The UGC idea in international perspective

Abstract

Any consideration of the effectiveness of the University Grants Committee (UGC) idea must take into account the wider historical and political context and what Lord Ashby has called "the ecology of higher education" (Ashby, 1966). With the exception of the example of Israel, the development of the UGC model in different countries described in this volume represents the conscious adaptation of one characteristically British institution to manage another. The university systems of all these countries owed their foundation and modus operandi to the British university model. In some cases we see that Britain consciously exported the university concept, as in Ghana, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and India, as an instrument of national development. In others, where the universities were developed indigenously, they were so closely modelled on their British counterparts that the differences of structure and constitution from the conscious exports were more semantic than real. The particular British model London in the case of India and Sri Lanka, the Victoria University in the case of New Zealand, Oxbridge in the case of Ghana was usually more significant than the source of the initiative whether British or local. But what characterised the British model above all, when compared to other national systems such as the U.S. or European, was the significant role played by academics in university governance. Although this had to be fought for in some countries like Canada or New Zealand, the predominance of academic participation in university government has become a characteristic of these countries as well. There can be little doubt that this was the determining factor in ensuring the presence of academic members on the various UGC bodies, a feature which we suggest in the Editorial is distinctive of the UGC model as compared to higher education coordinating commissions in other countries. The creation of UGC structures was less automatically based on the British model than the establishment of universities because, as in Britain in 1919, the decision to set up a UGC had necessarily to be a conscious act by government to solve national university planning or resource allocation problems. Governments appear to have come to their decisions in different ways. In Australia the