I think list members might appreciate this extract from Peter Hennessy's
contribution to the House of Lords debate on Tuesday 6 December:
“I fear that the admirable arm’s-length instinct [which was evident in
the setting-up of the University Grants Committee in 1919] has gradually
given way to an instinct to intervene, a tendency that has become ever
more pronounced in recent decades and spread by a creeping, uninspired
and uninspiring managerialism which has reached deep into our labs and
libraries, seminar rooms and lecture halls, diverting the energies of
scholars and teachers from their primary and indispensable purposes and
the so-called Humboldt principle, first developed in the German states
200 years ago, that the essence of a university is the precious
symbiosis between research and teaching. Every scholar worth his or her
salt should regret every piece of bureaucracy or excessive prescriptive
audit which takes them away from their students, their labs or their
archives, not because university teachers crave some kind of producer
monopoly but because, quite rightly, scholars joined up for the thrill
of the intellectual chase and its enthusiastic, contagious transmission
to their students — for the poetry of university life and not for its
plumbing, as my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton likes to put it. As
we crawl our way through the plumbing in the pages of legislation before
us, we must not forget for one moment what universities are for and the
poetry of learning that gives them life — what Albert Einstein famously
called “a holy curiosity”. / I in no way criticise the motives of the
framers of the Bill, but they are, I suspect, tone-deaf to several of
the factors that have given us over the past century since the state
became seriously involved in funding universities such a fine record as
a higher education nation.”
Best wishes,
David
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