Endings and Beginnings
Whether it's the prospect of a return home in the not too distant future or the sight of Francis Pym alongside Alexander Haig so frequently in recent days, something has made me turn over in my mind the curious way in which my two great countries differ so much and yet stay so close. And it struck me that I might use my last column from this side to say something about higher education in a "here (Britain) and there (America)" context.
All of my contemporaries among my British friends have children in university, and visiting them has helped to remind me of the really significant differences between the system in which I studied and that within which I work between my alma mater and my alma mater adoptiva. Actually, the commencement ceremony which I hope to be back to Hanover in time for is one of the few points of basic similarity. Except that here we call it Degree Day, no one ever having had the imagination to see the concept embodied in the word we use there: the concept that one should concentrate at such a moment on the future rather than on the past.
Reading the weekly tales of woe in the education pages of the major daily newspapers, I have been made conscious again of one of the greatest contrasts in the two systems: the absence here of the private university. One ought to add, I suppose, that it isn t only Britain which differs from the States in this regard; in fact, the U.S. is very nearly unique in its maintenance of private institutions (by which, of course, one means institutions financed indirectly by public money through tax deductions rather than directly through treasury grants). I wonder from time to time how many Americans realize that even in Canada there is not a single private university to be found. Here the dependence on those direct infusions of government funds is an inescapable fact in these days of tight money. Austerity has meant that despondency hangs over all the universities here less favored parts of the educational system are even deeper into the slough with cuts in faculty an absolute certainty practically everywhere. Austerity combined with the fact that the minister of education and science seems to be Mrs. Thatcher's counterpart of Interior Secretary Watt when it comes to hard-nosed readiness to turn back the clock rather than merely slow it down.
The experiment of establishing an institution that would have nothing to do with government money the founding of the University College of Buckingham in 1973 seems to me almost an irrelevance, since nearly 80 per cent of its fewer than 400 students are foreigners; and if my friends' children's grapevine is reliable (and such things usually are) it has the reputation of being a "crammer" for would-be lawyers and for wealthy kids who are not bright enough to get into the regular universities. And its small size, in spite of the extraordinary difficulty of getting into any university, suggests that it is not exactly an idea whose time has come.
We like to think that it's hard to get into Dartmouth (and, of course, in Americ an terms it is), but our 8:1 ratio of applicants to freshmen looked different when I read in the Guardian the other day an article that began: "The University of East Analia has had a record 15,000 applications this year for 1,100 places ... the sheer number of applications for its most popular departments verging on the embarrassing ...{yet} it is by no means the most popular university in the land." The system of majoring (not a word used here) from one's first day as an undergraduate means that one applies to a department as well as a university, as it were, and 2,000 sixth-formers (high school seniors) applied for 60 places in U.E. A.'s computer studies program and another 1,700 did so for the same number of openings in English and American Studies.
Getting in isn't the only problem, though. A very high percentage of students are on public money grants, usually given by the local education authority rather than by the central government, and the size of those grants has failed significantly to keep up with inflation. Which helps to explain the huge rally I happened to see in Hyde Park, where delegations from' every part of the country came together to bring their plight to the attention of the television news cameras.
At this time of year, however, the thing that's uppermost in the mind of any British student hoping to-graduate in 1982 is the prospect of "finals, '' an ordeal very few Americans know anything about: the necessity to take up to a dozen formal examinations in a period of a week or so, which deal with all (or at least any) of the pieces of information and the insights and the issues encountered in the course of the previous three years, the.results of which supercede effectively everything else that's happened during undergraduate studies. No wonder my friend's daughter left the lively family conversation after dinner last Saturday evening and retired to her room to concentrate on those miserable pieces of paper still several weeks down the road. But (at least if her university follows the tradition at mine) she will be rewarded by having her name called out at the precise moment she advances to shake the hand of the vice chancellor (president) and hear the all-important words "I admit you.''
Being reminded of that phrase suggests to me that perhaps there was more understanding than I'd previously recognized that the degree is a beginning rather than an end. Even when there are no jobs to go to with it.
