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.