Higher Education

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luce. I shall confine my remarks to my particular experience, with four years as the independent adjudicator for higher education. I also have an interest as former chair of admissions at Oxford, and head of St Anne’s at Oxford. In my capacity as adjudicator, I dealt with student complaints from 147 universities. I issued 1,400 decisions, with a disproportionate number of complaints from overseas and postgraduate students. From that perspective, I saw what could, and did, go wrong—but also what went right. I am filled with admiration for the wonderful job that our universities do, on a shoestring, for many times the number of students who attended when your Lordships were young. The expanded universities are now, however, a microcosm of the world outside, with all the diversity and problems to be found in the general population—disabilities, poverty, child care, lack of support and unfamiliarity with the system. I shall refer to two of the problems that I dealt with. Among overseas students, whom we value and on whom there is such heavy reliance, the Chinese educational culture is so different that we are ignoring, in our ignorance, the transition that we expect Chinese students to make when they are admitted here. Over there, there is a hierarchy with a veneration of professors, but no academic competition and no ownership as such of the wording of texts. Some of the books used are many hundreds of years old. They rely on the lecturer to help them, out of class. Yet when they come here, we are critical and independent, we have class-based teacher-student interaction and we regard plagiarism with horror, whereas they can scarcely understand or fathom what concerns us. Will the Chinese students adapt to our system or do we have to adapt to theirs? There is much to be said for the halfway house, for UK campuses to be found in China and the mentoring system. One dissatisfied Chinese student wrote to me, saying, ““As God is my witness, I thought British education was the best in the world””: but in his case, it had not been. The other problem I will refer to is the extremism and racial tension of society, which has reached campus and, indeed, may even start there. Some universities are failing to keep the peace on campus, even though that is the place for dialogue. The universities, and the University and College Union, have failed to get to grips with the guidance on good race relations and the avoidance of extremism issued by the DIUS and UUK. The UCU is an unprofessional union, and universities would do well to cease to recognise it and to deal with the alternatives. My own university, Oxford, tops the league tables. I am, therefore, distressed to have to note that in dealing with racism it has, like some other universities, apparently ignored the code of practice on freedom of speech and its obligations under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act and other acts controlling freedom of speech. When I complained, as others did, about the trouble caused by the presence of David Irving and the BNP representative at its union, the university spokesman replied that he was not in a position to know whether the university had complied with the law. It seems that it did not take the advice that it should have on the race relations obligations, and seemed unaware of the limits on freedom of speech, whether you like them or not, imposed by law. Along with other universities, it needs to study the law and its obligations, update the code of practice on freedom of speech and take action to promote good relations. The tools are there; the department should consolidate the guidance that applies to campus racism. Students should be told to whom to complain and be helped to do so. Before we go forward, we must take care of the problems of the students we have. I will conclude by paying my respect to teaching, above all, but also to research. I have frequently been stopped at railway stations and airports by former students who I barely recognise. They say, ““You taught me””, and they are grateful. That makes it all worthwhile, but no one has ever stopped me to say, ““Your research made all the difference””.