The aims of a University
The Independent University — "an institution," according to one of its own publicity documents, "supported by private endowment and students' fees . . ." but determined to "serve many of the same public purposes as do the best of the Independent Schools" — has appointed Professor Max Beloff as its first Principal, and intends to open its doors to students at Buckingham in January, 1975. A project first conceived in December, 1968, has thus passed beyond the stage of pious hope and radical daydream and has now achieved, partly because of private contributions from those who believe in its promise, a measure of concrete reality. Preparations are being made to appoint the first members of its teaching staff; and planning is well under way on curricula, buildings, and all the lavish appurtenances required by a modern university — even one not sustained by the unwillingly bottomless pocket of the taxpayer.
Two questions arise. Is it worth the attempt to create a private Institution of higher education when the entire system has already been almost wholly digested in the maw of state provision? And can it be possible for a (relatively) povertystricken private organisation to finance the attainment of the high and traditional ideals of university practice which motivated the original proposers of an Independent University?
Any brave individual attempt of this kind is always worth making. But it should be noted that there has already been a foreshortening of the original ideals of the Independent University. In the climate of student unrest at the end of 1968 it was the conviction of the hundred or so academics and teachers who first suggested the new foundation that the financing of the state system from a single dominant source was the main cause of that loss of central academic purpose and conviction for quality which led to the invasion of the older universities by students unqualified for higher education, others not at all desirous of benefiting from it and teachers and administrators similarly unsuitable, and therefore willing to bend the knee before the student rebels. In such a system, the original sponsors declared, "independence sin scholarship, learning and research cannot flourish ..." No one at all caring for the achievements in learning and pedagogy which once distinguished British Universities, and which still mark a few outcrops in the present jungle, would deny the essential truth of that proposition. But it is also fair to say that the proposals for the first few years at Buckingham lay stress on a four-term year; emphasise the mundane practicality of the subjects — especially economics and law — which will be taught; and state clearly that none of the new teachers will have any university time for research. This practical emphasis first appeared in a tract by Professor Harry Ferns, an early protagonist of the Buckingham idea, when he expressed the hope that the university should be "governed in designing its programmes by the demands of society and not by the demands of discovery on the frontiers of knowledge." But if a practical training in practical affairs is all that is being offered, what then are we to make of the implications of Professor Beloff's ringing inaugural declaration? He said, "What has united all the protagonists of the idea is a belief in the virtues of independence as such, the belief that significant discoveries and advances are normally made within the confines of single institutions which are not subject to control from outside." How are such discoveries and advances to be made in so practical an institution?
It seems likely that straitened circumstances, and the limits of what appears to be economically possible has imposed a certain constriction of the ideas of the Planning Board of the new University. It cannot be stated forcefully enough that, ultimately, nothing which merits the name of a university, in the sense in which Western civilisation properly understands that word, can be created out of an institution which proposes to be so severely practical. Some allowance must be made for research, or the most promising young teachers will not be available at Buckingham. Some clearer idea than has so far been provided of what the governors of the Independent University intend to happen when circumstances become less straitened must be made public. If the new institution is to be taken seriously, there is an absolute necessity for an early, detailed and long-range statement of academic policy on the part of the Planning Board.
Mark Pattison once observed, in his strictures to and on the commission investigating the affairs of Oxford in the last century, that a university was both a practical and a beautiful adornment of a country. The state-dominated system is rapidly ceasing to be either. Once Mr Aubrey Jones began to ask scholars and teachers to specify how they spent their time we were well on our way to Mr Edward Short's ideal of the comprehensive university: one in which, to quote a recent hope of his, shop assistants would invariably possess university degrees. Such a universal world, in which everyone would have a university degree, would have no place for a university. Once the state is responsible, through taxation, for the finance of higher education, the life of the independent institutions, the independence of which has sustained through the ages almost all that we know of quality in scholarship and academic thought, has begun to run towards the end of its term. The bureaucrats and the deluded are left to infest the ruins.
It is because of what is happening to our universities that the Independent University is important. And it is because of that, too, that the Independent University should not be permitted, even by its friends, to mislay for a moment its finer inspirations, however difficult and even impossible they seem of attainment. There are many more people and institutions than the Buckingham Planning Board may anticipate or even dream of, who wish them and their project well. Such people and institutions will be encouraged to help and contribute by the hope of sustaining, and of re-creating, a tradition of learning and teaching, not yet forgotton, but now being forgotten. The Independent University cannot be allowed to fail, for if it does, its own failure will threaten academic freedom itself.
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