UNLIKE Sir Harry Kroto, I am not returning my honorary degree to Exeter University because its chemistry department is to close. Instead I shall take the degree from the drawer and make it a shrine to academic autonomy. I have no objection to chemistry, queen of the sciences. But when a university finally summons the courage to reorder its priorities and say “boo” to the academic lobbyists, I cheer.

That also goes for other closures: for Exeter’s Italian department, for the Cambridge School of Architecture, for East Asian studies at Durham, for music at Reading and for yet more chemistry at Queen Mary’s and King’s College London. Condemned as below par by peer group assessment, they are starved of central grant. Exeter’s chemistry department is losing £3 million a year. This, says the vice-chancellor with reason, “just can’t go on”.

Sir Harry is a former president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Chemistry, he claims, makes a £5 billion profit for the nation, so it needs more subsidy. Why? Why not find Exeter’s shortfall from the capacious pockets of his Royal Society, or from drug companies fat on NHS procurement? That is what an American would do. Instead, Sir Harry pours abuse on Exeter for redirecting its money to what he dismisses as “candyfloss studies with minimal use to this country’s future”. In those he includes my own profession of journalism.

I disagree. If forced, I would put the state of the nation’s journalism ahead of chemistry in the canon of public interest. Sir Harry implies that subsidy should not go to subjects that do not contribute directly to the economy, in research or in manpower. To him scholarship is about efficiency, not humanity. But his enthusiasm for efficiency wanes when he addresses failing departments in provincial universities. Then Sir Harry is all for soppy tradition. I am suspicious of any profession claiming subsidy because of the national interest. I am even more suspicious when this involves insulting as candyfloss vocations freely chosen by young people desperate to make a living.

The truth is blazoned across every newspaper advertisement column. Britain does not need more chemists from every county in England. Whatever political correctness dictates, it appears to need more administrators, lawyers, accountants, internet designers, media practitioners and business graduates. As for research, the days are over when 30 academies could expect to do fully-funded nuclear physics. Exeter’s cathedral may be irreplaceable. Its chemistry department is matched by others in Bristol, Bath and Plymouth, in the South West alone.

The more important question is who should decide. On radio yesterday, Kim Howells, the Higher Education Minister, stunned his audience by saying that universities were “completely independent bodies”. He is clearly new to his job. Mr Howells should be told that he awards Exeter its research grants. He counts academic references to measure its productivity. He tells Exeter how much it may charge in fees. He indicates the social background required of Exeter’s students. Mr Howells makes Lenin seem a wimp. Higher education in Britain is wildly centralised. Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, wants universities to discriminate in favour of the poor and the dumb. Yet he will not let them discriminate against the rich by charging them higher fees, since he is afraid that scholarships and means tests might humiliate the poor. He is all screwed up.

Mr Clarke is more chary of interfering in academic research, but not very. He wants, rightly, to concentrate resources on centres of excellence. The only subject departments likely to survive are those to which he awards a rating of 5 or 5*. Those ranked 4 or below face assisted euthanasia unless they can find private sponsors. In other words, Mr Howells’s universities are about as independent as the Ritz guest who cannot pay his bill and finds himself sleeping in the gutter.

I wonder how long universities will tolerate being so beholden to Mr Clarke and his colleagues? Subject departments are closing nationwide, sign that the costly duplications of the 1980s and 1990s are over. The good news is that painful decisions are at last being taken by vice-chancellors and their boards. Departments no longer have tenure by virtue of antiquity. They can no longer rely on their subject lobbies to look after them in Whitehall.

Needless to say, Mr Clarke is already plotting to undermine this autonomy. He has signalled that he wants to “protect subjects of strategic importance” from any attempted rationalisation. He wants Arabic, Turkish, Asian languages and anything to do with science declared protected species. He adds “creative industries” and anything to do with Europe. We must hope that the barmy return to postwar manpower planning is nothing but a brainstorm in a control freak. If Mr Clarke really means it, the vice-chancellors should resign en masse and tell him to send in apparatchiks.

Universities ought to throw Mr Howells’s boast of “independence” back in his face. They should assert their autonomy and behave like the private institutions that they legally are. They should fix their own fees, offer their own scholarships and fund their own research. If the Government wants to pay for bursaries or research, as it will, fine. But the contracts should be open and unconditional. That is how American universities are run, and successfully. They teach and study what students and the marketplace demand.

Every year ministers humiliate universities with another regulator, target or burst of jeering. Vice-chancellors meekly turn the other cheek, terrified of losing cash. They are sliding towards the state dependence of their continental counterparts. Nor do the rich institutions give any lead. For years I have heard the grandees of Oxford, Cambridge and London threaten a dash for freedom. But they never do it. They are brave for a day, a gutless bunch. Small wonder ministers treat them with contempt.

simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk

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