Britain's brains go into battle

By Melvyn Bragg

This country has four great assets in the modern era. The first is our talent for inventions that take the world by surprise and change it. The World Wide Web is a good example.

The second is a gift for what I call high-quality niche. We can see it in the whisky trade, now bolstering the north of Scotland, in the best of the City, in hi-tech and in heritage.

Third is our skills, wonderfully exemplified in the double Olympics that gave us per capita the top results on the planet, and in our creative industries, again the biggest in the world for the size of country.

But last and best is our universities, which are second only to America’s. Not only do they punch way above their weight in research and quality, they also have an unrivalled ability to attract the finest overseas graduates.

Which is why a distinguished group of intellectuals gathered last Tuesday night in central London. Like a covert meeting of an ancient cabal, they had mustered to defend our universities, believing that they are in danger of losing ground, direction and clout.

The scene, on a damp and misty evening, could have come straight out of a Conan Doyle story in which Mycroft, the brilliant brother of Sherlock Holmes, heaves himself from the Drones Club to meet the call of his country. The gathering would have featured well in Trollope and maybe George Eliot, too. Yet it would also have fed the prejudices of those who think that this country is still run by a largely invisible Establishment that meets amid grand semi-secrecy and changes the course of the nation. I hope it does this time.

The initial call to arms had come from Sir Keith Thomas, Distinguished Fellow at All Souls, the archetypal Oxford college of dreaming spires and supreme scholars, a place where Cabinets have been created and high learning pursued for its own sake for centuries.

In a letter, Sir Keith summoned 100 people to London to set up a Council for the Defence of British Universities. And they arrived bang on time for the six o’clock meeting in the magnificent Carlton House headquarters of the British Academy, a house that was once the private residence of William Gladstone. It overlooks the Mall, and has both Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster in its sights.

And so in they filed, the founding members. Some were our greatest scientists: Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Prize winner and President of the Royal Society, Prof Sir Roger Penrose, Lord Rees of Ludlow, Prof Marcus du Sautoy, Prof Richard Dawkins, Lord May of Oxford and more.

There were public figures, too: Lord Waldegrave, Lord Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, Sir John Tusa, A S Byatt, Claire Tomalin, Lady Warnock, Dame Jinty Nelson. All of us answering the call to stop the rot.

Once this assembly had been wedged into a room in the British Academy and welcomed by its president, Prof Sir Adam Roberts, we set about shedding our Establishment skin and laying into the task of establishing a cross-party organisation that will, I think, bring to the attention of this Government what it has on its hands and what it is losing.

Politicians in Britain have never been very keen on intellectuals or “arty types”. For a while, neglect seemed to work. But now the intellectuals at the universities and the arty types in the creative world have achieved platforms of financial capability and world recognition that were once the preserve of heavy industries and our Armed Forces. Which is why they have become so ripe for plucking by the state.

The meeting – which lasted precisely one and a half hours, as it was billed to do – was politely chaired, effortlessly unmelodramatic and spot on. Its consensus was that British universities are in danger of suffocating because of too much bureaucracy, too much government direction (or interference, as it might better be called) and too little recognition of the basic fact, brilliantly encapsulated by Prof Sir John Meurig Thomas, that “planned discovery is impossible”. In short, the very greatest discoveries, many of them made at our universities, have often come by indirections.

Most of the time, business targets and commercial constraints just don’t work in universities. Bureaucrats should be few and in the background, not many and increasingly in the foreground. Those who do the hands-on work should be given their heads. After all, it is their heads that matter.

Universities are to do with knowledge and imagination. When asked for the most important thing about his work, Einstein replied “imagination – above all, imagination”.

As we sail into the dark energy of the 21st century, what we need is to unleash the imagination as effectively as the Romans unleashed war in 400 years of victories. Just as we have done over centuries in industry, in the development of democracy and in the great dream of health provision for all.

A secure, independent knowledge base is essential and British universities are noted worldwide for their rigour and success. It doesn’t do to boast, but why not in this case? Our universities are way ahead of any in Europe and are on the shortlist of the greatest universities of the world. It’s no accident that we’re also the only real challenge to America at the Oscars. And on the bestseller lists.

And so the clarion call came out from All Souls, in one of the oldest universities in the world. The first aim of nine (I love the nine – no fooling around to make it look neat or correct, with 10 or 12) is “to defend and enhance the character of British universities as places where students can develop their capacities to the full, where research and scholarship are pursued at the highest level, and where intellectual activity can be freely conducted without regard to its immediate economic benefit”.

Those who spoke did so as the guardians of something hard won, much treasured and in danger. It should be regarded as a quiet social miracle that our university system, which used to take about 6 per cent of young people when I went in 1958, now accepts upwards of 50 per cent, without busting the bounds of those universities. And, whatever the droning of naysayers, it often results in higher standards, better research and improved facilities.

From my own experience as Chancellor of Leeds University, which has grown apace like so many others, I see world-beating research in the medical sciences, extraordinary progress and leadership in the environmental sciences, groundbreaking work in textiles and literature. Those of us who gathered in Carlton House Terrace are determined that this should continue and not be diminished.

But this is more than a British issue. We attract the best students from all over the world. How long will that trend continue?

The clumsy, short-sighted and incomprehensible block on students coming to this country means that some of the cleverest and best young brains from China, India, the Middle East and Europe are swerving away from Britain into the open arms of Australia and America. These nations cannot believe their luck. Our stupidity is their opportunity. And they’re grabbing it.

Take the example of Chinese students, who have come in numbers to Leeds University (and many others). They are now finding it harder and harder just to get into this country at all. But they not only bring income to the city in the form of fees, they also provide future contacts and relationships of immeasurable value in a world that is globalising faster by the day. We are not just turning down students, we are shutting out the future.

And so, like a clan in the Highlands that has gathered in secret caves to defend its faith, the country, a way of life, those who turned up on a damp night in autumnal London came together to share a cause: to let this country’s young people achieve their full potential, magnetise the attention of the rest of the intellectual world, disturb government into positive action and to take these islands into another great chapter in our story.

We have nothing to use but our brains.