Buckingham at 25 Buckingham at 25 Freeing the Universities from State Control Edited by JAMES TOOLEY The Institute of Economic Affairs First published in Great Britain in 2001 by The Institute of Economic Affairs 2 Lord North Street Westminster London sw1p 3lb in association with Profile Books Ltd Copyright © The Institute of Economic Affairs 2001 The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 0 255 36512 8 Many IEA publications are translated into languages other than English or are reprinted. Permission to translate or to reprint should be sought from the General Director at the address above. Typeset in Stone by MacGuru [email protected] Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers CONTENTS The authors 9 Foreword by Sir Martin Jacomb 19 Introduction: The future of higher education in the UK: seven straws in the wind 23 James Tooley 1 How necessary are universities? 39 Alan Peacock Introduction 39 The argument presented 41 Questions raised by the argument 44 Some radical conclusions 48 Whither Buckingham? 52 2 Who owns the universities? – the battle for university independence; the battle against the dependency culture 56 Sir Graham Hills The nature of the battle 56 The passive state of British universities 59 Constitutional stalemate 61 New dawnings 63 Affordable universities; fair fees for all 65 The shoot-out 69 3 A fine balancing act – freedom and accountability 73 Diana Warwick 4 The collapse of the academic in Britain 86 Kenneth Minogue The fate of the academic world in Britain 86 The real character of the academic 88 The techniques of subversion 91 The consequences of democratisation 93 The fate of academic research 95 The academic world as a mysterious realm 97 5 UK universities and the state: a Faustian bargain? 101 Tony Dickson Universities and the state 103 Public funding and the university sector 106 Private investment and university development 110 Funding options and equity 115 UK universities in a global economy 118 6 Investing in private higher education in developing countries: recent experiences of the International Finance Corporation 121 Jacob van Lutsenburg Maas Universities 124 Non-university specialised training centres 129 Student finance 131 Issues and guideposts 134 7 Who should pay for HE? 143 David Halpern Introduction: the political and ideological context 143 A simple principle to guide reform – who benefits pays 145 State subsidies and the issue of differential fees 146 How should ‘fees’ be paid? 148 Capital grants – a radical alternative? 152 Who else has a stake in our universities? 153 Should universities be privatised? 155 Reform beyond funding 157 Conclusion: tomorrow’s university 160 8 The great higher education investment swindle 163 Duke Maskell The sub-reports in Dearing 165 Beneficial spillovers? 168 Conclusion 180 9 Dreaming spires and speeding modems 181 Niall Ferguson 10 The University of Buckingham: an historical perspective 189 John Clarke 11 Privatising university education 211 Norman Barry Universities and a free society 215 The place of the state 221 Conclusion 226 12 Back to the future 228 Terence Kealey 13 Towards an independent university (IEA Occasional Paper 25, 1969) 249 H. S. Ferns About the IEA 294 THE AUTHORS James Tooley James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Prior to this he was Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education, University of Manchester. He is also Director of the Education Programme at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. Professor Tooley gained his PhD from the Insti- tute of Education, University of London and has held research positions at the University of Oxford’s Department of Educational Studies and the National Foundation for Educational Research. He has taught at Simon Fraser University (Canada), the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) and as a mathematics teacher at schools in Zimbabwe. He is a columnist for Economic Affairs, and is the author of Disestablishing the School (1995), Education without the State (1996), The Higher Education Debate (1997), Educa- tional Research: A Critique (with Doug Darby, 1998), The Global Ed- ucation Industry (1999) and Reclaiming Education (2000). Sir Alan Peacock Sir Alan Peacock, now 79, retired in 1985 from his last full-time academic post as the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham. Previously he held chairs of economics at Edinburgh 9 buckingham at 25 (1957–62) and York (1962–78) and was for three years (1973–76) full-time Chief Economic Adviser at the Department of Trade and Industry with the rank of Deputy Secretary. He co-founded the David Hume Institute, Edinburgh, and was its first Executive Dir- ector (1985–91), during which period he was Chairman of the Home Office Committee on the Financing of the BBC, which re- ported in 1986. He is still ‘enjoyably busy’ writing in diverse fields such as public choice analysis, the economics of the welfare state, the economics of civil justice and, unusually, the economics of the arts – he chaired the Scottish Arts Council from 1986 to 1992. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the Italian National Academy, and has been awarded eleven honorary degrees. His latest publications are Public Choice Analysis in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1992), Paying the Piper: Cul- ture, Music and Money (EUP, 1993), The Political Economy of Eco- nomic Freedom (Elgar, 1997), and (with Brian Main) What Price Civil Justice? (IEA Hobart Paper 139, 2000). Sir Graham Hills Professor Sir Graham Hills was educated at London University, reading and researching chemistry at Birkbeck College. He taught at Imperial College for ten years before being appointed Professor of Chemistry at Southampton University. In between he was a visiting professor in Canada, the United States and Argentina. In 1980 he was appointed Principal and Vice- Chancellor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. During this time he was Scottish Governor of the BBC (1988–93) and a member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Science and Technology (1986–94). He is the founding father of the 10 the authors prospective University of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Diana Warwick was appointed Chief Executive of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals in 1995 (now Universities UK). Universities UK is the ‘voice of UK universities’ that represents their executive heads. Previously she had been Chief Executive of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which was estab- lished by Parliament to provide funding to organisations involved in strengthening democratic development overseas. During the 1980s she was the General Secretary of the Association of Univer- sity Teachers, representing some 30,000 academic and senior staff in UK universities. Diana was a member of the Employment Appeals Tribunal from 1984 until 1999, and the Standing Committee on Standards in Public Life (Nolan/Neill Committee) from 1994 until 1999. From 1985 until 1995 she served as a board member of the British Council, was a governor of the Commonwealth Institute until 1995, and a member of the TUC General Council between 1989 and 1992. She has been a member of the Executive Council of the Indus- trial Society since 1987, Chairperson of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) since 1994, and a trustee of St Catherine’s Foundation, Windsor, since 1996. She is a member of the Technology Foresight Steering Group and the House of Lords Select Committee on Sci- ence and Technology. Diana was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, and graduated from Bedford College, University of London, in 1967 with an honours degree in Sociology and Economics. She has been awarded 11 buckingham at 25 honorary degrees by Bradford University and the Open Univer- sity. She was made a life peer in July 1999. Kenneth Minogue Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was born in New Zealand, educated in Australia, and is the author of The Liberal Mind, Nationalism, The Concept of a University, and Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, as well as academic essays on a great range of problems in political theory. In his academic per- sona he has lectured at universities and research institutes in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia and many other coun- tries, and has also written columns for The Times and the Times Higher Education Supplement and reviews in both intellectual and academic journals. In 1986 he presented a six-part television pro- gramme on free-market economics called The New Enlightenment, repeated in 1988. A frequent commentator for radio and television on European Community issues, he was Chairman of the Bruges Group from 1991 until 1993. He is a director of the Centre for Policy Studies, for which he has written ‘The Egalitarian Conceit’ and ‘The Constitutional Mania’. Tony Dickson Tony Dickson is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Northumbria University, where his responsibilities include acade- mic policy, academic programmes, international development, and e-business capability. He has previously held academic posts at Paisley University and Glasgow Caledonian, where he was head 12 the authors of the Department of Sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences. Major publications include Scottish Capitalism and The Politics of Industrial Closure. Interests include corporate strategy and e-business models.