SZ/WF/12 - Higher Education Policy

SZ/WF/12

File

Higher Education Policy

1965-1967

4 Sub-files

In June 1966 the Trustees considered an application for a grant for a new graduate college at Oxford, absorbing the existing Iffley College. SZ had reservations about the application, notwithstanding his high regard for its champion, Sir Isaiah Berlin, and was moved to question the Foundation's existing policy on Higher Education, and university-based scientific research in particular. A committee was set up, chaired by Leonard Wolfson, which convened on May 8th 1987 to consider a paper submitted by SZ, Proposals for a Review of Policy in the Field of Higher Education.

SZ proposed that for a five-year period two-thirds of the funds designated for academic purposes should be devoted to areas of applied science deemed likely to help to improve the UK economy and to assist the modernisation of industry. He also advocated a funding strategy that would direct support to those institutions that had borne the major burden of university expansion, the civic universities and colleges of advanced technology, rather than Oxford and Cambridge.

It was agreed that SZ's paper should be put to the Trustees when they met in June 1967, with a recommendation that the proposal should be approved, and that £500,000 per year for the next five years should be made available. These funds would be primarily for the promotion of those fields of applied science which, in the view of the Trustees, were most likely to improve the economic position of Britain and help the modernisation of British industry.

The greater part of this series consists of drafts of SZ's paper and related working papers and correspondence.