Higher Education

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a couple of interests. I am a professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Council for the Defence of British Universities.

Like everyone else engaged in higher education, I am deeply concerned about the question of student funding. There is a dramatic starkness about the figures in the Public Accounts Committee report, Student Loan Repayments, published in February. It stated:

“There is at present around £46 billion of outstanding student loans on the Government’s books, and this figure is set to rise dramatically to £200 billion by 2042 (in 2013 prices)”.

I suspect that all political parties privately accept that something will have to be done about this staggering accumulating burden on the public finances. I can feel another inquiry coming on post-general election. It is a first-order question for higher education provision in England.

I should like to make a case for a wider and broader gauge inquiry comparable to the great Robbins report of 1963, which the Minister mentioned in his opening remarks. That report fashioned the university scene that shaped the world I inhabited as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, when but 7% to 8% of my age group received a higher education. As we have heard, today that figure is certainly above 43%, and is rising towards 45%.

On rereading Robbins for the purposes of today’s debate, two things stood out for me. First, as Lord Robbins himself put it in his 1963 report:

“Our terms of reference instruct us to consider the pattern of full-time higher education in Great Britain. We believe that no such instructions have been given to any committee or commission in the past. … The reason is obvious. Even today it would be a misnomer to speak of a system of higher education in this country, if by system is meant a consciously co-ordinated organisation”.

Lord Robbins explained that he believed it was time for an all-encompassing look at higher education because of what he called the,

“great Education Act of 1944, which inaugurated momentous changes in the organisation of education in the schools”.

Indeed, many of us in this House are beneficiaries of that Act. We are Rab Butler’s “children” in that we were the first people for whom a proper ladder of opportunity was ever lowered. I am not given to regrets but one of my great regrets is that that generation was almost certainly the best provided for ever in terms of health, education and welfare. Certainly, that is the case as regards the foreseeable future. There was no private finance initiative for the generation that went without for us and no shoving of debt down the line to the grandchildren. We were the most privileged generation in that regard and that has shaped today’s debate because, if I may say so tactfully, many of us are of a certain age. Lionel Robbins said that it was the job of his committee to consider changes for the higher education system of a comparable magnitude to those in the Butler Act.

I should like to linger a little longer on the Robbins report as I am convinced that it has resonance for us today. Robbins promised that his committee would eschew overprescription—how unlike our dear life under HEFCE these days. Instead, it would advance common principles. In a deliciously fluent opening chapter entirely free of the acronymia and management babble that infects so many state papers, and, indeed, even the internal communications of our universities, where precision in the use of language is a first-order question, Lionel Robbins’ pen was fluent and acronymia free. That is exactly what he did—he drafted longhand with his fountain pen at home, as my noble friends Lord Moser and Lord Layard, who were his statisticians, confirmed for me the other day.

Lionel Robbins was a great economist with a liberal, humane outlook—one of the greatest luminaries the LSE has ever produced—and had great generosity of spirit. As I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, knows, he was a great admirer of the Scottish higher education system and wanted the English universities to go over to the four-year model. In his own way, Robbins breathed the tradition of Cardinal Newman’s classic, The Idea of a University, when he answered the question: what are universities for? That is a question we very rarely hear these days. Each generation must ask it anew for itself.

Robbins wrote:

“We begin with instruction in skills suitable to play a part in the general division of labour … secondly, while emphasising that there is no betrayal of values when institutions of higher education teach what will be of some practical use, we must postulate that what is taught should be taught in such a way as to promote the general powers of the mind. The aim should be to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women … Thirdly, we must name the advancement of learning … the search for truth is an essential function of institutions of higher education and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes of the nature of discovery”.

Lord Robbins rounded this off by speaking of British universities transmitting,

“a common culture and common standards of citizenship”,

concluding that the UK higher education system as a whole,

“must be judged deficient unless it provides adequately for all of them”—

that is, all four of his principles.

The strength and lustre of the Robbins report lay in the way it scooped up and blended the best traditions of the past before setting out a plan for future expansion, including what was then going to be six—but was later seven—wholly new universities, one of which, Stirling, was in Scotland. Indeed, they came to pass and have powerfully advanced and enhanced the life of the mind in our country from the late 1960s, when the bricks were first laid.

Also in Lionel Robbins’ pages you find Isaac Newton’s idea that scholars stand on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before, and Humboldt’s notion that research and teaching are symbiotically linked and that, in today’s parlance, students should be the first to hear and comment on their teachers’ work in progress. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, gave us a vivid example of this with the incomparable Max Born at Edinburgh.

Rereading Robbins for the purposes of this debate was a tonic, as I have indicated. However, we have not seen its like since in the intervening 50 years. There have been inquiries and changes aplenty but no wider look at the purpose and system in the Robbins style, and I think we are the poorer for it. As a country, it is a void that we need to fill. I borrow a metaphor from my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton, who, sadly, is not in his place today. When he was recruiting to the politics department at Queen Mary, he used to ask would-be students, “Are you a poet or a plumber?”, which is a pretty good question for would-be undergraduates and, indeed, postgraduates. To borrow his metaphor—the noble Lord, Lord Smith, is himself a distinguished former vice-chancellor—I think we in the universities are too often obsessed and ground down by the plumbing of academic life. I refer to the ever greater intrusion of administration. In so doing, we have allowed too much of the poetry to be syringed out of our everyday existence as scholars and teachers. I refer to the thrill of the intellectual chase and the pleasure and primacy of teaching. We need a new Robbins for many reasons, not least to remind our university teachers and scholars what will get them zestfully out of bed on a wet Monday in February. It is certainly not the next committee or the research exercise framework, which, without exception, diminishes the mental life of all those who have had to take part in them.

Our universities need to be institutions of inspiration as well as utility. Indeed, the rest of the world tends very kindly to regard them as such. They are a particularly subtle instrument in our armoury of soft power, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, indicated, and as your Lordships’ Select Committee on Soft Power, chaired with great brio by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, illustrated vividly last month in its eloquent report. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has already mentioned some of the figures contained in that committee’s report, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. I hope she will forgive me if I repeat them. With 1% of the world’s population, the UK provides 3% of global funding for research, 7.9% of the world’s scientific papers, 11.8% of global citations, and, most important of all, 14.4% of the world’s most highly cited papers.

It is difficult to apply similar measurements to the arts, humanities and the social sciences, but here, too, we undoubtedly think and publish heavier than our weight. When it comes to the life of the mind, as a country we really do meet Einstein’s requirement of sustaining what he called a holy curiosity. In so doing, we arouse the curiosity of the world. This is not squishy soft power; it is steel-rimmed soft power. There are plentiful reasons to be cheerful amidst our anxieties about the future of higher education. Let us have a Robbins inquiry for the 21st century and let us curb the plumbing and enhance the poetry.