Universities: Explosion in Britain

The world’s most dramatic outburst of higher education is under way in neither the U.S. nor Russia but in staid old Britain, which is creating seven brand-new universities of the highest academic order. One of them has been running for two years; two more open this week; four others are set to go.

Their avowed ambition is to shake up nearly every hoary tradition of Britain’s 23 other universities. “There has never been anything like this in Britain,” gloats John S. Fulton, vice chancellor (president) at one of the seven, the University of Sussex. “This is rightly called an explosion. Things will never be the same again.” From Cape Wrath to Land’s End, Britons are avid to explode. “We are in a mess about our education,” says Sir Charles Snow. “There is too little of it. It is too narrow both in spread and concept.” Under fire is the sheltered snobbery of Oxford and Cambridge, whose 18,000 students so easily inherit British power and glory. Equally resented is the impersonal lecture system at the 19th century urban redbrick universities, whose 46,000 students often feel like social second-raters. Higher education has become a major British political issue. The Conservative gov ernment is about to produce a report, three years in the making, that is expected to recommend even further expansion, and the Labor Party cries that “Britain’s economic stagnation is a direct result of neglect of higher education” (see THE WORLD).

Wasted Talent. Only 8% of young Britons get higher education, compared with 25% in the U.S., and of that number about half attend technical and teacher colleges that give no university degrees—a coveted badge of social distinction. In 1962, says Sir Eric Ashby, master of Clare College, Cambridge, “we selected about 33,000 young people to go to universities out of an age group of some 700,000. This represents only a fraction of the pool of high ability in Britain.”

To give Britain 30 universities by 1965, the University Grants Committee —which administers government funds while fending off government control—first authorized the new Sussex campus in Brighton, the holiday town on England’s Channel coast. Then it opened a national competition for six more universities of 3,000 students apiece. To snag them, towns had to offer cash, 200-acre sites and fitting cultural attractions. Scenting profits as well as prestige, 20 cities and towns launched a regular gold rush, cranked up lively boosters and lavish brochures (Lancaster: “A progressive, prosperous and well-balanced community”).

The winners—York, Lancaster, Canterbury, Colchester, Norwich and Warwick—set up blue-chip academic planning boards to get fast approval by older universities. Instead of spending years as apprentice colleges, the old way of breeding British universities, the new schools are opening as full-blown universities. Skirting wet cement and snarling bulldozers, a visitor at one raw campus last week felt “the kind of enthusiasm you find in an Israeli kibbutz. You want to pick up a shovel or roll up your sleeves and unpack books. It is all so unstuffy, informal and energetic that it seems downright un-English.”

Starting from Scratch. At Sussex, Architect Sir Basil Spence has designed one of Britain’s tidiest campuses—a $21 million series of graceful quadrangles with archways commanding handsome views of rolling hills and water. While stressing tutorials, Sussex has rejected extreme specialization and the redbrick type of academic department. It is organized into schools of related subjects, such as English and European studies. A specialist in English literature, for example, must equally master the history and philosophy of his period. Broadening is the big goal.

An hour from London, Sussex already gets 20 applicants for every one it accepts. Starting its third year this week, it will have 920 students and may eventually have 6,000. Like its new sisters, it scorns the male dominance (3 to 1) at other universities. In its first year it enrolled twice as many girls as boys. A big attraction is the top teaching talent brought in by Vice Chancellor Fulton, 61, a onetime don (politics, philosophy) at Oxford’s Balliol College. New teachers jump at Sussex’ freedom. “You can’t imagine the inertia at other universities,” says one chemist. “Here I can start from scratch without any preconceived ideas.”

Third Force. The pattern differs at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which opens this week with its first 113 students. To give its planners time for perfection, East Anglia will spend three years in a village of prefabs before moving to its site, a 165-acre golf course. The ultimate campus plan looks like a sleeping lobster: a complex of arms and claws that unify “cognate disciplines in broadly based schools of study.”

Things American appeal to East Anglia’s Vice Chancellor Frank Thistlethwaite, 48, a former Cambridge lecturer (economics, politics) and onetime visiting professor of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. He likes U.S.-style “progressive specialization” from the general to the particular. He dislikes British reliance on final exams to judge students, distrusts both tutorials and lectures as the best way of teaching. Result: heavy reliance on seminars. Thistlethwaite happily envisions the new universities as “a third force to break down the antithesis between Oxbridge and the redbricks.”

Rebel Spirit. The University of York, opening with 227 students, is taking a middle course of mixed tutorials, lectures and seminars. It also aims to broaden British higher education, will offer not only single-subject degrees but also combinations, such as history and education. A surprising smorgasbord of elective courses will range from “Art and Ideology” to “Civilization and Industry in the 19th Century.”

York’s vice chancellor, Lord James of Rusholme, 54, is the Oxford-trained former high master of Manchester Grammar School. A crack fund raiser, he has a target awesome for Britain; $24 million in ten years. Along with making York strong in social sciences, Lord James plans ten colleges that will center each student’s living and learning under one roof, like the Harvard house plan. The trend, he says, is to “something much more like the American pattern. The new universities are bound to be more experimental than the others.”

Whatever these new schools become, the men creating them are counting on what Sussex Dean Ian Watt, fresh from the University of California, calls Britain’s rising “rebels against the social order”—youngsters fed up with established codes and hypocrisies. “The new universities will be beneficiaries of their spirit,” says Watt. Impatient to innovate, Sussex Vice Chancellor Fulton sums up the view of all his colleagues: “This is a great adventure.”