Welsh Journals

Higher Education reported the feeling 'among many dons' to be: 'this sort of research is all very well; but do it in the professor of physics' department, please'. 'I probably spend 70 per cent of my research time', he added, 'simply overcoming resistance' (Universities Quarterly, vol. 17, p. 143). Nor is Professor Perkin to blame for the old-fashioned air that his final chapters have acquired by 1971. Jubilees can fall just as changes are impending. He went to press in or around January 1969, before university teachers had learned what they could expect in the 1970s. Since then the D.E.S. and the Higher Education Research Unit at L.S.E. have raised their projections to show that, if we continue on 'Robbins principles', we must increase the students in full-time higher education in Britain from half a million to some 850,000 by 1981-82. In face of this the vice- chancellors have invited universities to consider thirteen possible econom- ies and a gathering called the Higher Education Policy Group has added, by way of a footnote, that, if these numbers are to be accepted without economies, public expenditure on higher education could rise from £ 550 to £ 1,150 million-or from 1-4 to 2-1 per cent of the gross national product. With the announcement of the new salary negotiating machinery in February 1970, the A.U.T. won the position which it had long sought. A few months later the Finance Act dealt the universities' long-established pension scheme (F.S.S.U.) a near-mortal blow. To the A.U.T.'s new, post-Perkin General Secretary the days when the Association gave its evidence to Lord Robbins must seem almost as distant as the period when Douglas Laurie, that most attractive of founding fathers, ran the whole affair virtually single-handed from Tyn-y-Gongl, Caradoc Road, Aber- ystwyth. Not all the book's defects were unavoidable. It shows too many signs of haste-factual slips, slipshod sentences, and misprints. St. John's, Oxford, was not founded in 1516, for instance (p. 11). It was probably a mistake to try to anticipate the conclusions of Halsey and Trow on British university teachers by means of a questionnaire to a thousand academics (681 of whom responded in time). The exercise of the author's critical detachment is intermittent and the recital of the A.U.T.'s pronouncements sometimes becomes bland. Three recommendations in the 1944 report are summarized as follows. Six examination subjects should be studied to 'seventeen plus'; both special and general degree courses 'should include some study of the structure and evolution of society, of the social significance of the subjects studied, and of the main problems of philosophy'; 'long vacations should be put to better use, in guided reading or practical work' (pp. 116, 117, 121). In 1957-58 the A.U.T. pronounced 4,500 students to be, 'for a unitary, non-collegiate university', the maximum 'compatible with the close social and educational relations traditional in British universities' (pp. 211-12). Little comment is offered on the ineffectiveness of these recommendations: perhaps room