Alison Richard — who has a quarter of her staff and more than half of her postgraduates from overseas — raises the prospect of universities depending increasingly on foreign academics for regeneration.

The situation across the country is most acute in science, technology and mathematics, as fewer British students are recruited to undergraduate courses, which restricts the pool going on with postgraduate study.

Professor Richard’s comments are echoed by Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors, which cautions that the danger of relying wholly on non-British researchers in some subjects is not only that they go home, but also that the lack of home-grown talent spirals downwards into less interest in schools.

While Professor Richard, an anthropologist who has returned to England after 30 years at Yale, delighted in the cosmopolitan make-up of her staff, she said that she was concerned that the brightest students did not want to follow in her shoes.

“What does it say about the perception of universities in this country if an ever-falling proportion of really bright British undergraduates is not considering continuing with this as a career?” she said.

“We will always be able to staff Cambridge with brilliant people from all over the world, but if you can’t get your own students then British universities will carry on, of course — but without their own.”

For the past two decades the number of overseas students undertaking postgraduate research at Cambridge has risen each year. Last year 53 per cent of its postgraduates were foreign students. At undergraduate level overseas students made up only 15 per cent of the total, and overall more than one in four (27 per cent) of all its students came from abroad.

“Twenty-five per cent of Cambridge’s academics are from outside the UK and it’s a wonderful cosmopolitan international mix and I think it’s quite splendid that we are as international as we are,” she said. “Now the question is — if it were 75 per cent from outside the UK would that be a ‘bad thing’? I don’t know how to answer that question.

“So should we be troubled if none of our brightest British undergraduates goes on to further studies and PhDs? Actually, if the truth be told, that does trouble me.”

Professor Richard says that lecturers’ historic poor salaries are partly to blame, as is the old public opprobrium of universities as irrelevant ivory towers. While that has changed, she says universities are still underfunded and competing with a more exciting world. Although it is not a problem for all disciplines, Professor Richard is clearly concerned about the lack of children studying science, technology and maths (STEM) at a higher level at school. Currently roughly 39 per cent of STEM postgraduates at British universities are from overseas.

Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, agreed that an overreliance on foreign academics in those subjects was a concern. “The long-term issues for UK business, industry and universities are very serious, because some proportion of overseas academics will stay in Britain, but a good number will go home,” he said. “In some subjects we can already see this — especially in maths — where we’re seeing huge numbers of people from Eastern Europe in the staff. They are very good, but there is a shortage of home-grown talent.”

Professor Bone, who is also Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool, said that the danger was that Britain would not generate its own core of academics. He said this problem had already been encountered in Australia, where some universities were dependent on Asian academics.

Last week a study found that nearly two thirds of British academics had considered leaving the country to work overseas and that more than half had considered abandoning university life completely for a better-paid job in the private sector.

The biggest gripe among lecturers was bureaucracy, with one in three spending at least 16 hours a week on paperwork.

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