Swinnerton-Dyer and the UFC

We look below at a small sample of newspaper articles relating to Peter Swinnerton-Dyer's time at chair of the University Grants Committee (UGC) and University Funding Council (UFC). We have selected a sample that related to his dealings with the Scottish Universities, in particular with Aberdeen University. To put these into context, however, we present first a version of his paper Prospects for Higher Education which he gave in 1981, two years before becoming chair of the UGC.

1. Prospects for Higher Education.

P Swinnerton-Dyer, Prospects for Higher Education, London Review of Books 3 (21) (1981).

The election of the present Government abruptly halted, and indeed reversed, the growth in Higher Education which everyone in the profession had become accustomed to over the last twenty years. The policy of charging 'full economic cost' fees to overseas students, the 8 per cent cut in support for universities announced in the last Budget, 'capping the pool' for polytechnics and the more recent cuts in that pool, and the cuts in support for technical colleges and similar bodies which have been forced on local authorities by the budgetary ceilings imposed by central government, will all lead to a reduction in the number of students and to a bigger reduction in the number of staff and in the facilities provided. My impression is that the cuts were meant to fall equally on all sectors of Higher Education, and no one has enough information to judge whether in fact they did so. I shall be concerned here largely with the university sector, because that is the one which I know best: but any planning for the future will have to look at Higher Education (indeed perhaps all post-18 education) as a whole, and not at universities in isolation.

The cuts of the last two years may form part of a plan for Higher Education, or they may simply be a gut reaction to excessive government spending. If there is a plan, it has been well hidden - but doctors often apply a cure without telling the patient what it is. Nevertheless, I believe that those in Higher Education need themselves to produce a realistic plan for what should happen, in the hope of thereby influencing the next government, and to produce forecasts of what is likely to happen, so that we can minimise the damage that contraction will cause. An Alliance or Labour government may be more sympathetic in principle to Education than the present one appears to be: but it will be just as intent on reforming the present system. Some resources may be put back into the system after, or even just before, the next election, though the economic situation will not make that easy: but no foreseeable government will allow us to use those resources simply to restore the system we know and love.

Not everyone would share these views. Indeed, many leading figures in British universities maintain that at present all forecasts are damaging: for any realistic forecast must be gloomy, and gloomy forecasts are apt to be self-fulfilling. They believe that the way to minimise damage to the university system is to carry on all our activities as usual, and to react to external pressures as little and as late as possible: that policy will avoid unnecessary sacrifices, and may lead to the cuts imposed on the system being smaller than they would otherwise have been.

I believe that this hope is vain and that any policy based on it is foolish; and that those universities which follow it will do themselves unnecessary damage. Universities cannot hope to pass through the next few years unchanged, and we shall all have to learn to live with less resources than we have become accustomed to. What we are facing is not just a squall that will soon die away, and to come through the impending storm we shall need to lighten the ship. We shall have to cut away some things that are in themselves good, in order to be sure of preserving what is excellent. Because the cuts that will be needed can only be brought about gradually, we need to consider now which cuts should be made and we need to start implementing them as soon as possible; we cannot afford to wait until it is evident to all of us that the situation is desperate. It can be argued that the least damaging cut would be to close some universities and leave the rest unscathed: but whatever its merits, that is a policy that could not realistically be implemented. Each university will suffer cuts, and will have to choose between a drop in its standards and a decrease in its range of interests: to avoid the first alternative, it will have to accept the second.

In forecasting the constraints and changes which seem likely to be imposed on the university system, I am not implying that I welcome them, or even that I think they will necessarily do the system good. Even when I suggest how we should react to these constraints and changes, I am doing no more than to suggest which of the choices open to us is the least damaging.

The two major concerns of any university are teaching and research. It is not possible to divide up the expenditure of a university explicitly between teaching and research, saying that this item is for teaching and that item is for research. Nevertheless, one can tell roughly what the balance is, and in particular one can tell if the balance is shifting over the years. In the last seven years, the period of declining resources, the balance has shifted towards teaching and away from research. Universities have increased their teaching staff and the range of subjects they cover: but in real terms they have decreased spending on libraries, on equipment and on consumables. This has been the easiest path to follow: pressure both from students and from unions is for more teaching and more jobs. It takes some time for the price of such a policy to become evident. But the price, in the gradual collapse of scientific research in some universities, is becoming evident just at the time when the policy has become far harder to reverse

A university has two major sources of income: on the one hand, the UGC grant and that other income (mainly from fees and endowment) which the UGC takes into account when it determines its grant; on the other hand, research grants and contracts. The first of these two sources is meant to make full provision for teaching and to provide basic facilities for research: but much of the cost of expensive research projects is met by grants from the Research Councils or by other similar means. This is the so-called 'dual support system', which worked well for a long time. Recently it has been crumbling as universities find themselves less and less able to provide a well-equipped basis for research. Research Councils have done what they can to take over costs which universities would formerly have met from the UGC grant, but their real income is not increasing and in any case there is a limit to what they can properly do. Ministers have made it clear that the cuts in recent years are meant to fall on the costs of teaching and not on research. The best evidence that this is their real intention, and not merely what they find it convenient to say, is that, in a period in which virtually every controllable part of Government expenditure has been reduced, the total income of the Research Councils has been left in real terms almost unchanged. It is true that the cuts that have been imposed must fall on research as well as on teaching, because of the way they have been made: but I believe this to be because Ministers do not really understand how universities work, and that is to be ascribed to the almost total collapse of communication between universities and government.

A year ago, the major financial problem for universities seemed to be the loss of income - and the uncertainty of income - that followed from the Government's new policy on overseas students' fees. Despite considerable pressure from inside this country, and from other Commonwealth countries, that policy remains wholly unchanged; and there is nothing to suggest that any likely future government will change it - though we can reasonably hope that a different government will put more money into bursaries for deserving overseas students. In the coming year a few universities will be charging overseas students what they estimate to be the full cost of teaching them. It must be emphasised that this is not the same thing as the 'full economic cost' in the sense which the Government has put upon that phrase. It would be unreasonable to charge overseas students not only the cost of teaching them but also a proportionate share of the cost of maintaining adequate research facilities. Nevertheless the Government's arithmetic assumes that universities should charge overseas students this share also, and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals have been so choked with moral indignation that they have felt unwilling to argue over definitions. Thus even if all universities were to charge overseas students fees based on the principles which underlie the Government's action, the research base in the universities would have been inadvertently cut by 12 per cent.

A year ago, the then Secretary of State said that throughout this decade he expected to be able to provide, so far as home students were concerned, for constant student numbers and for constant unit income in real terms. It was not long before that expectation was abandoned. Last Christmas he announced that in the next year there would be a 3½ per cent cut in the grant to universities, additional to the cut which followed from the new policy on overseas students' fees; and at Easter he announced that that 3½ per cent cut was only the first part of an 8 per cent cut spread over three years. The total cut in university income over these three years is now estimated at between 11 and 15 per cent - and to me the higher figure seems the more plausible.

The immediate cause of this latest cut is, of course, the present economic crisis and the need to cut that part of public expenditure over which the Government has some control. But it is worth looking deeper than that, for we must hope that the crisis will eventually ease, and we need to assess whether these cuts are likely to be, at least in part, restored. In my view, they will not be restored. The grant to universities has been at risk for some years, and it is probably only the momentum common to all spending programmes which has prevented it from being cut earlier. The clearest evidence of this is the lack of any protest, except for ritual noises from the TUC, from outside university circles. To explain why this is, it is necessary to go back into recent history.

The British university system, in its present form, is the child of the Robbins Report, and more particularly of the Robbins Principle. It does not now matter what Lord Robbins actually said, or what he meant: what he was taken to mean was that every 18-year-old with two A levels who wished to go to university should be enabled to do so. There have never been quite enough university places to achieve this, but the growth in places has very nearly matched the growth in demand; and it is only in the last two or three years that the wisdom of this policy has been challenged. Part of the case for the policy was based on social justice, but it was also widely claimed that a massive expansion of university education was the key to national prosperity.

It did not work out like that. The failure to produce prosperity might have been shrugged off: there have been many recipes for prosperity and none of them has succeeded. But the much publicised troubles at the end of the Sixties led ordinary people to doubt whether all those who were getting a university education deserved it or gained from it; and the support which all too many academics gave to rioting and disruption undermined the respect which universities had previously enjoyed. In particular, it made it acceptable, as it had not previously been, to question the way in which universities organised themselves. At the same time, there were beginning to be doubts whether economic growth could be indefinitely sustained, and expansion had caused the cost of the university system to rise to a level at which economies might save a significant sum.

It was in this context that Shirley Williams, as Minister of State for Education, put forward her 13 points. These were possible measures of economy, put forward as the first step towards a rational dialogue with universities. They were brusquely rejected, in terms which made it clear that universities did not intend to discuss their affairs with outsiders. How foolish that was has gradually become clear. It has left the widespread view, both in Westminster and in Whitehall, that the university system is not to be moved by reasoned argument, and that British universities are as wastefully organised and as feather-bedded as British Rail or British Steel. Some more recent events - the reception of the Atkinson Report on Russian Studies, for example - have reinforced that view. The money at stake in the Atkinson proposals was trivial. But the Report was seen as a symbol, and the way in which it was treated may have cost universities dear.

So I do not regard the recent cuts merely as an aspect of an economy drive. I think they reflect a belief that the university system needs to reform itself, and the only way in which it can be forced to reform itself is by financial pressure. Those who are applying the pressure do not know what reforms are needed, any more than they did for those nationalised industries which have been given the same treatment. But they will know whether there are changes or not, and if there are none, the screw can be tightened further. Perhaps no other government would have been resolute enough to embark on this course: but no likely government will reverse it.

If this is so, it is not a matter of making ends meet until better times come. Every university will have to reduce its expenditure to match its diminished income; and though reserves may provide a little help, this reduction must be done painfully quickly. There are in fact two distinct problems: to cut expenditure in the next two or three years by whatever means are possible, and to decide what the long-term shape of a more economical university system should be and how by the end of the decade to achieve that shape. Most universities, it seems, will have no option but to dismiss tenured academic staff, despite the problems which that poses and the bitterness and divisiveness which it will engender. What the cost of such action will be, no one can yet be sure; and no one will be sure until cases are taken all the way to the House of Lords. The costs may vary dramatically from one university to another, depending how the Statutes of the university happen to have been drafted. Some of the figures now being rumoured will be not merely beyond the capacity of a university to pay but beyond what is politically acceptable in comparison with redundancy payments in other walks of life. If the rumours are right, the problem will rebound into the lap of government - but not that of the present government, since no case seems likely to reach the House of Lords until after the next general election.

Tenure was created and is defended for the protection of academic freedom, but it looks increasingly as if it is for the protection of jobs. Compensation for the dismissal of tenured academic staff will be seen as what in more vulgar forms of employment is known as 'buying out the rule-book'. No academic can be blamed for trying to drive the hardest bargain he can. But a new government, faced with a bill of perhaps £200 million because of the ill-thought-out actions of its predecessor, may conclude that there is an alternative both politically and economically more acceptable. This would be an Act of Parliament retrospectively abolishing tenure, together with a compensation scheme for those dismissed which would probably be no more than comparable with whatever other redundancy schemes the Government was operating at the time. This is not an attractive prospect, but it is a possibility which it would be foolish to ignore.

Tenure, in the strong form which it takes in Britain, has already come under fire - partly because it has been put forward as the reason why universities cannot make quick economies. I am not one of those who would defend the British system of tenure: indeed the advantages to universities or to scholarship that are claimed for it seem to me disproved by the evidence of other countries. In America, whose system is the closest to ours, it takes on the average seven years from obtaining a PhD to being considered for tenure; and half of those who are considered do not get tenure. Even when in America tenure is achieved, there are escape clauses: a university can get rid of tenured staff if it lacks the money to pay them, or if it wishes to close down a whole activity. In most Western countries, the position is even more flexible. To most of its academic staff the university is in the position of any other good employer: it hopes to retain them permanently, it will pay them reasonable compensation if it fails to do so, but it gives them no absolute assurance. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that about one-third of British universities do not have tenure: staff are indeed appointed to retiring age, but that appointment is subject to one year's notice. I have not seen in those universities the evils which tenure is meant to avert.

Moreover those who defend tenure, as implemented in this country, have two particular difficulties to face. The first is the inadequacy of the evidence on which it is given. Initial appointments are for a three-year probationary period, with tenure following if that period is successfully completed. In fact, the decision on tenure has to be taken within two years of first appointment, and the pressures to give tenure are so strong that it is seldom refused. To be able to assess, on at most two years' evidence, that someone deserves to be employed in an exacting job for the next 40 years in absolute security would be remarkable; and it is no wonder that some of the decisions have turned out indifferently. Cambridge, uniquely, is free from this fault. The existence of Assistant Lectureships, which are necessarily transitory and from which it is no disgrace not to be promoted, does mean that tenure is only given to scholars of some maturity.

The other difficulty is at the other end of a career. In every branch of learning, maturity has advantages as well as disadvantages: for some of them, indeed, maturity is essential. So it is no surprise that some academics are still making valuable contributions to teaching and research at an age when they would have been forced to retire from most other kinds of employment. But not all academics age so slowly, and there is no other profession in which it is as easy as in universities to hold one's job while no longer doing it properly. If tenure is to continue at all, it needs to be combined with a substantially lower retiring age. A university could continue to employ, on either a whole-time or a part-time basis, those who had reached retiring age but were still active and vigorous: but it would no longer have to continue to employ those who were not.

A permanent reduction of the retiring age, effective immediately, would also achieve that reduction in staff numbers which government cuts have imposed on the university system - and in human terms it may well be the least cruel way of doing so. But it is essential that the reduction in the retiring age should be permanent. Many people within universities are advocating meeting the present crisis by the premature retirement of the older staff, and then carrying on as usual. The consequence of this would be that, once the immediately needed cut in the academic staff had been achieved, there would be no further retirements and therefore no new appointments for a decade. Teaching may survive a decade with no new blood, but research certainly will not: such a policy would be the sure path to mediocrity for our whole university system.

Professor D S Jones, the Chairman of the UGC Mathematics sub-committee, has put forward for his own subject a quite different policy for deciding which academic staff should be shed. He points out that the great expansion of the Sixties meant that far more academics were recruited then - and that consequently the standards of those recruited were lower - than at any time before or since. University teachers who were recruited then are now in their late thirties or early forties, and are not so old as to make a change of career impossible. Moreover, while Government policy will not allow the universities to employ as many teaching staff as they do now, there is a desperate shortage of mathematics teachers in schools and sixth-form colleges. It is therefore university teachers in their late thirties and early forties who should be made redundant, because there are other jobs for them in which their talents will be just as valuable, whereas if older people are made redundant there is nothing but retirement open to them. These arguments may not be applicable to all subjects, but they have a wider relevance than to mathematics alone.

Further off, but likely to have an even greater effect on the university system, are the potential changes in post-compulsory education. Until recently, education beyond the age of 16 was organised primarily for the benefit of the top 15 per cent of the age group - those who could hope to go to university. Others could stay in the system, but they had to get what benefit they might from a system that was not primarily designed for them. The emphasis is now shifting towards the needs of the top 50 per cent: a new Robbins Principle is coming to birth - that anyone who would benefit from education beyond the age of 16, and wishes for it, should be provided with it in some form. The forms may be very diverse, and they will be more oriented towards the needs of employment than the original Robbins Principle envisaged: indeed it is significant how often the phrase 'education and training' is now used.

This has implications for A levels, for, however good they may be as preparation for those who plan to enter universities, they constrain education between 16 and 18 in a way that is unsatisfactory for an increasing proportion of those who experience it. There have already been attempts to reform A levels so as to broaden that stage of education. Those attempts failed because of the practical flaws in the proposals; and the flaws may well have been there because the proposals were half-hearted. Future schemes will be more radical. Universities are deeply conservative bodies; arguments against change, and statements that there still remains scope for further discussion, will always find a ready hearing in them. But in this matter change is inescapable, and how much say universities have in that change will depend on how constructive a part in the debate they choose to play. There is nothing inviolable about our system of A levels: indeed there is no other major country in the world which has the degree of specialisation between 16 and 18 that we do. Universities have a particular duty to protect the interests of the brightest schoolchildren. For them, it is vital that their education should be sufficiently demanding to stretch their abilities and retain their interest: but it is not nearly so vital what the content of that education is.

More generally, we must recognise that universities will be less dominant in British education than they have been accustomed to be. Universities do a good job for those students who come to them: the problem is that a system which has been built around them does not provide what the less good students need. We would be wise to accept that there must be changes in the national system of education, and that universities will have to change too if they are to serve their students in the new system as well as they have served them in the old. What we face is not the emasculation of Higher Education in this country, unless by our own folly and intransigence we make it so. But we do face great changes, and it is natural for those who have grown accustomed to things as they are to be apprehensive of what may come. For all we know, the caterpillar may view with equal apprehension his inescapable transformation into a butterfly.

2.Newspaper reports

2.1. Dons' Campaign 'Waste of Time': Wednesday 3 June 1987.

J Duckers, Aberdeen Press and Journal (Wednesday 3 June 1987), 1.

Aberdeen University's financial crisis hit a new low yesterday, as the insults flew.

Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, chairman of the University Grants Committee, the national funding body for universities, claimed the Senate's 100-redundancy survival plan was a "waste of time".

Association of University Teachers president Mr John Chartres accused Sir Peter of treating Aberdeen with complete contempt, while Prof Paul Wilkinson, one of the leading backers of the Senate proposals, claimed Sir Peter was trying to use the university as a "guinea pig" for the 40-week academic year advocated by Principal George McNicol.

Meanwhile, attempts are in hand to clip the Principal's wings in future UGC meetings.

The AUT said a move would be made at next week's Senate meeting to have a team of senior university figures carry out future negotiations rather than just the Principal himself.

The latest developments follow the University Court's refusal to back Prof McNicol's radical plan and their decision instead to support the Senate proposals.

The Principal met Sir Peter in London on Thursday to discuss the Senate scheme and yesterday a letter in response from Sir Peter was released by the Principal.

In it he accuses the Senate working group, who drafted the proposals, of "wasting time in planning on an unrealistic basis".

He reiterates that extended transition money would only be available to a university if it produced a long-term plan to meet grant levels produced by a UGC formula, based on student numbers and research performance.

Sir Peter says the Senate proposals are not "even an attempt to satisfy this condition".

Saying he does not believe his committee would "shift their ground", he goes on: "I can assure you that we did most thoroughly and critically review the new method of funding before we agreed to adopt it.

"We have made public the principles on which the new method is based, and so far as I know, no one has suggested that there is anything seriously wrong with them.

"I have seen no evidence that Aberdeen is unfairly treated under the new method compared to other universities. It is, however, clear that under the old system Aberdeen had more favourable treatment than most universities.

"The reason for this appears to be that some time ago the grant to Aberdeen was increased in order to prepare for an increase in student numbers in due course.

"Changes in Government plans meant that the increase in student numbers never materialised, but the increased level of grant was inadvertently carried on from year to year. Now that anomaly must come to an end."

Prof McNicol said the letter was a "major disappointment" and warned it would have "serious implications" for the whole university.

He said it would be considered by the Senate and then by the Court.

Mr Chartres, on a long-planned visit to the university, said the letter treated Aberdeen with complete contempt.

He said it should be "simply ignored". It was a rebuff, but should not be considered a barrier to negotiations. He said he was astonished by its severity and hard line.

Mr Chartres accused Sir Peter of a number of "dishonest" statements in his letter.

Sir Peter claimed Aberdeen was not being unfairly treated, but would not recognise the university's remoteness meant extra costs, or that past funding levels meant a particularly difficult adjustment. Sir Peter claimed the UGC funding formula had not been seriously challenged when in fact it had been shown to be "seriously flawed".

The results for Aberdeen were "potentially disastrous", leaving it worse off than many English polytechnics. No recognisable university would be left.

Prof Wilkinson said the UGC letter was "extremely peremptory and unacceptable".

He accused Sir Peter of ignoring a whole weight of academic and scientific opinion which had drawn attention to "gaping gaps" in the committee's funding formula.

He had used "weasel words" on transitional funding. If such money was available for an extended period, it would allow the university to adjust to the new grant levels while allowing it to gain extra cash through an improved research effort and a greater link-up with industry and commerce.

Prof Wilkinson warned: "The terms of the letter and the speed with which it has been sent seem to indicate a greater degree of involvement by the chairman of the UGC in intervention in the internal affairs of a university than has ever been publicly recognised or admitted.

"He has been holding a funding gun at the university's head to try to get us to be the guinea pig for this 40-week teaching year."

There had been no fat left since the 1981 cuts, yet the "myth" persisted.

2.2. Gloom over campus cash: Tuesday 23 June 1987.

C MacDonald, Aberdeen Press and Journal (Tuesday 23 June 1987), 1.

The prospect of Aberdeen University getting extra funding without accepting the widely-unpopular proposal of a 40-week teaching year looked remote last night.

A flying visit by the chairman of the University Grants Committee, Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, brought little relief to the financially-troubled campus.

He told staff and students at meetings during the day: "I don't think the funding given to Aberdeen University is unfair."

But he repeated his message that if the university moved towards the extended academic year originally suggested by Principal Prof George McNicol, then "transitional funding" of more than £2,000,000 would be made available.

Recent market research indicated that relatively few future students would be attracted by the 40-week year.

Sir Peter spent several hours in talks with the university Senate and Court, and officials from the Aberdeen Association of University Teachers and the Students' Representative Council.

Some comments afterwards described the meetings as "depressing" and "a waste of time".

Sir Peter told a Press conference later he had heard no convincing arguments which would persuade the UGC that the Senate working party's proposals involving about 100 job losses and major internal reorganisation - could be funded.

"These proposals simply ask for more money without good reason. If we were to provide more money, Aberdeen would carry rather less of the misery caused by declining Government provision in real terms, and we would have to ask other universities to carry rather more of the misery.

"The proposals would mean postponing decisions, something academics are very good at. But there is a cost in postponing decisions, and it's not a habit the UGC are in the business of encouraging."

Sir Peter added: "If the university wish to go down the path of an extended teaching year, then it would be quite wrong for us to veto it. We could provide appropriate funding for that path."

This would amount to more than £2,000,000 from 1989-90 as bridging finance. Although this would mean a higher level of funding for Aberdeen, the cost to the taxpayer for each graduate would be reduced, because more students could complete their degrees in a shorter time.

The chairman said they had not taken account of any specific Scottish factors in deciding Aberdeen's block grant, but pointed out the traditional four-year Scottish honours degree cost about 30% more than its three-year English equivalent.

"If the Government are thinking in terms of allocating money per capita, then they are paying more here than in England," he said.

Aberdeen's strong regional role "did not cut much ice with Ministers," said Sir Peter.

He added, in response to a suggestion that Scottish Secretary Mr Malcolm Rifkind might ask for more money for Aberdeen: "If we were asked by politicians to take account of a regional dimension in a funding model, we could reasonably ask to see the colour of their money."

Prof McNicol declined to give an immediate reaction last night on what he called "a complex day of talks".

But Dr Jim Mellis, an official of the lecturers' union, said their talks with Sir Peter had been "a waste of time", and Prof Paul Wilkinson was one of several academics who called the day's events "depressing".

The chairman's visit appeared to have confirmed the private view of some on the campus that the UGC are very keen to see Aberdeen adopt the 40-week teaching year.

The university Court are scheduled to meet today.

2.3. Facing up to the university challengers: Tuesday 8 September 1987.

D McLeod, The Scotsman (Tuesday 8 September 1987), 11.

Donald McLeod, Education Correspondent, interviews Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, the man in charge of funding Britain's universities.

Facing up to the university challengers.

Sir Peter plays bridge rather well, I imagine. At any rate he has done so to international standard. He says - and means it - that this has stood him in better stead than his academic career when it came to being chairman of the University Grants Committee.

The UGC's small office in an elegant crescent near Regent's Park, London, is the principal source of income for all British universities. In this game we are talking about £100,000 a point, but the full extent of what is at stake is incalculable: the health of our universities, with all that means for the future of the country.

In an ideal world (or the US) universities would have everything they needed in the way of staff, equipment and buildings. As things stand after the great post-war expansion in the UK they face a period of contraction a process that is likely to be particularly painful in Scotland with its distinctive tradition.

In this drama Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer - though so obviously suited by shape and manner to be Father Christmas - has been cast in the role of Scrooge. There have been times during his four years as chairman when the academic boos and hisses have risen in crescendo from the stalls. This summer was one such occasion when he descended on Aberdeen and told them that they were talking humbug.

Are the sweeping changes now visible on the horizon inevitable, or the result of unsympathetic policies by the Thatcher Treasury? Certainly there were academic critics who accused the UGC of not standing up to the Government enough. Now, however, the Government is abolishing it and replacing it with what many fear will be a more tightly controlled body, the University Funding Council. Perhaps Kenneth Baker, the Education Secretary, decided that Sir Peter was taking too many tricks and decided to deal himself a new hand. ...

Meanwhile it is not just the eight Scottish universities that look anxiously to this Cambridge professor of mathematics as the man who wields summary powers of financial execution or reprieve. The barrage of conflicting claims must be intimidating. How does he cope?

His approach has been to establish clear guidelines by which universities are to be judged, both on their teaching and research. It is what academics like Sir Peter call a methodology - but what a bridge player would recognise as the rules of the game. Feed in the mass of information about biochemistry at Dundee and botany at Durham, urban design at Edinburgh and English at East Anglia and so on and out comes a list of winners and losers.

Scotland as a whole did badly last year and, despite the changes afoot, there seems little likelihood of it doing much better in the coming round. A Scottish committee of the UGC will be set up before Christmas, chaired by a businessman. For, as Sir Peter caustically remarked: "This Government believes that no body that does not have a majority of businessmen is competent to run anything."

In fact this committee will have a majority of academics, including the UGC's two Scottish members, Mr David Semple, Lothian Region's Director of Education, and Professor Thomas Douglas, of Glasgow University. How the Scottish committee will function when the University Funding Council takes over from the UGC (probably in April 1989) is still the subject of negotiation between the Scottish Education Department and the Department of Education and Science in Whitehall.

Its members will receive "guidance" from the Scottish Secretary, as Mr Malcolm Rifkind has announced, and be expected to have regard to his views on higher education in Scotland. "These will, of course, be consistent with guidance given by my Rt Hon Friend to the Universities Funding Council," he told Parliament. (Tell that to the marine biologists ...)

Given the very private workings of the UGC, it is difficult to predict what influence a Scottish committee, would have, if any. As Sir Peter said: "We have a reasonable idea of what will be intolerable to Government and the cases where I can persuade the Government. A great deal goes on in private - and has more influence because it goes on in private. If it was in public, Ministers would say, 'Oh they had to say that because their constituency expects them to."

But when it comes to the poor ratings of most Scottish universities according to the new UGC methodology, Sir Peter is unrepentant; they have done badly because of their weakness in research and because they were over-favoured in the past, he claims.

To determine a university department's future funding for research, the UGC attempted to assess the quality of work being done - basically how it was regarded by others working in that field. As far as teaching was concerned, it was more of a head count - the ratio of staff to students which tended to favour large departments. Scottish universities have in the past formed a lot of small departments in order to offer a wider range of subjects.

Sir Peter said: "If staff/student ratios are uneconomic, it is expensive to run a subject for a small number of students. Ministers have decided that we are not going to do things expensively, and that is the root of the pressure for bigger departments.

"A small university like St Andrews or Aberystwyth has to be more limited in the number of areas that it covers than it has been.

"It all comes down to the size of the cake. If you wish to run the higher education system with maximal efficiency and economy then St Andrews cannot go on running in the way in which it has been accustomed," he added.

Hence the pressure from the UGC on struggling Dundee to seek some sort of merger with St Andrews and Stirling. "It is fairly ridiculous that Dundee and St Andrews ever split. Local political jealousies gave rise to the split and prevent it being glued together," said Sir Peter, who sees Dundee becoming more and more a technological university.

He added: "We have been trying to persuade Dundee, St Andrews and Stirling that a very considerable degree of collaboration must represent their most comfortable future. It is for them to try and work it out."

In Aberdeen the university's problems were compounded by the fact that extra staff and facilities were funded to permit an expansion to 10,000 students. The students never arrived but the "bonus," as Sir Peter calls it, continued to be paid by the UGC.

The solution put forward by the Principal, Professor George McNicol, involving a change to three-year courses and a 40-week year, was greeted with horror by his staff. Sir Peter strongly denies that the UGC was trying to push it.

The alternative plan put forward by the university staff - the "Senate Plan" - was immediately written off as unrealistic by Sir Peter because it ran counter to the new methodology. "It is unrealistic to spend more money than you are going to get," he said flatly. The only concession the UGC was prepared to consider was a longer transition period for the cuts.

As to the argument that Aberdeen University held a special place in its region, Sir Peter said he was "thoroughly sceptical." He commented: "It is perfectly clear that the UGC is not funded to take account of that and in any case in what sense does Aberdeen have regional responsibilities that Exeter or East Anglia or Hull or Lancaster don't have?"

Small departments and small universities may well feel threatened already, but worse is to come. The Government will soon be considering a plan put forward by the Advisory Board for the Research Councils to concentrate research on a limited number of universities - 15 is the figure mentioned - with the rest being funded for a restricted amount of research or as purely teaching institutions.

The UGC will be commenting on this plan next month and Sir Peter certainly would not be drawn when asked how many Scottish Universities were likely to be in the top tier. But he seems fairly sympathetic to the thinking behind the ABRC proposals.

"The best academics are going to demand the opportunity to do research but that does not say that research is essential to the quality of teaching. The Central Institutions and the polytechnics certainly teach as well as the universities do," he said.

Not everyone could have equipment costing £14 million, he pointed out, and there was bound to be a concentration of expensive types of research. "What exactly the implications of that are it is not easy to work out, but within any major science there are still cheap and important areas of research."

But wasn't scientific discovery too unpredictable to limit in this way? "The progress is still made by the bright people who tend to cluster together - good people tend to concentrate themselves," said Sir Peter.

The trouble is that so many bright people are going abroad because of a desperate shortage of academic jobs. Sir Peter is more concerned about the loss of young academics who cannot get started on the ladder than the defection of the occasional well-known name.

As he contemplated another year as chairman of the UGC before returning to Cambridge, Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer reflected: "This is not a job that encourages optimism."

2.4. Lectures' fury at attack on teaching: Friday 15 April 1988.

J McLeish, Aberdeen Evening Express (Friday 15 April 1988), 3.

Aberdeen lecturers are outraged at criticisms of university teaching standards by the chairman of the University Grants Committee.

In a forthright speech Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer warned that universities must get rid of bad teachers who refuse to improve.

"Most academics in post have never been taught to teach and, my God, it shows," Sir Peter said during a visit to Dundee earlier this week.

"You can't always guarantee successful research, but you should be able to ensure your next lecture is a good one.

"Academics who are not prepared to do that and adamantly refuse to improve have to be got rid of. There is no other sensible policy," Sir Peter said.

Aberdeen University lecturers have reacted furiously to the remarks with a bitter attack on Sir Peter's record as chairman of the UGC, the universities' funding body.

And President of the Association of University Teachers in Aberdeen, Dr Paul Whiting has defended the high teaching standards in the North East.

"While he has been chairman higher education in this country has been subject to the worst attack of this century.

"We look to him to support us and to fight for higher education and for appropriate funding. He is not there to come out with silly statements which at best can only damage the profession," said Dr Whiting.

"Aberdeen is an excellent university. And we need Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer at the UGC like we need a hole in the head. His record is lousy."

"We are continually updating our teaching and we take great cognisance of what our students want. We are always canvassing their opinions about how the teaching is done.

"We are not there to sack people. We are there to make sure they develop their full potential. His comments are quite strange.

"He comes from a Cambridge maths department where they just have tutorials they don't have lectures. I don't think he is in a position to criticise." Dr Whiting added.

"He knows as well as I do we are in the middle of discussing appraisal schemes where the full views of everyone concerned will be taken into account," he said.

2.5. Double boost on university crisis: Thursday 8 December 1988.

C MacDonald, Double boost on university crisis, Press and Journal (Thursday 8 December 1988), 3.

Aberdeen University last night looked set to emerge from a two-year trough of critical financial problems and heated debate over plans for the future.

Members of the university senate voted overwhelmingly in favour of proposals to save £2 million a year in expenditure with the probable loss of 35 academic jobs.

And the chairman of the University Grants Committee gave a broad hint that a £5 million rescue package would be made available to Aberdeen over the next four years.

Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer said that although he was unable to sanction the special assistance, he would give the plan his personal backing.

It now remains only for Aberdeen's court to accept the proposals at their meeting next Tuesday, but this is regarded as a virtual certainty.

Yesterday's senate was called to discuss a report pre-pared by independent consultants Segal Quince Wicksteed. who were commissioned to examine the university's financial affairs.

They warned of a "chronic" imbalance between income and expenditure, which could lead to a £12.5 million running deficit by 1992 unless urgent corrective action was taken.

Their report recommended a need to cut costs, improve research income, and update management structures. And they urged the UGC to provide extra grant aid, conditional on the university meeting pre-set "benchmarks".

Aberdeen's Principal, Prof George McNicol, met Sir Peter earlier this week, and returned with a letter, copies of which were distributed at yesterday's meeting.

In it, the UGC chairman says: "I intend to recommend to the committee that the consultants' proposals for conditional financial support should be accepted en bloc, providing they are accepted in the same terms by the university."

Sir Peter says that, on "a matter of this importance", he does not have the power to commit either the UGC, nor their successors next spring, the Universities Funding Council.

However, he is due to take up the post of chief executive with the new body, and it is considered highly unlikely that he would be prepared to give personal support to the proposals without a reasonable degree of certainty that the committee would endorse his view.

The UGC will discuss the consultants' report on January 19.

Prof McNicol said after the senate meeting, where the proposals were accepted with no opposition and only a small number of abstentions: "Provided we do what we have committed ourselves to do, we should have no accumulated deficit by 1992, and we will have income and expenditure in balance.

"While we have formidable problems to address over the next year or two, yesterday's letter and today's decision are very good news for the university.

"There is a clear and sensible way ahead opening up for us, and there is every evidence that the university are, as a whole, going to address the problems and opportunities imaginatively and constructively."

The Principal said there had been no discussion of where jobs might be lost, with much of the debate centring on the recommendation for a new joint court-senate policy and resources committee, scheduled to be established by the end of next month.

There had been fears, he said, that it would take authority away from the university's traditional decision-making bodies.

2.6. 'Anti-Scottish' remarks spark academic row: Friday 19 May 1989.

B Christie, The Scotsman (Friday 19 May 1989), 9.

Scottish control was demanded yesterday for Scottish universities after what were described as intemperate and ignorant anti-Scottish remarks reportedly made by the chief executive of the Universities Funding Council.

Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer was quoted in a newspaper report as saying that Aberdeen University had been moaning too much about funding cuts and that Edinburgh University had a "lousy" dental school which is the most expensive in Britain.

Rectors and the elected student presidents of the eight Scottish universities met in Edinburgh yesterday and issued a statement condemning the reported comments. The group, which includes the Edinburgh University rector Muriel Gray, the Aberdeen rector Willis Pickard and his Dundee counterpart Paul Scott, said, "It has long been obvious from the actions of the University Grants Committee that they are ignorant of the traditions and conditions of the Scottish universities and prejudiced against them.

"Sir Peter has now made this anti-Scottish prejudice explicit. He says he is cynical about the Scots because he was born in Northumberland, whatever that might mean. He then goes on to abuse the Edinburgh Dental School and Aberdeen University in language which is not only intemperate and unjustifiable, but shows a complete ignorance of the position.

"Both the students and university teachers have recently called for Scottish control of Scottish universities. Sir Peter's remarks clearly reveal how urgent and essential this change now is."

Sir Peter, who was chairman of the University Grants Committee before it was replaced by the Funding Council, is out of the country.

The dean of the dental school, Prof Philip Sutcliffe, also reacted to Sir Peter's comments, saying that he found them surprising given that the high standards of teaching and patient care in Edinburgh had been acknowledged by the UGC. He said that had been achieved "despite the desperately poor accommodation in the existing dental hospital.

"Over 90,000 patient consultations a year take place in cramped conditions no longer suitable for modern dental practice. University staff provide essential specialised treatment for patients referred from all over south-east Scotland including the elderly, children with facial deformity and cleft palate, patients with cancer of the mouth and those with HIV infection."

2.7. Ignorance beggaring belief: Sunday 21 May 1989.

W Pickard, Scotland on Sunday (Sunday 21 May 1989), 10.

[To put this in context we note that Willis Pickard was editor of the Times Educational Supplement Scotland from 1979 to 2001 and Rector of Aberdeen University from 1988 to 1990.]

As readers of C P Snow's novels are aware, the dagger is often inserted in university politics, but usually under a veil of suave politeness. Therefore it was all the more startling last week that a university bureaucrat, Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who is chief executive of the new Universities Funding Council, should label an academic department "lousy" and complain that another Scottish institution had been "moaning".

Sir Peter, who is largely responsible for deciding the destination of millions of government money to individual universities and who, in his similar role at the old University Grants Committee, masterminded the cuts which so affected the Scottish universities, was reported as claiming that "lousy" is the adjective applicable to Edinburgh University's dental school. Aberdeen, he went on, would not be as good as Edinburgh or Glasgow universities for at least 100 years.

Well, it may be said, if the man believes it, should he not say it publicly? Better that than bottling up his resentments and uncorking them for the ears only of principals and vice-chancellors.

But the arrogance and ignorance of Sir Peter beggar belief. And therefore for his own sake and for such remnants of respectability as remain about the way in which our universities are governed from south of the Border, he should have kept his mouth shut.

He condemns Edinburgh's dental school without pausing to think that one of his own colleagues on the UFC, Sir Donald McCallum, is conducting a review of dental provision in Scotland. Talk about conspiring to prejudice the issue ... in the last days of the UGC Sir Peter was responsible for getting Aberdeen University an extra £5m to help that battered establishment reassert itself. As rector of Aberdeen I know that the process is under way, painful though it is. What confidence therefore can the staff and students expect to have when the chief funder puts off full recovery for a century?

Clearly he is out of touch with the North-east. He is reported as saying that for Aberdeen to sell off its buildings, as it is doing, is like selling refrigerators to Eskimos. In fact, the property market in the city has so recovered that houses which the university has recently sold went for well above their valuation.

If Aberdeen has "moaned" about its treatment, why not when the medicine man is so shamefully unbriefed and yet trails his prejudices behind him? Does he expect a university deeply embedded in its community and with a history of almost 500 years to take the potion uncomplainingly - and go to sleep for the 100 years which Sir Peter has prescribed?

The little point about property values, insignificant in itself, in fact tells the whole story. In Park Crescent, London, the UFC cannot be expected to know of conditions more than 500 miles away. The former UGC resolutely closed its ears to the argument that Aberdeen had a regional role, comparing it instead with similar-sized universities in, say, the English Midlands, where there are several within an hour's drive.

The lack of sensitivity to the Scottish position, so luridly highlighted by Sir Peter, underlines the need for our eight universities to be repatriated. They need to come under a funding council north of the Border, as was recommended four years ago by the Scottish Tertiary Education Advisory Council chaired by the same Sir Donald McCallum who is now peering into the dentists' mouth. Making the universities ultimately responsible to the Secretary of State for Scotland instead of to Mr Kenneth Baker would be sensible whether or not in time they come under a Scottish legislature.

At one time, academics feared devolution. Now the Association of University Teachers has come out in favour. As for Sir Peter's UFC, it is due to flit from London to Bristol. Scots would rather send it to Coventry.

2.8. Retiring chief blasts university funding: Thursday 28 March 1991.

D Fraser, The Scotsman (Thursday 28 March 1991).

By Douglas Fraser, Education Correspondent

A fierce attack against university funding was made yesterday by the man responsible for it during the past eight years.

Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, retiring this week as chief executive of the Universities Funding Council, also reversed his previous opposition to Scottish planning of Scottish universities.

Speaking to bosses of the centrally-funded Scottish institutions in Edinburgh, he was particularly harsh about last year's plan to have universities bidding against each other for their allocation of student places.

"The existing funding councils have made a monumental cock-up of their affairs over the last year," he said.

This "notorious planning exercise" had relied too much on market forces, he said. The system had been aborted because it had been defective in not seeing that students could not be seen as customers because they did not pay fees, and that universities could not be allowed to close for political reasons.

He claimed ministers had pressured him to save certain universities from bankruptcy.

The speech was a thinly veiled attacked on Lord Chilver, the UFC chairman, who was appointed by Margaret Thatcher to impose market forces on universities, and with whom Sir Peter is believed to have disagreed strongly in private. Sir Peter said "the Chilver pound" bidding system, by ignoring inflation, gave financial planning as much certainty as working in roubles or a South American currency.

Next week allocations of student numbers over three years are to be announced and Sir Peter indicated that those universities teaching students at the lowest cost would be allocated the biggest increases.

He also said the time had come for the Scottish Office to take over funding of Scottish universities, a reversal of his previous position. He argued it was "inevitable and desirable" that because English and Welsh universities were soon to be run from Bristol on the same basis as polytechnics, Scottish higher education should be planned by a parallel body north of the Border.

"There is little sense in transferring responsibility for the Scottish central institutions to Bristol," he said.

"Even if there were sense, it is politically out of the question. The general indignation in Scotland and the specific powers of resistance of the Scottish Office Education Department mean that nobody would take it seriously.

"It would also be politically impossible to put Scottish universities directly under the Scottish Office, so it is also unavoidable that there should be a Scottish higher education funding council with responsibility for the universities and the central institutions."

Sir Peter's criticisms of Government policy extended to the effect of health service reforms of hospitals used for teaching medical students.

"It is odds on, if present policies continue, that a major teaching hospital will become insolvent within five years," he said. "What most worries me is that that hospital will not just go under itself, but will carry the institution that goes with it." He added that this was more likely to happen in the south of England than in Scotland.

He also attacked the replacement in 1989 by the former education secretary, Kenneth Baker, of the University Grants Committee with the UFC. "In all the speeches Kenneth Baker made, he never once gave a plausible reason why the UGC had to be replaced by the UFC."

He said that in the dramatic move to mass higher education, it was likely that computer-aided learning should be developed. This would take very substantial investment to develop the right software, and funding councils should ensure that every institution adopted it to save on teaching resources.

2.9. Ten years of 'pain': Friday 5 July 1991.

Aberdeen Evening Express (Friday 5 July 1991).

Professor Sir Henry Swinnerton-Dyer OBE received an honorary Doctor of Law degree in recognition of his support for the university and university system. The ex-chairman of the Universities Grants Council is a former Professor of Maths at Cambridge University.

2.10. Voices of discontent as Sir Peter gets degree: Saturday 6 July 1991.

F Urquhart, Aberdeen Evening Express (Saturday 6 July 1991).

One of the most controversial honorary degrees conferred at Aberdeen University was yesterday awarded to Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, the former chairman of the University Grants Committee.

Sir Peter chaired the powerful funding body at the time of the university's acute financial crisis. There are some members of staff and officials who view Sir Peter as almost the saviour of Britain's most northerly academic institution and others who regard him as the bête noire of the university.

Four years ago, the UGC summarily dismissed a senate plea to increase funding for Aberdeen University by £2.5 million a year as part of a survival plan.

However, two years ago it was Sir Peter who recommended that the university should receive an extra £5 million in funding in a phased programme of support, following a study by a firm of independent financial consultants. It was too late to prevent 130 academic jobs being shed.

At yesterday's graduation ceremony at the Marischal College where Sir Peter was presented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, Professor George McNicol, the university principal, described him in his citation as "a friend of this university and the university system."

Prof McNicol continued: "His chairmanship of the UGC was characterised by rigorous logical analysis of the problems involved followed by the adoption of pragmatic, relevant and imaginative solutions which he saw through to implementation with determination, adroitness, and low cunning."

Rumours that some members of the academic staff would boycott the ceremony failed to materialise.

However, Dr John Sheehan, secretary of the Aberdeen branch of the Association of University Teachers, commented: "It is a great sadness to me that we are honouring Sir Peter at this time.'

Laura Edwards, senior vice-president of the Student Representative Council, said: "The reaction of students is one of disappointment."

Last Updated December 2025