ambience though it is. Less physically we have in common the facts that we are both short of money, and that we are both still universities of the foremost world class, although neither of us can any longer take it for granted that this will continue effortlessly to be the case.
For seven centuries before 1922 we had both been privately funded universities - although private finance in the pre-capitalist era meant something very different from today - and remained substantially so until 1939. Then over the next thirty years we gradually became predominantly publicly funded institutions. I do not think that did us any harm. I speak here for Oxford, but I am not aware of a very different Cambridge experience. Over that period Oxford broadened its entry, improved its examination results, magnified its research capacity, maintained its réclame and preserved most of its framework of man-made beauty.
It is an over-austere - perhaps a doctrinaire - view that living off public money is enervating for an institution that knows how to spend it well. It is the cutting off of an adequate flow that is debilitating. But that has happened. There is no early prospect of a reversal, and if we are to maintain our reputations I see no alternative to major fund-raising efforts. I do not welcome the prospect. I think that there are considerable dangers in the idea of a university becoming increasingly that of extracting money from private benefactors, and skill in this task, which while important is not the greatest of the intellectual arts, becoming almost inevitably an important qualification for high academic office. I note with mild dismay that three-quarters of my conversation with the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford is devoted to this subject. I like to think that Curzon must have talked to Sir Herbert Warren about something more elevated. Yet I accept it as inevitable, made more so by the threat to university independence that is contained partly in the Education Reform Bill and partly in the proposal for contract funding which looms alongside it. Private money becomes necessary not only to preserve posts, to attract talent and to fund research, but also to maintain a hold on the independence of research and teaching judgement, without which no university can approach excellence.