http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4268151,00.html
Oxford blues
Chelsea Clinton enrols for a masters degree at Oxford
University next week, but is she making a big
mistake? Prominent dons are beginning to think the
unthinkable about Britain's oldest academic
institution: it is in decline. Lee Elliot Major
investigates.
EducationGuardian.co.uk
Lee Elliot Major
Guardian
Tuesday October 2, 2001
No one - not even Bill and Hillary - will be more pleased than
Tony Blair when Chelsea Clinton enrols at Oxford University next
week. The friendship between the Blairs and Clintons is well
known, but few realise that Chelsea has exerted a spiritual
influence on the prime minister. Blair now carries a copy of the
Koran at all times for "inspiration and courage" - a habit he
picked up from President Clinton's daughter.
Chelsea is also now a key national asset. Even before the
terrorist attacks in the US, the Stanford University history
graduate had been recruited by the government to help convince
the rest of the world that Britain, despite the recent ravages of
foot and mouth disease, is still a place worth visiting. Now
Chelsea's decision to do a two-year masters degree in
international relations at the country's oldest academic
institution has taken on an even greater symbolism: it is still
safe for rich American kids to fly across the Atlantic to study
over here. (Although for Chelsea this will now come at a greater
price: she will be accompanied by an even bigger army of
security guards.)
Overseas students are important to Blair for two main reasons.
The extortionate fees they pay make them one of the few
profit-making activities for UK universities. But even more
importantly for the country's future trade, today's high-flying
foreign graduates are tomorrow's sympathetic leaders in
governments and businesses across the globe.
Nowhere else has this nurturing of international contacts worked
better than at Oxford, where a young Rhodes scholar called Bill
Clinton studied and made lifetime contacts during 1968-1970. At
Oxford, Clinton was drawn into the orbit of future writers,
academics and politicians - many of whom remain close friends
and advisers. Blair (himself an Oxford man) knows that Oxford is
one of the few genuine global brands based in the UK. The
university is synonymous with ancient scholarly traditions. And
academic standards - from one Clinton generation to the next -
are still second to none in the world.
Or are they? This question - unthinkable when Bill took up
residence at University College 33 years ago - is now being
asked by prominent academics on both sides of the pond with
worrying frequency. The causes may differ - a lack of funding,
poor management, even complacency - but the prognosis is the
same: Oxford is in steady decline, falling increasingly behind the
academic powerhouses - Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard
- of the US Ivy League.
Knocking Oxford is, of course, an academic tradition in itself.
But a powerful case has been put forward for the prosecution
over recent months. "Inward-looking complacency in the
university, and mindless political opportunism in New Labour,
may well be doing damage which will be impossible to repair,"
was the verdict from Robert Stevens, recently retired master of
Pembroke college. Outgoing president of Harvard, Neil
Rudenstine, said: "If you look at the trajectory of Oxbridge, it's a
disaster, a nightmare... Oxbridge is suffering because of the
lack of resources and private sector involvement." John Kay,
former director of Oxford's business school, concluded: "The
university has no structures of authority, responsibility and
accountability. Oxford University is sinking in a morass of
committees, unable to take decisions that might enable it to
compete with the world's best."
Another blow for the university, meanwhile, came this month
when Sir Peter Williams unexpectedly announced he was
standing down as master of St Catherine's College. Williams
was tipped by many as Oxford's next vice-chancellor, the one
person who could guide the university into a new modern era
and challenge the much envied reputation of its ancient rival
Cambridge as the country's central hub of new innovative hi-tech
companies - England's answer to California's silicon valley.
Cambridge, unlike Oxford, has managed to curb the often
wayward powers of the independent colleges and develop a
strong university centre to coordinate academic affairs. At
Oxford, academic appointments are still made jointly by
departments and colleges. A growing dilemma, meanwhile, is
that Oxford is still run by committees of academics - in stark
contrast to the slick professional management teams of the US
academic elite.
One respected college don spoke, but wished to remain
anonymous. "Harry Truman once said that the buck stops here,
but here it doesn't stop with anyone. Can you imagine an
institution where responsibility doesn't end on anyone's
doorstep? It is like working in some medieval court run by
politics of a sotte voce nature, where you touch one end of the
spider's web and you watch a water drop travel down somewhere
else to have the desired affect."
But most academics believe that the central reason why Oxford
is slipping behind Harvard et al comes down to one thing:
money. Despite its 800 years, Oxford's impressive assets by
UK standards (about ?1bn) are small bucks compared with the
huge endowment owned by fee-charging Harvard (approximately
?15bn). Oxbridge academics can expect half the salaries of their
US counterparts.
It is notoriously difficult to measure the international standing of
a university, but several ominous signs have emerged for Oxford
during the past few years. Some point to the relatively few Nobel
prize winners in recent times. A study this year commissioned
by the Guardian ranked Oxford outside the top 30 academic
institutions in the world when it came to the impact of academic
papers published in the biological and physical sciences. And
this was before the university experienced a sudden
haemorrhaging of staff in the biomedical sciences, when 90
researchers left earlier this year to start a new research centre
at Imperial College in London.
On the teaching front, the signs have not been much better. One
study this year concluded that Britain's top bosses are now
more likely to be graduates of foreign universities than Oxford or
Cambridge. There is also anecdotal evidence suggesting that
bright young A-level students in the UK are increasingly
spurning Oxford's squares and spires for the sunny climes and
fat bursary packages of the US Ivy League colleges.
Any cross-Atlantic drift will have been inspired in large part by
the furore surrounding Laura Spence, the Tyneside sixth-former
with 10 A-starred GCSEs who was rejected by Oxford in May
2000, but later accepted at Harvard. Gordon Brown launched an
ill-informed and unfair attack on the university claiming that its
interview system was "more reminiscent of the old boy network
and the old school tie than genuine justice in our society."
Yet Oxford only made matters worse by committing the cardinal
sin of discussing the individual case of Spence in public as
academics tried in vain to defend its name. The reaction
revealed a lack of sensitivity and professionalism that only
served to confirm the stereotypes of snobbery and elitism still
associated with the 800-year-old institution. Since then, Labour
ministers and Oxford heads have construed to produce a
number of 'access' schemes which merely aim to attract a few
more highly educated students into Oxbridge who might
otherwise have gone to Sheffield, Leeds or Manchester, all but
ignoring those from working-class backgrounds who stand little
chance of getting into university at all. The latest government
indicators reveal that Oxford still enrols the lowest percentage of
state-school pupils of all UK universities. In 1998-99, 50% of its
intake came from the private sector, representing just 7% of all
school pupils.
The university's apparent inability to deal with staff and student
problems has surfaced in other areas, with at least four separate
cases of racial discrimination currently being brought against it.
The university disputes all the allegations, but many academics
are asking why Oxford has been unable to deal with the
complaints internally, avoiding the protracted legal battles it now
faces.
One case focusing on a postgraduate student, Nadeem Ahmed,
who claims that he was a victim of racial discrimination when he
was asked to leave the university's oriental institute in 1999 after
being made to sit "flawed" exams, is being championed by Tom
Paulin, the Irish poet, TV art pundit and Oxford English don.
Paulin has written hundreds of letters urging the university's
authorities to reconsider the case, but was met with deafening
silence. The vice-chancellor has so far declined to meet Paulin
to discuss the issue.
All this seems a distant cry from the Oxford of Bill's
(marijuana-smoking, but not inhaling) days. Despite the
emerging challenge from young upstart universities such as
Sussex, as well as the fledgling "university of the air" (otherwise
known as Open University), and the US Ivy League, Oxbridge
remained the world's unrivalled centres of academic prestige.
Oxford, it has been said, made Clinton a candidate for the
world's power elite. But now the question appears to be not what
Oxford can do for Chelsea, but what Chelsea can do for Oxford.
Many academics believe that Chelsea's arrival has coincided
with crunch time for the university. For the first time, academics
are openly talking about relinquishing administrative duties so
that they can get on with what (in theory) they are good at:
research and teaching. But for some college masters there is
only one way ahead to preserve Oxford's unique offerings:
charge students US-style tuition fees. David Palfreyman, bursar
of New College and director of the university's centre for higher
education policy studies, warns that the ancient Oxford tutorial
system is doomed if new money is not found. "Unless 'top-up'
tuition fees are charged and/or extra endowment capital found,
they [the Oxford colleges] will simply, slowly, collectively, sink
into a steady decline," he writes in an introduction to the Oxford
tutorial system aimed at freshers starting next week.
Palfreyman advises students to make full use of and enjoy the
Oxford tutorials while they remain, as they may be the last
generation to benefit from them. Alternatively, if the system
survives, he says that students may be the last generation "not
personally paying to your college hefty tuition fees for the Oxford
tutorial experience".
The final decision, of course, comes down to Chelsea's friend,
prime minister Blair, who is the person who can free the
university of the current government constraints preventing it
charging extra fees. As a product himself of the Oxford system,
he has an awful lot of soul searching to do, and who knows,
may draw some inspiration and courage from the holy verses of
the Koran.
Guardian Unlimited (C) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001