Threat to the universities
J.A.G. Griffith
Charles Addams once drew a cartoon showing the small figures of two police officers standing by their car in the middle of desert country, one saying to the other something like 'Another one of those cock-a-bull stories'. Only on closer inspection do you see that they are standing in the middle of an enormous footprint. Universities in this country are about to be the casualties in a revolutionary change so vast in dimension that even they are finding difficulty in seeing it.
The ancient universities and colleges of England and Scotland were bodies created by royal charter and so independent of state or governmental authority, with the right to spend their income as they thought best within the terms of their charters. This independence was crucial. It also could be seen as a threat to that authority and James II famously sought to have some charters set aside and was famously defeated. When the big civic universities, and later the new post-war universities, were created they also were granted charters and given the same independence. Nowadays, the great proportion of the income of universities comes from moneys voted by Parliament to the Departments of Education.
In 1919, to try to find a solution for the obvious dangers of governmental control — these were the days when liberal principles were well thought of — the University Grants Committee was set up to advise the government on the application of moneys voted by Parliament. The UGC has a full-time chairman and 20 part-time members, most of them university professors chosen on no known basis by the Secretary of State. Very senior civil servants from.the Education Departments attend its meetings and these departments also supply its staff.
The main job of the UGC is to distribute amongst the universities the grant made available by the Secretary of State who has traditipnally not sought to interfere with this function. The basis of distribution during the more affluent years was primarily student numbers. The grant to each university was a single sum, not earmarked. Then came the present cuts in public expenditure which, together with the Government's decision to withdraw all support for overseas students,,amount to something of the order of 15 per cent, to be implemented by 1983-4. That is a lot of money, but I am not here concerned with the wisdom or the desirability of its magnitude.
The UGC, advised by the officials of the Education Departments, had a choice. It could have followed its broadly traditional role and distributed the reduced grant on much the same principles as before. This would have meant acting as equitably as possible between institutions, and it would have left to the universities the solving of many serious problems and the adopting of such devices as they could to minimise the consequences. Some universities would have decided to run down particular faculties or departments, even to close some altogether. The admission of students would have been carefully scrutinised.
Research work would have had to take its share. Almost inevitably some academic and other staff would have been made redundant. The process would have been painful but the decisions would have been those of men and women who knew the institutions and the nature of the job to be done.
But the UGC, with government approval, is taking a different course. It is a course which cuts across all the traditions, and must in a few years destroy the independence and autonomy of universities. In a circular letter to Vice-Chancellors dated 15 May 1981 the UGC announced that it will allot 'a set of student target numbers for each institution for 1983-4'. How detailed each set will be has not yet been revealed but the expectation is that it will give figures, at least for faculties and in some cases for departments, for each institution. The UGC 'believes' this will not lead to the closure of any whole university but it explicitly expects it will lead to the 'closure or radical reduction' of some departments. Grant will be allotted on the basis of the targets and it is thought that universities will be financially penalised or fined if they do not comply.So the UGC is taking upon itself the decision where to cut, how to cut and what to cut. It is proposing to decide the content of university teaching and research. This excercise verges on the unbelievable not only in its arrogance but in its inepti tude. The UGC has not the remotest authority or justification for adopting this course except that it 'advises' the Secretary of State. It has not the legal power. It has not the skills or the experience. Manpower planning, which is what the UGC is aiming at, is a monstrously difficult exercise and even governments have not shown themselves competent at it. That the UGC could begin to make decisions on this scale which would have any likelihood of serving the public interest is hysterically unfunny. But the big isue goes far beyond the irresponsibility and incompetence of the UGC. .Amost overnight, almost without protest, the principle of university independence, of the right to take the academic decisions on teaching and research, on a limited budget but with unlimited freedom, without state control, is to disappear. That is the size of the footprint.
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