Extracts from committee state (Lords) (day 1) of the Higher Education and Research Bill - Jan 9
Tuesday, 10 January 2017 08:40
Baroness Deech (CB):...On uniformity of excellence in teaching, I
always say that Isaiah Berlin’s PowerPoint would not have been up
to scratch, and Stanley de Smith, the originator of the law of
judicial review—in the news every day now—would have been
castigated for talking way above the heads of his audience while
smoking on the edge of the platform, which was acceptable in those
days. Nearly all academics who made a difference did so precisely
because they did not conform to the...Request free trial
(CB):...On uniformity
of excellence in teaching, I always say that Isaiah Berlin’s
PowerPoint would not have been up to scratch, and Stanley de Smith,
the originator of the law of judicial review—in the news every day
now—would have been castigated for talking way above the heads of
his audience while smoking on the edge of the platform, which was
acceptable in those days. Nearly all academics who made a
difference did so precisely because they did not conform to the
bureaucratic ideal. The culture of box ticking and moving lecturers
around as if they were footballers for transfer is already taking
hold. The system of research funding has boosted elite universities
at the expense of others, as a certainty. The teaching excellence
framework will make this worse. Wealth creation and higher salaries
for graduates needing to be ready for employment in business and
market-driven schemes will, in themselves, do nothing to engender
the spirit for which our universities are renowned and which
brings—and I hope will continue to bring—to them the most ambitious
and creative students from the Far East, Russia, the United States
and India...
(CB):...I
therefore agree with the noble Lords, Lord Waldegrave and , that the use of “must” in
this clause does not make sense in many circumstances. For example,
in India, 1.5 million students apply to get
into the Indian Institutes of Technology. The first
cut is 130,000. Ten thousand of them make it. Some of the brightest
people in the world have come out of that funnel and run some of
the biggest organisations in the world today. It has nothing to do
with engineering, but it is a specialist engineering science
institution. Caltech is always ranked among the top universities in
the world. It is a pure science institution. One cannot therefore
prescribe that all universities must do everything, but the spirit
of this amendment is absolutely right: that universities on the
whole must strive for variety...
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