Oxbridge rancour not the route to broader system

Labour, it was said last week, needs "new enemies" as it bids to regain popular support from the demagogically inclined leader of the opposition, William Hague. And chancellor Gordon Brown's attack on elite universities shows that he thinks he has found them. While the Tories appoint criminals, asylum seekers and Euro enthusiasts as enemies of the people, Labour has turned on a sector that overwhelmingly supported it during the last election: academics, particularly those in highly sought-after universities.

There is a whiff of personal rancour about Mr Brown's ill-informed outburst. He is an angry man. The job he wants is held by a privately educated Oxford graduate, a son of privilege who overrode plans to save money from college fees when Oxford and Cambridge beat a path to his door. Anger made the chancellor careless of the facts. Comprehensive education is not synonymous with deprivation. Laura Spence is not one of the deprived of society (nor are many, perhaps most, of those who enter university from state schools) and her failure to win a place to read medicine at Oxford (though she was offered several places elsewhere in the United Kingdom) is not a national scandal: it is the consequence of rationing. Mr Brown and other cabinet colleagues' attacks may be guilt-inspired. Ms Spence will go to Harvard on scholarships of a generosity undreamed of by ministers who killed off maintenance grants, while her case is used to justify yet more cuts and controls on universities here.

As the spending review nears its end, it looks ominously as if universities are to be shafted again (page 1). The National Health Service, pensioners, schools and colleges will get higher priority. Yet ministers are blaming universities for a situation of their own making. Universities have effectively been nationalised by successive governments, Conservative and Labour. Government policies mean that the number of top flight universities is static or shrinking as research funding becomes more concentrated and per capita funding for teaching dwindles everywhere. Student numbers are tightly controlled by a government too mean to pay for the staff, facilities and support needed to power wider participation.

But while supply is controlled, demand is rising. The value of a university degree is ever more apparent. Aspiring parents, students and schools compete ferociously for places in the handful of internationally recognised institutions. People trying to do a professional job of selecting the best students are under ruthless pressure from the privileged. They are also under pressure of time and resources. Who can be surprised that interviews are now rare outside Oxbridge (where they are under attack for bias), and A-level grades or predicted grades are seen as the only relatively objective way of apportioning scarce places - despite the known correlation between A-level scores and careful coaching.

Government nagging (plus inducements) may well result in more under-privileged young people being admitted to top universities. That will be a good thing. But it will not produce the just society Labour dreams of. It will increase cheating and it will further swell the flow of talented (and rich) students to the United States. What is needed is not bitter wrangling over too few opportunities but a broader and more generous higher education system with better support for the poor and wider opportunities for all. And there is only one way to get that: pay for it. Either the government must stump up or it must give back to universities the freedom, so effectively exercised by Harvard, to seek their own salvation. The trouble is that no one - neither university leaders, staff, students nor politicians - has much taste for such freedom, which is not surprising (see letters opposite) when you look across the Atlantic to the burdens involved.