Academia

Translation of a post by Vaughan Roderick:

I'd never come across the word "valedictocracy" before reading this column in the New York Times. To tell the truth I suspect the columnist, David Brooks, had coined it to describe the next government of the USA - a government that is likely to be full of the best university graduates in the country.

The last president to form a government of this kind was Kennedy and the effort has been chronicled in David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest - a political classic which chronicles the mistakes and bad ideas that led to the torturous experience of Vietnam. In the Doonesbury cartoons it was suggested that The Worst and the Stupidest would be a better description of the Kennedy government.

Nonetheless the academics of our university institutions should play an important role in Wales' civil and governmental life. The fruit of their research should be a basis to the development of policy and a key input to debates regarding the direction and future of the country. The plain truth about it is that our universities on the whole have failed in that regard.

There are exceptions of course such as the business school in Cardiff and the Institute of Politics in Aber but they are exceptions.

Why is that? Well, partly it stems from the irony that our oldest national institution - the University of Wales - has had very snobbish, elitist, even anti-Welsh tendencies at times. A substantial percentage of our academics, it seems, thought that the day to day concerns of the society around them were too petty, too insignificant too study. Thinking big thoughts was their work not offering solutions to problems. The common people were welcome to contribute their sparse pennies - as long as they didn't expect anything in return. That is changing, I hope.

But there is another problem that stems from the structure of financing research in our universities. While extensive parts of the educational financing system have been devolved the Research Councils are still bodies organised on a UK level. There are strong arguments for that system and it's hard to see what advantage there would be in having four councils to care for, for example, medical research. But in other fields, the Economic and Social Research Council for example, it's fair to ask if the present system gives enough consideration for the need for important and relevant research in the devolved countries.