THE Government decision to take up Sir Ron Dearing's suggestion that it ought to ask whether the public gets good value from the college fees paid to Oxbridge colleges has predictably generated more heat than light. At the risk of alienating all my colleagues, let me offer a quick guide to what is at stake. First, how much money is at stake? Roughly £35 million. This represents about a sixth of the money the Funding Council gives Oxford and Cambridge altogether. Second, why does it look unfair? Because it adds £2,000 a year to the £4,000 - on average - that the Funding Council pays for teaching for each student. That discrepancy is insignificant compared with the discrepancy in research funding that Oxbridge gets; but it is harder to persuade the public that fairness requires us to spread research funding so as to be nice to less competent researchers.
Is it unfair? Yes, it is unfair in just the same way that the training lavished on Manchester United footballers is unfair. It is unfair in just the same way that the training Tim Henman gets is unfair. Oxford and Cambridge are the Manchester United of the educational system; their best students are cleverer, more confident, livelier and more imaginative than the vast majority of their age group. They write better, think more exactly, and are more educable than their peers - all of which makes them no better than anyone else in the eyes of God, but does make them better suited to an intensive education, the like of which they could get at Cal Tech, MIT, and Princeton, and about half a dozen other places in the world, of which two are still, just, situated in Britain.
Why is the proposed removal of what is, after all, not a very large proportion the total budget of Oxford and Cambridge such a big deal? Because Oxford and Cambridge have pulled off something that is still envied by the best American colleges and universities. In the US, colleges such as Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and the like provide a wonderful (and very expensive) undergraduate education in colleges of about 1,500 to 2,000 students. They have no graduate programmes, and their faculties teach very long hours. The so-called research universities provide a mass education for large undergraduate bodies - Berkeley is on the small side at 21,000 students, and Ohio State runs to 50,000 - and do their serious work at the graduate level. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, Duke and a dozen others do their utmost to combine the intensive liberal education of the best colleges with a world-beating graduate and research programme. That is essentially what Oxford and Cambridge do. Sentimental gum about tutors is beside the point; it is not the tutorial set-up that matters but what that represents - an intensity of education that nowhere else in Britain can touch.
It is difficult to do it, and it is everywhere getting harder, because the standing temptation for clever academics is to spend their time advancing their research careers. The only device anyone has yet discovered to make very clever people wear themselves out in the service of both their undergraduates and their own discipline is some sort of college system. The difficulty is to preserve the autonomy of colleges inside a university framework; and that is why fees matter.
OXBRIDGE college fees are not a "top up"; they are charged by colleges to students as they have been for centuries, and only a proportion of students get their fees paid by someone else. Most graduates pay their own. What matters is that fees provide an income independent of the favour of expensive science departments and their research programmes. That is why the loss of a comparatively small sum could wreck the delicate college-university balance which underpins the success of Oxford and Cambridge.
Is this an elitist argument? In one sense, of course it is. Who wants to have a non-elite brain surgeon work on one's brain? Who wants Pushkin translated by someone can't read Russian and can't write English? The search for excellence is the search for elite. Ask Alex Ferguson. More deeply, it is not elitist; it's an argument about merit, ambition, and hope. David Blunkett goes on about making Oxbridge accessible to the 93 per cent of the population who don't go to private schools. The answer is that what's worth having in Oxbridge is accessible already. A good education is like Everest; if you feel like climbing it, and you have the right skills, there it is. The question an education minister might do better to ask is why the state schools do such a rotten job of inspiring their students. The North London primary school I went to in 1945 had no doubt that it should show working class children the way to a better world than their parents had lived in. This is surely what is meant by the "ladder of opportunity".
THE question about fairness is not whether it is worth spending money on Oxbridge; it is why Britain is such a miserably unambitious country. Oxford and Cambridge are about to accept 6,000 new students; at the same time they will refuse some 12,000 school students most of whom will go on to get three A grades at A level. Why isn't anyone demanding two new universities which will stretch these students as they ought to be stretched? In the States, Harvard set a model to be emulated; John D Rockefeller duly founded the University of Chicago and Leland Stanford's ill-gotten gains paid for Stanford. They did not set out to wreck Harvard. Can Britain really have so completely run out of ambition?
Does it follow that the Government ought to pay the whole bill for Oxbridge, or indeed for anywhere else? Absolutely not. Given a sensible loan and scholarship system, students and their families can be encouraged to invest in their own futures. But a government that insists on refusing to allow universities - all universities, not just Oxbridge - to charge what they need in order to do a decent job, and which pretends that students can get a world-class university education on the cheap, is either misleading the public or misleading itself.
Dr Alan Ryan is the Warden of New College, Oxford. He was Professor of Politics at Princeton (1988-1996)
Click for the next item in the 1997 Oxbridge funding row or for more of Ryan's wit and wisdom: THES letter.