Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

Before returning to England we visited Jerusalem — at that time a divided city. I confess it did not add to the pleasure of sightseeing to be told to keep one's head down near the demarcation line, so as to offer no target to trigger-happy Jordanian guards on the other side. We also visited the impressive Weizmann Institute at Rehovoth (of which I was to become a Governor a few years later), and one evening, at the home of the British Consul at Tel Aviv, with David Samuel and his wife Reina, we heard on the radio the result of the general election in Britain. The Labour party was returned, although by a smaller majority than most people expected. In one way it was something of a relief to me, since it was widely thought that, had the election gone the other way, I might have been under considerable pressure to take ministerial office. Had such a thing happened, of course, life might have been a little less hectic for, in addition to a lot of overseas commitments, I had acquired added responsibilities at home, which acceptance of ministerial office might have allowed me to shed.

In 1963 agreement was finally reached that the Royal Technical College in Glasgow should have university status. This followed a long, and at times bitter, struggle between 'the Tech.' and the University of Glasgow since the former came into existence as Anderson's University in 1796. Now it was to become the University of Strathclyde, and I was invited to be its first Chancellor. As a born Glaswegian, I was delighted by this honour, although, on appointment, I recalled with some amusement that, many years before, on my first attending a metallurgy class in the old Tech., I had had my overcoat stolen from the cloakroom. My formal installation as Chancellor did not occur until April 1965, when we had a tremendous party in the Kelvin Hall, and I became the first honorary graduate. I have continued to hold the office of Chancellor ever since, and have enjoyed every bit of it. It really has been a joy to be associated with the building up of a modern technological university in which people are not inhibited by the weight of tradition; unlike some of the new universities created in the 1960s, Strathclyde has been a real success, both academically and in its relations with industry. The latter I have watched with particular interest, since, under pressure from my good friend the late Lord Netherthorpe, then chairman of Fisons Ltd, I joined the board of that company as a non-executive director in 1963, and, during the next fifteen years, was in close contact with the actual operation of a large research-based company; I learned much as a result.

Most people in England regard Strathclyde as one of the new universities created as a result of the Report on Higher Education issued in 1963 by a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins. As I have indicated, this is not so; the long drawn-out battle between the 'Glasgow Tech.' and Glasgow University for university status, which would allow it to give its own degrees was finally won before the Robbins Committee reported. The University Grants Committee was, however, aware that the Robbins Report, when it appeared, would propose the creation of a number of other new universities and its chairman, Sir Keith Murray (later Lord Murray) asked. Strathclyde to agree that the granting of its Charter should be deferred until a decision had been taken on Lord Robbins' recommendations; the Charter was, in fact, granted in 1964.

The committee set up under Lord Robbins to conduct an enquiry into higher education reported in 1963. I found myself in disagreement with a good deal of the Report, and especially with the proposals greatly to expand the number of universities in the United Kingdom, and to upgrade several colleges of advanced technology by giving them university status. I confess that I was astonished - and still am - by the ill-considered haste with which its recommendations were accepted by the main political parties (largely, I fear, for reasons not unconnected with an approaching general election). I made no secret of my views at the time, and, indeed, criticised the report in the House of Lords when it was adopted, and on numerous later occasions.

The setting up of the Robbins Committee was a response to the growing feeling in the United Kingdom that all was not well with our educational system. We seemed to be educating too few scientists and technologists to satisfy the demands of industry and to make up leeway in the field of industrial innovation; the weakness of our industries in technologically based innovation also encouraged the loss of too many of our ablest scientists and technologists to the United States - the so-called 'brain drain'. On top of all this, the public was frequently provided, through the press and other media of communication, with statistics of the number of young people per thousand attending universities in various countries; these invariably showed Britain to be at, or very near, the bottom of the league. What they did not, of course, show, was the wide variety of institutions listed as 'universities' in different countries; little attention was paid to the pyramidal nature of our educational system, in which the term 'university' was reserved for a small group of institutions designed to complete the education of an elite.

Whatever views one holds about elitism, it seemed to me self-evident that simply to multiply the number of institutions giving education designed for an intellectual elite would offer no solution to our problems. I agreed, of course, with the Robbins view that all who were fitted for university education should have it; but I did not believe that a vast untapped pool of such young people existed, most of them being, supposedly, denied opportunity for advancement for socio-economic reasons. In any case, most of our universities were relatively small, and until each had grown in size to accommodate perhaps ten thousand students I saw no point in creating a rash of small new universities, most, if not all, of which would try to provide the traditional English type of university education, modelled on that of Oxford and Cambridge. The probability that new universities would develop in this way seemed to me the more likely on the basis of past experience. Most of our great civic universities, originally founded as technically oriented institutions, had had their original pattern and aims modified in this way quite early in their development; history, I felt sure, was likely to repeat itself.

An approximate doubling of the number of our universities would, it seemed to me, be not only extremely costly, but, if the number of students was to be vastly increased as Robbins recommended, it would deflect too many of our young people away from the advanced technical and vocational education which was far more needed by the country, and far more suited to the young people themselves. For it must be remembered that, if discoveries are to be made and exploited, far more technicians are needed than scientists and technologists; this did not seem to be recognised in the Robbins Report. If my view that the number of suitable young people who were under existing circumstances denied a university was not as great as many people thought, then doubling the number of universities would almost inevitably lead to a lowering of standards and the presence in the universities of too many students lacking in ability and especially in motivation.

Looking back now over the years, it seems to me that practically everything which I foresaw when the Report appeared has come to pass. I believe, moreover, that the period of student unrest in the late sixties and early seventies was, at least partly, rooted in the Robbins-type expansion which, incidentally, occurred at about the same time in most other developed countries - Germany provides a striking example. One consequence of the creation of a large number of new universities which I did not at the time foresee - although I should have done so - was the way in which the provision of tenured staff for them would mean simultaneous recruitment of a large number of young university teachers from more or less the same age group. This would clearly upset the staff age-distribution in universities, and block the promotion of promising young people coming forward in future years. The economic depression of the seventies has revealed these consequences of our actions all too clearly, and we are now faced with the daunting problem of rethinking some, at least, of our arrangements in the face of financial stringency, which makes our problems even more intractable.