The Decline of Donnish Dominion?

Abstract

When adversity came to the British universities at the end of the 1970s, it was remarkable as much because it was unfamiliar as because it was unwelcome. Dons could perhaps be forgiven for failing to notice that there is no necessary law of permanent university expansion. No evidence to the contrary had been imposed in the previous 100 years, not even in the slump years of the 1930s: and significant other countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, had been in the habit of expanding their higher education at a faster rate throughout the present century. Institutional memory of austere research budgets and of a small and uncertain equation between student supply and student demand had faded to virtual amnesia. During the 1960s rising numbers became perennially assumed. At a seminar on higher education as late as 1971, the then Permanent Secretary of the Department of Education and Science, Sir William Pile, remarked: We are approaching the apocalyptic moment when mass higher education will really be upon us... Certain decisions must now be taken... [1]. But towards the end of the 1970s the expansionary tide turned. Oxford, at least initially, faced retrenchment with incredulity. There were strong barriers to any contemplation of possible decline. An established 'first-choice' position supported tacit assumptions of financial buoyancy, attractiveness to undergraduates and graduates, connections to the metropolitan powers, and to international science and scholarship. The purpose of the seminars held in Oxford in the spring of 1982 and reported in this issue was to go beyond incredulity towards thought about the place of Oxford within the changing system of British higher education.

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