We are seeking your help along with your signature. We are hoping to gain support from a very large number of Oxford and Cambridge academics for the open letter below addressed to Mr Willetts and Dr Cable. If you would like to sign the letter please send an email to: cache.announce@gmail.com no later than the end of TUESDAY 1ST MARCH 2011 saying you would like to sign the letter and giving:
1. Your name and title,
2. Your University or College position, and
3. The University (Oxford or Cambridge) with which you are associated.
This information will be used as your signature on the letter. See below for an easy way to compose an approriate email.
We regret that we can only accept e-mail signatures from e-mail addresses ending in "cam.ac.uk" or "ox.ac.uk", so if you have another e-mail account (e.g. a Gmail account), please use your institutional e-mail account instead.
An appropriate email can (usually) be composed automatically in your email program if you fill in your name, etc below and press the button beneath.
We write to you as (X number) deeply concerned academics working in both Oxford and Cambridge. As you will be aware both universities have in the last weeks held meetings of their respective senates (Congregation in Oxford and the Regents of the Senate in Cambridge) to discuss aspects of the changes currently underway in the funding of HE in England. We note with dismay and alarm that universities are being forced to take major decisions, with unknown consequences, to a breakneck timetable. We are being asked to 'fly blind' over matters of the utmost importance in respect to our ability to continue to deliver world class education and research.
We, along with all serious economic analysts, accept that the form and shape of an economically advanced nation's HE system is crucial to its capacity for future growth. But we fear that the proposed new model by which 'the money follows the student' will produce random effects in the HE sector, depriving some courses of income streams, decimating the funding for teaching in some institutions without any coherent and publicly announced policy in regard to which of these institutions and courses you believe should be left to fail. As has been publicly announced this is to be left to the market to decide.
If, as you have said, the HE sector needs to be more diverse, there needs to be an informed and open public debate on how that diversity is to be shaped, what it may consist in and the aims and objectives for wanting to introduce such diversity. Under the current proposals we see your preferred mechanism for delivering these outcomes - 'student choice' - as an extremely risky and irresponsible experiment. It appears to rest on no more than an article of faith- a belief in the absolute wisdom of the market.
Given this we, the undersigned, ask you to halt the current plans for implementing such enormously risky legislation in such undue haste and until such time as the possible outcomes and consequences of these proposed changes have been coherently and rigorously examined. We believe that a public commission of enquiry, properly and fully consultative, charged with the responsibility of examining these issues is urgently required and ask you to set in motion such an enquiry.