One of Oxford University's most senior academics confirmed his departure to join one of America's top institutions this week, arguing that "no rational person" would work in British higher education.
Alan Ryan, warden of New College, Oxford, who was tipped to be the university's next vice-chancellor, railed against the "incoherence and stupidity" of government policy and the "incessant interference by managers and officialdom", when he confirmed to The THES that he was leaving British academe to go to Stanford University. He said he would return to Oxford after a year but only because of his unique affiliation to New College.
He told The THES: "I feel that no rational person would work in the British higher education system, and that anyone who enters it under present conditions is engaged in a self-destructive act; it is an ill-paid, overworked line of work, and has lost almost all of the old pleasures, particularly the freedom from incessant interference by managers and officialdom."
Dr Ryan, Director of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute and former professor of politics at Princeton University, is going to Stanford's Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences. "I like New College too much to think of bailing out again and heading back to Princeton, but I can't think why anyone who doesn't have my peculiar reasons for doing this sort of job would stay here rather than go."
Dr Ryan sat his BA and MA at Oxford in the 1960s, and earned a DLitt at the university in 1993. He is a vociferous supporter of a more market-driven approach to higher education, and believes universities should be freed from national funding formulae more in line with the private universities of America. He launched a blistering attack on government higher education policy.
"Working against government policy of the degree of incoherence and stupidity as we currently do is simply not an activity for grown-up people," he said. "It is just about imaginable that the government will eventually form a coherent view of what higher education is for, and how much they will pay for which bits, but the signs are not good."
Dr Ryan joins a lengthening list of senior Oxford academics who have left the university with stinging criticisms of the British system, raising concern that Oxford, and UK higher education in general, are losing their international stature. In 1999, John Kay resigned as director of the Said Business School, arguing that Oxford was "sinking in a morass of committees, unable to take decisions that might enable it to compete with the world's best". Robert Stevens, when he retired as master of Pembroke College last year, warned that "inward-looking complacency in the university, and mindless political opportunism in new Labour, may well be doing damage which will be impossible to repair".
The university also received a blow last September when Peter Williams, seen as a modernising saviour for the university, announced his resignation as master of St Catherine's College, 18 months after he took the post.
I am taking off to California for 2002-03. That is not much of a news item. Even in these straitened times, most academics take one year off in seven as sabbatical leave. What has surprised me is that everyone assumes that I am not coming back. Perhaps it is because of my increasingly public irritation with the present state of British higher education. I am sure I will return after a year in the academic paradise of Stanford, but my advice to anyone young enough and unencumbered enough to do so is indeed to get out and stay out - out of academic life, or if not, out of the British academic system.
British academic life has become unviable. It is ill-paid, overmanaged and increasingly uninteresting. For someone who can marry an investment banker, and/or be given a large house by their parents, it is just about financially possible, but even then, it is increasingly uninteresting as an intellectual exercise, and it has lost just about everything that made it worth pursuing 40 years ago.
In the 1960s, the bargain was a good one; you gave up the chance of wealth, power and fame and got the life of a free spirit in exchange. Now, you get Margart Hodge, John Randall and Howard Newby, and a salary that City firms would hesitaste to offer their receptionists. In the 1960s, professors were paid much the same as GPs, MPs and under-seceretaries in the civil service and, by the end of the decade, most of Camden Town could be purchased on a lecturer's salary. But you didn't expect to be a lecturer much beyond the age of 30 anyway. Following the Robbins report and the expansion of the university sector, you could have tenure at 24 and a chair at 30. Nor was fame entirely given up. Young sociologists at the London School of Economics were vastly more glamorous than even their director is today.
More crucially, what was on offer was freedom and optimism, and what has replaced them is a deep, sullen pessimism. The post-Robbins assumption was that it would be possible to create new universities that would run rings round Oxbridge: on the one hand, liberal arts colleges, and, on the other, the British offspring of Berkeley. Nobody in 2002 could read Albert Sloman's Reith Lectures in which he imagined that Essex might be the Berkeley of the UK system without realising that it is not only money that the present higher education system has run out of.
The contrast between the 1960s promise of indefinite expansion of new courses and new institutions, coupled with an influx of enthusiastic and well-qualified new students, and the contemporary world of reluctant and ill-qualified students filling crumbling, ill-equipped institutions, is too obvious to need belabouring. Oxbridge students in 2002 receive in real terms the funding of Essex students in 1979; and Essex students in 2002 have had the money spent on them cut by a third. Whether more means worse is arguable; that more means less well provided for - is undeniable.
In those distant days, the much-reviled "binary" system presented university lecturers with a spectacle of how the other half lived - teachers in polytechnics were at the mercy of local authorities, put upon by their principals and departmental chairs, by the chairmen of education committees and managers of very modest abilities. Now, the binary line has gone, and this is the fate of the entire sector.
Asking why anyone who could bail out to the US doesn't do so in the face of all this is a bit like wondering why Marx never quite gave up on the revolution. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that rational human beings will go on making such a mess of a not entirely unmanageable system and on the other hand, anyone who worked in the system before it was wrecked finds it hard to walk away from the wreckage rather than hanging around to try to save something in the hope of better times ahead.
from D. A. Trotter, Department of European Languages, Univesity of Wales, Aberystwyth
Alan Ryan sensibly suggests that "British academic life has become unviable". On other pages, the School of Oriental and African Studies advertises for a director of a project on endangered languages with "a salary and benefits that are commensurate with a senior academic post that are competitive within higher education", salary negotiable from £41,500, inclusive of London allowance.
Directly opposite, the University of Lincoln seeks a higher education planning manager, salary circa £45K, plus relocation. On the next page, the University of Bristol wants a director of academic affairs with a salary "in excess of £60,000" and a director of student administration ("c. £45,000").
Are these advertisements and Ryan's column related? I think we should be told.
from Alan Ryan, Warden, New College, Oxford
As an admirer of your former editor, I enjoyed the front-page suggestion that she and I might non-accidentally have left our jobs simultaneously ("Ryan quits", THES, May 31). Still, it's funny to ask me whether I am leaving, and when I say I'm not, to go on to report that I am. Is this post-modernist news-gathering or have I missed some irony?
Click for related Cherwell article, 7th June 2002 or for The things people say - more extraordinary fall-out quotes, including Ryan's departure puff and literary plan in The Independent, 13/6/02. Return to Malcolm vs. Oxford 2001/2 Explanation & Index.
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