Recipes for the Universities

In favour of a scientific elite

LORD TODD, FRS, Master (Christ's College, Cambridge)

Everywhere it is evident that economic strength, and with it national stability, are dependent on technological progress, and it is difficult to think of any area of national affairs in which science and technology are not involved directly or indirectly. Under such circumstances it is hard to believe that correct policy decisions can be reached in a democracy whose members are ignorant of science; and yet that is, even today, very much the position in this country. Educa- tional patterns and social attitudes are closely related and both are slow to change for man feels the need to seek stability during his lifetime. So it is that while science and technology have been bringing about vast changes in our material existence at an ever-increasing pace we have failed to match them with appropriate social and educational changes. I believe the root of our present problems is in fact educa- tional, that much of the frustration evident among young people is a symptom of our lailure to adapt ourselves to rapid technological change and that we would do well to give educational change a high place among our priorities. Failure to do so could be disastrous, since the powers we now possess to alter drastically our environment are so great that, improperly or foolishly used, they could menace our own survival.

Advancing technology has brought with it great material benefits which have been widely spread throughout the entire popula- tion, so that the general standard of living has everywhere been raised and leisure in- creased. As a consequence there has been a gradual elimination of class barriers and a continuous movement in the direction of equality among members of our society. This has expressed itself in many ways, and not least in the demand for universal education which would give all children equal op- portunity to develop their talents to the full. Response to this demand came first at the level of primary education, then moved on into secondary education, coupled with a ris- ing school-leaving age, and now, with the ad- ded pressure of population growth, the de- mand is being made for universal tertiary education.

There is really nothing surprising about the current push for tertiary education; it was quite predictable. But the general pro- longation of the period of education to the age of twenty or twenty-one which it implies is, in my view, likely to present society with acute problems unless we can offer each individual the type of education appropriate to his or her future role in society. For the majority the education must have a vocational content such that they can proceed at the end of it to suitably lucrative employment without a further period of training akin to the old-fashioned ap- prenticeship.

There are two major difficulties in our way. The first is the failure to recognise that natural science is just as much a branch of culture as literature, music and the arts and that it is not in any sense a subject for the specialist only. In school curricula it should be part of the education given to eve?), child and should be treated on all fours with the standard compulsory subjects like English, history and the rest. Unless this is done we will never have a scientifically conscious democracy. The second is that we must make available a diversity of types of tertiary education and must avoid over-emphasising (as we now do) the virtues of the traditional type of university education, especially when it is applied in a context for which it was not intended. Both of these problems are serious, but neither is insoluble. The necessary broadening of school education is gradually taking place, and the speed with which it is happening will increase as we get rid of cur- rent prejudices in tertiary education.

Over the last century or so we have built-up in England a pyramidal system of education in which we started children in the primary schools at about five years of age and instituted from the age of twelve onwards a system of selection based on academic ability, under which those rejected at each successive selection step were chan- nelled off into various technical forms of education or training. Each successfully completed step in this selection process was accompanied by increasing specialisation un- til, finally, at the top of the school pyramid there was left a small highly selected group which then went on to university. University education was, of course, highly specialised, but was designed, in each specialty, to offer to an intellectual elite the maximum op- portunity to develop their intellectual and creative powers. Now, it is true that we did not operate the system very well, and that, in the past, social privilege may at times have been given more weight than academic

ability; but at least that is the system which we built up, and I myself believe that, for the past forty years, during which secondary education has greatly expanded, it has been operating more and more on the basis of academic ability alone.

During the course of the past ten years or so we have seen a vast increase in the number of applications for university en. try—so much so that we have roughly doubled the number of universities in order to meet the demand for places. Now we are told that we can expect a further doubling in

numbers, so that by 1980 we are likely to

have 450,000 students in our universities. Such an increase, if it is to be absorbed, would almost certainly entail the creation of more new universities, although a good deal of the pressure could be relieved by in- creasing the size of the present universities, some of which are so small as to be barely viable, to around 10,000 students each.

But is this increase in the number and size of traditional-type universities really desirable? I do not believe that the tradi- tional type of English university education is appropriate for such a large proportion of

each age-group; it was designed to deal with

a small minority of our young people which was believed to be creative and to have powers of leadership. That such a group or elite exists must be clear to anyone who has been concerned with higher education, and it should, and indeed must, be given every op- portunity to develop its power to the full. But that group is not going to amount to 450,000 in 1980; what a large proportion of that 450,000 ought to pursue is some other form of higher education with a different and greater vocational bias.

Already the expansion of numbers has reached a point where the inappropriateness of the system to many of the entrants is evi- dent. This is why we hear so much about bringing the universities closer to industry not only at the graduate level but also by giving a more industrial orientation to un- dergraduate courses in science, technology and (through management studies) the social

sciences.- We must remember that in this technological society we need a relatively small number of creative scientists and technologists to generate new ideas and a vastly greater number of technicians whose task it is to apply these to practical use. It is nonsense to suggest that both these types should have the same training, but I sometimes wonder if we pay sufficient heed to this problem.

The 'degree fixation' has its roots in our own educational history but has been power- fully reinforced by the argument that in the us one of the great 'super-powers' of this century, the educational system is such that far more people take college (i.e. university) degrees than in this country. It is always difficult to make direct comparisons between countries. with different cultural and social backgrounds, and there are some features of the American educational scene that are often overlooked in this country. One which I think is relevant to our problems is that although America has created a large number of university-type institutions giving Bachelor degrees of a rather general character and of a standard academically somewhat lower than the English Bachelor degree, with the increasing numbers flowing into higher education a marked hierarchy has developed within the system. Nowadays it is evident that a small number of universities are emerging as superior institu- tions working at a higher level than the others and with a large graduate element. It sometimes seems to me that those who ad- vocate the adoption of a generalised American-type system of higher education do not realise that already America is mov- ing away from that kind of system towards one which is more like the one we have built up slowly in this country.

There is much talk of a new system for British universities: a two-year general degree followed by a further two-year specialised degree for a selected group and finally a very restricted two-year doctorate group. If something on these lines is adopted, as I believe it may well be, then we will have to come to some kind of hierarchical system in our universities—and perhaps it would be better to plan for a range of different types now rather than wait until change is forced upon us by circumstances. But whatever system is finally adopted I hope we will bear in mind that we need far more technicians than scientists and technologists. If we train too many of the latter then many of them will have to follow the career of technician for which their training was not designed and which they will tend to regard as 'in- ferior' to that which they expected; the result will be a frustrated 'white-collar' class, with all the dangers that such a class implies. I believe this frustrated class is, to some extent, already with us and that, together with the continued segregation of science in our schools and universities, it is in part responsible for the so-called 'drift from science' which is said to be visible in schools. This drift probably reflects .also the 'anti- science and technology' attitude which in re- cent years has raised its head as a modern form of anti-intellectualism. This anti- science attitude originates, of course, in man's reluctance to accept radical change in his way of life; he is aware that technology is imposing such change, and if an individual has no understanding of science or technology he begins to regard science as some kind of monster over which he has no control whatever. Abridged from Lord Todd's address to the British Association.