News & Views item - May 2007

 

 

UK Nobelist Harry Kroto, Australian Emeritus Professor of History Alan Ward Tell Us the Universities Got Problems. (May 22, 2007)

    Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Alan Ward in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald:"Two-tier university system is a second-rate solution" while Professor Harry Kroto, 1996 Nobel Laureate in chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes has contributed to The Guardian: "The wrecking of British science"; an abridged version of a chapter in, Can the Prizes Still Glitter? The Future of British Universities in a Changing World.

 

In both cases they serve up considerable pessimism, no particular solutions, but leave no doubt that significant corrective measures need to be implemented. Professor Ward writes a short critique of The Sydney Morning Herald's May 15 editorial on the need to change the structure of Australia's University sector, while Professor Kroto decries the short sighted closing of a number of Britain's science departments for short sighted reasons of short term cost savings. Below are some excerpts but Professor Ward's letter to the SMH can be read in full as can Professor Kroto's contribution to The Guardian.

 

 

 Emeritus Professor of History Alan Ward

Professor of Chemistry Harry Kroto

    Your leader "Five billion reasons why universities need a shake-up" (May 18) has nailed the cause of university funding problems, namely the crude and doctrinaire Dawkins "reforms" of the late 1980s, which turned colleges of advanced education into universities and created an overblown and needlessly expensive university sector.

 

But the remedy proposed by the Herald, namely creating a tier of elite and well-funded universities while letting the remainder sink to second-rate status, with lesser funding, is almost equally crude. [Before Dawkins]  universities were staffed by corps of professional scholars whose training and qualifications were based on international traditions of research and publication.

 

[R]egional universities were able to recruit staff trained and dedicated to working within that professional framework. This meant that the teaching of core disciplines in the arts and sciences was generally of the same high quality in Wollongong, Newcastle, Armidale or Townsville as it was in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra.

 

This kind of access, this kind of high-standard education at regional as well as metropolitan level, will almost certainly be destroyed by the creation of a two-tier university system... The regional universities and the communities which they serve will be the losers.

There is food for thought in the fact that, after a decade of Labour government and at the same moment that the prime minister was making a speech about how important he considered science, the University of Reading announced the closure of its physics department.

Thirty per cent of physics departments have either been closed or merged in the past five years... last year, the small Sussex chemistry department - a fantastic department to work in, where I stayed for some 37 years and which has housed some 12 fellows of the Royal Society, three Nobel laureates and a Wolf prize winner since it was created in 1962 - was under threat of closure? It was only through the concerted efforts of staff and students that a U-turn occurred.

[N]othing effective has been done by this government, or for that matter the previous one, to improve the situation on the science education front. ...[T]his matters because the need for a general population with a satisfactory understanding of science and technology has never been greater.

The failure of our general science educational policy is manifest in the fact that so few are aware of the true level of our dependence on science and technology.

Many think of the sciences as merely a fund of knowledge. Journalists never ask scientists anything other than what the applications are of scientific breakthroughs. Interestingly, I doubt they ever ask a musician, writer or actor the same question. I wonder why.

The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew "belief", the enemy of rationality... Curiously, for the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes this capacity to disappear by adolescence...

Scientific education is by far the best training for all walks of life, because it teaches us how to assess situations critically and react accordingly.

The [current] situation in universities is exacerbated by present policy, which actively encourages vice-chancellors who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing to eliminate science departments in favour of trendy, cheap courses.

Another major factor, encouraging VCs to close science departments - even if, as at Exeter University, they have plenty of students - is the inadequate provision made by the government to cover the real cost of science education.

I think there is every likelihood that the lack of scientifically educated and aware young people in the UK will result in ever poorer performance on a global scale... It is truly disturbing that a well-funded cohort of religious groups - aided, abetted and condoned by the Labour government - is undermining our science education.

[M]y final message is: "Do Panic!"