Diana Madill (presenter): Are Oxford and Cambridge, two of the oldest and most elite universities in the country still the crème-de-la-crème of education and research and filled with the brightest and the best, or are they are riddled with too many second-class, mainly public-school brains which trade on their past glories? Tonight we are at Magdalen College, Oxford, which was founded in 1458 by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England. Magdalen is considered to be one of the most striking Oxford colleges and is home to the beautiful deer park and the famous 144-foot Great Tower which was finished in 1509 and which dominates the east entrance to Oxford itself. Not all the buildings are as ancient of course, and today we are in the Auditorium used for lectures, music concerts, theatre and cinema, which was completed in December 1998. In a moment we will hear the opinions of a forum of people with strong views on Oxbridge: writers, academics, students, teachers. First we have asked our two protagonists to prepare a short report. Here is David Walker.
Walker: I am editor of the Guardian's Public magazine and for the record I was an undergraduate at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. I say down with pampered, dysfunctional, socially exclusive colleges, but up with Oxford and Cambridge as global centres for teaching and scholarship, on the condition they are reformed and modernised.
Walker (recorded): The fate of Oxford and Cambridge matters to us all, including those never likely to sup port at High Table or stroll on fabled college lawns. We live in a knowledge economy. Our well-being depends on the production and utilisation of new knowledge, so research universities are national institutions. They should be. Instead, Oxford and Cambridge have the trappings still of private clubs. Lewis Elton, honorary professor of higher education at University College London, says that as a result Oxbridge is losing ground.
Elton: If we judge by research performance then clearly there are other universities which are equal and superior to Oxford and Cambridge. If you look at it in terms of research organisation then this is even more so, because the management and organisation of Oxford and Cambridge are peculiarly unsuited to modern conditions.
Walker: The problem is the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are too weak, their constituent colleges too strong. Bob Brecher, a philosopher at the University of Brighton:
Brecher: It is ridiculous that institutions which have their own endowments anyway should be funded independently of 'the university' by government. So actually what happens is Oxbridge colleges get three streams of income: they get income as part of the funding of the university; they get income from the government in their own right; and of course many of them, most of them, are sitting on pots of money in the first place.
Walker: And they don't spend it well. It's not just High Table and donnish privilege. They take in very good students, but do they add value in their teaching?
Elton: Oxford and Cambridge are extremely proud of their (tutorial) system, so one asks, what is the evidence? It is extraordinarily difficult to find any kind of evaluation of the tutorial system.
Walker: It is the colleges that admit disproportionate numbers of public school students and warp British society.
Elton: Not even Harvard provides the kind of social advantages in the United States that Oxford and Cambridge provide in this country. This is a peculiar phenomenon of this very traditional country that we live in, that the sociology of the past dominates the sociology of the present.
[University Challenge spoof extract: Footlights College, Oxbridge vs. Scumbag College.]
Walker: An anachronistic image, say Oxford and Cambridge, but they cannot make a reputable case for extra grants for research and more public money until they modernise, and sort out these private clubs, the colleges.
Brecher: They are sitting on piles of money and land which would be much better used actually to teach students, and not only to teach students at Oxbridge, but through taxation to spread throughout the university system. I think that the wealth of the colleges, and their assumption that that wealth is something which ought to give them the sort of autonomy that it does, are extremely insidious.
Walker: Autonomy could at least justify the colleges' existence, but they aren't the islands of scholarly non-conformity they should be, says Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
Kealey: Scholarship is about the dispassionate criticism and observation of a society. Scholarship is about saying do we actually want stem-cell research, rather than doing stem-cell research. Scholarship is about saying do we want GM foods, rather than doing GM foods. The question is not should Oxford and Cambridge do GM food research, but the question is should society do GM food research? And the trouble about Oxford and Cambridge these days is that to an astonishing degree they do not challenge societal norms.
Walker: That's the problem: Oxford and Cambridge are neither fish nor fowl. Neither world-class research institutions nor private scholarship clubs. They try to be both, and the inertia applied by the privileges the colleges still enjoy stops them evolving, as I think they should, in the direction of research-based postgraduate institutions.
Madill: Now to defend Oxbridge, here is Anthony Smith.
Smith: I am President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and I'd like to reply to some of the evidenceless assertions I've just been listening to by advancing my case in this way.
[Recording of choral music.]
Smith: Ethereal voices floating from the chapel of Magdalen college, one of Oxford's three world-famous choirs. But as well as enjoying some of the finest choral music in the world, Oxford and its slightly younger sister Cambridge are also homes to the finest undergraduate teaching the world, and the basis of this is the tutorial or supervision system. Colin Blakemore is the chief executive of the Medical Research Council and one of the world's leading neuroscientists.
Blakemore: I think the tutorial system is quite extraordinary, and I speak as someone who went through it from a working class background in Cambridge in the 1960s, and as the father of someone who went through it, and I think in both cases the tutorial system transformed our lives. It certainly transformed our ability to think for ourselves, to organise our thoughts, to present our arguments rationally.
[More discussion of Oxbridge's tutorial/supervision system... Susan Hitch, former Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford... Contribution of Oxbridge's scientific research to UK's economy... Sir David Cucksie, Chairman, Advent Venture Partners... local electronics firms, medical research etc.]
Smith: The British university system is known by, and its quality often judged by, the great brand names of Oxford and Cambridge, and without them I think this country and its university system would be hugely diminished. You see, 40% of all the UK's professors have studied at or researched at one or other of these universities.
Blakemore: If it ain't seriously broke, don't fix it too much. I'd point to the fact that Oxbridge is constantly changing anyway, but it is an evolutionary process, and yes, Oxford and Cambridge ought to be subjected to the same kinds of pressures and constraints and environmental demands that have driven biological evolution, but if you like, they should not be genetically modified.
Madill: Okay, so there you have the arguments for and against. David Walker, first a quick thought on what you have just heard.
Walker: I don't think in your introduction, Diana, you gave full justice to the magnificence of the surroundings in which we find ourselves tonight. Beneath our feet, metaphorically speaking, there is a lake of port. Outside this magnificent hall there are lawns sweeping down to the River Isis, there are fantastic buildings. The question is: do they have any connection at all with effective research or education? The answer is no. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are the problem.
Madill: A quick response from you, Anthony Smith.
Smith: The colleges are wonderful enterprise forms, in which fellows, students and researchers have enormous opportunities to interact and to produce success. There are opportunities for students, within the collegiate system, to run organisations and societies and to have the experience of adult life in an experimental form on a scale that's not, unfortunately, possible elsewhere.
Madill (opening up the debate to the forum): Before we look at some of the more controversial issues, it is worth asking just how good Oxford and Cambridge really are. Are they still the be-all and end-all of UK universities?
Daniel Trump, Director of 6th form at the Acland-Burghley School, Camden, North London: Over recent years I have noticed a shift... best students now not applying for Oxbridge... Two main reasons: (1) Oxbridge perceived as elitist, non-egalitarian; (2) difficulty of access. Just as good degrees are available from other Russell Group universities.
Bahram Bekhradnia, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute: I think David Walker is rather in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. You don't have to deny the undoubted excellence, in fact the outstanding nature, of Oxford and Cambridge to recognise that there are some serious problems that need addressing. Access is an issue. Oxford and Cambridge have only 55% of their students coming from state schools and 9% of their students coming from poor backgrounds, which is well below what it should be. But the reason for that is not particularly of Oxford and Cambridge's making. Students are not applying. These are outstanding universities, but they need some serious work to fix.
[More discussion follows about access, the tutorial system, the college system, the courses available. Contributions from Priscilla Chadwick, ex-headmistress, Richard Killock, 1st year undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge.]
Madill: David Walker, isn't this tutorial style of teaching second to none?
Walker: No. There is no empirical evidence that I am aware of that suggests that the more expensive unit costs of undergraduate education in Oxford and Cambridge produce the kind of results we are hearing claimed. And if you look at seminar systems and lecture-based systems elsewhere, the results in terms of the grades of degrees reached by students compare admirably with Oxford and Cambridge.
[More contributions on the tutorial system.]
Richard Partington, Admissions Tutor at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, first-generation university from working-class background in Liverpool: I would back up what other people have said about the collegiate system actually being very important as part of a way of drawing students in from non-traditional backgrounds. We recruit enormously heavily in the North of England in particular... (etc.)
Francis Beckett, writer on education for The New Statesman: Oxford and Cambridge universities have the tutorial system because they are rich, they don't have it for any other reason. Every university in the country would love to have Oxford and Cambridge's tutorial system, but they don't get enough public money to be able to run it. My objection to Oxbridge is not that they are elite but that they are elitist. 45% of the students who come to Oxford University come from that 7% of the population that attend private, fee-charging schools. Now I know that we have heard that Oxford is trying to do something about that, but it hasn't done enough about it. It is not good enough to say, oh it's all the fault of the comprehensive schools, it's all the fault of the rest of the population. One final statistic for you: what happens afterwards is that Oxford creates a kind of hereditary elite that governs Britain, with the result that of the last eleven prime ministers since 1945 eight of them were educated at Oxford University.
Madill: Anthony Smith, there is a lot of concern about access to Oxbridge.
Smith: Yes, of course there is. The number of applications greatly exceeds the number of places. We don't care what schools the children come from. We use every possible device we can to discover who are the ones who are likely to benefit most from the very, admittedly expensive, education that we are able to provide.
Beckett: But you should care what schools they come from. What you should be doing is discriminating positively in favour of those who have come from schools where they are less likely to be able to reach the A level grades that we are talking about.
Smith: I do not support positive discrimination of any kind, except in favour of those who are most committed to their subject, and they come from all sectors of society.
Clare Sambrook, novelist, tells the story of her own interview for Cambridge, suggests public-schooled applicants are confident at such interviews because they are much more likely to be accepted for places.
Smith: But our tutors are very well experienced at seeing through that kind of well-trained interview performance, and I'm afraid anecdotes of the kind you have just offered, when really tracked to their source, very frequently evaporate.
Madill: (laughing) I think Clare is the source of her own story!
Sambrook: Seventy students from Westminster getting into Oxford and Cambridge every year is not anecdotal, that is evidence.
[Exchanges follow about quota-systems, positive discrimination, school-weighting, the position of postgraduates.]
Walker: You say college fellows spend time teaching undergraduates. I know they spend a lot of time administering wine committees, and that's not an anecdote. I'll quote you, if I may - as an graduate of Cambridge, I am sent Cam, the periodical of the university - and this is a fellow of Clare College, who is an eminent scientist and historian in her own right saying that, as College Fellows Steward she spends a large chunk of her time drawing up placements for High Table. She, incidentally, goes on to say that there is a penumbra of highly-qualified women - we have talked about class but not about gender yet - who are vital for maintaining high standards in the university, but who are excluded because they have no formal college or university position. So the idea that, again, everything in the garden is lovely in Oxford and Cambridge is not borne out by college fellows' own, unselfconscious testimony.
Madill: Alright. Richard Killock.
Killock: Why shouldn't we live in a nice environment while we are studying at university?
Walker: Because public policy depends upon the excellence of these universities, and too much money is wasted upon frippery.
Killock: There's no reason why it can't be an excellent university just because you are living in nice surroundings while you are studying there.
Walker: I don't see the corelation, if I may say so, between King's College, Cambridge spending £1.8 million a year on the food for High Table, or the large amounts of wine and port consumed in Oxford and Cambridge, and academic excellence.
Killock: Nobody said there was a corelation, but surely those people have a right to enjoy themselves, to enjoy their time at university, just as much as anybody else?
Walker: They don't have a right to enjoy themselves at public expense, no. They are here for the purposes of education.
Smith: Most of the stuff that David has been trotting out here is absolute piffle, it really is embarrassing to waste time on this programme going through these items one-by-one, but we actually make a profit on selling our wine that we have looked after here, and that goes into the coffers of the college. Now, much more importantly than that is this question of public expenditure. The government contribution towards the cost of running the teaching side of the university is about 20%. The government does not pour vast sums of money into the tutorial systems of this university, would that it did.
Rachel Phillips: I turned down a place at Oxford for LSE, put off by the isolated environment at Oxbridge.
[Discussion follows of the disproportionately low Oxbridge intake from ethnic minorities. Discussion of off-putting Oxbridge rituals. Sambrook talks of public-school hooliganism and attacks Oxford for its recent choice of Chris Patten as Chancellor.]
Walker: What proportion of college fellows are women? So that the normal environment in which they are matches the population at large.
Madill: Anthony Smith, how many fellows are women?
Smith:It's about 20% at this particular college.
Madill: Which is not good enough is it?
Smith: Well, you'll find the same thing pertaining right through the higher education system of Britain, and of course we have a higher turnover of women fellows who stay for some years and then leave for obvious reasons, so that the number we recruit is probably rather higher than that. But the number at any moment tends to be about 20%.
Madill: At the beginning of the programme we heard critics say how the university could be better managed. Do you think, first of all, that the universities should retain their collegiate system, or is this like lots of little fiefdoms, where people are given certain privileges?
Killock: I absolutely think that they should keep the collegiate system. It encourages competition between the students, not only within the academic, but also in things like sports and all the other competitions between the colleges, and it encourages them to push to be the very best.
Trump: Some of us think that collaboration in learning is more useful than competition. The colleges look absolutely beautiful and the tourist dollars that we make from them are great, but I don't know whether they really have a great place in the modern world of learning.
Madill: Do they actually hold back learning, do you think?
[Discussion of the college structure and inter-disciplinary collaboration.]
Partington: I'd like to return to another issue, if I may, that David Walker raised in his initial piece, which is the question of college wealth. My college (Sidney Sussex) is a middling college in terms of wealth within Cambridge. Like most colleges, we are asset-rich in terms of our buildings, but of course we can't do anything with the buildings because we have to put the students in them, it is overwhelmingly student accommodation. But we are relatively cash-poor, and the money that we do generate is spent almost entirely on providing student accommodation, subsidising meals and paying for tuition. I just don't recognise this world of fellowly privilege that you talked about.
Walker: St John's College Cambridge has multi-million pound equity investment on the stock market, it has huge landholdings, it owns the St John's Innovation Park. Now, I have no problem with that, except it fragments Cambridge's ability to present itself as a first-rank research university. If St John's and Trinity and Sidney Sussex and the other colleges are all doing their own thing, it prevents the university from realising its collective potential.
Bekhradnia: There is bound to be a degree of added complexity and duplication and waste added by the colleges. What has to be the case is that the university and the colleges try and sort things out between them so there is no duplication and waste, and that decision-taking is possible. And if you can't have a centre managing the university, I think the university will lose ground.
Madill: Do you think the autonomy of the colleges should be challenged, their assets liquidated?
Beckett: Well, I think certainly that the major financial problem relates to the colleges. It was a point made in David Walker's report at the beginning: the difficulty is that it means collegiate universities like Oxford and Cambridge get far far more than their fair share of the public money that is going into higher education.
Madill: Let's clear up this point.
Smith: Completely untrue. We get the same fair share of public moneys, but what we have are our own endowments, which have been given to us or we have made for ourselves out of our own entrepreneurial efforts during the course of the years. Now let's go the question of governance: Oxford has in the last year or two adopted a new system of governance; it is divided into five divisions, it is much clearer, and it makes possible cohesive, unified leadership of the whole university, without in any way diminishing all the benefits that accrue from the life of the colleges.
Madill: Does it take power away from the colleges?
Smith: No it doesn't.
Madill: Does it make the colleges more similar to each other?
Smith: No it doesn't. What the colleges have done has been to create a stronger unity themselves in the Conference of Colleges, so that they can have a clear dialogue between the university and the colleges, and the whole university moves on much more rapidly. And I understand Cambridge is thinking about a similar change.
Walker: This is, if I may say, to want to have it two ways: Oxford and Cambridge have had to enact a system whereby they have tried to persuade the richer colleges - here in Oxford, Nuffield and All Souls - to make some contribution to the poorer colleges, which clearly indicates there is some huge imbalance in the collegiate system.
Smith: They didn't require persuading.
Walker: But the system hasn't worked, as you will I think admit, because the university hasn't been strong enough to compel the ancient - in this case 15th century - establishment to give significant amounts of its endowment for common academic purposes. The colleges are still, although they are charitable and have charitable status, which is itself something we might think a scandal, they are effectively private institutions, and the deceit, if I may say, of Oxford and Cambridge is that these private institutions the colleges are allowed to present themselves as pursuing public purposes.
Smith: You have got the whole thing jumbled up in your mind David, I'm afraid. The colleges have been engaged in programmes of mutual support since the end of the 19th century; this has been intensified in recent years. We contribute a very large proportion* of our total income, for instance at this college, one of the richer ones, to the support of the poorer ones, to the point at which all their students get the same kinds of benefit as the students at the richer colleges.
*Akme note. In the year 2002/3, Magdalen's 'college contribution' (its contribution to the university's internal wealth-redistribution system) was in fact just £199,366, that is 4.5% of its endowment income (£4,414,973) or 2.4% of its total income (£8,168,694). For more information, go to Akme's Oxbridge College Accounts Index - A. M.
Walker: In that case, why have separate colleges?
Smith: Because we are separate colleges, we have been here for nearly a thousand years, some of us, and we have been accumulating those assets, and finding better and more socially useful ways to employ those assets as the years pass.
Madill: A very quick point, Peter Thompson.
Thompson: I am a teacher of American history at the univesity of Oxford. One thing that listeners might like to be aware of is that there is a move among colleges in Oxford and Cambridge to cluster, to say, okay well here's a group of four or five colleges, we'll do history, and here's another group of four or five colleges, we'll be more physics-oriented. But I would like to put it to David Walker - he's in a Cromwellian mood tonight - suppose he was in charge of the country, and he made us sell off all the land, you know, ignore the charitable laws, sell it all off: it would only spread the misery.
Walker: Can I just say you wouldn't have to go that far.
Thompson: The entire UK higher educational system is in a funding crisis and yes, we can get our jollies by beating up on Oxford and Cambridge and flogging off the family silver, and then what? Ten years later...
Walker: You cannot make a convincing case for more public money until you at Oxford and Cambridge have sorted out that boundary between the private and the public within these universities.
Madill: Well let's look to the future and let's look at going private. There are a number of people inside Oxbridge who want to follow the Ivy League example and go private. How likely is it that to happen here, and what would going private mean for student entry, the future of research projects and the traditions of academic life here at Oxbridge? Who supports the idea of going private?
Thompson: Reluctantly, I do. In the short term, the vengeance of the government will be savage and the undergraduate university may well be filled with Americans and people from the Pacific Rim. A generation later we would resume our position as a cherished institution within the United Kingdom, and, by going private we would force parents and students in the UK to ask why they want universities in the first place.
Smith: I don't think we should go private, but at the same time I would like to say that we are slowly going private. The proportion of government money on which we depend is going down all the time, and at some point in the near future, in the next few years, the government will lift the cap on fees and we will be able to charge higher fees, perhaps fees without limit - we don't know, it depends on the government of the time - and at that point we will be able to provide even more scholarships and more support than we currently do to the poorer students.
Bekhradnia: Tony Smith is right that the proportion of government money is going down, but then so it is for all universities. But in absolute terms, I cannot see Oxford or Cambridge turning away the £150 million a year that they get at the moment, which is, incidentally, twice what a university like Bristol gets in government grant. I think it's unrealistic, I think it's bad politics to be talking about going private, and it would only make Oxford even more open to the accusations of elitism. And the elitism would be probably a reality as well in that case.
Walker: These figures refer mainly to the core of the universities' grant from the HEFC, they don't refer to the universities' wider work in research, the vast majority of which comes through government research councils, and I think if the future of these institutions, as I believe, lies at the boundary of new knowledge and new research, they are inevitably, as Harvard and Princeton are, public institutions, because both Harvard and Princeton themselves for their research work depend hugely on American taxpayers.
Madill: Why do you think it would matter to some people if the universities were to go private?
Bekhradnia: I think politically it would not play well. I think there's been a calculation that it would cost £18,000 a year to train an undergraduate here.
Smith: Yes.
Bekhradnia: The fees you would have to charge would be so high, I mean higher than those charged by Harvard probably, it just would not be...
Smith: I agree, it is a policy of exasperation, and I think the reason why some people are advocating it is because they feel that government is just not looking in our direction at all. But I agree with Bahram that we are probably better off not making that case.
Sambrook: I think it is madness to suggest that these institutions should go private. What they should do is play their role as full members of society...
Beckett: I think going private is actually a terrible bluff, because everybody in Oxford actually knows that the great American universities are able to do that because of the US tradition of private funding. We don't have that here. Now there's one other crucial financial point that we haven't touched upon. Oxford was in the vanguard of those universities that were demanding variable fees. Oxford and Cambridge have been screaming and lobbying governments for this for ages. They have finally got a system which means that poorer students are going to be put off applying for places like Oxford and Cambridge simply because of the mountain of debt that they are going to have to let themselves in for if they come here.
[Discussion follows of David Walker's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge should become postgraduate-only institutions.]
Partington: I'm hostile. If you look at an institution like Harvard they have a huge endowment, which you are absolutely right, we cannot possibly even aspire to have that level of endowment. What we do have is a very, very different undergraduate system, and the big question for me is how far that undergraduate system feeds into what we get at research level. The other thing I would want to add is that we can only be a viable postgraduate institution if we have proper postgraduate student funding, which nationally at the moment we do not have, and that is the real access question, because you can go to a top university at postgraduate level if your mum and dad have got the money. That is not an access issue that is ever discussed, and it is a national scandal in my view.
[Peter Thompson bemoans the inadequacy of the libraries at Warwick University.]
Madill: Okay, let's sum up. David Walker, would you discourage parents from sending their children here?
Walker: Parents will make their own minds up, but I am more concerned about the UK's future and the place in it of these two potentially excellent research institutions. I think we have heard this evening the weight of history. I think unless Oxford and Cambridge can emancipate themselves from history and British sociology, from the class system, from these skewed patterns of access, their capacity to make a case, in the UK and internationally, for resources is diminished. I think unless and until Oxford and Cambridge come to terms with the problem which is the colleges and undergraduate teaching, they are going to find it difficult to move into that future, on which I think that all of us in Britain depend.
Madill: Anthony Smith, 93% of pupils attend state schools, but when do you think 93% of the Oxbridge student body will come from state schools?
Smith: I think a very long from now, but I think a much larger proportion will come in the coming years. These two universities are Britain's only two in the world's top ten universities, and the changes we are undergoing in this university - I'm sure it is the same at Cambridge - are absolutely enormous at the present time. That doesn't mean to say that we are going to jettison any of these wonderful traditions that have been decried by some of our colleagues here today, but it does mean that we are going to experience an enormous range of readjustment to a changing society, as we always have over the course of the last centuries.
[Madill thanks everyone, signs off.]
After the broadcast, Anthony Smith told a reporter: "The programme was a saddening experience which I have blotted from my mind. The proponents of the debate appeared to me to be in the grip of virulent social jealousies rather than harbouring any real concerns about the condition of our universities. The argument about elitism went along the lines of all arguments about elitism, one side concerned with standards and the other preoccupied with social change."