Higher Education: EUC Report

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, I welcome this report and debate on modernising higher education in Europe. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, who is emphasising modern-language teaching. I have friends in France who have a company that is developing software to enable French companies to work with British ones. It is important that the translation of English is regional; if you are in a Birmingham factory, you jolly well want the French people to speak Brummie, not some other language. Of course, English is a broad and complex subject, and sometimes when we say “English” we should think about what we are saying.

Those of us of a certain age have hugely benefited from this extraordinary period over the past 30 to 40 years of the renewed Europeanisation of academic life. Around 130 years ago my great-grandfather, after doing medicine and chemistry at Oxford and having been introduced to his wife by none other than Oscar Wilde on The High, then went to Germany to study medicine. Then there was a long period when there was a breakdown in relations across Europe during the first half of the previous century, and it is very gratifying now that that has all been restored. It is also interesting to remind noble Lords that we should remember that the PhD degree, which came from Germany, was still regarded in Cambridge in the 1960s as an interesting experiment.

The report emphasises the growing masters’ courses in English. One of the features that it does not emphasise is that the ones that I know about in the Netherlands are not just courses in one university; they are collaborative across universities, and that is a very important feature. Almost every master’s course in the UK is given by a university, but there is no subject in which you would not benefit from spending a week here, a week there and so on. I have participated in that.

The other important point is that these advanced masters’ courses are all highly specialised, even the ones I have just referred to. Surely we should be moving to masters’ courses in English or well understood languages to enable students in Europe to understand and study broader issues, perhaps involving social science questions, environment, health or business. Business schools are one of the areas that enable people across Europe to study processes and ideas in a very broad way.

Perhaps the greatest critique, which is not mentioned in this report, of European higher education is that China, in thinking about its higher education, is moving away from the European model. It is moving to the American model because it realises that it is important that people have a broad education when they start higher education. They should learn about languages, philosophy, politics and science, as you do in the United States, where you have to know the name of the planets, for example, even if you are studying English literature.

Is Europe going to follow this idea? Fifty years ago, Lord Snow spoke of the need to combine science and humanities teaching. He visited the school I was at and talked about Russian physicists having to write essays about the character of Natasha in War and Peace, which is an inconceivable concept in the way we educate people now. We are now changing in the UK. There is a new course at University College London on humanities and science. Interestingly, it is partly funded by the movement of science funds into humanities as the result of the Government reducing the humanities budget. It is an ill wind, et cetera. It is also interesting that some of the Netherlands universities are also developing science/arts universities, so all is not lost.

Another important feature touched on in this report and, indeed, responded to by the Government in paragraph 120, is that collaborative research is vital in EU higher education to enable us to be in this leading position. I do not quite take the gloomy view of my noble friend Lord Giddens. As a result of the EU, we have extraordinary and marvellous research programmes involving people across Europe. The attraction of EU research is that it is totally unexpected. You have no idea what your colleagues in Latvia, Greece or some other place are going to do. It is not like, if I may say so, a grant from Swindon when you more or less have to say what you are going to do and you do it. If you have a European project, you have no idea what is going to happen, and really new things happen. This is, of course, a very minority view about European science. Most of my colleagues prefer a grant from Swindon, which is very regular and predictable. I believe that this EC practice of insisting upon collaborative projects is bringing Europe together, and we are getting many important ideas. I believe this should be welcomed. The Government in their welcome response to the report referred to the importance of small companies benefiting from these developments and their connection to the Technology Strategy Board.

Another important development in European higher education and science in the past 20 or 30 years has been the formation of networks of activities across universities. I was involved in the formation of something with the indigestible title of ERCOFTAC—European research community for flow turbulence and combustion. It involved major European companies and many of the major universities and technical institutions. Forming that kind of bottom-up network was considerably resisted by officials in national research communities and by the European Commission. They said, “It’s our job to tell you what networks you have. We’re going to control them”. We said, “No. We’re going to have our own”. Periodically European-funded networks participated in this bottom-up network, which has lasted longer than every finite-time initiative from the councils. In the 1990s, we had a meeting at the Royal Society that looked at these large numbers of groups from beekeepers and watchmakers to physicists and engineers. This is a great feature of European development, and you do not see it on any other major continent. Industry has been highly supportive of this. As a result of such networks, databases and scientific developments have been formed.

One of the interesting developments in Europe is that Airbus, for example, shares its future plans. It is going to produce some sort of “Dan Dare” paper-dart-like aeroplanes in future. We all know about this in Europe, and the way in which the wings are going to wobble around and hopefully be controlled. It is an extraordinary participation of universities and industry, the like of which you do not find in any other country. Boeing keeps its future plans very secret.

In the enlightened world I see around us in Europe, if you wear these rose-tinted glasses, the United Kingdom research councils should be much keener on this. They should be in much closer contact with the other EU research councils. If they get a research grant, they should be able to ring up their friend in Germany, Paris or Italy to find out whether some proposal is similar to what they are doing. Not a lot of that happens.

It is interesting that, still as a result of the lack of languages, a lot of EU science is not credited in the UK because it is not in English. A really important point was mentioned in a meeting that I had a couple of weeks ago in Bergen in Norway: one of the most important findings about climate change—the fact that we have very long periods of great heat or cold—was published in French. It is nowhere published in the English language. Therefore, at the moment, it may not appear in the next IPCC report on climate change. I had to rush to my French friend and say, “For goodness’s sake, quickly write this in English. Then it will probably be credited”. The consequences of this lack of understanding of other languages have many practical applications.

The movement of students, as other noble Lords have commented, has great merits. Those of us in British universities have seen excellent students arriving and bringing with them new ideas. Some of them have then also joined small British companies. The French universities’ “stage”, as they put it, can be held not just in another university, but in companies. Many of them make this transition, and bring with them their ideas, their language skills and employability.

The British Government could do much more— I welcome that this is highlighted in the report—in showing UK students the merits of doing some of their advanced work in universities in other European countries. How should this be done? It is interesting. I was talking to colleagues in Delft this week. Even in Delft, they find that their academics do not understand what happens in Brussels, which is not far away. They want their academics to understand the EC programmes, so they put them all in a bus and took them to Brussels in order to do so, with great benefits. Surely we should have familiarisation courses for students who are very unaware of what happens on the continent. That may be the first way of overcoming this problem.

One of the reasons why British companies and even certain government agencies now employ many continental rather than British graduates is simply because the continental graduates arrive with great familiarity of several languages and an understanding of wider European institutions, industry and so on. The Met Office now employs a considerable number of scientists and experts from these countries, which they did not use to. I am glad to say that our government agencies are broader than other European agencies in being able to employ people from other countries. However, the reason is that it is because our graduates do not have this broader savoir faire, as one might call it. That will continue until UK universities are taught in their entry standards and insist that they know at least one other language. Special courses could be laid on by universities, as they are at UCL and many other universities I know. For example, professional bodies like engineers, bankers and lawyers should also insist upon this.

Finally, since this is a report to government, I can see no reason why the Civil Service entry examinations should not include a foreign language qualification, which would show some seriousness. In this debate, we have tended to talk about foreign languages as something European. Of course, many tens of thousands of our Civil Servants speak several Asian languages. We should not forget that they are also modern languages. It is extremely important that we have people speaking Asian languages and we have that benefit because of Britain’s enlightened immigration policy. Long may it last.