The Approach of Robbins
By A. D. C. PETERSON THE Commonwealth Universities Conference, and particularly Sir Eric Ashby's opening address, have reminded us that the period of 'Waiting for Robbins' is now nearly over. It may well, of course, be succeeded by a period of waiting for something to be done about Robbins. None of the main recommendations of Crowther (1959) have been implemented yet. So clearly the mere dazzling novelty of appoint- ing a tough economist to head committees on education does not guarantee that the Treasury will listen to them. Nevertheless, it is perhaps worth trying to dispel some of the fog before the post-Robbins debate begins.
Suppose that the Robbins Committee recom- mends a considerable expansion of the base of higher education, not to bring our enrolment of degree students to anything approaching the American figure of four and a quarter million for 1962, but perhaps to double it, as both the Liberal and Labour parties have now promised to do. Such a move would almost certainly run up against three stock objections: the first that we must not debase the Standard of the Degree; the second that we must not divoice Teaching from Research; and the third that we must not confuse Liberal Education with Vocational Training.
None of the three objections is worth very much, but it is interesting to see how they stand up to questioning. What is the 'Standard of the Degree' and what in this context does 'debase' mean?
Before 1939 students commonly entered the universities with the equivalent of five '0' level passes. At Oxford many of them devoted their time mainly to life rather than letters, and left with a pass BA, or an academic performance hardly above 'A' level. The passage of years and the payment of a small sum converted this into an MA—a degree which elsewhere repre- sents postgraduate work of some quality. No conceivable broadening of the base of contem- porary higher education could 'debase' in terms of academic repute the value of these degrees. Does 'debase' then perhaps refer to social rather than academic repute? At times it looks almost like it. With our remarkable capacity for manu- facturing distinctions, we have already created two oddly named awards, the Dip. Tech, and the Dip. AD, which are specifically graded as 'equivalent' to honours degrees, but cannot be called degrees, presumably because this would be debasing.
There remains one further possibility: that the issue is one of academic repute, but only the repute of those degrees awarded since the Second World War. It is this which must not be debased. The first question to ask here is: Why not? For the statement is not self-evident. If the standard of the BA has been drastically altered once in our life-time, there is no clear reason why it should not be altered again and in a more rational fashion. ,Certainly no one is thinking of a difference as great as that between the pre-war pass BA and the post-war honours BA. A new structure in which the Bachelor's degree had a wider range and was more commonly secured at a lower level, the Master's degree represented some genuine advanced work, and the Doctor's degree became more accepted as the hallmark of the scholar would bring us more, and not less, in line with the normal pattern of higher education. There is no point in treating the present high academic level of the BA as our most cherished tradition, when, like the eleven- plus, it has only existed for fifteen years.
Where, then, would this much wider range of first degrees be taken? Where are the Labour Party's forty-five new universities to come from? The obvious answer seems to lie in developing _some of our existing teacher training colleges, colleges of technology, colleges of art and commerce, into degree-granting university col- leges. It is here that the second objection comes in: 'neither teachers nor students at those places are working at the frontiers of knowledge. You cannot separate Teaching and Research.' One very simple answer, of course, would be that the Americans, at such liberal arts colleges as Reed, (Merlin and Swarthmore, contrive to do so with excellent results. But here again it is worth asking a little more rigorously why not, and what a first degree is for.
Undergraduates should be taught to think. But the kind of thinking which most of those who read arts subjects need to develop would be better described as reinterpretation, under- standing, creative imagination or criticism than as research—unless, of course, you extend the term 'research' to cover all original thinking, as some people now seem to. They are not, after all, going to be professional historians, literary or social, nor professional philologists nor econo- mists. They study these subjects not to learn how the frontiers of knowledge in them are advanced, but to help them interpret the intel- lectual culture in which they live. The few who are going on to become professional academics can learn their research techniques after their lirst degree.
Is it then the scientists who should be spending part of their first degree course on the frontiers of knowledge, even if it is only 'crawling along with a hand lens?' Are not most of them going to be professional scientists; and surely the typical occupation of professional scientists is research? This is the most dangerous fallacy from which our present science specialists at school and university suffer. In fact only a small proportion will go into research for a fairly small proportion of their working lives. The image of every science sixth-former as a future research worker is not only false, but is diverting early talent from problems of development and design. The new students- in this expanded higher education will be much better brought into contact with the frontiers of action, with creative writing, industrial design or social administration, than with the frontiers of knowledge. Research opportunities for some teachers in these colleges present no serious problems provided they are linked to university libraries or laboratories. They will not, of course, be able to carry out fundamental research in the most expensive fields- of physics, but how many university teachers do that now?
There is still the third fateful objection about the confusion between Liberal Education and Vocational Training. Again we must ask what is the purpose of higher education. 'To train the mind.' And if the mind is just as well trained by thinking about problems of twentieth-century industrial relations as about those of the con- flict of the orders in third-century Rome? And if students are more interested in contemporary German thought than in Old High German and so work better and train their minds better? Is there something immoral in useful knowledge, Which disqualifies it as training the mind?
The demand for expanded higher education is not coming from those who are sufficiently able and sufficiently 'pure' in their academic temperament to follow with genuine devotion the paths of pure scholarship. There are too many places for such people already and a sad lack of genuine commitment among existing students. 'The. University.' as one said, 'would be all right if it weren't for the lectures.' If we are 'to expand, it must be for the next great group, whose interests, judged on the tests of pure scholarship at eighteen, are slightly less pure and rather more closely tied to life outside the academic world. From them we shall get perhaps a few more real scholars, developing a single 'pure' interest later than their fellows, but mainly the great structure of fully educated professional men whom our society so badly needs.
It is worth remembering, too, that if we provide this sort of college education, which is what a great many sixth-formers want, it will not only suit the next group much better but cost much less than trying to educate them as if they were all dedicated scholars clamouring to do pure research. And if we offer them loans instead of grants or provide opportunities to work their Way through college, instead of assuming that they must be bent over their books term and vacation alike, as the Hale Committee has shown that in fact they aren't, then we may be able to afford more places. The greatest danger at present is from an increasingly vicious competition for too few places. not from diluting the pure milk of the word. The assumption that all higher educa- tion must conform to largely imaginary stan- dards established since the war is an irrelevancy hich we should not allow to stand in our way.
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