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Higher Education

My Lords, I welcome the Statement from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, under whom I have had much pleasure in serving for several years. There is no doubt that the present Government have done many good things, both for universities in general and for research in particular, but, as a voice from the trenches, I tell them that not all the trends have been happy. One remarkable achievement that the Secretary of State did not mention is the growth in administrative and bureaucratic processes and staff in universities in this country. There is a study, based simply on the telephone directory of a major university from 15 years ago to today, that shows that the ratio of administrative staff to faculty has doubled. There are other studies of this kind. I assure him from my 20 years at Harvard, Caltech and Princeton, that that is totally different from the leanness of the administrative staff in American universities. While I do not wholly agree with the simple statement that producing growth is what higher education is all about—it has many other purposes—the one thing it is certainly not about is producing growth in administrative services.