Spring Martlet 2017

FROM THE
MASTER
How will Univ fare in post-Brexit Britain?
What changes can we expect? The
University, and the College, Fellows and
students alike, voted overwhelmingly to remain,
out of both professional self-interest and personal
values. The deep dismay (and shock) at the result
was palpable the day after and has persisted since.
The College foresees a chilly climate of economic
austerity and academic isolation ahead.
Little is likely to change in the short-term, other
than continuing uncertainty about the long-term.
The legal status of our many Fellows and teaching
staff from the EU is secure for the time being but
they naturally feel unsettled about the future further
ahead. The fee liabilities and loan entitlements of
our current EU students, as well as for this year’s
applicants for places, are also secure, but are
uncertain from 2018 onwards. UK obligations to
existing EU-funded research programmes will be
honoured, including programmes that continue after
Britain has formally left the EU, but the probability
and terms of UK participation in European science
agencies and the EU’s research programmes after
2020 are quite uncertain.
The College cannot escape the impact on
University departments, to which all our Fellows
belong. Oxford has benefitted enormously from
EU support for science, punching well above
its weight. Big science today is almost invariably
a collaborative enterprise involving a group of
laboratories across the UK and Europe (and
elsewhere in the world); Oxford is notable for
producing the lead department in many cases.
Two years or more of uncertainty about the UK’s
future part in the European research community
has already affected Oxford’s capacity to attract
and retain the world’s leading scientists, with EU
candidates withdrawing from shortlists and EU
citizens in Oxford posts applying for positions
elsewhere. Departmental plans to bid for major
EU programme funding – 2-3 years advance
preparation is the norm – have been suspended
or abandoned as a result of withdrawals by their
putative European partners.
Pessimism could be premature. The Government
may agree to pay for UK universities to remain
eligible for EU research funding as ‘associate
members’ or, if not, replace EU funding with its
own. An expensive and tiresomely bureaucratic visa
regime has not stopped Oxford attracting world
class academics from America, South Asia and the
Far East and is unlikely to do so from Europe either.
The adverse impact on the recruitment of EU
students seems more certain. Currently EU
students are treated as UK students for tuition
fees and loans to pay for them. After Brexit,
universities will have no legal basis for treating EU
students differently from other non-UK students
and on financial grounds will have to charge
them the higher overseas fee, for which no UK
Government loans will be available. Inevitably
Oxford will be fishing in a smaller pool of (largely
wealthy) EU applicants, to the detriment of the
diversity of the student body.
It remains to be seen whether withdrawal from the
EU will produce the enduring economic downturn
that most economists expect. If it does, the damage
to the University in the form of a squeeze in public
funding, industrial funding and financial support for
students will be more significant than whether the
UK is inside or outside the EU.
Sir Ivor Crewe
THE MARTLET | SPRING 2017 5