Buckingham and elsewhere - some viewpoints from the U.K.

by John Kersey

Forty years ago, British universities regulated themselves in a culture of independence. Government was prohibited by a Treasury minute from interfering with the administration of the universities, which were regarded as sovereign institutions, and such government bodies as there were (including the University Grants Commission, which was founded in 1889) were generally remote and strictly non-interventionist. Academic standards were regarded as a matter of common agreement between institutions, largely maintained by means of external examining. Reading statist material on the universities now, one would never imagine that the stifling web of university regulation was such a relatively modern encumbrance. Those who wish to destroy institutions begin with the re-writing of their history.

The increasing dominance of the authoritarian Left and the negligent concentration of the free-market Right on areas other than education has allowed the ties between state and universities to become a stranglehold. Not only this, but statist academics have effectively ensured that their ideas now dominate the academic agenda and that academic appointments are largely restricted to those who support that agenda. That post-war period saw an expansion in university provision; in 1992 this was to be further augmented. More universities may not have resulted in a lowering of standards, but more universities certainly did not mean an increased variety or an increased choice. Rather, expansion led to ever more oppressive centralisation. The coming of the Research Assessment Exercise standardised postgraduate education to little more than a tick-box procedure whose blandness insults genuine innovation and subjects every subject to explicitly political strictures.

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