Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my professorship of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of London, my fellowship of the British Academy and my membership of the Council for the Defence of British Universities. There is a special, a delicate quality about higher education legislation. It is the nearest we get to framing a Companies Act for the life of the mind within our islands. Governments need to tread carefully and with restraint on this sensitive terrain, for here the state should always be a reluctant intruder. For the bulk of the 20th century, this was the guiding impulse behind the relationships between the Government and the universities. It was a remarkable civil servant at the Board of Education, AH Kidd, who created the arm’s-length principle after the Great War, when the University Grants Committee was established not by statute but by Treasury minute in 1919. As John Carswell, the historian of the UGC, put it:

“His problem was to reconcile the need for the Exchequer to subsidise universities as a national system with the need to maintain the autonomy of the universities as indispensable for the function they performed”.

That is exactly the task that faces your Lordships’ House as this Bill grinds its way towards Royal Assent.

The arm’s-length instinct was both crucial and natural in previous generations. It sustained a remarkable range, as we have heard, of lustrous universities given our size and population. On the research side, it was reflected in the royal charters that buttressed our research councils, and it shone through in the Haldane principle that state funders do not tell scientists what and how they should research.

I am not a golden-ager—I might sound like one, but I most certainly am not—but I fear that the admirable arm’s-length instinct has gradually given way to an instinct to intervene, a tendency that has become ever more pronounced in recent decades and spread by a creeping, uninspired and uninspiring managerialism which has reached deep into our labs and libraries, seminar rooms and lecture halls, diverting the energies of scholars and teachers from their primary and indispensable purposes and the so-called Humboldt principle, first developed in the German states 200 years ago, that the essence of a university is the precious symbiosis between research and teaching. Every scholar worth his or her salt should regret every piece of bureaucracy or excessive prescriptive audit which takes them away from their students, their labs or their archives, not because university teachers crave some kind of producer monopoly but because, quite rightly, scholars joined up for the thrill of the intellectual chase and its enthusiastic, contagious transmission to their students—for the poetry of university life and not for its plumbing, as my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton, who sadly is not in his place, likes to put it. As we crawl our way through the plumbing in the pages of legislation before us, we must not forget for one moment what universities are for and the poetry of learning that gives them life— what Albert Einstein famously called “a holy curiosity”.

I in no way criticise the motives of the framers of the Bill, but they are, I suspect, tone-deaf to several of the factors that have given us over the past century since the state became seriously involved in funding universities such a fine record as a higher education nation.

There are two elements in the Bill—many noble Lords have touched on them already—which could in the hands of a Minister less fastidious than Mr Jo Johnson, whom I greatly respect, lead to our losing rightly cherished university autonomies almost in a fit of absence of mind. Some of the instruments proposed for the new Office for Students are concerning—its power, for example, to remove the use of a university title, a power that the Higher Education Funding Council for England does not currently possess. This power at the moment lies, as does the granting of degree-awarding powers, with the Privy Council advised by the Quality Assurance Agency. There is, I fear, a high and worrying degree of latent state power contained in the pages of this legislation.

Paradoxically, as we have also heard, there may be insufficient rigour in the test to be applied to would-be new entrants to the university sector. The domestic and international reputations of British universities come into play here. I hope the Government will find ways to reverse and to ease the anxieties of Universities UK and many others who have been in touch with us on all these fronts.

I shall share a few thoughts on the creation of UK Research and Innovation. I am a great admirer of Sir Paul Nurse, the organising mind behind this development. I appreciate that UKRI’s swift flourishing will be critical to the Government’s new industrial strategy, whose details we shall get in a Green Paper in the next few days. Whether you were, or are, a leaver or a remainer in the great debate of our age, the success of this the eighth industrial strategy that we have tried since the end of the Second World War is crucial to our national well-being and will need the highest possible level of consensus to fuel and sustain it. For that and for many other reasons, I wish UKRI well, but I hope that it will not lead to a syringing out of the vitality of the research councils through their reduction, in effect, to subgroups of UKRI no longer able to attract the very best people to their service.

In the weeks following the Second World War, the great Nye Bevan, contemplating the UK’s post-war economic prospects, declared that Britain was an,

“island … almost made of coal and surrounded by fish”.

How odd that sounds to us today. Natural resources come and go; human resources do not. This Bill is about our greatest fixed capital assets: our brain power, our ingenuity, our skills and, above all, our “holy curiosity”. We must do nothing to diminish them. It is time for the poets to prevail over the plumbers.