Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Speech opening University College of Buckingham

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Venue: Buckingham
Source: Thatcher Archive: speaking text
Editorial comments: The CCOPR (112/76) was embargoed until 1530.
Importance ranking: Minor
Word count: 1001
Themes: Conservatism, Education, Higher & further education

The inauguration of the University College is of more than parochial significance.

It represents the first time in this century (which is already beginning to draw towards its close) that a university has been born in this country without the central government acting as midwife.

In earlier centuries, such a birth might not have been remarkable but the atmosphere of our times has been such that your project has been greeted with wonder by many people.

It has seemed to them a strange curiosity, born out of its time. In the last thirty years, education has come increasingly to be a state monopoly.

Universities, even more than schools, are expensive institutions to establish and to maintain, and our society has become one in which we have become accustomed (albeit reluctantly) to having a government which taxes us heavily to secure the resources that will allow it to embark on grandiose projects.

Many of these projects have, of course, been admirable, and amongst them must be included much of the work of university creation that went on in the 1960's. [end p1]

Nevertheless, to a free people assustomed to great richness of private initiative, there is something undesirable, indeed debilitating, about the present mood of the country in which so many people look not to themselves or their fellows for new initiative, but to the State.

Fundamentally, this dependence on government means that our educators have to compete with all the various claiments upon the resources of the state—roads, defence, social services, overseas aid and all the rest.

It means, above all, that those who love education and learning have had to demonstrate that more money for education is a valuable means to the single overriding end recognised by governments—furthering the national interest.

We need not doubt, of course, that an educated population is one of the richest national resources, but it is not something that can automatically turn on the tap of national prosperity or restored glory.

A university training is, as Newman wrote more than a century ago, “the great ordinary means to a great ordinary end: it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, … at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.”

He, of course, was talking about intellectual attainment in its best sense. But it is not difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the imitation. Stanley Baldwin once said that the difference between a man of intellect and an intellectual, was the same as the difference between a gentleman and a gent.

In that phrase he, complex man that he was, expressed the statesman's just respect for that excellence of the mind which has been the glory of universities since the late middle ages and which has been the glory of nations as well. [end p2]

He also expressed, well in advance of our time, the politician's suspicion of something that is not the genuine article.

Excellence is good in itself, whether it be in the sciences or the arts. It does not matter what the subjects are, so long as they are not merely popular or fashionable, but provide for a true and vigorous discipline of the mind.

Education in the sciences and technologies has brought enormously increased prosperity to many peoples; teaching in language, literature and general knowledge has raised the quality of living throughout the Western world.

But belief in education as the national salvation, much canvassed in the last decade, has led to inevitable disappointment and has been partly responsible for the lack of favour into which education has fallen these last few years.

The inauguration of the University College at Buckingham in this educationally difficult time is therefore a sign of hope that teachers may now be encouraged to take their destinies more into their own hands and to embark upon institutional adventures which do not involve the lobbying of public opinion or government departments.

Conceived in a time of troubled prosperity, your University has come to fruition at a low point in our national fortunes.

But in the innovations it has pioneered, we may detect signs of a genuinely fresh approach to the real conditions of modern education.

Those university teachers who have the secure backing of government funds may well be inclined to feel sorry for a new institution so much preoccupied with its own budget and with that of its students; but I think such compassion would be misplaced. [end p3]

A relative indifference to cost was a luxury of easy times, and we may look to the University College as an experiment, we hope practical, in thinking out in contemporary terms what is essential to education by contrast with what we have merely become used to enjoying.

This challenge is one faced by everyone in the Western world, and a new institution untrammelled by past habits may well be in the best possible position to respond to it.

Besides, challenges have their benefits.

They involve far greater personal effort and ingenuity than is sometimes obtained by making life too easy.

You have already responded to the challenge of cost with refreshing inventiveness, and your situation is there to remind us all that it is not a law of the universe that the pursuit of learning and culture should inevitably be a comfortable and riskless engagement.

But I, as a politician, must not prescribe to you. After all, the great challenge you offer our society is your independence of such prescriptions. And independence, we must remember, is not a gift. It is not something that governments confer, but something that a free people enjoys—and uses.

Your initiative is there to remind us about important features of freedom which we have been in danger of forgetting. Freedom requires vigour, and imagination in using the opportunities available. It may well, in the present situation, require resourcefulness to which the educational world has grown unaccustomed.

But unless we are worthy and able to take advantage of a freedom not yet extinguished in our land, we shall become pale shadows, like civilizations before us who were eventually thrust aside and dispossessed by more vigorous rivals.