Higher Education

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, I do not wish to break the rules of the programme “Just a Minute” so I shall try to avoid repetition, and will not talk about my days at Cambridge; nor will I retreat to talk about my time at Aberdeen University, both of which served me excellently well.

The first-rate opening speech by the Minister was followed by an excellent speech by my noble friend Lady Morris. Both speeches raised a question in my mind that I want to face up to: why do we talk now about higher education when at one time we would have spoken about universities? This is a significant shift. It is not necessarily a bad shift—I am not complaining about it—but the point was well made by my noble friend Lady Morris that “higher education” is a much more inclusive range of institutions, possibilities and opportunities.

Subsuming universities into that has had some advantages. Universities have learnt a broader context in which to live and work, and that has been good for them. Higher education institutions have had some benefit in terms of kudos and powers from the Government if they have been effectively declared universities. But there has been a downside. The mission of many higher education institutions has been distorted by the company that they have been forced to keep. It showed up initially when the polytechnics became universities: there was a stampede towards teaching law and sociology. I am enough of a vice-chancellor to know that one of the main reasons for that is that they are very cheap subjects to teach. That was not a good direction to move in, and many of them have reversed it, much to their credit. Equally, it has led us to ignore and avoid the distinctive features of what makes a university a university. The discussion has shifted because of the language we use and the context we set.

It first struck me when I had my first ever visiting teaching post as a visiting professor in the USA. At the end of my first lecture, a large Texan student came up to me, jabbed his finger into my chest—this was at nine in the morning, they start early there; and it was minus 20 degrees outside—and said, “This better be good. My old man is paying 4,000 bucks a year for this”. I suddenly realised that there was a different perspective on what one was doing as a university teacher. That shifted my mind a bit.

More recently, one of the leading think tanks in this country invited me to a seminar on the student experience; I am sure that many of your Lordships had an equivalent invitation. That is great, very important. I looked down the list of speakers. There was a government Minister, which is appropriate; the chief executive of something called the Higher Education Academy; two people of journalistic backgrounds; the head of public services and consumer rights policy at Which?; someone from the Office of the Independent Adjudicator; happily there was a student, the vice-president of the NUS; someone from the Quality Assurance Agency; the odd vice-chancellor, and so on down the list. They were all worthy people—I am not saying that they should not have been there—but what was missing? There was no university teacher, no one who taught, and it was a conference about the student experience. There was no reference to the Max Borns of this world or, in my own case, the Donald MacKinnons of this world, who inspired a genuine, lifelong interest in what it was I wanted to do with my life. There they were and there they will be.

What has brought this about? A picture of what a university should be seems in our public discourse to have changed. It has become very near to what my noble friend Lord Hennessy has referred to as business “babble”—MBA speak. It is too prevalent. Universities, HEIs, are now selling products. These products vary: degrees, they might sell; employability, they might sell; high salaries and initial jobs, they might sell; and the latest one is they will sell social mobility. This is what universities now present themselves as doing. It is not the picture of universities that one or two of us in this debate wish to spell out. One occasionally fears that some are selling academic snake oil.

The language of MBA-speak has taken over. This may lead you to think that I am a dreadful old fuddy-duddy and that I may be becoming too conservative—with a small C, looking deferentially across the Chamber—in my old age. That is not so, I hope. I declare now my interests. I was what some have called a serial vice-chancellor: in the Strand, in Bloomsbury and in Newtown, Edinburgh. In the course of that, I had to learn all the skills that are necessary for a modern vice-chancellor. I learnt about property values in London and helped fund the merger of King’s College with two other colleges and a medical school out of the value of London property. That was a long way from my courses in moral philosophy. I learnt in Edinburgh, too, to avoid committing the university medical school to a PFI scheme that the hospital was entering. We fought that off, and that is probably the most important thing that I have ever done for higher education. One had to take these issues on. One had to learn that the university world and the world of vice-chancellors is really rather different these days.

The move down that line, towards seeing the business side of universities, was inevitable because of the expansion of the system—it has been referred to already. There was a 2.5% age participation rate after the war; it was 7% when I went to university in 1959, was double that in 1970 after the first tranche of Robbins universities and went up to 43%—in Scotland, it hit 50% one year. That is the age participation rate that we are talking about. It is not a bad thing; I am not protesting. Opportunity is what made many of us, and that is what we are offering. However, it is expensive, and if it is expensive, we cannot live in the hope that the traditional system will continue to apply without question. We cannot hope to avoid the issue of what the real costs are. A very well known head of one of the Ivy League universities in the USA was accosted after commencement, or graduation, by a set of parents who said, “Mr President, I want to tell you that our Elmer’s had a great experience here. It really has been a very fine, fine experience for him. He got a good degree. He’s got a job with Kinseys”. Then a slight shadow fell as they said, “However, it just all seemed a bit expensive. Why does it cost so much to produce a graduate?”. To which the president said, “If you think knowledge is expensive, try ignorance”. That is a fundamental principle, but, on the other hand, if you have a free flow of cash, you will not check whether the costs are real.

The atmosphere has changed; we have had to learn to live with that. But what has been missing—I thank my noble friend Lord Hennessy for raising this, and the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, mentioned it as well—is the question: what are universities for?

For the first half of this debate, that was not mentioned. What are universities for and what is a good university? I have another American story. The president of the University of California, asked what makes a good university, said, “That’s straightforward. Three things: football for the alumni, sex for the undergraduate and parking for the faculty. If you’ve got those three, you’ve got a good university”—well, a contented university, perhaps. There are bigger questions than that, which the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has raised. What are the drivers of change and expansion? The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, raised the dangerous side of the drivers, which is that we are becoming a uniform system that was not meant to serve 50% of the population and is merging in the middle.

I support the proposal that we need a thorough look—perhaps Robbins-style—at what is to be the future shape of the higher education system and the place of universities in it, alongside further education, different forms of teaching and different ways of providing courses, whether part-time or adult education. We are arguing about whether the participation rate should be 40% or 50%. It should be 70% or 80%, because we are talking about continuing education, not what percentage of 18 year-olds we should have; that is a different and much narrower question.

My only additional proposal is that we have the relationship between universities and government increasingly out of kilter. Once we had grants, more recently we have had funding with conditions attached. In my view, we need to move to a different system—a contractual relationship. I will not take time now to spell all that out, but I think a different route ahead could and ought to be considered in such a long-term look at higher education.