Graduation Address

"The State and the Universities in Great Britain." (19 May 1950). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Before I begin reading to you the dissertation which I have written, there are three tasks for me to perform.

In the first place courtesy demands that I give expression in words to the thanks of that section of the class of 1950 which is placed on the platform. How much more appropriately, how much more eloquently, those thanks could have been expressed by any one of my colleagues present today, than by me. While the honour of belonging to the 1950 class has come to those in the body of the hall as a just reward for toil, sweat and perhaps even tears, to us on the platform it has come as a matter of grace, like manna from heaven. The free gifts of grace will, however, serve only to swell our loyalty and devotion to the learned society which we are today joining or rejoining at Fredericton. If you will forgive a personal reference, I would refer to the fact that my first university college was known as the College by the Sea, and today I feel proud and happy to be elevated to membership of the College on the Hill.

The second thing which I have to do is to bring cordial, sisterly greetings from a big younger sister, the University of London. In doing so I would like to refer to the strong and delightful human links that now connect the two institutions. It has been a real pleasure to my wife and myself to visit that distant vineyard in which there is grown and cultivated that attractive species know in London as the Beaverbrook Scholar. For three sessions we have enjoyed their company in London, they have enriched our society of learning, and they have stimulated us in our world. As one who was privileged to negotiate the arrangements with your munificent chancellor, I am delighted at the success that has attended the venture. My hope is that the scheme, now a proved success, will be continued indefinitely.

The third thing which I must do is to explain very briefly how it happens that I have chosen as the subject of my written dissertation "The State and the Universities in Great Britain".

Experience, first as a vice-chancellor and then as a member of the University Grants Committee, a poacher turned gamekeeper, as it were, has made me a firm believer in two things relating to university life. No university governing body can successfully perform its proper function of planning and developing its university if harassed by undue anxiety about its finances.

And no university can serve its proper purpose in a free community unless it enjoys a healthy measure of autonomy and independence in the planning and execution of its work. And I thought it might interest you on this side to hear how these two things are sought to be secured in Britain today.

An increasing measure of public attention is being paid in various countries to the universities and their problems. So far as Great Britain is concerned this derives, in part, from a greatly extended public interest in education generally and a more insistent demand by all classes in the community for a share in the privileges of higher education, and, in part, from a general appreciation of the important scientific, technical, administrative and other contributions which the universities were able to make to the national effort during the second world war.

While, on the one hand, many of the normal functions and activities of the universities had to be suspended during that war, there was, on the other hand, an artificial stimulation of such of their activities (particularly in the fields of science and technology) as were directly related to the needs of the war machine. Once the public interest in higher education had become aroused and the benefits of university education had become more widely appreciated, and once it had been realised how valuable the assistance of the universities could now be in a national emergency, it was only natural for the state to stimulate the expansion of the universities and the university colleges in peace time, and to expect, in due course, contributions from them during the post-war period of economic and social re-adjustment.

The extended interest in the universities of England and Wales after the war is reflected in the great increase in student numbers, in the appearance of a number of important publications - official and unofficial - on different aspects of university work, and in the very substantial increase in the financial assistance in the form of direct grants in aid to the institutions themselves and in the form of grants to students from both the central and local authorities. This widespread public interest, however, has had its embarrassing moments, its obvious difficulties, and its hidden dangers; for public attention often brings with it public criticism. In the past academic workers have normally shunned publicity. They have been more than content to carry out their duties in the seclusion of their institutions. They have enjoyed comparative immunity from public criticism; and their attention has not been unduly distracted by considerations of publicity. Henceforth they may have to reckon more and more with public discussion of their activities; and they may expect to have to answer more questions from the public about different aspects of their work.

Conscription and direction were common instruments of government in Britain during the war period. Government planning and control tended to take their place in the period immediately following. In the political, social and economic mood of the people prevailing at the conclusion of the war, public interest in the universities might well have taken the shape of a demand for direct government control of universities by a Minister of the Crown; for example, by the Minister of Education or the Lord President of the Council. Fortunately, this particular threat never materialised and so, for the time being at least, a potential danger to the independence or autonomy of the universities and university colleges of Great Britain was avoided.

Two things in particular seem to me to have contributed to the passing of this danger. First and foremost among them is the tradition of sturdy independence which has become a valued heritage of British university life generally. Some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge owe their origin to royal patronage, others to prominent royal or court influence: a number of provincial universities could not have come into existence or continued to flourish without ready and generous local and municipal support. The constitutions of a great number of our universities and university colleges take the form of royal charters. Notwithstanding all this I know of no occasion in modern times when the independence of the universities from government and private interests has not been recognised as both desirable and proper. This tradition of autonomy is a real source of strength and sustenance to the universities in facing their present tasks.

Second but almost equal in importance to the first consideration is the establishment and growth in influence and authority of the University Grants Committee. This is a committee which was first set up by the British Treasury in 1919. The practice for the first 24 years of its existence was to confine its membership to persons not in the active service of a university. But in 1943 this practice was abandoned and the committee, as now constituted, combines a majority of persons drawn from the current stream of academic life.

When it was originally appointed in 1919 the committee's terms of reference were:-

"To enquire into the financial needs of university education in the United Kingdom and to advise the Government as to the application of any grants that may be made by Parliament towards meeting them."

Twenty-seven years later (in 1946) these terms of reference were reconsidered; and as a result of this reconsideration, and in the light of experience, and in the then prevailing mood of the country, they were extended and were more fully defined by the addition to the original terms of the following words:-

"to collect, examine and make available information on matters relating to university education at home and abroad, and to assist in consultation with the universities and other bodies concerned, the preparation and execution of such plans for the development of the universities as may from time to time be required in order to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs."

The latter part of this new paragraph is significant in its reference to plans for the development of the universities to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs. It suggests that to the University Grants Committee's task of serving as an effective and acceptable link between the universities and the agencies of central government, and in particular the Treasury, there has been added the duty of gauging national needs with respect to education at the university level and guiding the universities in meeting those needs.

How can this guidance be given without prejudice to the autonomy of the universities? One cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question without giving some consideration on the one hand to those branches of university activities in which the guidance will be necessary, and on the other hand, to the methods whereby the universities are now financed in Britain. Before we embark on such a consideration I think I can confidently assert that there is at the present moment no shadow of any threat in Great Britain to academic freedom in the sense of the freedom of the community of intellectuals that forms the university to do its work in the way the members of that community think best. The state, for example, does not interfere with the freedom of the scientist to think as he likes; it does not restrain the historian from publishing in such form as he chooses the result of his researches; it does not forbid the academic lawyer from criticising the law and its administration. Le me illustrate this by reference to what has been happening elsewhere.

During the last five years a series of cultural crises seem to have occurred in Russia. Some of these culminated in notable purges, particularly in the fields of medical and biological researches. These crises seem to have followed a distinct pattern and to reflect a planned state attempt to isolate the country from western science and culture. A distinguished British scientist, Professor Eric Ashby, in the Listener, March 30th, 1950, at page 549, described the plan and its purpose in these words:-

"The Soviet economy urgently needs short-term technical research, and the application of well-established scientific principles to industry. Therefore for the present many Soviet scientists must be content to be handmaids of industry. Russia cannot yet afford to release her scholars into the intellectual climate of western Europe, for in the west the state adopts an attitude of non-intervention toward intellectuals. Even though most western scientists nowadays depend on state patronage, they do not expect (and I think they would deeply resent) any dictation from their patrons. This relation between the state and the intellectual, which we regard as natural and beneficial, is (in my experience) most attractive to the Soviet scholar, but it is incomprehensible to the ordinary Soviet citizen. I often tried in Moscow to explain its merits, and I always failed. To the Russian communist an intellectual worker is in the same category as any other worker. The workers in a boot factory produce boots the public wants, not the boots they think they would like to make; and for precisely the same reasons a worker in a laboratory does the research the public wants, and a novelist writes the stories the public wants. Regarded in this way, the output of a scientist and the output of a factory hand must measure up to the same test: the test of relevance to the needs of society."

Whatever may be the reason behind this deliberate policy of academic, scientific and cultural isolation in Russia, its operative existence is unquestioned and must serve as a serious warning of what the loss of academic freedom may mean to a community.

Let me now return to the consideration of the problem of planning British universities and guiding them to meet national needs. As was pointed out in the report of the University Grants Committee for the years 1935-1947 the solution of this problem "is immensely facilitated by the fact that the Government adhere, no less firmly than the universities themselves, to the fundamental principle of academic autonomy. Education and research in the universities of this country are not (and, we believe, are not likely to become) functions of the state; and the story which this report relates is essentially one of a partnership between universities and state, in which each partner has something to take and something to give."

In the academic year 1947-48 (which is the last year for which the full details have been made public), the total income of the universities and university colleges which were in receipt of grants from the University Grants Committee amounted to £16,276,286. This sum was distributed over the main heads in the following manner:

Endowments - £1,241,325 (7.6 per cent)
Donations and subscriptions - £320,664 (2 per cent)
Grants from local authorities - £773,490 (4.8 per cent)
Parliamentary grants - £9,412,042 (57.8 per cent)
Fees for tuition, examination, graduation, matriculation and registration - £3,480,340 (21.4 per cent)
Other income (such as payments for service rendered) - £1,048,424 (6.4 per cent)

The corresponding figures for the last pre-war year are total income - £6,712,067, distributed as follows:

Endowments - £1,035,757 (15.4 per cent)
Donations and subscriptions - £172,619 (2.6 per cent)
Grants from local authorities - £605,957 (9 per cent)
Parliamentary grants - £2,400,402 (35.8 per cent)
Tuition and examinations, etc. - £1,998,833 (29.8 per cent)
Other income - £498,499 (7.4 per cent)

Although the actual amount in each case is up you will have noted that the percentage under every head except one has gone down by 1947-48. The one exception is parliamentary grants which has grown from 35.8 per cent to 57.8 per cent and in 1947-48 amounted to nearly 9½ million pounds. In addition to this sum of nearly 9½ million pounds, the British Treasury contributed through the University Grants Committee no less than £2,148,520 by way of capital grants for building and equipment completed or acquired in the course of the year.

This enormous sum of public money is paid direct by the Treasury to the institutions concerned on the advice of the University Grants Committee. Each university or university college in receipt of a grant is visited by the Committee and asked to submit estimates of its income and expenditure and to indicate its plans for development and its needs generally. The committee reviews these estimates and submits to the Treasury a general statement of the needs of the universities and university colleges in the aggregate. After due consideration the Chancellor of the Exchequer announces in Parliament the aggregate sum of money which he intends to put at the disposal of the University Grants Committee as a block grant for distribution to the different institutions. Until the later years of the war the practice had been for all Treasury grants and to be paid annually for such periods by way of unearmarked block grants. The fixing of the grant for a quinquennial period enabled the universities to plan future developments with more security and gave them more confidence generally. The making of the grant to each institution in one aggregate or block sum, unearmarked for any specific purpose, constituted a clear recognition of the autonomy of the university and its freedom to utilise its resources in the manner it considered best for the fulfilment of its mission.

During the later years of the war period and for the first two year of the post-war period there was, for obvious reasons, a departure from the former practice of making quinquennial grants. In 1947, however, there was a return, at that time generally welcomed, to the former practice. The last few years have also seen two important departures from the practice of making block, unearmarked grants. Substantial sums, in the form of grants for non-recurrent needs have been distributed annually through the University Grants Committee to the different universities for the purchase of sites, buildings and equipment and the erection of new works and buildings. Before the war such grants were rarely made and were then only small in amount. It is expected that this departure from the former practice will continue for the time being, though it is not clear whether the distribution should be announced for periods of one year or five years at a time. The other departure has taken the form of earmarking grants for particular purposes such as to cover the greatly increased cost of medical education, the extension of university facilities for training dentists, veterinary surgeons, agriculturists and economists, and to make better provision for Oriental, African and East European studies.

The expectation is that this somewhat constraining practice of making earmarked grants for special purposes will for the greater part, or perhaps entirely, disappear in the next quinquennial period.

Thus although the universities have since the war become more and more dependent on the state for their finance, the manner in which the grants are made and the intervention of an independent committee between Treasury and the universities contribute in large measure to the maintenance of autonomy in the universities. But it is generally recognised that in administering the much larger funds now at its disposal the University Grants Committee must almost as a matter of course exercise a somewhat greater measure of influence over university policy than hitherto. The government that provides the money is entitled to be satisfied that every field of study which in the national interest ought to be covered at the universities is in fact covered and that the resources which are placed at the disposal of the universities are being used with full regard both to efficiency and to economy. it is a significant fact that the large sums provided by Parliament are entrusted to the universities without the detailed control of expenditure which obtains in other fields of government assistance, and it is equally significant that it is a ministry concerned with finance, that is to say the Treasury, and not with educational or research policy, that appoints the grants committee and receives its reports. It is not solely in the field of finance that the state might have brought undue pressure to bear on the universities. As I have already mentioned, it became obvious before the end of the war that provision would have to be made for the universities to receive considerably increased numbers of students. The universities were taken into consultation by the University Grants Committee and as a result some universities and university colleges planned to enrol twice or three time their pre-war numbers; while other universities, particularly the larger ones, planned only modest increases in numbers; The Universities were encouraged to make provision for increased numbers but received no direction to that effect. They planned according to their own ideas after being informed of the needs of the nation for certain classes of university trained personnel.

Again a large number of Further Education and Training Grants were made by the state to ex-service men and women to enable them to study at the universities; and considerably increased numbers of state scholarships and local authority grants are now given to boys and girls leaving school to proceed to the universities. In none of these cases has any attempt been made to direct any institution to take in such students. It is at all times taken for granted that the universities must not be deprived of an effective choice of their own entrants. In no sphere is the autonomy of the universities more carefully respected than in the selection and admission of their students.

It is not merely in the Treasury that is found an attitude respectful of university autonomy. It is found in all departments of Government who have dealings with the university, for example the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Labour, and the Ministry of Health.

It will be appreciated from what I have said that there has grown up between the state and the universities in Great Britain during the last five years a relationship that is new and intricate. On the one hand, having regard to national needs and increased costs, a certain measure of central planning is inevitable and the problem has been to arrange this planning while at the same time maintaining academic freedom and traditional university autonomy. It is accepted that some body like the University Grants Committee should make it its business to survey the various fields of academic study in the country as a whole so as to prevent overlapping and undue waste of resources on the one hand so as to see that there are no unfilled gaps on the other hand. Having made the survey it follows that the Grants Committee should guide and stimulate the universities to contract or extend their facilities as the case may be. As the report of the University Grants Committee for 1935-47 observes "central planning on these lines involves no abridgement of academic freedom, for no university is required, or could be expected, to undertake developments against its own considered wishes, and if a university feels impelled to expenditure on purposes for which financial support from the Exchequer is not forthcoming, its remedy is to find a private benefactor to supply the need."

That, in outline, is the manner in which in our British, empirical way we seek to provide the daily bread of the universities without selling their souls to any body, private or public, in the community.