42. Memorandum submitted by Professor
Andrew Hamnett, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of Strathclyde
Thank you for writing to me to seek my views,
as a Scottish University Principal, about the recently published
document: "The Future of Higher Education", published
in January by the DfES.
It would be sensible for me to make a number
of overarching comments and then some more detailed comments.
The first comment is that the document recognises the funding
difficulties being experienced within the HE sector but takes
the view that these cannot be resolved by the provision of further
large increases in public funds. There is an apparent contradiction
between this position and the statement made in Section 7.43 that
fees charged by universities, which will only be recovered on
a 10 to 20 year time scale following graduation, will nonetheless
be made available immediately by the Treasury to universities.
In addition, it is pledged that the Treasury will make good the
immediate loss of £1,100 per student, currently paid up-front
to every university. The only way of reconciling the promises
made in Section 7.43 with the reluctance by the Government to
commit significant additional public funds to universities is
to believe that the Treasury will reduce its block grant to the
Funding Council by an amount approximately equal to the additional
funds that the universities otherwise might expect. The Government
has "form" in this regard: when up-front fees were introduced
in 1998, the block grant was abated almost exactly by the funds
raised from up-front fees, and neither Mrs Hodge nor Mr Clarke
have been able to reassure the HE sector or Parliament that a
similar process will not take place in 2006.
The Government clearly wish to create a much
more differentiated university sector and quote, with apparent
approval, the Californian State University system, however, this
system came into being as a result of legislation by the State
of California in which the roles of the individual constituted
colleges was carefully defined. The White Paper pulls back from
this reasonably rational approach, presumably because it would
require highly contentious primary legislation, and seeks to do
the same thing by manipulating the Funding Council. The Funding
Council can, in turn, only manipulate the universities by altering
the parameters in its funding formula. The problem with this approach
is that not only is the funding formula becoming immensely complex,
but it is becoming more and more difficult to predict the longer
term consequences of these changes. The alterations made this
year in the Funding Council's model have had the broad effect
of increasing the Teaching funding of some of the post-1992 universities
whilst, at the same time, raiding their research funding and redistributing
it to members of the Russell Group. Unfortunately there is a significant
number of middle-ranking universities including some very successful
post-1992 institutions such as Oxford Brookes University, who
have found themselves losing substantial sums and will be driven,
as a result, further into debt. This is simply not, fundamentally,
a rational approach: universities have local, regional, national
and international roles and responsibilities and it would have
been better to have examined, at each geographical level, the
roles that should be played by the FE and HE sectors together
rather than attempting to create a striated system through the
manipulation of so blunt an instrument of the Funding Council
formula.
With regard to research, the Government has
drawn some lessons from the US experience but perhaps not all.
A substantial number of universities in the US do carry out research,
much of it funded by the US military, which is a major source
of money for researchers throughout the country. I do accept that
the funding of research infrastructure does require substantial
resources but I am deeply concerned that the view apparently being
expressed that research should only be funded in departments that
are currently rated at 5 or 5*. There is a fallacy of composition
here: to describe a department as being of RAE Grade 5 implies
that up to half the research submitted is of international excellence
with the remainder being of national excellence. In the case of
Grade 4 the description is that virtually all the research activity
submitted is of national excellence and there is some evidence
of international excellence. However, it appears to be assumed,
by those writing the White Paper, that any member of a Grade 5
department must be carrying out work of international excellence
whereas those in Grade 4 departments can, at best, be expected
to be carrying out research of only national excellence. This
is the same kind of fallacy that would lead from the statement
"this is a good Government" to the statement "every
Minister in this Government is good". Whilst there may be
those in the Government that would like such a statement to be
true, the second statement does not logically follow from the
first. The result of this over-concentration on a process that
is admitted to be flawed, will lead to a great deal of outstanding
research being destroyed with very little gain.
Furthermore, there is an additional underlying
fallacy in the Government's White Paper, which is the implication
that additional fee income from students will support primarily
enhanced teaching. This is, as the Government must know, highly
unlikely; should the universities ever see any additional funding,
they are very much more likely to use it to attract and retain
researchers of international calibre.
Finally, if I can summarise, the Government
wish to create a more striated HE sector, a perfectly sensible
approach, but the methodology adapted, which is to use fees and
the manipulation of the Funding Council formula, is fundamentally
flawed. There needs to be a far more rational approach to funding
both FE and HE sectors, exploiting, where possible, synergies
between the sectors, and to avoid a devastating North/South split,
it is essential that every major city in the UK should have a
university of real international calibre.
March 2003
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