Is it, for example, to continue to be taken as an article of faith that all established academics are capable of first-class research and that all students obtaining first- or upper-second-class honours degrees should be encouraged and provided with the wherewithal to pursue academic research? The answer to both questions must, I fear, be no. Earlier in this address I indicated my view that the very rapid expansion of university staffs which has occurred was bound to involve some who were not of first-class research calibre. Moreover, we have seen in the past decade or so an approximate doubling of student numbers in our universities, the increase being drawn very largely from the same social classes of our population as in the past. Despite this the proportion of first-class honours degrees awarded each year in science at least has not diminished; it is difficult not to equate this with a lowering of standards. If these doubts are justified and we continue to believe that each department in every one of our present universities should have a substantial research school the strain on our financial resources may become intolerable. The resulting decline in the standard of our research will in due course extend through to our technology and so militate against the nation's economic recovery. Yet this is the road down which we appear to be travelling owing to over-rapid expansion and the inflexibility of our university employment patterns. The dual support system of the University Grants Committee and the Research Councils would ideally ensure that extra funds for the support of research were concentrated on those most likely to spend them well; as things now stand, however, while there is no reason to believe that really able young scientists with good projects to put forward will be denied temporary funding to initiate them, the prospects of their being given a sufficient measure of permanence to build up a centre of excellence in their institution is small indeed. Since in research only excellence begets excellence it is essential that universities individually or collectively should face up to this problem.
But can all university departments or even all universities really become centres of excellence? This question (and the inevitably disappointing answer to it) has been lurking in the minds of British academic scientists for the past decade but has not been openly faced. In reality, however, it is not possible - and it may not even be desirable - that all departments of, say, chemistry or physiology should stand out for the high quality of their research in some corner (and still less in all corners) of their discipline. Some, for example, have too small a staff adequately to sustain undergraduate teaching and to supervise at the same time programmes of postgraduate work which all departments in all disciplines appear to regard as the essential breath of life. Need this requirement for large postgraduate programmes be universal? It is a remarkable fact that in proportion to population there are more institutions awarding Ph.Ds in physics in Britain than in the United States. In the United States we find many more institutions devoted to professional education and applied sciences and there are many distinguished universities whose reputation rests substantially on the quality of their basic teaching.
Such diversity in our institutions should be encouraged. Why should there not be some differentiation between those who teach and those who pursue research? Even if by proceeding along these lines it should turn out that some of our universities become concerned essentially with undergraduate education of a more practical and vocational type than they now seek to provide, that would not be the end of the world.
Unfortunately the present machinery for the support of higher education and research in the United Kingdom was not devised for the encouragement of diversity. For all its undoubted virtues the University Grants Committee system does require that universities should compete within what is increasingly a common framework of objectives. These may be laudable enough as far as they go but with grants being geared to undergraduate numbers individual universities are not necessarily rewarded for doing well what they are best able to do.
The result is that competition between British universities is almost always competition on familiar terms - increasingly and unhappily competition at the margin for the increased tuition fees with which students are endowed by local authorities. Preliminary (and anecdotal) evidence suggests that in this competition Oxbridge and the older civic universities are winning out. If this be the case and the trend continues then we will end up with a hierarchy in which the universities lower in the pecking order will be trying to do the same things as the others but doing them with students who are not suited to them and would do better and become more useful citizens with a more vocational type of education such as is - or should be -provided by our polytechnics. Rather than let things drift slowly and painfully towards such an arid pattern why should we not seek boldly to alter patterns and develop diversity in our institutions now? At a time when a major effort is required to remain competitive in the technological revolution that is now occurring the idea that our traditional type of university education should be universally applied for reasons of social prestige is dangerous as well as foolish.
If we are to change our present university pattern the mechanisms by which we support research in academic institutions may also have to undergo some changes. Project grant applications will no longer be assessed simply on their merits alone without reference to the circumstances under which the research is to be carried out. Research projects in a given field will tend to be concentrated in one, or in only a very few, centres with considerably larger research groups than are usual today. It may well become necessary for the research councils to be more selective in the way in which postgraduate studentships are allocated to university departments; more radically, they may even have to think of making the grants to students of exceptional promise rather than to their potential supervisors. Another convention that may have to go is that every reasonably able Ph.D. graduate can expect as of right to have two or three years of postdoctoral research during which he can establish a claim on a tenured research post.
The frequent frustration of this expectation is one of the saddest of the current symptoms of malaise in our university research. Many postdoctoral fellows, many of them skilled and imaginative people, have discovered that there are more of them than of permanent jobs in what they have come to think of as their own field of research and must turn to something quite different. Nobody will deny that this entails a sad waste of skill; unhappily it is a circumstance that will not naturally go away until the British economy is once again buoyant. And the vigour of our research enterprise would surely suffer if all those concerned were now provided with a formal tenured career structure as many of them are now asking despite the current staff structure in our universities.
And so I come back to the over-rapid expansion of our universities in the 1960s and to the disastrous age-distribution in our university staffs which has resulted from the way in which it was carried out. The unfortunate circumstance that we have since then entered upon a period of acute economic recession has entailed severe restraint on the money available for teaching and research and led to resources being spread too thinly over too many centres. I have indicated in the course of my Address where I believe our problems lie and have only posed some of the questions which could be asked about research in our universities and the ways in which it is promoted. But in the last analysis it is difficult to see any real progress being made unless we can do something about our ageing university staffs and the lack of openings for our brightest young academic scientists.