When the profs don’t pass

IT’S EXAM TIME. I have spent much of the last week marking final papers written by undergraduates and graduates. I would guess I have been doing this kind of thing for more than 15 years now at four universities -- Cambridge, Oxford, New York and now Harvard.

There have been times when I confess I haven’t much enjoyed it. This year, however, examining has been a positive pleasure. This has been my first semester of teaching Harvard undergraduates, and I now understand why so many of them get A’s. It’s not all due to “grade inflation” by overgenerous professors, as critics have sometimes alleged. So many of these papers are outstanding that it’s hard to impose a rigid distribution, imposing C’s or worse on the lower third.

Returning to England, I had rather expected to find my British counterparts toiling under comparable circumstances. But no. In pursuit of a pay claim by the Assn. of University Teachers, a substantial proportion of the lecturers at British universities are refusing to grade examinations.

Now, I don’t claim to be the perfect prof. But, busy though I have been in the last week, it would never have occurred to me not to get my final papers graded, whatever the circumstances. My students have worked hard this semester. Some of them are about to graduate and cannot do so if I don’t deliver. Even if it means one more cup of coffee and one less hour of sleep, that last paper -- all 21 pages of it -- is going to get read and graded.

So I am frankly disgusted by the spectacle of dons downing tools. It’s proof that those concerned are not professionals at all but merely a kind of academic proletariat who conceive of their institutions as nothing more than degree factories. If I were a student, I’d be furious. And many are, in a wonderful inversion of the late 1960s, demanding that their protesting professors get back to work.

This go-slow is more than merely irresponsible, however. It’s also absurdly unrealistic. Professors are demanding a 23% pay hike over the next three years. Where do they think British universities are going to find this money? The fact of the matter is that British higher education is close to broke as a direct consequence of a massive expansion that has been systematically underfunded.

In 1979, the proportion of British teenagers who went on to higher education was just 12%. Today, the proportion is close to 45%. But because British universities depend overwhelmingly on the state for funding, the resources available per student have declined steeply.

In essence, Britain has a National Higher Education Service, and it is afflicted with many of the ills that afflict the National Health Service -- among them, chronically underpaid staff. On average, professorial pay is less than half what it is in the United States, which is one reason why so many British academics have migrated across the Atlantic in recent years. But the idea that this problem can simply be solved with a whopping pay raise misses the point.

There is a reason why higher education expenditures in the United States amount to 3% of gross domestic product, while in Britain it is just 1%. The reason is private funding. Harvard’s $26-billion endowment alone exceeds the assets of all British universities combined -- by a factor of roughly two. Oxford and Cambridge, the wealthiest of British universities, would rank roughly 15th on the U.S. rich list if they were somehow relocated across the Atlantic.

Ah, I hear you object, but what about those enormous fees? And it’s true that annual tuition and fees at Harvard total more than $32,000. But -- and here’s the key point -- not if you can’t afford it. Because Harvard is rich, it can follow a “needs-blind” admissions policy, based purely on academic criteria. If you get in and your family turns out to be poor, it’s free. That can’t be claimed by any British institution. Oxford and Cambridge scholarships were long ago so eroded by inflation that they are now purely honorific.

Does it matter that British universities are funded as badly as British hospitals? Yes. More than most people realize, higher education has become globalized. The number of foreign students studying in developed countries has doubled over 20 years to 1.5 million. In the academic year 2004-05, the number of international students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions exceeded half a million.

This is beneficial in more ways than one. Not only do they generally pay, they bring talent to their host institution. In effect, there is now an international competition among the world’s universities to attract the most able students, particularly at the graduate level. As Western economies depend more and more on brains rather than brawn -- on minds rather than on manufacturing -- elite universities have a vital role to play not only for those working within their walls but for the society that surrounds them. They are gold mines for gray matter, oilfields for ideas.

The truly remarkable thing is that in this global market for brains, Britain is the No. 2 player after the United States. More than one in 10 students at British universities are from abroad. Oxford and Cambridge are the only two European universities in the internationally recognized top 20 rankings produced by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (all the rest, apart from Tokyo University, are in the U.S.). That’s pretty impressive for a state-run National Higher Education Service.

But the question is obviously this: What kind of signal does it send to an ambitious young Chinese student when British lecturers go on strike at examination time? Let me see ... how about -- in big, red letters -- “APPLY TO HARVARD”?