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.