The Times Higher Education Supplement

'In the 1960s, the bargain was a good one. Now you get Margaret Hodge, John Randall, Howard Newby and a salary that City firms would hesitate to offer their receptionists.' Alan Ryan

I am taking off to California for 2002-03. That is not much of a news item. Even in these straitened times, most academics take one year off in seven as sabbatical leave. What has surprised me is that everyone assumes I am not coming back.

Perhaps it is because of my increasingly public irritation with the present state of British higher education. I am sure I will return after a year in the academic paradise of Stanford, but my advice to anyone young enough and unencumbered enough to do so is indeed to get out and stay out - out of academic life, or if not, out of the British academic system.

British academic life has become unviable. It is ill-paid, overmanaged and increasingly uninteresting. For someone who can marry an investment banker, and/or be given a large house by their parents, it is just about financially possible; but even then, it is increasingly uninteresting as an intellectual exercise, and it has lost just about everything that made it worth pursuing 40 years ago.

In the 1960s, the bargain was a good one; you gave up the chance of wealth, power and fame and got the life of the free spirit in exchange. Now, you get Margaret Hodge, John Randall and Howard Newby, and a salary that City firms would hesitate to offer their receptionists. In the 1960s, professors were paid much the same as GPs, MPs and under-secretaries in the civil service and, by the end of the decade, most of Camden Town could be purchased on a lecturer's salary. But you didn't expect to be a lecturer much beyond the age of 30 anyway. Following the Robbins report and the expansion of the university sector, you could have tenure at 24 and a chair at 30. Nor was fame entirely given up. Young sociologists at the London School of Economics were vastly more glamorous then than even their director is today.

More crucially, what was on offer was freedom and optimism; and what has replaced them is a deep, sullen pessimism. The post-Robbins assumption was that it would be possible to create new universities that would run rings round Oxbridge: on the one hand, liberal arts colleges, and, on the other, the British offspring of Berkeley. Nobody in 2002 could read Albert Sloman's Reith Lectures in which he imagined that Essex might be the Berkeley of the UK system without realising that it is not only money that the present higher education system has run out of.

The contrast between the 1960s promise of indefinite expansion of new courses and new institutions, coupled with an influx of enthusiastic and well-qualified new students, and the contemporary world of reluctant and ill-qualified students filling crumbling, ill-equipped institutions, is too obvious to need belabouring. Oxbridge students in 2002 receive in real terms the funding of Essex students in 1979; and Essex students in 2002 have had the money spent on them cut by a third. Whether more means worse is arguable; that more means less well provided for - is undeniable.

In those distant days, the much-reviled "binary" system presented university lecturers with a spectacle of how the other half lived - teachers in polytechnics were at the mercy of local authorities, put upon by their principals and departmental chairs, by the chairmen of education committees and managers of very modest abilities. Now, the binary line has gone, and this is the fate of the entire sector.

Asking why anyone who could bail out to the US doesn't do so in the face of all this is a bit like wondering why Marx never quite gave up on the revolution. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that rational human beings will go on making such a mess of a not entirely unmanageable system and on the other hand, anyone who worked in the system before it was wrecked finds it hard to walk away from the wreckage rather than hanging around to try to save something in the hope of better times ahead.

Alan Ryan
Warden
New College, Oxford