Minister for Universities talks in York
John Denham is an Old Labour man with a brand new brief. Nicky Woolf finds out what he has to say.
“It’s almost like trying to build into the system the equivalent of what will happen to a young person whose parents have both been to university,” says John Denham, Labour MP for Southampton Itchen and the first occupant of the newly-created post of Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills, on a recent visit to the University.
“They will tend to grow up in an environment where the assumption is that if you’re clever enough you will go to university. But these young people who are saying ‘people like me don’t go to university’ – they’re part of the problem… So you raise their aspirations.”
Denham speaks quickly, but confidently. His hand gestures are clipped, but vehemently expressive. He seemed like a man in his element.
“Legislation in this area is a crude and probably counter-productive tool,” he says.
This does not sound like the classic spiel from an agent of a New Labour that has introduced more new crime laws than many previous governments put together. In fact, despite being promoted to the front bench for the first time by Blair in 1995, he reminds me a little of old Labour under John Smith.
Denham is an experienced campaigner; he was a transport campaigner for Friends of the Earth, and worked for Oxfam and other development agencies before being elected to parliament in the 1992 general election, obviously having a very clear vision of social equality.
He famously had his membership of the Southampton University Students’ Union revoked for his support of tuition fees, but is endearingly coy and self-deprecating about it, before launching into an extremely convincing defence of the controversial policy.
“The reality is,” he says, “that introducing the variable fees system has brought about £1.3 billion into British universities, which has put the university system on to a much more stable footing.”
“I think,” he continues, “that given the other choices, which were to say that fewer people could go to university or that the quality of university education should decline, it was the right decision to take.”
His enthusiasm is hard to resist, and his reasoning hard to refute. He is very confident with facts, and wields them with Blairite self assurance and Brownian honesty; an endearing combination. His air, in fact, is modern and ministerial, but his beliefs seem to lean in the direction of socialism. It is obvious that everyone in the room is impressed.
I ask about the balance between research and tuition, something that the University has found difficult to strike without straining financially in recent years; as the recent cuts to departmental budgets attest. But once again, his enthusiasm and earnestness are overwhelming.
“A good university can be excellent at research and excellent at teaching as well. In fact, that’s the York University mission, as it was explained to me this morning. There is no need to decide whether you’re going to be good at teaching or good at research.”
York’s enigmatic Vice-Chancellor, Brian Cantor, spoke up here. Silent till this point, he must have finally felt moved to speak.“Let me put it stronger if I might,” he began, speaking slowly and deliberately. “We believe that the best teaching is done by people who are so engaged in research so that they are bubbling over themselves with the most exciting new developments. We believe that the best research is done when the researchers also teach, because it makes them continually re-evaluate the fundamental things that they base their research on.
“That’s quite hard to do, because people’s time is pressed. There’s a temptation to focus all your research in one place and all your teaching in one place, but here, at York, we believe strongly in bringing the two together.” John Denham seems to be an asset to the British university system, and we can hope that even little York could benefit from his input.
