An Academic Life: The David Lloyd George Memorial Lecture for 2005*
by Sir John Meurig Thomas, FRS, FREng


Introduction
Shortly after I began seriously to study the life and achievements of David Lloyd George (henceforth abbreviated LG), I held him in awe; and have done so ever since. It was not only his moral courage, intellectual energy, versatility, wit and oratorical gifts that struck me. It was an amalgam of other rare qualities: supreme analytical skills, emotional insight and a passionate sense of social justice. After diagnosing the nature of a complicated subject or situation he sought and implemented novel and visionary solutions. Many politicians prior to him in this country had studied the problem of poverty. LG did something about it. With Old Age Pensions and National Insurance he opened up a new era; and he was the founder of the Welfare State.
His parliamentary skills also were legendary. You will recall his famous retort (after the Pensions Bill was thrown out in the House of Lords) when a Conservative Member had praised the House of Lords as ‘the watchdog of the Constitution’: ‘You mean it is Mr. Balfour’s poodle.’ According to Macmillan, LG was one of ‘the most remarkable men who have ever entered into the tempestuous arena of politics’.1 His brilliant organisational skills were perhaps seen at their best during World War I, and Macmillan paid tribute to his achievements as an administrator: ‘When I was at the Ministry of Supply in the Second War, all we had to do was to revive, with some modifications and adaptations to changing service demands, the machine which Lloyd George had constructed’ (as Minister of Munitions). And the greatest of all tributes was perhaps the one paid by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons shortly after LG’s death: ‘When the English history of the first quarter of the twentieth century is written it will be found that the greater part of our fortunes in peace and in war were shaped by this one man’.2
In this talk I propose, first, to highlight two of the many innovations made by LG. They have profoundly influenced the academic and public life of the

* Delivered at Llanystumdwy on 22 June as part of the Criccieth Festival for 2005, with Mr Philip George in the chair. 1 H. Macmillan, The Past Masters: Politics and Politicians, 1906-1939 (London, 1975),

chapter 2. 2 Quoted in Lord Beaverbrook’s essay on LG in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

nation, yet they are hardly mentioned even in the most detailed biographies of LG: the Medical Research Council (MRC), which he founded in 1911; and the University Grants Committee (UGC) which he set up in 1919. As an academic, I know a good deal about these two innovations. I shall outline how they came about and then adumbrate some consequences arising from their existence.

The MRC and the UGC

The MRC is one of Britain’s (if not the world’s) most successful scientific seedbeds. It was set up for practical purposes as a consequence of the 1911 National Insurance Act when LG was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He singled out tuberculosis as a problem needing special and urgent attention. In Great Britain and Ireland at that time it was responsible for 1 in 3 deaths among males aged between 15 and 44, and half the deaths among females aged 15 to 24. Germany was making great strides through the building of TB sanatoria. So LG was motivated to act – to investigate in a scientific fashion the causes of, and ways of combating TB.

The first World War brought many other pressing medical problems as well
– wound infection, especially tetanus and gangrene, typhoid, cholera,dysentery, civilian malnutrition, even TNT poisoning in munition factories. So, after the war ended, the then Secretary of the MRC made the case for broadening its remit so as to encompass the study and elimination of these diseases. He found a ready ally in the Prime Minister, LG.
So the emergence of the most glittering jewel in the crown of British science – where long-term fundamental studies are pursued to underpin clinical medicine goes back to LG. The secret of success in scientific research consists of at least three ingredients: (i) a sharply focused eye for the problem to be solved, (ii) intellectual freedom, to allow the researcher scope to follow peripheral vision and unexpected or uncharted new ground, and (iii) security of funding for a reasonable period of time. The MRC laboratories, especially the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge – one of the most successful research centres in the world – owes its towering achievements to these ingredients.
When the UGC was set up in 1919 it enabled parity of academic performance among the universities of the UK. The UGC was then – and up to the time it was dissolved by the Thatcher government in 1989 – made up of individuals (all academics) that represented the intrinsic heterogeneity of the British university system, and was composed almost exclusively of experienced senior academics drawn from a wide selection of disciplines. It had considerable autonomy; and through its response to regular quinquennial plans submitted by each university, it facilitated – by the award of appropriate capital and/or recurrent grants – a great measure of discretion for individual universities to operate. The UGC was a body designed to be at arm’s length from government; and it worked admirably. At many British universities, timely and novel developments emerged, such as Applied Optics in Reading, Marine Biology in Bangor, Acoustics in Southampton, to name but a few. These were perceived to be desirable and established by the combined vision and professional expertise of the universities themselves, and of members of the UGC and its advisors.

When the UGC was abolished it was replaced by the University Funding Council (UFC), which was largely manned – at the decision-making level by non-academics, especially businessmen, in whose judgement, applied to any sphere, Mrs Thatcher and her myrmidons had great faith. The UK-wide UFC, which was no longer at arm’s length from government, was later replaced by a number of Funding Councils: the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and HEFCE (for England), with similar bodies for Scotland and Northern Ireland could then dictate (by inter alia holding the purse strings), as I witnessed myself when I had responsibilities (from 1991 to 1994) for enhancing the academic power of the University of Wales. Far from being independent, as had been the UGC, these Funding Councils were explicitly the instruments of government, as laid down by the so-called Great Education Reform Bill of 1988. (It is interesting to note that Canada, which followed the
U.K. example in setting up a UGC, still utilizes such a body, and calls forquinqennial estimates from individual universities3). So, for the formation of both the MRC and the UGC, the whole country – and certainly all academics – are in their debt to LG.

There are many other facets of LG’s remarkable life which have fascinated me. For example, when he was well into his seventies and engaged in composing his memoirs, he would often start writing at 5.30 am. And when he was in his early twenties and deeply immersed in his courtship with Margaret Owen, his future wife, the letters (in English) that he wrote to her sometimes contained words that I felt were rather recondite for a Welshman steeped in the Welsh language: ‘What is the gravamen of your charge?’, wrote the twenty-three-year old LG. (I was over forty before I came across the word gravamen). ‘LG could follow a virulent attack [wrote Harold Macmillan] in the language of pure demagogy, by a passage of simple and moving appeal, in the language of pure poetry’.4 And in reflecting on why LG lost office as Prime Minister, Macmillan said of him that ‘I believe he was too quick, too versatile, too imaginative to command the trust of the English people. They liked something that seemed more solid, at any rate for times of peace’.5
The profound influence exerted upon him by his uncle, Richard Lloyd (RLl) has been extensively described by many, not least by Dr. W.R.P. George
3 I am grateful to Prof. G.E.Hinton, University of Toronto, for drawing my attention to this fact. 4 H. Macmillan, The Past Masters. 5 Ibid.
(LG’s nephew), whom we have with us this evening.6 By any definition RLl was an intellectual, notwithstanding the largely manual nature of his daily tasks, here in Llanystumdwy. RLl contemplated the eternal verities. He was steeped in scholarship, and he possessed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Imbued with such qualities, he transmitted to his nephew, by a kind of intellectual osmosis, a multiplicity of skills, attitudes and aptitudes which most of LG’s contemporaries were denied.7 RLl belonged to the ‘Disciples of Christ’, a religious sect derived from the beliefs and actions of the Irish-American clergyman, Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), who incidentally, also influenced another remarkable religious sect, the Sandemanians, to whom Michael Faraday, my greatest-ever predecessor as Director of the Royal Institution, belonged. Both Faraday and RLl, following the precepts of their creed, were autodidacts. Both shunned the established church, and both favoured, as did Campbell, a return to Christian simplicity.

Intellectuals and Academics

Intellectuals exist in all communities world-wide: they abound in all walks of life, and are not found solely in academies or institutes of higher education. A certain small fraction of all communities focus on the nature of things and inevitably pose questions of the utmost profundity. What are the origins of our moral codes? What is life for and how should it be lived? Has the universe any unity or purpose?
It is an exhilarating thought that RLl, a few yards from where I now stand, cogitated deeply on these and other intellectual questions. I also find it fascinating – and indeed I am deeply indebted to the fact – that in the mining valley (Cwm Gwendraeth) where I was brought up, one learnt where to meet the intellectuals. It was not in the Billiard Hall (where I spent a disproportionately large part of my early teens until my father put his foot down and declared it out of bounds). It was not always in the Barber’s shop, although, if I were fortunate, I could discourse there with an old miner who had an interest in astronomy and who had built his own telescope. (The Barbers shops in Tumble, South Wales, the village where I lived from the age of 5 to 20, offered unexpected intellectual stimulus for another reason: one could regularly read superb popular scientific essays by men like J.B.S. Haldane (the geneticist and polymath) and J.D. Bernal (the physicist and historian of science) in the Daily Worker newspaper, which was placed in these shops every day by the leading Communist in the village, Jack John). Occasionally, in the cobbler’s shop one could enter into an analysis of the skills and impact of the famous preachers of Wales – Y Pregethwyr Cyrddau
6 W.R.P. George, The Making of Lloyd George (London, 1976). 7 John Grigg, Young Lloyd George (London, 1973).

Mawr. But the places where I personally was guided towards things of the mind were The Band of Hope and the Sunday School.
Continuing along this semi-autobiographical account, I was extremely fortunate to be brought up in a community where things intellectual – where education in general, and any form of scholarship, were greatly valued. No one had told my father and mother or others in my community what John Henry Newman had said in his famous book, The Idea of a University, that ‘knowledge is its own reward’. They knew it in their minds and hearts. They would have concurred with George Bernard Shaw, who said that ‘The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing’.
Being one of the beneficiaries of the great R.A. Butler Education Act of 1944, which meant that my father no longer had to pay a fee for my secondary education, I sensed, as I proceeded to the Sixth Form of my Grammar School, that I, too, wanted to focus as much as I could on the intellectual life. I yearned to become an academic. It struck me as a late teenager that ‘the desire of knowledge increases ever with the acquisition of it’, and that in expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of over ignorance.

A University is an intellectual institution: it is a place where academics flourish. It is also a moral place in the sense that it honours truth. It listens to all voices, and it ventilates all views. It is a place where all claims are rigorously tested under the impartial light of logic and the incontrovertible facts. And this is true not only of science, but also of the humanities and the arts. It is relevant to recall what the poet W.H. Auden once said: ‘Without science, there would be no equality; without art, there would be no liberty’. A University is the haven of free thought. Academic life, in the humanities and the sciences, is about building bridges, not destroying them: it is about opening minds, not closing them; it is about hearing both sides of an argument, not one alone.

The other day, while reading an article by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Saccs, I came across the words of John Masefield, the poet, who addressed an audience in Oxford after World War II: ‘There are few earthly things more splendid than a university. In these days of broken frontiers and collapsing values … wherever a university … exists, the free minds of men, urged on to full and fair inquiry, may still bring wisdom into human affairs’.
And there are other fine words, which I have taken from an address given in 1929 by the Nobel-Prize winner, the Indian scientist, Sir C.V. Raman:
Intellectual activity of the highest type such as every University should strive to develop is a force of incalculable power and importance for the national welfare. Apart from the direct results of such activity in promoting agricultural, industrial or commercial progress, its indirect results are even more important. Intellectual stagnation is equivalent to national decay and death. Intellectual activity, on the other hand, leads to a quickening of the national life in all its aspects … The mainsprings of intellectual activity in every country are education and the spirit of enquiry, and its quality varies with the standard set by the thinkers and educators of the nation. Thus, in the last analysis, it is the leadership offered by the Universities that determines the level of intellectual activity in the country and therefore also the national efficiency.8
Intellectuals are people who are not just interested in ideas: they actively engage with them. They see it as part of their remit to contribute to the conversation that society has with itself about matters political, moral, religious, cultural and educational. This continual alertness of mind, that such preoccupations demand, was very much a characteristic of RLl, and he imbued his nephew, LG, with yardsticks, principles and aspirations that equipped the latter to undertake some of the greatest social revolutions (in the elimination of poverty for example) that this country has ever witnessed.

Turning to yet more personal recollections, I was sub-consciously aware of the verities enumerated above as I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate days in Swansea more than half a century ago. The more I pursued my academic research the more I felt, somewhat indulgently perhaps, that nothing could be nobler than to pursue a career in which the joy of acquiring knowledge and of imparting it to others is the essential core of one’s task. This is why I opted to become a university-based academic.
I was attracted by the romance of science in general, and by chemistry in particular. Many members of the general public have a low regard for chemistry and chemists; and one often hears that the ills of the world – atmospheric pollution, the despoliation of the environment and the problems associated with global warming are ascribable largely to chemistry and its practitioners. Whilst it is undeniable that, hitherto, many sectors of the chemical industry did indeed contribute to environmental damage through the profligate use of aggressive reagents, it must not be forgotten that living a long, comfortable, civilised life would be impossible without the chemist and his creations. The production of foodstuffs, fuels, fabrics, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals is made possible by the chemist. Chemist create, inter alia, clean water, antibiotics and anaesthetics and immuno-suppressive drugs, without which no organ transplant operation would be possible. Chemists help to prolong and improve life, to alleviate famine and to facilitate global travel. Molecular traffic in and out of all living cells is governed by the laws of chemistry; and even the language of the genes cannot be understood without chemistry.
The subject of chemistry, as I found when I was a student, can elevate one to an inspirational plane and it also stimulates a sense of mystery and awe. One
C.V. Raman, Convocation address, Benares Hindu University, Jan. 1927.
of the most influential passages in chemistry that I read as a second-year undergraduate was written by Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, the polymathic Professor of Physical Chemistry at Oxford at that time. In a textbook dealing with the seemingly mundane topic of the kinetics of chemical change, his opening paragraph gripped me:
That everything changes is an unescapable fact which from time immemorial has moved poets, exercised metaphysicians, and excited the curiosity of natural philosophers. Slow chemical transformations, pursuing their hidden ways, are responsible for corrosion and decay, for development, growth and life. And their inner mechanisms are mysteries into which it is fascinating to inquire.9
Later, I came across a passage composed nearly forty years ago by a man who was my predecessor-but-one as Director of the Royal Institution, Sir Lawrence Bragg:
The spirit of science is international and classless. What gives the scientist such profound aesthetic pleasure is the realisation that Nature, not man, pronounces the verdict, and there is the feeling that one is being given a glimpse of something far more enduring and fundamental than the ephemeral and local affairs of man.
Many years later, I came across the remarks made by Albert Einstein in a speech at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1931:
Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours … in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equation.
Einstein created many memorable sayings. For example, in 1934 he said:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Einstein also ruminated deeply about the laws of nature, which, amongst other things, the scientist seeks to establish and retrieve. Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe them only because of our innate love of order?
C.N. Hinshelwood, The Knietics of Chemical Change (Oxford, 1946), 1.
Ninety years ago, Einstein corresponded with the renowned Hindu mystic and poet Rabindranath Tagore, who held that scientific truth was realised only through man. Einstein, on the other hand, maintained that scientific truth must be conceived as a valid truth that it is independent of humanity. Einstein went so far as to say: ‘I cannot prove that I am right in this, but this is my religion’.

The Pleasures of Studentship

Reverting again to the autobiographical, I soon discovered as an undergraduate, blessed as I was to be studying at Swansea, where the Principal, John Fulton (later Lord Fulton and the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex) had organised weekly general lectures for all first-year students, that the education offered to me and my contemporaries was both a liberalising and a liberating experience. How could one not relish the feast of intellectual nourishment offered by scholars of the following calibre?
Sir Isiah Berlin, on highlights in Russian literature; Sir Idris Bell, on the nature of Celtic poetry and prose; Kingsley Amis, on the emergence of the English novel; Benjamin Farrington, on Greek science; Revd Gwilym Williams,10 on the idea of Nationalism in Wales; Glanmor Williams,11 on Williams Pantycelyn and religious revivals in Wales.
These talks, which also encompassed topics such as the theory of evolution, the consequences of Darwinism, and the size of the universe, were enormously stimulating.
A little later in my undergraduate career, I learned about the age of the earth. The names Llandeilo and Llandovery are known to most Welsh people. But every geologist in the world knows of these two names. The so-called Llandeilo series refer to rocks, first identified beneath the town of Llandeilo less than 200 years ago, that were formed (we now know12) some 500 million years ago. They are older by some 70 million years than the rocks beneath the nearby town of Llandovery. As to the magnitude and size of the universe, I
10 Later Archbishop of Wales. 11 Later Sir Glanmor Williams, FBA. 12 Although the palaeontologists and geologists had concluded that the age of the earth had to
be at least 800 million years, there was great opposition in other scientific circles (amongst physicists for example) to this figure. This was because Lord Kelvin, a towering giant in nineteenth century science, had calculated the earth to be about 100 million years old. It was only after the young Ernest Rutherford, using natural radioactivity as his guide, had shown the earth to be at least 800 million years old, that the estimates of the earth scientists gained credence. E. Rutherford, ‘Some Cosmical aspects of Radioactivity’, Jnl.Roy.Astronomical Soc. of Canada, May-June 1907, 145.
could not then, and hardly now, come to terms with the terrifyingly large magnitudes and vast emptiness of the cosmos. (There are about a billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way; and there are at least a billion galaxies in the known universe, all receding from one another at increasing velocities).
Of the mood and atmosphere that pervaded British universities in the 1950s and 1960s, it could certainly be said that, such was the general thirst for knowledge and zest for higher education in its widest cultural context that most undergraduates relished the circumstances within which they operated. They could not fail to be aware of being part of the noble quest for knowledge, enlightenment and truth. There was also a great sense of fun and genuine intellectual enjoyment. The cut-and-thrust of debate amongst the more eloquent and quick-witted students reminded one of the innocent but satisfying pleasures that could be derived as a by-product of the earnest pursuit of knowledge.
I shall recall two examples of the flippant repartee amongst members of the student body at Swansea in my day. The first involved Mr Desmond Donnelly, MP for Pembrokeshire, who came to address the Student Labour Party. Chris Rees, the student president of Plaid Cymru, was sitting in the front row. When the speaker mentioned ‘this country’, clearly referring to England, he rapidly corrected himself and said ‘the UK’. Feeling rather pleased with his own rapid action, he then went on to say ‘I nearly made a faux pas then’. And then he rhetorically announced ‘What’s faux pas in Welsh?’ Whereupon Chris Rees immediately retorted ‘What’s faux pas in English?’ The other incident took place when the United States debating team visited Swansea which, at that time, had several outstanding debaters. One of them, Ednyfed Curig Davies (later to become an MP as Ednyfed Hudson Davies), was particularly impressive, but quite scathing about many aspects of US life. He taunted his opponents with quips that implied that the US was not the ‘land of the free’. One of the US team responded rather in earnest and, inter alia, said ‘I became a student at an Ivy League college even though my father was just a garbage collector’. Immediately, Alun Richards, a formidable heckler (who later wrote some scripts for the TV series The Oneidin Line), blurted out ‘Rubbish’, and brought the house down.
That kind of exuberance – the academic’s own sense of humour – occurs at all levels in the university system. I witnessed it as an Assistant Lecturer when I joined the staff at Bangor in 1958. Often the humour was mingled with the surreal behaviour of members of staff. At Bangor, for example, the Lecturer in Classics, Dr Tony Fitton Brown (later to become Professor of Classics at Leicester University), decided he would learn Welsh. Not content to follow the pace laid down by the lecturer in charge of Welsh-for-beginners, he decided to pursue a ‘fast track’ course by adopting unconventional methods – like taking an English-Welsh dictionary and a torch (flash lamp) into the student performances of the Welsh plays of John Gwilym Jones. I remember one performance of ‘Y Tad a’r Mab’, in which beams of light from Fitton Brown’s torch (in the front row) flashed across the stage in mystifying and strange ways
– to those who were unaware of what he was up to. Tony Fitton Brown, pleasedthat he had mastered the rules of Welsh mutation, one morning knocked at the door of the Professor of Welsh, Caerwyn Williams. When Caerwyn, deep in thought, opened his door, Fitton Brown proudly proclaimed: ‘Bore da, yr hen frân fawr ddu!” (‘Good morning, thou big black crow’).
Intellectual humour still flourishes in academia. The late Sir Rees Davies, in his capacity as Chairman of the Faculty of History at Oxford (where Rees was Chichele Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of All Souls), once had to speak to a rather indolent lecturer in history, a person who was on the point of retirement. Rees innocently told this man: ‘I suppose you are looking forward to a time when you can sit down and enjoy a good programme on TV’. The reply that this elicited was ‘Do not underestimate the pleasure one may derive simply by sitting down’.

Turmoil, Turbulence and Opportunity in British Academic Life

Up to the 1960s and indeed well into the 1970s the academic standards among the fifty or so Universities that existed in the UK were quite uniform, in marked contrast to the situation nowadays among the one hundred and ten or so Universities that we now have. At present, the difference in quality – as measured by student entry requirements, intellectual content of courses and scholarly output in research and related activities – between the best universities, which include Oxbridge, Imperial College and LSE – and the worst is very considerable.
Up to the mid 1970s, the variation in standards as between the best and the worst universities was no more than about a factor of four. And, moreover, it did not follow then that all the best Departments (for a given discipline) were at Oxbridge, although many of them were. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realise that, as a result of much good fortune, I was educated in Chemistry at Swansea in the early 1950s as thoroughly and effectively as any of my contemporaries, many of whom had the advantages13 of the collegiate system in Oxford and Cambridge.
Likewise, many of the Departments in Universities at the academic periphery brought forth some of the greatest achievements in research. Let me cite a few striking examples. The technique of genetic fingerprinting, which has transformed forensic science and helps to track down terrorists and
13 All students in Oxford and Cambridge, and most members of the teaching and research staff, are members of individual colleges as well as members of the university. Colleges are the focus of undergraduate life, but they offer an extra dimension to Fellows also. They stimulate the cross-fertilization of ideas, they expose individuals to other fields and they also calibrate standard across disciplines.
criminals, was discovered, developed, tested and proven at Leicester University. Endorphins, the substances that humans secrete to alleviate pain, were discovered and identified at Aberdeen University. Magnetic resonance imaging, that has led to all major hospitals throughout the world having their MRI machines, which explore soft tissue more effectively than X-rays, was pioneered in Nottingham University. Superior grasses, capable of growing on thin veneers of soil at high altitudes and in arid regions of the earth, were developed in Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cambridge.
All the above-cited examples are taken from the fields of science and technology. But the same arguments hold for the humanities. At Aberystwyth, for example, the late R.I. Aaron, who became President of the British Aristotelian Society, was, in his day, arguably one of the world’s greatest authorities on the philosophy of John Locke (1732-1804).
Twenty five or so years ago, British universities flourished in a stable, sensible and equitable fashion. The rest of the world admired, even envied, the success of British universities in regard to turning out in three years well-educated young graduates equipped to serve the community in a multiplicity of ways. It was not satisfactory, however, that at that time the percentage of the age group capable of benefiting from higher education in this country was smaller than it should have been. In the United States, for example, in the mid 1960s, per head of potential student population, there were twice as many PhDs turned out than in this country. Given that, in the good universities of the US, a PhD is about one and a quarter times as good as a UK PhD, this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, so far as securing the economic viability of the U.K. was concerned.
A succession of policy changes driven by government has steadily increased the so-called participation rate – the percentage of the eligible age-group that enters institutes of Higher Education – and, at present, the figure is close to 40 percent. It is surely right that more people should benefit from higher education. But, in my opinion, the way it has been done is not effective, for reasons that I shall now summarise.
First, a massive increase in the number of university-educated young people occurred when the ‘binary line’ was abolished in 1992. As from about 1965 a ‘binary line’ existed which distinguished between the established universities on the one had and institutions such as polytechnic, technical colleges and teacher-training colleges on the other. The degrees awarded by the institutions in the latter category were validated by the Council for National Academic Awards, CNAA, a body that functioned well. These institutions had a strong bias towards vocational and applied subjects, and their teaching staff were not expected (but not discouraged) to pursue research. CNAA did a very thorough job in monitoring and maintaining standards in courses designed to cater for vocational needs.
In 1992, the John Major government abolished the binary system, so that all the former polytechnics were now called universities. Amongst other things, following the passing of the Further and Higher Education Act (1992), the traditional roles of Vice-Chancellors as academic leaders and standard bearers has been replaced by a role as Principal Accounting Officers, institutional managers and expert fundraisers. In the post Thatcher-Major eras, university management has been remodelled on the basis of business and industry. And in the urge to enhance further the ‘participation rate’ of eligible teenagers and mature students, a massive rise has occurred in courses offered at most – but mercifully not all – British universities, very many of these courses being demonstrably non-academic: they possess only minor intellectual content, but often a good deal of commercial flavour. Courses such as:

Sports science Cosmetics
Golf course studies Embroidery
Floristry Knitwear design
Garden design Sales management
Book-binding technology Tableware design

I do not object to the fact that subjects like sports studies or gardening are being studied by young people. It is far better for them to be engaged in such activities than to be unemployed or taken up in destructive or arid pastimes. My concerns are that such subjects are being taught in places that aspired formerly to more demanding and cerebral topics. Such is the enthusiasm of young people to be awarded degrees in these non-academic subjects, that more fundamental subjects (such as philosophy) have fallen by the wayside.
I have discussed elsewhere14 my detailed concerns about these developments; here I shall mention three factors that now need to be recognised. First, I believe that in the early 1990s our politicians aimed to set up in the UK a Higher Education system akin to that of North America. But they did so without adequate forethought. The enormous range of the 2,500 universities in the U.S. is quite unlike what we have – even now – in the U.K. And the culture of support from individual philanthropists and institutional organisations in the U.S. is far more advanced than in this country. (Last week, while in New York, I was told that one University in that State had received an anonymous donation of some $300 million to support its educational programmes. It was given out of respect for the world of learning, for the untrammelled pursuit of knowledge, to which the benefactor was passionately committed).
Second, Universities in the UK have now become engines of commercial enterprise and innovation. There are currently over sixty Science Parks scattered throughout the Kingdom, all closely associated with Universities and

14 J.M. Thomas, ‘What has Happened to our Universities?’, Transactions of the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, n.s., vol., 8 (2001), 170-187.
Colleges, from which ‘spin-off’ commercial companies have been created. This is all to the good of the British economy; and it mirrors development in the US, especially the Silicon Valley area of California and the immediate vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard and several other leading universities are situated.

Third, Universities have also entered the market for awarding degrees on a world-wide basis. Outposts of British and especially of North American Universities have been created in India, China and even Japan (where there are already over 2,000 Universities, the majority of them private). But it is anathema to some – including me – to regard Universities solely as a business operation; simply as a means of validating degrees and awarding certificates. It is salutary to recall what the Indian scientist, C.V. Raman, whom I cited earlier, said in an address seventy five years ago:

The highest function of a University is to stimulate intellectual activity and advance knowledge. There is a danger today of its being forgotten that examinations and Faculty meetings are only a means to an end and not an end in themselves. There is a danger today of the production and advancement of knowledge receding into the background in the intellectual outlook of our Universities.

The academic life is a noble one; and those who can immerse themselves in it are fortunate and privileged people. They can satisfy their own curiosities and ambitions while at the same time they have opportunities to instruct and inspire the rising generation of intellectually aroused students. The academic appreciates that knowledge is power and that knowledge and truth are inextricably bound to one another.

But such has been the major revolution in information dispersion and retrieval that has been spawned by recent technological advances in electronics and associated disciplines, that it is now quite feasible for the intellectually-oriented individual to pursue his cerebral and other studies outside institutions of higher education. Indeed, it could be argued that, with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web – which was created in the early 1990s, as a consequence of the need for large teams of scientists from geographically dispersed outposts working at the Geneva (CERN) Research establishment to exchange ideas and interpret results – individuals are freer than they have ever been to retrieve facts, theories and guidance in an enormous range of topics. For example, thanks to the Internet, one may listen (live) to each of the lectures given by Nobel prize winners in Stockholm on topics such as literature, economics, physics, chemistry, medicine and physiology. Moreover, many major Universities, especially in the U.S. (places such as MIT), make available, free, on the Internet all their undergraduate courses and most of the research seminar and public lectures presented at their campuses. Other public institutions, again especially in the US, such as the Federal Government’s Fermilab, outside Chicago, puts on to the Internet all their highly educational talks given by their own employees or by distinguished visitors. Most of the National Academies and scholarly bodies of the world also ‘post’ on to the internet, either live, or as recordings, or as transcripts, information encompassing a bewilderingly wide range of subjects. Public broadcasting bodies do likewise, whether it be Radio 3 BBC critiques and presentations of Beethoven piano concertos, Schubert’s sonatas or Mozart’s masses, or numerous other world-wide bodies highlighting turning points in humankind’s knowledge of the external world or turning points in history.15

All this contrasts vastly with the world into which Richard Lloyd and David Lloyd George were born. In their days, it was the written word that served as the main vehicle of instruction and inspiration, apart from direct personal contact. Nowadays, resources have magnified to almost beyond imagination the different means of communicating knowledge and of satisfying the intellectual thirst of the academic. With this revolution has also emerged an exponential increase in the outlets of entertainment and relaxation-oriented pastimes. Modern TV allows a choice of more than a thousand films per week. Music, of all kinds, can be brought to the individual for 24 hours a day; and the cellular phone renders it possible for two people as far afield as Vladivostok and Valpariso to talk directly to one another.

I hope that I have convinced you that academics have a key role to play in any civilized society, and that the precise nature of the contributions that they make is greatly influenced by the political atmosphere within which they operate. In this country, the 1944 Butler Education Act opened doors for well-nigh any member of our society to attain academic distinction, and to contribute to the general good of society and to the economy of the land. In the last half century, we have seen a transformation from a situation in which far too small a faction of the 18 to 36 age group was given opportunities to flourish academically into one in which as much as half that age group may now do so. Moreover, people of any age group may now live a rewarding academic life. There is still room for reform, however, and efforts must be made to ensure that certain key academic subjects are pursued, and that radical measures are required to ensure that we do not in future allow too many of our secondary school leavers to be illiterate and innumerate. Likewise, it is essential that our future graduates will serve their immediate communities and the country at large in a manner that both fulfils the aspirations of the individual and at the same time contributes to the national good. I cannot help feeling that, were he alive today, LG would relish the task of addressing these important concerns.

15 Search engines, such as Google, have made it exceptionally convenient to explore a vast range of topics (not always reliably, for the information ‘placed’ on the Internet is not, in general, edited or refereed).