Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
Damien Shannon is a DPhil candidate in Economic and Social History at New College, Oxford.
In this episode, Nick and Damien speak about:
Damien's experience in suing Oxford University over its admissions criteria, which initially prevented him from taking up his degree place on financial grounds
Educational access and equity
Damien's current DPhil research on the abolition of tenure at British universities and the impact on research outcomes and long term institutional performance
The history of universities as institutions from their earliest roots in Bologna and Oxford
Intellectual freedom and the ideal conditions for free inquiry
Sir Keith Joseph and the economic and philosophical foundations of the Thatcher administration
The corporatization of universities and modern employment conditions for academics
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:49)
Welcome back dear listeners to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm delighted to be joined today by Damien Shannon, who is a DPhil candidate at New College at the University of Oxford, studying economic and social history.
Today we'll be talking about Damien's research into the changing nature of universities and research in Britain, the relationship between the university and the state, the historical role of the university and the ideal conditions for free intellectual inquiry and Damien's own personal educational journey at the University of Oxford. So Damien, thank you so much for being with us here today. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
For our listeners who aren't as familiar with you as I am, could you talk to us a bit about your early life in Britain, where you come from and who you are?
[Damien Shannon] (0:51 - 2:52)
I can. I was born in 1986. So the height of the Thatcher area, actually, so it's, I will come to that, but the object of my inquiry is my own origins in a sort of strange way.
But I was born in Leeds, which is a city in Yorkshire. I don't really remember my early life in Leeds. But then I, my, my mother, I was the child of a single parent, my mother then moved to a place called Mansfield, which is a town in the East Midlands, and was synonymous throughout most of its economic history with coal mining.
And much of my extended family worked there in coal mines, including my grandfather and uncles, and so on and so forth. So most of my formative years were spent in a coal mining community in the Midlands in the 80s and early 90s. And at that time, the government had taken the decision to try and close as many coal mines as possible.
And most of them were closed in Mansfield, and eventually they were all closed. And the effect that that had was that it was a pretty poor town, there wasn't much money, there wasn't much employment, and you were living with a sort of strange residual effects of the government decision to shut down the means of subsistence for many people. So I think that was formative.
I think that's sort of given me a view of England and myself and the world. In Mansfield, I attended what we would call state schools, so ones run by the government, they were both Roman Catholic schools. So and I think all of my intellectual curiosities can probably be traced back to that origin.
And from there, I went on to initially try and study acoustics at university, I was the first member of my family to go to university. So that was a big deal at the time.
[Nick Fabbri] (2:52 - 2:54)
Acoustics is in sound engineering, yeah.
[Damien Shannon] (2:54 - 4:05)
So when I was younger, I had an obsession with maths. But it was one of those things, although I greatly enjoyed it, as soon as I tried to put it to practical use, I lost all interest in the subject, right. So it was whilst I was studying acoustics, that I inadvertently fell in love with the subject of history, which is something I hated at school, which is strange.
And I, I jettisoned my study in acoustics, I went on to something called the Open University, which is a great British institution that allows anybody to study anywhere in any subject of their choosing. Is it online sort of it's, it is predominantly online, it's a correspondence based degree. And through that I acquired a degree, a mixed degree in history, economics and politics.
And off the back of that, I came to Oxford, I studied economic and social history. And then after that, I became a civil servant. And now I'm jointly completing my DPhil whilst trying to help administer the state, which is a strange, strange existence.
[Nick Fabbri] (4:06 - 4:10)
And to raise a 14 week old son with your lovely wife.
[Damien Shannon] (4:10 - 4:18)
Yes, yes. So my energies are split between those three sets of obligations at the moment, which are all equally time consuming.
[Nick Fabbri] (4:18 - 5:20)
I imagine you're not getting much sleep, hence the second cough we've just had before jumping into the interview as well. Yes, yes, that's right. So in 2013, you came to the University of Oxford to do your MSc in economic and social history at St. Hugh's College. When I met you in October last year through a mutual friend up at The Perch, which is a wonderful pub just north of Port Meadow, many Oxonian listeners will know it well by the banks of the river. We were talking a little bit about some of the difficulties you actually had in getting into the University of Oxford and actually led to quite a big test case really for the university in terms of how seriously it took educational access and equity for people from your backgrounds who maybe didn't have the financial means to be able to do a financial declaration or guarantee, as they call them, to actually get into the university doors. So could you sort of take us back to that time, and I suppose the battle that you had with the university legally to actually become admitted to the degree?
[Damien Shannon] (5:22 - 7:34)
Yes. So the world was somewhat different even only 12 years ago, which is when I first applied to study here. So in England, at least, as things existed then, the state provided a good suite of funding for anybody who wanted to study all the way up until undergraduate level degree.
So you would get free comprehensive schooling, undergraduate degrees were funded through a combination of loans and grants. And effectively, if you apply to Oxford as an undergraduate and you secure a place, the state would finance you and the university would help. And in that regard, the university is actually very good at facilitating access.
So long as you've got the to get through the door, you will be very well looked after once you're here. But at the world as it existed 10 years ago, or 12 years ago now, is that there was no state provision for postgraduate funding as of right, there were a very small number of what are called research council grants that were available. But most people who chose to try and study at postgraduate level were ineligible for any form of state funding.
So I applied, initially in 2012, I secured a place. And one of the conditions that the university had in place at the time was that in addition to the academic credentials for admission, you needed to be able to satisfy them that you had enough money at your disposal to stay the course as it were. Now, you might say that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
In the absence of state funding, the university can't really be expected to fund everybody admits. And it would be probably unfair to admit people who would run out of money within a matter of weeks and would have to withdraw for that reason. But my feeling at the time was that provided I could pay my fees, and I had enough money to satisfy my own sense of what the living costs would be, it wasn't really any of the university's business how much money I held in a bank account.
But nonetheless, the university withdrew the place that they had given me on the grounds that I hadn't proven to their satisfaction that I had, I think the sum was 13,300 pounds in a bank account to meet my projected living costs.
[Nick Fabbri] (7:35 - 7:41)
So they stipulate you must self fund the living costs as well as the tuition. So what are we talking for tuition and living costs altogether?
[Damien Shannon] (7:41 - 8:07)
It depended on the course that you were doing. So my course I was applying for at the time was a one year course. So I think tuition was in the order of about 8000 pounds.
And their living costs were stipulated at about 13,000. Yeah, so you needed 21,000 pounds in cash in a bank account upfront. But if you were doing a three or four year course, they required the cash for the entire duration of the course.
So some people were required to demonstrate that they had 100,000 pounds in the bank account as a condition of admission.
[Nick Fabbri] (8:07 - 8:07)
Yeah.
[Damien Shannon] (8:08 - 8:55)
Now, obviously, there are a number of problems of that. My main objection was first of all, that greatly advantaged those who held capital assets rather than those who relied on income. So if you had a passive form of income through which you could fund yourself, that was not recognized, it had to be capital.
And the other was the university had arbitrarily chosen their own figure for living costs should be. And when I began to interrogate that figure that they'd stipulated this 13,000 pounds you needed to live here, it became apparent that this included some things that were let's just sort of say optional extras. So how many black tie balls do you need to attend in a year, there was actually a requirement that you should fund at least one.
You should be able to fund the costs of dining in your college five days a week.
[Nick Fabbri] (8:55 - 8:56)
Rather than making a meal at home.
[Damien Shannon] (8:56 - 9:03)
No, that was not a fact. You had to be able to afford the costs of living in college, even though the rents in college are substantially higher than living outside.
[Nick Fabbri] (9:03 - 9:04)
You could negotiate a cheaper rent.
[Damien Shannon] (9:05 - 9:29)
You can and I did. So the main issue I had with the figure that they'd alighted upon was first, they did not allow any other form of income to be considered in meeting the cost. And second, the figures that they'd chosen to inform that figure, it seemed to me to be very much geared towards sustaining the traditional Oxford lifestyle than they did about facilitating your progress through your academic degree.
[Nick Fabbri] (9:29 - 9:35)
And then so you couldn't spend time, let's say 15, 20 hours a week supplementing your income and you know, future earnings rather.
[Damien Shannon] (9:35 - 10:29)
No, the rules as they existed at the time were that you were expressly forbidden from considering any part time income from any Saturday jobs or anything else. And this led to a sort of bizarre situation whereby the university was saying, if you took a job for 10 hours a week, it would completely imperil your academic prospects. I did point out in the court case, and this caused some disquiet at the time, I gave his evidence, the training schedule of the rowing club for the university, which required about 40 hours per week commitment.
And it said in very big letters at the top of the training schedule, this is not shown to have imperiled the academic performance of any of the participants. So I did argue, you might say reasonably, if the university is prepared to allow a rower to sacrifice 40 hours to enhance the reputation of the university, why can't it let me work 10 hours to supplement my own income, but we never got to test that argument.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:29 - 10:40)
And what was it like actually taking St. Hugh's College and the University of Oxford, I suppose, as joint respondents to the case and you were a self represented litigant, really? I mean, how did it actually work?
[Damien Shannon] (10:40 - 12:03)
Yeah, so there were a number of problems with it, really. So first of all, the ultimate respondent in the case was the college, because the college was one that was required to administer this rule, even though they hadn't created the rule, they were required by a university wide policy to administer it. So it's somewhat unfortunate for the college that they were effectively in the firing line for the entire institution.
But that's just the way that things worked out. The second was legal aid in the UK is very heavily restricted. It's a very narrow subset of cases that qualify.
And the effective rule is if you've got about 300 pounds per week of disposable income, which at the time I did, because I was working, you're ineligible for legal aid. Now, how much time with a lawyer does 300 pounds by you? It's an hour a week.
I mean, it's not enough to conduct an entire case. So I was ineligible for legal aid. So I was in this sort of strange position of having to represent myself in court against a very well funded institution that had endless political connections.
So yeah, I was I argued my own case, it went to a hearing, and the university hired a solicitor and a very capable barrister, who I am actually still on good terms with. So it was certainly a formative experience, let's put it that way.
[Nick Fabbri] (12:03 - 12:09)
And David and Goliath story and the outcome of the case was what they had to reform how they...
[Damien Shannon] (12:09 - 13:33)
The outcome of the case was twofold. One was that the university or the college asked me to withdraw the case in exchange for them agreeing to change their own college rules. And since I had no purchase upon which to force the entire university to change, that seemed to me to be a reasonable outcome.
And they did change their rules immediately. And the principal of the college who is still there, a wonderful woman called Ailish Angelini, gave me her word that she would advocate for the rule changes to be implemented across the rest of the university. And she did, and they were.
So within about six months of the case being settled, the rule had been scrapped across the entire university. And I think I'm right in saying I'm the only person in English legal history ever to successfully challenge a university entry criterion. The second consequence, although I wasn't aware of this at the time, I've only become aware of it subsequently, was that the government began to realise that all of the arguments I deployed against the university were equally applicable to the government.
So the legal basis upon which I brought the claim would apply to both. So there was a very hurried effort within government to introduce some means of state funding for postgraduate education. So you do now have in the UK, which you didn't before I brought the case, loans available to undertake a master's and loans available to undertake a PhD.
Two things that didn't exist 12 years ago.
[Nick Fabbri] (13:34 - 13:44)
It's quite an extraordinary societal change, really, in terms of fundamental access and equity for people to gain entry to the University of Oxford and all tertiary institutions as graduate students.
[Damien Shannon] (13:45 - 14:51)
It only really applied to Oxford and Cambridge, because no other university had the Okay. And my feeling at the time was that the reason the universities of Oxford and Cambridge applied is because they knew they would have enough rich people applying to always fill the places they had available. Whereas actually, at most other universities in the UK, you can never take that as a given.
And I kind of didn't sit too well at the time. But I have had people write to me. I mean, whilst I was actually bringing the case, I had people send me checks, which if I kept them and added them all up would have paid for my entire education multiple times over.
Wow. But I sent them all back and said, I thank you very much, but I don't think it's appropriate for me to take these. There are other more deserving candidates who aren't able to meet the fees at all.
And you might consider funding them. And the other thing is, since I've succeeded, and the rules were changed, a slew of students wrote to me on an annual basis to say, thank you very much. I would not have been able to come and study here.
But for your bringing that case, I haven't had one of those letters for a while, because I suspect most people have forgotten about this. But it was rewarding to have that happen.
[Nick Fabbri] (14:51 - 15:25)
So seriously, humbling and impressive thing to have done for, you know, fellow young people looking for a leg up and to sort of fulfill their dreams at university. And it's life changing stuff. I mean, just to be able to sit with that thought and think about how many lives have changed, because you had the bravery and the wit as well to actually realise that there was something not quite right in how the system was set up to make an intervention.
But I'm curious as to why you went into civil service and working in policy rather than perhaps pursuing a legal career. Did you not, were you not tempted to sort of?
[Damien Shannon] (15:25 - 16:17)
I did initially start to pursue a legal career. So I joined one of the ends of courts, I began training as a barrister. But as you know, I became very unwell.
And let's just say the life of a predictable. So I joined the civil service. I initially did so in the expectation that I would go back into law at some stage.
But I've had such a satisfying career in the civil service that I've not felt the need to leave. And that I wouldn't have thought that would have been true at the point I entered, I would always assumed it was a stepping stone. But it's proved more rewarding than I could have ever thought possible.
So yes, I continue to be for a way as an official. And greatly enjoy my, my, my time in government.
[Nick Fabbri] (16:18 - 16:30)
Fantastic. And obviously, you've come back to the to the DPhil in recent years at New College, would you like to talk a bit about the subject of your inquiry? And what do you what have you spent the last few years working on on your DPhil?
[Damien Shannon] (16:31 - 17:22)
So the broad subject of my inquiry is the changing role of the university in English society. From, well, as far back as you care to go, up until Mrs. Thatcher came into government in 1979, and a series of reforms that her government wrought the university sector over a period of 10, perhaps slightly longer years, and how those reforms relate to the concept of intellectual inquiry. The ideas that government have about using universities to expand their own agenda for wealth creation and wealth generation, and whether a university's role is an engine for society, or if it's more about people disinterestedly learning things that they are privately interested in.
So at a very high level, that's my summary.
[Nick Fabbri] (17:23 - 18:43)
Fantastic. And the whole question about, you know, the history of the universities is something that's so live here, I think, at the University of Oxford, it's a nearly a millennia old as an institution. I think some of the oldest buildings can be traced back to almost 1100.
You know, certainly university college, I think, as well, the university chapel goes back to around that time, but they kind of were all born out in the built environment, you see it, you know, you see these ancient places of worship, ancient places where people got together, almost in monastic kind of autonomous college institutions to pursue scholarship and intellectual inquiry. And then as I understand it, you can see, again, in the built environment, the layering of Oxford as a city as it expands, more colleges come about, recent ones as a couple of decades ago here, like Kellogg and Rubin College, I think. The institution of the university is developed around that, right here in around the independent colleges.
But the university's institutions are also, you know, quite separate institutionally to the state. And this wasn't a phenomenon that occurred in Britain alone, it was also the case in Italy in the University of Bologna. So do you want to sort of reflect on and talk a bit more about the history of universities as institutions in their own right?
[Damien Shannon] (18:43 - 20:45)
Yeah, the modern conception of a university owes itself to medieval Bologna. And Bologna is taken as the the oldest surviving university that's been in pretty much continuous existence. And in its initial form, it was primarily concerned with a relatively small number of subjects.
So theology, training the clergy, medicine, training doctors and law training your lawyers, the three things that have always been seemingly indispensable to the functioning of any society. And it was an international institution, even from its very earliest days. And you will know, but listeners may not be familiar that the university is so old that it predates the Treaty of Westphalia.
So there was not the conception of stable states with stable borders. And the idea of your individual rights as a citizen did not derive from your membership of a country. Civic rights tended to derive from your membership of a local community.
And Bologna, as an international institution attracted a lot of individuals who wanted to study and learn who'd traveled from all over Europe. And the problem they faced was, what civic rights do we have when we get there? How can we trust that we're not going to be arbitrarily treated as soon as we arrive, because we are not recognized as citizens of the city.
And we have no rights in relation to the city's judicial or municipal authorities. And it was a very practical problem that was solved in Bologna by having an incorporated association of students. So a university of students, whereby everybody who wanted to become a scholar of Bologna became a formal member of the corporation of the university.
And Roman law, as it existed at the time, allowed individuals to come together and form these private corporations and set their own laws effectively.
[Nick Fabbri] (20:46 - 21:02)
They were almost hermetically sealed off from the state. So the supervisory jurisdiction of the state, which again, prior to the Treaty of Westphalia didn't necessarily exist, in which you would be subject to Italian law, for instance, in Bologna, you would subject therefore to the laws of the private corporation. Yes.
[Damien Shannon] (21:03 - 22:48)
So you would swear an oath to uphold the rules of the corporation. And generally, the role of the wider magistracy was restricted to ensuring that you kept your oath. So if you defy the rules of the corporation, you could be tried for perjury.
But as a general rule, the university was able to formulate its own laws, it was also it was able to adjudicate on civil and sometimes criminal disputes involving its own members. And the ultimate arbiter of disputes was the role played by a regent to effectively headed the institution and took on the simultaneous role as judge, jury and executioner as it were. And the reason this existed was to provide people with some guarantee that if they traveled to Bologna to take up study, they would be able to secure for themselves some civic rights.
So they would have property rights, they would have right not to be interfered with, you know, they would have some right to appeal to an impartial adjudicator in the event of a dispute. And those things are all very important for the class of individuals that would partake in study at the time, which is primarily the upper classes and the nobility. And that legal lineage survived almost right up until the 1990s.
In Britain, we had a derivative of it that became the nucleus of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And by the time you get to Mrs. Thatcher becoming into government, you have new ideas taking hold in politics about what the role of the university should be in society. And they were much less willing than had been their predecessors to allow these disinterested associations of fellows to govern and direct their own affairs as they saw fit.
[Nick Fabbri] (22:48 - 23:31)
But it really is a radical reorienting or just sort of taking ourselves back conceptually into Bologna or Oxford and Cambridge in that medieval lineage or tradition you've mentioned. It's a radical reconstitution of the individual's relationship with the state and their community as well, their imagined community of what they're a part of, what laws govern their lives, what they have recourse to in cases of injustice, etc. It's almost like a foreign territory for me to picture myself living in such a world in which the Leviathan state wasn't such a kind of an all-consuming, all-powerful entity, basically.
[Damien Shannon] (23:31 - 24:09)
Yeah, it's strange for me as well. And before I began this objective inquiry, I wasn't aware that it was possible to form a private association of members, even relatively recently, and set your own rules and choose your own judge and that the state had no purchase into that relationship. The state had no means of projecting its own power into how those disputes were resolved.
And I mean, you will know as well as I do, there were almost no avenues in which the courts can't go in, certainly in modern Britain, I'm not so sure about modern Australia. Yes, indeed. But this isn't very, this is, you know, within living memory that this system existed.
[Nick Fabbri] (24:09 - 24:27)
And basically until Thatcher's reforms, which will come to as a result of these changing political and economic ideas in the 70s and 80s, in your particular case, you wouldn't have had legal recourse to the courts of England to actually take judgment on your case.
[Damien Shannon] (24:27 - 25:11)
Your case would have been handled probably internally within the university in terms of, you know, Yes, so so the legal evolution of how the state sees the role of the university made it possible for me to bring the claim that I did. Yeah. So that the two things that were necessary for me to be able to do that were the passage of something called the Human Rights Act in 1998, which gave a very broad basis upon which private individuals could challenge the act of public authorities.
And the second was this erosion of the role of something called a university visitor. So the university visitor was the modern conception of what I described in Bologna as the regent. It was the internal judge that ruled on disputes about the rules of the institution.
But that role has now been almost entirely abolished in favour of ordinary judicial oversight.
[Nick Fabbri] (25:11 - 25:32)
And before we go into, you know, your precise thesis topic and some of Thatcher's reforms, I'd like to talk about at a high level, some of those new ideas about the role of the state and universities within the state as well that came about in the 70s and 80s that actually provided the intellectual, you know, soil or grounding for some of the Thatcher government's reforms.
[Damien Shannon] (25:33 - 26:32)
So I think the primary preoccupation of Mrs Thatcher and her government was what role the state should play in facilitating and enabling the creation of wealth. And obviously the core inputs to the creation of wealth are capital and labour. And your labour needs to be skilled, especially the more verified your economy becomes.
And they very quickly realised that universities had almost complete control over the market for skills. And whereas before, governments have been quite prepared to allow the process of enrolling in and studying at a university to be a purely private affair in which you would pursue a subject of interest to and the university would teach you whatever it saw fit. Mrs Thatcher saw it much more that the university should be an enabler, an enabling institution in the creation of wealth throughout society.
So she wanted the university to be much more responsive to market forces than it had been previously.
[Nick Fabbri] (26:32 - 26:43)
In a way that the university's work is aligned to the resourcing and funding of the state to sort of meet the state's objectives and goals in terms of how it wishes to develop society economically and socially.
[Damien Shannon] (26:44 - 27:11)
Quite. So I mean, this has been a long running theme in most developed societies. Our universities don't produce enough scientists, or they don't produce enough doctors or whatever your current pinch occupation is.
But the same debates raged in the 1970s and 1980s. We've got these institutions, they're taking very large sums of public funds, and we're not sure that they're producing the outputs that we need in order to be a successful and prosperous society.
[Nick Fabbri] (27:12 - 27:45)
And this abuts, of course, with the whole question of intellectual freedom and the ideal conditions for free inquiry at universities, rather than them being kind of subordinated really to the goals of the state and what it wishes to see bear fruit economically, socially, etc. So before we jump into your precise thesis question again, can we sort of sit with that idea of the debate about what the ideal conditions for free inquiry are, and I suppose kind of what the state was before those major reforms in the 80s?
[Damien Shannon] (27:45 - 29:05)
Yes. So if you think of the ideal research environment as one in which you're free to pursue your intellectual interests and go where the evidence leads you, the ideal condition in a way for you to operate is to be solely focused on whatever it is you're interested in researching, and not be subject to outside pressure of any kind, coercive pressure, financial pressure, or otherwise. And the analogy I always provide is judicial.
I mean, why do senior judges have tenure? Why can't they be dismissed at will by the state was actually because it's quite important for the judge to be able to express himself or herself independently and come to a proper adjudication on issues of dispute that they can't be removed easily. That logic used to hold throughout the entire university sector in the UK.
The idea that in order to be able to conduct free inquiry and think through problems, you should be free from financial coercive pressures, and you should be able to take as long as you wished to reach a conclusion on something that you were interested in. And that was just judged to be a necessary condition for meaningful research. Obviously, there are disputes about how true that is.
But that was the prevailing orthodoxy, certainly before Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister.
[Nick Fabbri] (29:06 - 29:15)
Fascinating. And how precisely did you come to this thesis question? What was the spark that kind of got you interested in this line of inquiry and historical research?
[Damien Shannon] (29:15 - 32:35)
Well, it was an idle comment from a reader on a news article on I think the Times Higher Education Supplements. And the article was something to do with the university sector. I don't remember exactly what the article was about.
But the commenter had put some throwaway comment in about how the university sector had struggled since Mrs. Thatcher abolished tenure. And I'd never heard any reference to Mrs. Thatcher abolishing tenure before. And I thought, well, is that true?
So I went away and began trying to read as systematically as I could about this. And I couldn't find much in the way of secondary literature that either validated or invalidated the claim. There were some references to her having abolished tenure, but no real exposition of what that tenure was or what it consisted of.
So I did the next logical thing I would do, which is I went down to the National Archives at Kew. And I began looking through as many files I could get my hands on there, this question of academic tenure as it existed for Margaret Thatcher. And there were actually reams and reams of documentation from her governments about what academic tenure was, why they were concerned to do anything about it, and the efforts that they ultimately went to to abolish it.
So tenure as it existed at the time was, it stemmed from the legal form that universities took. So most universities had been established by something called a Royal Charter. The Royal Charter was a form of law.
And what these charters said was that all academic members of the institution were full members of the institution, they weren't just employees. And the contracts of employment with the academics directly incorporated the terms of the Charter. So there was a sort of a legal hybridisation between your being simply an employee, and you're being a legal member of this institution, as required by the Royal Charter.
So what the Charter said in many of these institutions with that was that if you were a tenured member of academic staff, you could not be dismissed for any reason other than, I think, I think it was scandal. Some sort of strange phrase like that, there had to be a scandal that justified removing you. Ambiguously defined.
I mean, very ambiguously defined. And Mrs. Thatcher came into power in 1979. And one of her secretaries of state, a man called Keith Joseph, almost the very first issue he directed his attention to once a minister was trying to abolish tenure in universities.
And the way that they sought to do this initially, the government cut very heavily the funding of universities in their 1981 university grant settlement. And what they had assumed, and this is there's plenty of evidence of this in the archives, this isn't my idly speculating, what they had assumed is that by cutting funding, the universities would be forced to make redundant members of staff. And what happened is the universities went away and took independent legal advice, and came back to the government and said, well, we've taken our own advice.
And we've been told that we don't have the legal power to make any academics redundant, because they all have this protected form of tenure, which derives from their Royal Charters. And we can't dismiss them without changing the Charter.
[Nick Fabbri] (32:36 - 32:42)
And the Charters go all the way back to that tradition from Bologna, as you sort of mentioned about universities being autonomous institutions.
[Damien Shannon] (32:42 - 33:41)
These legally autonomous institutions that had have their own independent legal grounding. And the government then took their own legal advice, which confirmed the finding of the universities and the government were told expressly, you can't dismiss anybody for reason of redundancy without paying very, very heavy compensation. And a sort of tug of war then emerged for years where Mrs Thatcher tried to browbeat universities into voluntarily changing their university charters.
But one of the curious features of these charters is that they could not be changed without the consent of the academic community. So obviously, no academic was minded to vote for a change that would worsen their own employment conditions. So everybody had veto power of everybody else, it wasn't really possible for the state to intervene in any obvious way.
And eventually, Mrs. Thatcher lost her patience, and she passed an Act of Parliament in 1986, which compelled every university in the country to divest the clauses in their rule charters that conferred tenure on their academic staff.
[Nick Fabbri] (33:42 - 33:43)
It's quite a radical intervention.
[Damien Shannon] (33:43 - 33:48)
It's radical. And the idea that you would pass legislation expressly for that purpose, you know, it's quite interesting.
[Nick Fabbri] (33:48 - 33:56)
Did it lead to a kind of a political, social conflagration in the way that Thatcher and the poll tax did or the closing of mines and things? What was the...
[Damien Shannon] (33:56 - 34:27)
No, it didn't. And that's a curious feature of the history. I think that for a number of reasons, one is the university sector was not very heavily unionized.
So formal opposition to most policies of that kind tended to come from trade unions. And without heavy unionization of the sector, there wasn't much of a voice to speak up for the academic community. Second, it was quite, they're quite an easy community to demonize.
You know, you can say they live in their ivory towers, they're paid silly money, they don't have to do anything, you know, they're all whining and dining.
[Nick Fabbri] (34:27 - 34:29)
Lift wing... Exactly.
[Damien Shannon] (34:29 - 35:10)
It's very easy to demonize the community. It's quite difficult to elicit public sympathy for the idea that you should be paid a job for life, in which nobody assesses whether or not you're doing any work. So it was it's just it was a very difficult system to explain or defend on its merits.
The only evidence I found of any real attempt to defend it seems to have come from the civil service. I think for the basic reason that they realized that they might be next. And they had a very similar system of tenure, which obviously they felt underpinned their capacity to speak truth under power to ministers.
And they were very wary that the precedent set in the academic community might suddenly be applied to them. But otherwise, there wasn't any evidence of a great backlash.
[Nick Fabbri] (35:11 - 36:10)
And I do want to come back to Sir Keith Joseph and the intellectual wellsprings behind this movement that sort of most facilitated the Thatcher government's policy reform. But firstly, I mean, just to sort of reflect on instinctively how strange it feels that a conservative government would institute such a sweeping radical reform, as we've just mentioned, which is so averse to the conservative ideal of preserving free association, institutions that are, centuries and millennia old, and instead actively facilitate the growth and the omnipresence of the Leviathan state, this sort of Hobbesian governmental entity, which intrudes upon all facets of our lives. I just can't understand how a conservative government, I can see maybe if it was a Labor or an Australian Greens government, that might sort of come more naturally, philosophically and politically.
But yes,
[Damien Shannon] (36:10 - 38:25)
I mean, I suppose, yeah, there is a, there is what looks like a contradiction in terms, because if you were to describe the idea of an institution of free association, where people chose their own members, they chose the rules in which they operated under, and they adjudicated upon their own internal disputes, that would sound like and in many ways, it was a conservative concept, that there were these institutions that existed entirely separate from the state.
And that was challenged by two things, really. The first was that that legal form of existence came into being before the university relied to any great extent upon government finances to finance their operations. And obviously, the argument then came why we handing over billions of pounds a year to a sector, which is entirely immune from our capacity to direct its affairs, unaccountable, it is in a way unaccountable, you're paying money without being able to examine the outputs.
So that was one argument that counted against it. The other was, although it seems instinctively conservative to say that there should be these associations that can freely incorporate and govern their own internal affairs. The other domineering feature of certainly British conservative thinking, and certainly going back to the 1970s, and maybe even still today, is this idea of parliamentary sovereignty, this idea that the state can make or unmake any law and there are no no go areas for Parliament.
So if Parliament decides it wants to intervene in almost any private relationship, it has the legal power to do so there's no written constitution in England or the UK. And there are no fetters on Parliament's power to do things of that kind. So I think those two things conspired at the same time to drive conservative politicians of the day to what seem might seem like a somewhat unconservative solution, which is to break down the barriers of this autonomous institution, and exercise the power of the state in order to do so.
And the guiding principles for that, I think we'll come on to, but they seem primarily to resolve around this idea that the university needed to be an engine of economic growth.
[Nick Fabbri] (38:26 - 39:02)
And perhaps to jump off into that line of inquiry, do you want to sort of reflect more on Sir Keith Joseph and his role as the intellectual progenitor of a lot of these ideas of managerialism managerialism as sort of an antidote to the malaise that Britain was in prior to Thatcher's ascendancy in 1779? And yeah, well, I suppose more the what other kind of philosophical and economic approaches was it like a, you know, we guided his policy reforms as well.
[Damien Shannon] (39:02 - 40:13)
Yeah, so Keith Joseph is one of the most fascinating characters throughout history, in that he was, in many respects, a very great intellectual success. And he helps guide the Conservative Party to the, the style of thinking and governing that led to successive victories after 1979. But he himself was also somewhat as a failure as a minister, there are no great personal politics, policy successes associated with his tenure.
So he's a man of internal contradictions, he was he was, he could see all of the problems in the world, but he struggled with execution, but his own intellectual lineage is a story in itself. So in his early years in politics, which trace all the way back to the 1950s, he would be described as to what might be called in the 19th century, an orthodox Tory, he saw the role of the state as being paternalistic. He was greatly wedded to the idea of social stability.
And he thought the role of government and social elites in society was to take care of everybody else to exercise their power benignly.
[Nick Fabbri] (40:13 - 40:18)
Red Tories, I think we call them sort of the more welfare and civic minded conservatives, right?
[Damien Shannon] (40:18 - 42:52)
Yes, although the that mode of thinking goes back long before the existence of a welfare state. So it was one of the underpinning justifications for the Conservative Party all the way back to the early 19th century, even the 18th century. But that would certainly be his position in the 1950s.
And that was probably a fairly representative view of where the Conservative Party was between the certainly between the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Heath government in 1974. But there seemed to be two innovations in his thinking that were dominant, and that came to be quite important later on. The fastest in the early 1950s, he took his first visit to the United States.
And he observed in action, the great weight that the Americans placed on the importance of professional managerialism as a way of achieving a highly productive society. Now, such things were almost completely anathema in Britain in the 1950s. There were no business schools in Britain to speak of in the 1950s.
The major universities didn't have them, they didn't believe in teaching business. So although we have the side here now, there was no equivalent in the 1950s, there was no such thing as the MBA. And the British view of effective leadership was that it derived from character, you know, you're, you would be a, you know, an honest gent, and you would therefore be good at leading the corporation.
You've been schooled in the classics. Exactly. Exactly.
You know, it was a very class based view of how you ought to govern society. But his exposure to American thinking and their innovative approaches to this and actually treating leadership and management as a discipline in and of itself, greatly shook him. And he immediately came back to Britain and founded a group whose role was to promote the adoption of business studies throughout British universities.
And he was successful in that. But that gave him faith in professional management in a way that he didn't previously had. And it greatly influenced his thinking from that point onwards.
But nonetheless, between that point in the early 1950s and onwards, he still remained very much of the mindset that the basic role of the state was to be paternalistic, and he didn't really shift from that. The other great intellectual breaking point in his life came in the Heath government in the 1970s, in which he was a minister. And that's because, first of all, the Heath government was seen by conservatives as unequivocal evidence of failure of what might be called consensus politics, which was the consensus that built up in British politics that the post Second World War welfare state, and all of its provisions, had to be kept as a means of ensuring social harmony.
[Nick Fabbri] (42:53 - 42:54)
And no government could sort of radically...
[Damien Shannon] (42:54 - 42:57)
Exactly, no government could seriously imperil that system.
[Nick Fabbri] (42:57 - 42:59)
Or manage yearly, sort of get there and manage the economy.
[Damien Shannon] (43:00 - 43:56)
Exactly. And but the view with certainly within many conservative minds was the Heath government was the last proof that that system had failed and something else needed to be put in its place. And he was at the thick of that.
He was in government at the time. A lot of his friends shunned him for his involvement in the Heath government. He felt privately humiliated.
The other thing is that as a result of some of the economic calamities of the Heath government, Keith Joseph himself lost a lot of his personal wealth. So his private financial position was seriously imperiled by the performance of the Heath government. The third thing was that his private life was also in peril as well.
His relationship with his wife was not great. And he had these three things come together simultaneously that seemed to shake him out of his paternalistic view of the state and try and look for something different. And that led him to embrace what you might call neoliberal economics.
[Nick Fabbri] (43:56 - 43:57)
Market reform.
[Damien Shannon] (43:57 - 45:00)
Exactly. Hayekian Freedmen. Exactly.
Exactly. And he began reading economics textbooks. He began attending the Mont Pelerin Society.
He began attending the IEA in London. And he acted as a sort of canary in the coal mine. And he explored all of these areas that other conservatives would never really dared to go.
Of how you could fundamentally reorient the role of the state towards market principles and the generation of wealth and something much closer to where the United States was starting to go as well. And where he led, others began to follow. And what he did was provide a sort of fertile ground upon which Mr. Thatcher could operate as a leader. And he himself had the ambition to be the leader of the Conservative Party. I don't know if we discussed this previously. But he was planning on running.
But his leadership campaign was very famously sunk by a speech he gave in which he referred to the working people of Britain as a human stock. And it was judged to be an extremely poorly judged phrase. And it killed his leadership ambitions.
[Nick Fabbri] (45:01 - 45:04)
So taking the labor and capital inputs to a really extreme degree.
[Damien Shannon] (45:05 - 45:05)
Exactly. Yeah.
[Nick Fabbri] (45:06 - 45:07)
Human beings is economic.
[Damien Shannon] (45:07 - 45:20)
But that meant, after that event, he shunned all leadership ambition. And he accepted that his fundamental role was to enable other ministers and the Prime Minister to achieve the things that he was interested in achieving.
[Nick Fabbri] (45:20 - 45:48)
Which is, in a way, a sort of a means of affecting more systemic, enduring change as well. Because it's not just sort of contingent upon him occupying the position of leader of the party and perhaps the government and the country. But he can kind of influence many generations of politicians and policy change makers as well.
And now looking back upon his influence, we see Thatcherism essentially is the fruit that, you know, his intellectual framework bore.
[Damien Shannon] (45:49 - 46:43)
It is. It is. And she readily credited him with a lot of her achievements.
But in a way, although society was, it was altered fundamentally by what Mrs. Thatcher sought to do. But at the same time, some of the core tenets of society didn't change. So the basic concept that the state would engage in large volumes of taxation and use that taxation to provide collective welfare didn't change.
At the margins, things did change. So property shifted from something that was in large part the preserve of the state, like a third of all housing stock in Britain in 1979 was owned by the state. That became much more of a private endeavor.
And you had a few areas like that, public utilities and so on and so forth that were privatized. But the core of what the state did didn't seem to fundamentally change so that it wasn't as revolutionary as it might have looked.
[Nick Fabbri] (46:43 - 47:34)
But one instance or instantiation of where that neoliberal ascendancy through Sir Keith and Sir Keith Joseph and Thatcher as well, it did change was the corporatization of the universities and the modern conditions of employment by way of removing tenure and kind of fundamentally changing or altering the relationship between university and state. So I mean, could you sort of talk in granularity about how in 1986 when that act of Parliament forced the divestment of those clauses in the Royal Charter, essentially removing tenure of professors and things. So what did it actually look like in those policy reforms, which kind of threw into high relief those broader political and economic philosophical changes towards the state and the universities?
[Damien Shannon] (47:34 - 50:52)
Yeah, I think the fundamental problem was the state took a view about the role that the university should have, but realized pretty quickly, it had no legal means at its disposal to effectuate its will. So if your if your view is, the university at the moment is too, is too preoccupied with its own interests and is not sufficiently preoccupied with wider interests of society, particularly, particularly economic interests, how do you coerce that institution in line with your view? Now, the legal form of the university as it existed in 1979, made that very difficult, you couldn't fire anybody, you couldn't make redundancies, it was even quite difficult to control what they did through financial means.
So in a way, what the state needed to do was create new powers for itself to intervene. And it did, it passed an act of Parliament, the primary goal of which was to send what were called commissioners, university commissioners to go into every single university in the country, and adapt the Royal Charter to expunge this legal right to tenure. But that was only one element of what happened.
The commissioners were also given covert instructions by the government when they were appointed, that they should also take as many decisions as possible out of the hands of these collective decision making forums of academics, usually called senates. And here, we would call a congregation and place as many decisions as possible in the hands of the vice chancellor. So on the one hand, the the subterfuge through which they sought to rework the legal basis upon which university existed was this issue of tenure.
But once they created this legal power, they sought to use it for collateral purposes, and mainly to create something that looks much more like a chief executive vice chancellor, who was empowered to run the institution along the lines of private corporation. So that was the goal. Once that had been achieved, a few other things happened.
So this this historic role of the university visitor, who was judge and jury within the university and adjudicated upon all disputes was steadily eroded by statues until now it's purely a ceremonial role. And that meant that almost everything that happened within the university was subject to supervision by the ordinary law courts. Now that's important in two ways, one, because the state appoints judges, certainly all senior judges.
And two, because the role of the court is not just to shield the individual from the power of the state, but it's to project the state power into private relationships. So it served both functions. And I think what then happened, you can almost guess yourself, once tenure had been adopted, abolished by these institutions, the basis upon which the academic workforce were employed and retained became much more casualized.
And you had no like right to lifetime employment, rolling year 12 month contracts, zero hour contracts, is that the sort of it didn't all happen that way. At first, that's taken a long time to get to that point. But you had you had a sort of toxic relationship whereby, on the one hand, the legal basis of secure employment had been removed.
On the other hand, Mrs. Thatcher did two other things that were innovative. She began conducting audits of the research of all academics to see how worthy was their research output. So you had periodic audits that determine whether or not that what you were producing was any good or not, which never previously existed.
[Nick Fabbri] (50:53 - 51:14)
And how can it because as we were saying before, I mean, you don't necessarily produce something of intellectual value within a year or some sort of like, you know, annual KPI audit, which a government boffin would be able to determine and assess it might take 10 to 15 years for your the value of your research and free intellectual inquiry to actually bear fruit.
[Damien Shannon] (51:15 - 52:19)
Yeah, I mean, the ultimate question is, should you be able to spend 15 years investigating one complex line of scientific inquiry, and at the end of that 15 years report that your findings are all negative? Is that a worthwhile use of public funds? I mean, the traditional view would be to say yes.
I think the pro Thatcher view would be to say no, actually, unless you're producing results, we don't want to fund you. And in a way, I mean, I suppose it's probably analogous to the university system is existed previously is probably more analogous to venture capital, you know, you fund 100 projects, and maybe one pays off and changes the world. Whereas today, it's much more, you know, public equity, you want everything to pay off every penny you put in, you want to get something back on.
So I think you have this unhealthy toxic relationship between a casualized workforce, an audit culture that checked everything they were doing to see whether it was worthwhile, and an empowered executive leadership within each institution that had the power to dismiss people, which never previously had.
[Nick Fabbri] (52:19 - 52:19)
Yeah.
[Damien Shannon] (52:19 - 52:39)
And those three things combined, led to a situation in which now, your pay as an academic is quite poor, your prospects of securing anything that looks like a stable contract of employment are also very poor. And it's become extremely unattractive as a place to work.
[Nick Fabbri] (52:40 - 52:46)
And yet universities or the number of universities in Britain has tripled since those reforms that Thatcher ushered in. Is that correct?
[Damien Shannon] (52:47 - 54:11)
Yes. So before Mrs. Thatcher came into government, you had a separation of what was your classic university sector, and what you would call polytechnics, which were trade schools, sort of they were run by local authorities, and they provided training for teachers or engineers or certain technical specialisms. And the john major government, it was not the Margaret Thatcher government passed a law in 1992, which redesignated these polytechnics as universities.
So almost overnight, you'd doubled the number of participants in the university sector. And then from there on the controls for creating new institutions were greatly liberalised till the you get to the point now where I think we're upwards of 130 universities in the UK, whereas before Mrs. Thatcher came to government, I think it would have been roughly 40. So the number of institutions competing in the field has grown enormously.
And at the same time, the value of the outputs, I mean, if the whole goal of these reforms was to improve the value of what these institutions are producing. We were discussing earlier, one of the basic problems with scientific discovery at the moment is that most of what goes in a scientific journal is a replicable. Other scientists find it very difficult to verify the discoveries made by others.
So how valuable the outputs are in this environment is seriously open to question.
[Nick Fabbri] (54:11 - 54:26)
Because of the publish or perish environment they're kind of forced into, you've got to publish something, whether it's replicable or not, or a scientific discovery or innovation worthy of, you know.
[Damien Shannon] (54:26 - 55:14)
Yeah, if you're in the position or if I'm in the position of knowing that we've got perhaps a two or three year contract, and our employability after that point turns on how often we've published and the impact that those publications have had, then you can be pretty sure we're going to publish something. And the incentives that creates are to publish almost things that aren't really worth publishing. You have to have something to your name to justify your continued existence.
Even if publishing nothing and waiting three more years would have produced something much more valuable. The time horizons of the academic employment contract and the discovery process are no longer very clearly aligned. The pressure is to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, even if that doesn't really align with the discovery process.
[Nick Fabbri] (55:14 - 55:52)
So the metrics we're using to value and appreciate the roles of university and intellectual inquiry are misaligned, as you've said. The findings, it seems, yes, the number of universities has tripled. There are more people going to universities now than there were 40 years ago.
The value of the workforce has eroded over time in terms of the pay and conditions. Security positions have declined. Academia is not a very attractive place to be.
And it seems, how do you assess, I suppose, over the last 40 years of this policy intervention, the outcome to be? I mean, it can't be anything other than profoundly negative in my view.
[Damien Shannon] (55:53 - 57:39)
I think it's probably a mixed picture. So on the one hand, I mean, the recent experience of COVID is illustration of what the university sector is capable of providing, what it really puts its mind to something. So you had here in Oxford, the conception, creation and validation of a vaccine for a novel virus within a period of months.
So you do get pockets of excellence within the system that are capable of doing great things at speed when they have to. So you still have that, that's not really gone away. And on the other hand, as well, you've got far more people participating in higher education.
I mean, if you go back to the 1970s, I think the enrollment rates were probably about 5% of the adult population, whereas it's much closer to 30, 40% now. So the number of people with exposure to higher learning has expanded. And you might say that in itself is a good outcome.
On the downside, it's very difficult to say that any of these interventions have had any real impact on productivity, economic performance, or any other metric that was justified to make the intervention in the first place. So you might be able to justify some of the interventions on terms that have got nothing to do with the basis upon which they were made. But either way, if you're one of the best people in your field coming out of mathematics or computer science, or any of the other pinch point professions in Oxford at the moment, you would really have to love what you do to stay in academia.
I mean, the rewards of going into the private or even into government, the rewards are so much higher than the cash rewards are so much higher, that the incentives are very much stacked against the retention of high quality people to conduct research and to teach tomorrow's scholars.
[Nick Fabbri] (57:40 - 58:12)
Which is a snowball effect because you get some of the best people deciding that they want to leave academia. It's not an attractive place to be, to raise a family, to live because it's so insecure in terms of the conditions of employment. It's not a model of what it used to be and what it could be.
And instead they go into the civil service, they go into law, teaching, healthcare, whatever it might be. And then of course, you get the guardians of bringing up the next generation, probably you've got a lower talent pool doing the teaching and the research. It's like a feedback loop, right?
It's a self-perpetuating kind of mechanism.
[Damien Shannon] (58:14 - 58:53)
Yes. Yes. I mean, in a way, Oxford is kind of insulated from this, although it's not totally insulated.
But in a way, institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, and to a lesser extent, some of the London universities, their lineage and their international prestige is almost a guarantor that you're going to get able people who want to come here. So we are in a pretty lucky position here in that we still have some of the finest minds in the world here. But step outside of Oxford, step outside of Cambridge, step outside of some of the leading London universities, and things are really a struggle, I think.
[Nick Fabbri] (58:54 - 59:31)
It's aggravated as well by recent migration law reform by the Sunak government. I think there was an intervention recently whereby PhD researchers or researchers full stop were not able to bring their families along on a kind of a joint visa to the UK. So if you came here as a researcher, that would be fine.
But you'd essentially have to send remittance back to your family, maybe in India or China or Australia. You can't actually kind of bring your family with you to do your PhD or DPhil rather over three or four years. And that obviously means that people might go to Europe or to America instead to do their research.
[Damien Shannon] (59:32 - 1:01:22)
So having advised on that question, I have to be a little bit careful in what I say. But I think it is fair to say that if you are a prospective student from any country in the world, and you're looking to where you might go internationally, part of what's going to influence your thinking is, can I stay in the country after I complete my studies? And if I have a family, can I bring them with me?
And that's been a long acknowledged challenge in setting visa policy for universities in that if you are heavily restrictive, you reduce the attractiveness of the British offer compared to your competitors. But if you heavily liberalise, it almost becomes too attractive. And you can have very high rates of immigration very, very quickly.
So from the I don't really want to get into how government weighs up these decisions. But like most decisions in government, there are very coherent arguments on both sides as to what you might do. And they present challenges however you however you go about it.
But I am aware that in Oxford, this has caused particular problems lately. I mean, I don't envy the university having to navigate these waters, but part of the reason they are in this difficulty, certainly with postdoctoral graduates rather than students, is that the pay has been so heavily eroded, that the university is no longer paying its postdoctorals enough to qualify for visas. So I mean, that gives you some indication that the university isn't entirely blameless in that situation, like had their pay kept pace with the wider economy and with inflation with other things.
They might not be in that position.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:01:22 - 1:02:00)
And having done or nearly completed this DPhil, in which, from what it seems for our conversation, quite a bleak image really of the modern academic environment has been painted and almost like a bleak assessment of the Thatcher interventions of 40 years ago. Where do you see your own career leading after this? And having lived and read academia for so long, do you see yourself kind of trying to make a living in this space?
Or is the value of the work that you've done, the intellectual contribution to understanding this question, and you'll leave it there? Or are you going to go back to the civil service? Or what sort of next for you?
[Damien Shannon] (1:02:00 - 1:02:48)
I think certainly in the medium term, I'll definitely stay in the civil service. There's been a lot of cross pollination between my intellectual development here and my intellectual development in the civil service. And that the more I've learned in the civil service, how the state works, the easier it's been to look back on historical problems and understand the relative points of view of ministers, officials and outsiders, and to understand the mechanics of how decisions were made.
Whereas, you know, the more I've learned about contemporary government, the easier it is to understand governments of the past. And that's been very, very helpful. But it's very difficult to see a world in which one can make a happy existence in academia at the moment.
And I wouldn't wish to leave the civil service anytime soon.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:02:48 - 1:03:24)
It's a great shame that, you know, we've sort of reflected on that. Academia is in that state. And I suppose, as someone who's worked in politics and policy, what kinds of interventions would you like to sort of potentially see to sort of change the situation whereby you still maintain intellectual inquiry, there was an alignment between government resourcing outcomes for society, politically, economically, socially as well.
But universities weren't under these strange pressures from the state to publish or perish and zero our contracts and things. What are the kinds of policy remedies you might see?
[Damien Shannon] (1:03:25 - 1:04:35)
Well, I mean, again, that's inviting me to get into sort of political dynamics. It kind of depends what your goals are. So what is the outcome you want to see?
I mean, it's easy for us to say, neither of us having lived through what it was to be in a university in the 1970s, so it doesn't all sound wonderful. But if you read some of the social histories of that period, most of the people that were participating in it at the time complained about it, that it was lazy, factless, nobody took it seriously. So, you know, would you substitute today's system for that system?
Probably not, actually. So I mean, the one thing I've learned from being a civil servant is that all decisions are compromises. There's no such thing as a perfect decision.
And all decisions are temporally sensitive. So what's good today might have been terrible 50 years ago, and what was good 50 years ago might be terrible today. So I don't think there's such a thing as a silver bullet.
I think what is true to say is that the society within which universities exist is evolving very, very quickly, certainly in the last 30 years. And I'm sure its role will have to evolve as well.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:04:35 - 1:04:53)
Mm hmm. Yeah. And to bring the interview to an end, what are some of the happier memories for you about your time at Oxford, living in this institution, and this amazing community, intellectual richness of the lectures and talks and the people you meet?
What are some of the fondest memories you have of this place?
[Damien Shannon] (1:04:54 - 1:06:21)
I would say, compared to other universities I've been at and other institutions I've been a part of, it feels much more like a community here than anywhere else. And that partly stems from the subdivision of the university into colleges. So you become a member of the college, it very much feels like a community that you're a part of.
And although obviously, I had my own bizarre route to coming here, once you're in the university, once you're within the institution, it's amazingly egalitarian, like the resources are very fairly distributed amongst the members. So you almost any question that you want to turn your mind to, there's somebody that can talk to you about it. Almost any skill you want to learn or acquire, it's available to you, either free or at a very reduced price.
If you want to stimulate yourself intellectually, you can do so. If you want to develop your oratorical skills, you can join the union. Almost anything that you can think of that you're interested in developing, you can do here and do it well.
And my great view of the university is it's so I've no experience of Cambridge, but I'm, I'm sure it almost competes. But my great view of Oxford is that it's the greatest gift that Britain can bestow upon an individual to allow them to study here and have the privilege of being a member of the university. And I would never have said that 10 years ago, but having been here, it is an example of an institution that can and does work well.
And we must do everything that we can to preserve it and defend it.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:06:22 - 1:07:50)
And so thinking back to younger Damien at Mansfield from a family that wasn't exposed to the privileges of Oxford, as you just mentioned, which is vouchsafed for very, very few people internationally, but also domestically in the UK and thinking about what accessing this institution means existentially, really, also in terms of your career development, your personal development, you met your, your wife here. I mean, you were very lucky, I suppose, in the way that you came here.
And you know, the chances that the things that had to happen in your life, you know, you, you weren't interested in the acoustics, studying acoustics, you instead got interested in history. You got into Open University, did well there, you satisfy that curiosity. But really, it's the probability of you ending up here was quite slim.
And then obviously, the big legal dispute with the university itself to allow you to come in with the financial means you did, notwithstanding your working class background, how can that kind of access be improved for more people like you back at Mansfield all those years ago? I mean, because it shouldn't take just sheer randomness, frankly, and very, very good luck and also your own personal qualities of, of, you know, taking the university to court to let you in, it's sort of like, you know, I'm trying to say how do you how do we sort of expand the opportunity for people to get in here?
[Damien Shannon] (1:07:52 - 1:10:06)
I think I think it tends to be fashionable to say that it should be the role of the university to do more to facilitate access to people from my type of background. But the truth is, had the university, let's just say the university done an outreach provision at my school, which it didn't, but let's just say that I would not have understood the value of it, I would not have understood the value of scholarship, I wouldn't have understood the value of university, I would have had no idea how to choose a course or a career or anything else. It's very difficult for the university as an institution to make up for a culture that exists in a lot of Britain of not fully aspiring to your full potential.
And I, I mean, I was certainly clever at school, but I had no conception of how to direct intelligence in a way that would lead to anything. I knew on a personal level, no university graduates, the only university graduates I came into account in into contact with would have been my teachers and doctors, and that would have been it. So you're just not surrounded by people who've done any of the things that you might want to do.
And it I can't easily see a way that the university can make up for that. I mean, for my point of view, the only thing that the university can do is have the fairest, most open system possible to admit the best people it can find. But really, the duty really has to sit elsewhere, to bring people of my level up to a degree of preparedness that they can actually compete to come here.
If I'd have interviewed for, let's just say I got the grades to apply when I was 18, which I didn't, but let's just say for fictions purposes that I did, I would have been hopeless in the interview process, I would have been entirely ill suited to the tutorial process. And it took years of unusual development, development on my account to get to a position where I was in any way ready to come here. It's very much a cultural issue, I think, in Britain, where if you're from my type of background, it just never occurs to you.
I gave as an example, in a newspaper interview a number of years ago, as my answer that I could no more have imagined studying at Oxford than I could have done living in Buckingham Palace.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:07 - 1:11:02)
One of the people, one of the things that people reflect on mostly coming from Australia, and perhaps any country really outside of Britain is just how stratified and class-based society is here. And your observations, I think, seem to be entirely sort of consistent with that. It really is almost like living in two worlds, right?
You're either some sort of from an environment and you've got high schools and things and primary schools and families that lead you towards Oxford and Cambridge and give you the preparation to come here. I suppose the ability to think on your feet, to talk, to engage in that tutorial system, all the kinds of things that the admissions departments would look for, right, which you don't necessarily get if you're from a state school and you don't have the resourcing around you and things like that. So do you have the feeling of walking in two worlds still?
[Damien Shannon] (1:11:02 - 1:13:11)
I do in a way. I think probably my biggest insight on that would be, first of all, an eloquent, witty, responsive 17-year-old who performs well under pressure at interview is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. So to the extent the university place any great weight on that as a predictor of future performance, I think that might actually be a mistake.
That is not a naturally occurring phenomenon to the extent that you do have a child. It's effectively a child who's attained those qualities by the age of 17. There's probably a lot else going on that you're not seeing.
The other thing is the cycles in which I move now, most of the people that I interact with, a lot of the people I socialize with, and it's almost all of the people that I work with are from what you might call the upper strata of English society. They've been to the good schools, they've been to the major colleges here, they've had the fetid existence all the way up. And what I tend to find is actually the performance differential doesn't actually carry on that well into the working life.
So whereas at 18, they may have looked 10 times better than the comp school kid, and at 21, at the end of university, they may have looked five times better. The working world is a great equalizer. You come into very different types of pressure there, you have to be much more impromptu, you have to be able to think responsibly to problems that you've not seen before.
And unlike the Oxford examination system, where you just memorize the answers to essays, you actually have to think on the spot. And actually, what has been surprising is the number of people from those backgrounds that can do that well, is absolutely tiny. And I have seen just about everybody you can imagine at the upper echelons of the state, and there's very, very few people who can do that well.
So if I was to speak to somebody in my own position, maybe 20 years younger, I would say just don't worry about whatever perceived advantages somebody might have at 17. They won't matter in 10 years time.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:13:12 - 1:13:16)
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Damien. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you.
Thank you.