Voting with their feet
TABLE TALK PENIS BROGAN
I have for some time past been pondering the question of the 'brain drain' and the recent re- port on the subject makes the question even more topical and more important than it seemed to be before. But in this week's news there is an indication of one of the reasons there is a brain drain. It is not a question of our technologists clearing off to the United States or our highly qualified engineers being forced to begin their labours in industry by sweeping up the plant floor. It is the pre- posterous attitude to important academic questions displayed by the Government in the person of Mr Patrick Gordon Walker. There is the curious argument that to decide not to do something is intrinsically valuable. We have now got from Mr Gordon Walker the announcement that a committee will start thinking of trying to do something else. Not that it matters, but I shall be dead long before the great question of the British Museum library is settled one way or the other.
Not all the arguments for the present site are valid. The greatest museum in the world, the Louvre, would not have been built as a museum: it became the greatest museum be- cause the French had a large empty palace on their hands. The conjunction of the Elgin Marbles and the Panizzi reading room is quite accidental. But the very visible fact that the un- fortunate Lady Phillips was unbriefed, or had been very badly briefed, in the House of Lords debate shows how casual Mr Gordon Walker is. In the House of Commons, we had the de haul en bas attitude of Mr Gordon Walker himself.
Before Frederick the Great promoted general, he used to ask not only was he intelli- gent, but was he lucky? At any rate it is quite certain that Mr Gordon Walker is not lucky. A long career of slipping on banana peels seems to continue; and the attitude of the Govern- ment to the future of the British Museum library would justify more brain draining than has occurred so far.
The whole question of the brain drain has also been debated with a curious ignoring of the fact that it is a very old phenomenon. People, expensively educated in Europe, have been going to North America roughly since the beginning of the seventeenth century—at any
rate since the foundation of Harvard College in 1636. It was an emigrant Scot, Alexander Graham Bell, who brought to America that ambiguous gift, the telephone. We have ex- ported a whole series of men of letters, for ex- ample Dr Wodehouse and Dr Auden. This has been for the good of the people of the United States and, to a less extent, of Canada. I don't see how it can be stopped, and I don't think it should be stopped.
Some of the arguments used are remarkably naive. For example, it is made a grievance against young men who go to take better paid jobs in America that their education has been paid for by the British government. The argu- ment seems to be that if they had paid for their own education entirely they could do as they liked, but having been subsidised by the Government, they are to be treated rather like mediaeval peasants adscripti glebae, and should be bound to old Squire Wilson until he decides to let them go.
Everyone who receives higher education in this country is subsidised by the Government even if he never sets foot outside this island. At the present moment, the education of the Prince of Wales at Trinity College, Cambridge, is being highly subsidised by the Government which meets most of the running expenses of Cambridge University, by Trinity College out of its endowments, and, as far as the depart- ment of archaeology and anthropology is con- cerned, out of subsidies from other sources as well. Nobody, not even the richest under- graduate, pays for his education in this crude sense.
An indignant letter in a daily newsprint
seems to suggest that people who have received government grants for their education, especially in technology, should not be allowed to leave the country until they have, by their arvices, paid back the investment. There is something to be said for lending money to students and getting them to pay it back when the vastly increased earning power which it is assumed they will have acquired, makes it easy for them to do so. This is not such an unjust proposal as is often asserted. But there is noth- ing that I can see to be said for keeping people in this country to work in conditions they won't accept voluntarily.
One of the reasons that the rulers of that highly artificial body politic, the German Democratic Republic, gave for erecting the Berlin wall was to keep fugitive technologists inside East Germany. This policy has suc- ceeded. It has succeeded, of course, by the use of machine guns, rifles, dogs, searchlights, barbed wire, mines, and repeated acts of mur- der, and I think it would be impracticable, even though this country is an island, to imitate Herr Ulbricht and the rest. In the United States, attempts have been made to keep graduates of the service academies in the army and navy even if they want to leave. Without going into the political morality of these schemes, they seem to me to be highly impracticable. For example, how can you keep a highly qualified engineer in Britain from get- ting to the United States by taking a plane to Dublin or taking the night ferry to Dunkirk, and then taking an Aer Lingus or Air France plane to New York?
I think there is too much panic about the brain drain and too little consideration of how it can be avoided. Anyone who knows the academic world knows that some of the brains that are draining are not of the very highest quality. I know at least one instance in which an intelligent young man, a research worker in what is a very popular field of science at the moment, simply decided that the competition was less keen in the United States, and it was for that reason he took his brain off to Cali- fornia.
Nevertheless, I have no doubt that we are losing a great many expensively trained men and women we might keep if we had a more intelligent academic and industrial policy at home. But I have seen in some of the more angry letters produced by this danger to our economic stability, a rather interesting note of outraged egalitarianism: why should young men, merely because they received a highly ex- pensive and specialised education, get more money and more prestige than the honest work- ing man? Ethically, there is perhaps no reason at all. Some people doing extremely unpleasant jobs ought to be paid much more than people doing attractive jobs that they want to do any- way, but which happen to have a high scarcity value and consequently are very much better paid than, for instance, garbage collection is. If the Labour party were committed to a genuine egalitarian policy or to a wage policy based on honest worth and not on scarcity value, one could sympathise. But I have seen no signs of the Labour party's preaching or prac- tising any such policy, and I think that appeals to the patriotic loyalty of specialists will have very little result until certain other problems are solved for the specialist and, undemocratic as it may seem, are settled on the specialists' terms. The Russian army, said Lenin, voted for peace with its feet. I need not extend the quotation to explain the present problem.
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