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Universities in Wonderland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Albert Weale
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Extract

Perhaps the allusions and references contained in the first part of this article might not be readily intelligible to someone whose childhood was not spent listening to stories from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or to someone not presently involved in the current debates about the finance of United Kingdom universities. Let me therefore offer a few words of explanation.

Alice in Wonderland, and its companion Alice Through the Looking Glass, are children's stories which explore the limits of reason in most creative ways. Their author, the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a nineteenth-century mathematician at Christchurch, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, used the stories to discuss the nature of limit processes in mathematics, the phenomenon of relative size and aspects of the absurd. In the stories animals speak, playing cards come to life and the heroine, Alice, undergoes many transformations of bodily size. Since I regard the recent research selectivity exercise of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) as beyond the limits of reason, I have drawn upon the Alice stories by way of satire and I have tried to use some typical Carroll literary devices — plays on words, accounts of physical transformations and the like — to emphasize the relevant points.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1990 , pp. 275 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

1 Jones, Peter, ‘The 1989 Research Assessment Exercise,’ London, Universities Funding Council, 1990, especially pp. 9–14.Google Scholar

2 Popper, Karl R., Conjectures and Refutations, London and Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, ed., p. 30.Google Scholar

3 Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, ‘Ranking the Graduate Departments in the 1980s: Towards Objective Qualitative Indicators,’ PS, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1986, pp. 651–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 ‘The 1989 Research Assessment Exercise,’ p.11.

5 Still best expressed in Hayek, F. A., The Road to Serfdom, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944 Google Scholar, but for a brief and cogent statement see Hayek, F. A., New Studies, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 236 Google Scholar: ‘The chief reason why we cannot hope by central direction to achieve anything like the efficiency in the use of resources which the market makes possible is that the economic order of any large society rests upon a utilization of the knowledge of particular circumstances widely dispersed among thousands or millions of individuals.’

6 I should like to thank Professor Hugh Berrington for many valuable conversations on this topic as well as for his original inspiration of Alice. Mr Peter Jones, then of the UFC, and Professor Ivor Crewe, one of the Politics panel members, provided many useful insights at a meeting of Heads of Department held by the Political Studies Association on 23 September 1989. Professor Michael Goldsmith has also supplied useful background information. None of these individuals is answerable for the views expressed in this article for which I take entire responsibility.