International News

Letter from London New super-size university tremors This October will herald the emergence of a new heavyweight in British academia. Manchester University and University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (umist) are all set to merge into Britain’s first half-billion pound university in terms of gross academic revenue, the largest in the UK. The merger will create an academic colossus rivalling Oxford and Cambridge, University College London and Imperial, each of which grossed more than £400 million (Rs.3,300 crore) from teaching, research grants and student fees in 2002-03 according to figures published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, accounting for a fifth of the education sector’s annual income. The two universities were both founded in the first half of the nineteenth century — umist in 1824 by Manchester’s business community, and the University of Manchester in 1851 by a local textile merchant — to become the first among Britain’s great civic universities. Their solid mercantile backgrounds is perhaps the explanation behind the fact that graduates of these two institutions enjoy the highest rates of employment in the country with umist and Cambridge rated as top institutions for employability across all British universities. Geographically next door to each other, the two universities have co-operated in teaching and research for many years, and are already involved in joint programmes and research projects, shared student accommodation and career counselling services. Therefore the merger seems a logical step, and with 28,000 full-time students, and 50 academic departments, the new university will have the scale to develop into a world-class institution, with a justifiable claim to the highest quality academic research outside Oxford, Cambridge and London. The first president and vice-chancellor of the new institution Prof. Alan Gilbert assumed office in February this year, and is working in tandem with the vice-chancellors of the two unmerged universities in preparation for the formal inauguration of the merged entity in October. Formerly vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, Gilbert believes he has bagged the most exciting higher education job in the world, and has ambitious plans to ensure the university becomes a world leader by 2015, on a par with other global players such as Harvard and Michigan. He won’t be looking to government for further funding, as he believes that students should pay for their education and universities should find other ways of raising money. He has already confirmed that British students will pay the maximum permissible £3,000 (Rs.2.4 lakh) per year by way of tuition fees. Certainly the idea of a new super size university and the language used to describe the merger has a corporate sound to it, something which is totally alien to British academia. However if universities are to compete in the marketplace, which is what they have to do to survive these days, business language and practice is required. This is an aspect that academic dons sometimes find disturbing, especially the huge population of administrative staff whose number tends to exceed that of academics delivering actual education to students. Although ex facie such prejudice seems justifiable, administrative staff…