British Higher Education and the State

The relations between university and in Great Britain have been heavily conditioned by their history, perhaps more so than in most countries. England was almost as much a pioneer in the intellectual revolution of the Middles Ages as she was in the Industrial Revolution; and Scotland, also, was remarkably well-developed academically before the Reformation. In a country with great respect for antiquity, of existence if not of purpose, the mere age of the leading institutions has been extremely significant in the developments of the last century, so that their values and objectives have consciously and unconsciously permeated, and some could think vitiated, the modernisation of the system. This is significant for the relations between the and higher education, because whatever the mediaeval realities may have been, one strong element in the Oxbridge tradition by the 19th century was the independence of the propertyowning corporation of scholars from the State. The resistance to the mid-19th century reforms proposed by the was, as Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, remarked later (1885) not on grounds of academic freedom but of property rights. At the same time the State's own perception of itself was declining, for the dominant political forces, the radical liberals, held a theoretical view on the place of the that was almost the same as that of Lenin. These last two factors, the property-based independence of the universities and the political dislike of action, led to the creation of the most famous of the British methods of educational administration, the 'buffer instrument' which mediated between and university to the broad satisfaction of both parties' criteria from the 1880s to the 1960s. The 'buffer' was made permanent by the creation of the Grants Committee (UGC) in 1919. This is the more striking in that the British State, despite the views of the radical liberals, has had a view, and a remarkably consistent one, of academic policy from the 1840s to the present day. This view, whose results were to be seen in direct action by the in Ireland and in the colonies, (especially in the Indian empire) embraced two main tenets, both challenges to the Oxbridge ideal. The British State University was in the first place to be governed from outside, with substantial government involvement. In the second place, the award of degrees was to be in the hands of outside bodies. The university, as elsewhere in Europe, was to be neither syndicalist nor self-validating. Thus, starting with the setting up of the of London in 1836, the new institutions were governed by laymen, including generally a strong element of local government authority. These institutions hired their teachers as servants, and required them to teach for the examinations of external bodies whose function was to set the curriculum and award the degrees; these limited bodies were called universities. Attempts were made to impose a similar scheme on the ancient Scottish universities by Acts of 1858 and 1889. 283