Stiff upper lips all round: it's International Bash the Brits Month. An unrated Croat blasts our great tennis hope out of Wimbledon. The Aussies vaporise our cricketers and pulverise our rugby players. The food critic of The New York Times declares London's newest nosheries to be an affront to his delicate palate. And now another influential American has put a steel-toed size 12 into Oxbridge, one of our few remaining world-beating institutions. Or so we naively imagined.
The boot belongs to Neil Rudenstine, retiring President of Harvard. Of course, in his capacity as Captain Cheerleader for America's plushest seat of learning (currently endowed to the jaunty tune of £13 billion, or roughly five times Oxford's assets), he is expected to indulge occasionally in a little genteel rubbishing of Harvard's competitors.
Even so, his critique of our top universities seems scathing beyond the call of customary academic waspishness. He contends that Oxford and Cambridge are so impoverished that they are slithering down a spiral of "persistent deterioration". "If you look at the trajectory of Oxbridge, it's a disaster, a nightmare," he says. "At Cambridge, they haven't made a discovery since Watson and Crick discovered DNA back in the 1950s."
Oh I say! Up in Silicon Fen, as you may imagine, this mischievous swipe has caused much foaming at the test tube. After all, to claim that Cambridge has done nothing recently to match what is arguably the greatest leap in the history of science is a little like criticising Austria for not producing a second Mozart. By any reckoning, the place still has a phenomenal research record. And if that record flies in the face of the huge funding disparity between British and American universities, it only proves that not all distinguished academics behave like the footballer in Jerry Maguire who screams "Show me the mun-eeee" before he deigns to touch a ball.
However, this is Bash the Brits Month. And nobody bashes us better than we ourselves. So let me pile woe on woe. Dr Rudenstine is not alone in detecting Oxbridge's decline. What's worse, many of those sounding the alarm work for, and love, the two ancient universities.
Last December, for instance, John Kay, the founding director of Oxford's Said Business School, concocted a terrifying rant against his own university. It is, he claimed, "sliding into mediocrity", "sinking in a morass of committees, inertia and muddle", with farcically inadequate salaries and a lingering fug of lethargy and snobbery that repels academic high-flyers and potential donors alike.
Robert Stevens, just retired as Master of Pembroke, took a different but no less disquieting line in last week's Spectator. He, too, accused Oxford of "inward-looking complacency". But his chief target was the Government. In his eyes, ministers appear determined to bring Oxford and Cambridge down - or at least to destroy their unique ethos - simply out of "mindless political opportunism". The Government, he suggests, is spitefully smacking Oxbridge with a triple-whammy by reducing the fees paid to its colleges, continually chastising them for alleged "elitism" (as in the "Laura Spence affair") and discriminating against their graduates in Civil Service appointments.
What's the truth? The widespread belief among dons that obsessively egalitarian government ministers are "out to get them" seems paranoid, even by the standards of Oxbridge conspiracy theories. After all, the Government has pledged an extra £1 billion for higher education by 2003. But Britain now has an astonishing 97 universities to support. Any notion that a large slice of that billion will go towards closing the funding gap between "privileged" Oxbridge and its American competitors seems hopelessly fanciful.
So Oxbridge must find its own lifelines, or sink. Both universities have had recent fundraising coups. Both have established mechanisms for ploughing profits from the commercial exploitation of university-based research back into their own coffers. But one ancient nettle must surely be grasped. The fact is that while individual Oxbridge colleges retain so much autonomy, power and wealth, the university's central fund-raising and decision-making capabilities will always be compromised.
In a minuscule way, I experienced this a few months ago. Responding to a fundraising letter from my old college, and with a sickly wave of nostalgia clouding my judgment (it is 25 years since I graduated), I dispatched a rather miserly cheque. Two things then hit me. The first was astonishment that, by way of gratitude, I was given a silk college tie since this must have consumed a significant percentage of my donation (yes, it was that small). The second was the realisation that I had never received a begging letter from the university itself, nor from my own faculty - though, God knows, the music department always operated on a frayed fiddle-string.
Within Oxbridge, one sometimes feels, far more energy and cunning goes into ensuring that College X builds a grander boathouse than College Y, than into securing the future of the university as a whole. In the 21st century, is it desirable to maintain this medieval clutch of colleges, each one a walled citadel answerable only unto itself? And if the answer is no, does either university have the will to reduce them to the status of halls of residence?
These are the fundamental questions that Oxbridge's multitudinous overlapping hierarchies must ask themselves. And if the taunts of Dr Rudenstine help to concentrate those first-class but sometimes blinkered Oxbridge minds, the man deserves to get an honorary degree, not a blast of contempt.
Click for related articles: 170 Guildhalls an investigation of UK universities' assets and attack on Oxbridge disparity, THES 13&20/7/01; Falling behind US Rudenstine's rant, The Guardian 10/7/01; Eviscerating Oxford The Spectator 14/7/01 includes spin-off in The Times, with top-ten table of UK universities' assets.