The expansion of British universities and their struggle to maintain Autonomy: 1943?46

Abstract

Tim national co-ordination of "scientific resources" to meet "national needs" was an important theme in the discussion on universities in Great Britain during and after the Second World War. 1 The idea, which was historically of Marxist and Saint-Simonian inspiration, was forcefully advocated by the Association of Scientific Workers and the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee. Scientists with communist sympathies working through the Association of Scientific Workers continued in war-time the argument for the rational planning of scientific work which was alleged to be so successful in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. 2 The businessmen and parliamentarians who were active in the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee were more inspired by the functional-managerial ideal which had been current in the Next Five Years Group and similar circles in the same decade. Both of these movements sought a policy of centralisation for the better provision and use of "scientific manpower"; both wanted a permanent machinery for advice and policy making for science within the central government, z Those campaigns met opposition during the war. The case for central governmental machinery for science became an object of serious consideration only with the intervention of the President of the Royal Society, after the agreement of a sympathetic Lord President, Herbert Morrison, to the long-standing request for an inquiry into "scientific manpower ".~ The subsequent debate and compromise on the issues of the central co-ordination of scientific activities took place within the Committee on Future Scientific Policy appointed by Morrison in I945, and within the civil service, following the circulation of that body's rep,ort. The proposal for the comprehensive forecasting of requirements for scientists and for the training which was to be required by the forecast would bear on all institutions of higher education; it raised fundamental issues of the responsibility of universities f o r meeting "national needs", and the admin~istrative co~<~rdination o,f their educat~oaaal and research activities.