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ASSESSING the state of the UK’s elite universities is a tricky business. Take a look at any of the various league tables ranking universities around the world and British readers will feel their chests expanding with pride. Oxford and Cambridge are in the top handful, while London’s University College and Imperial College sit comfortably in the top 25. It would appear that the best of British can stand on an equal footing with the world’s elite, the likes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tokyo University and the University of California, Berkeley. London, Oxford and Cambridge are a “golden triangle” of academic success.

But it is not hard to paint an entirely different picture. Embarrassing cracks are beginning to appear in the romantic image of dreaming spires and gleaming laboratory benches. After decades of underfunding, the UK’s elite universities are stretched to breaking point, their old-fashioned infrastructure filled with shoddy equipment, their researchers overworked and underpaid.

Cambridge is trying to punch above its weight. Oxford’s labyrinthine system of governance all but paralyses decision making. University College London (UCL) would be hard-pressed to find a broom cupboard for a potential spin-off company. And Imperial’s status is already on the slide – last year alone it dropped six places in one influential ranking of the world’s universities. You can almost hear the reputations crumbling. Forget the golden triangle: the area bounded by London, Oxford and Cambridge seems more like a Bermuda triangle where once-great universities disappear without a trace.

So where does the truth lie? Are the UK’s elite universities world class, or are they living on the inherited reputation of a bygone age? The issues are complex. There is no doubt that the UK’s universities have suffered terribly from a lack of investment. “We went through a period when Margaret Thatcher quite rightly tried to sort out the universities but that went on far too long. I think a lot of damage was done,” says Imperial’s rector, Richard Sykes. The problem with underinvestment was compounded, he says, because many US universities were going from strength to strength during the same period. He is also quick to point out that Imperial’s recent fall in that world ranking was due to a change in the way the ranking was calculated: it now includes social sciences, which Imperial does not cover.

Lack of funding is also the reason why the UK lags behind the US in the salaries it pays, particularly to postdocs and junior lecturers. Salaries are a key factor in attracting the best talent. “We need to be able to move salaries up to answer the competition,” says Alison Richard, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor. She hopes to narrow the gap in coming years by increasing her budget for salaries by 20 per cent. At Oxford, salaries lag behind not just the US but many other places in the UK, although many colleges offer benefits in kind such as accommodation.

But it is not just salaries that attract researchers. Factors such as the teaching burden, the administrative support and the quality of colleagues is also hugely important. “We have been stretched,” admits Oxford’s vice-chancellor, John Hood.

Yet despite the lower pay and the teaching burden, there is little sign of a brain drain. “My sense is that we hire as many as we lose and we are getting the very best,” says Richard. And others agree. The golden triangle universities can clearly offer the kind of environment that many researchers are looking for. Part of that may be the lesser pressure on academics in the UK compared with that in some of the top US universities, where a hectic 24/7 work schedule is the norm. Another possibility is the attraction of the cities themselves. “London remains a very attractive place for the global scientist,” says Malcolm Grant, provost of UCL.

Indeed, some hoped that the Bush administration’s stance on subjects such as stem cells would cause a reverse brain drain back to the UK. But for the moment, most US stem cell researchers are staying put.

The UK has little difficulty, though, in attracting the best students from abroad. Applications are up across the board, largely because of the restrictive US stance on foreign visas, and nobody is complaining. At undergraduate level, universities can charge foreign students the full cost of their tuition, which can be as much as £20,000 a year. This is in stark contrast to the money universities receive for UK students, which is woefully inadequate. “There is a shortfall of £4000 per year per student,” says Grant. That presents a serious gap in university finances and is one reason why some staff are overburdened with teaching commitments.

Funding for postgraduates is more of a challenge, particularly when they come from abroad. The top US institutions use endowments given by alumni – a significant source of income for many universities – to fund scholarships. But the culture in which former students endow universities has never taken hold in the UK.

Sykes believes that big changes are needed. “Universities need to be able to operate in a free market, to charge students the real cost of their education.” He believes the endowment culture in the US has matured because students pay through the nose for their education and this makes them value their alma maters. “Over here people say: ‘The government, or the taxpayer, paid for my education. Why should I give money back to my university?'”

“I’d rather be here than in some of the US universities where work dominates everything”

Given the gravity of the problems universities face, the prevailing mood is surprisingly upbeat. Talk to any of the academic chiefs at the golden triangle universities and you don’t have to wait long to hear about the UK government’s new-found commitment to pay the real economic cost of research. In the past, government agencies and others have made varying contributions towards the direct cost of research but more or less ignored indirect costs such as depreciation and administrative costs, which have had to be met from other sources. That is all set to change. By 2010, the government is committed to paying the full cost of research, including office rental charges, depreciation, infrastructure investment, equipment, travel and the cost of all the staff working on the project, including technical and administrative staff. “It’s a big step forward,” says Grant.

But it is only part of the changes that these elite universities have been making to remain competitive. Cambridge, for example, has invested £415 million in the past decade on its infrastructure. UCL plans to spend £77 million between 2006 and 2008 and to raise another £300 million. And Oxford has recently completed a warts and-all review of its role and the way it operates. The result is a comprehensive and sometimes painfully honest evaluation of how the university can build for the future. Oxford has set the ball rolling by simplifying its complicated system of governance to allow more effective decision making. There is a widespread belief that, despite the privations of the past, the elite universities have somehow managed to stay competitive and are now moving from strength to strength. “It’s been quite a battle,” admits Grant.

Other developments are beginning to pay off, too. One is technology transfer, turning ideas from the university into commercially viable concerns. The university that sets the bar in this area is California’s Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The relationship between Stanford and the companies surrounding it is one that many universities eye enviously. It has provided the technology and many of the founding teams for hundreds of global companies, from Cisco Systems to Google. And it has supplied a continuous stream of highly trained researchers to all kinds of companies in the area. But it would be wrong to think of Stanford as the key to Silicon Valley’s success. It is only part of a phenomenal infrastructure that provides office space, ancillary services such as lawyers and accountants, good transport links and an entrepreneurial culture unrivalled anywhere in the world. It’s a mix that is hard to reproduce.

Though not for lack of trying. Isis Innovation at Oxford helps researchers with the legal, financial and administrative challenges of setting up a spin-off company. “Isis Innovation is probably the leading technology-transfer organisation of its kind on the UK,” says Hood. It has been responsible for almost 50 spin-off companies since it was formed in 1997 and Oxford now boasts science parks around the city to attract new businesses.

Even more successful is the area around Cambridge that has come to be known as Silicon Fen. It is one of the fastest-growing biotech areas in the world, in 2003 alone attracting an estimated 10 per cent of the venture capital invested in the whole of Europe. Not bad for an area with only 0.1 per cent of Europe’s population. The imaging company Kodak has recently announced it is setting up a lab in the area, as has the US biotech giant Genzyme. “The university is a magnet for these companies,” says Richard.

For researchers at universities in London hoping to commercialise their ideas, life is harder. Despite high costs and limited space, the city has managed to attract dozens of biotech companies that cluster around the universities and research hospitals. And in 2001 the London BioScience Innovation Centre – a facility set up by the Royal Veterinary College to “incubate” new biotech companies – opened its doors. But the reality is that many new ventures set up shop elsewhere. “Many end up in science parks at Oxford and Cambridge,” says Malcolm Grant of UCL.

The other side of that geographical coin is that Oxford, Cambridge and London are close enough to each other to make the triangle a common pool of personnel. “If you hire someone from Oxford they may not even have to move house,” says Imperial’s Sykes.

The triangle is, of course, “golden” in more than ways than one: the four together bag the lion’s share of UK research funding. But this doesn’t imply unfair advantage. “We are institutions that have invested in excellence and we just happen to be located in the south-east of England,” says Grant. “It’s really a geographical coincidence.”

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Oxford

Larger than Cambridge and with a significant portion of its population working in industries unrelated to the university, Oxford is a city that offers many alternatives to academic life. It has a thriving cultural scene that would be the envy of cities many times its size. Oxford’s theatres, museums and concert halls are first-class and the city boasts numerous top-notch restaurants and pubs to match.

All this offers an easily accessed alternative to university life, says John March-Russell, a theoretical physicist at the university. March-Russell, who has worked at some of the world’s best-known institutions, including CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, and Princeton University, studied as an undergraduate at Imperial College London and got his doctorate at Harvard. His view of Oxford may surprise some. “From an academic point of view there is a definite step down compared to the best universities in the US,” he says. The biggest difference is the amount of teaching he is expected to undertake: up to 24 hours a week, more than 50 per cent of his time. “I spend a lot of my time teaching complex numbers to undergraduate first-years.” And the lack of support staff increases his administrative workload. “Compared to Berkeley, which is a state university, there’s a big difference.” In fact, he believes that the differences between the top universities are much greater than league tables suggest. But there are upsides too. “There is less of a ‘publish or perish’ attitude here,” he says.

And to complement his work on particle physics, March-Russell is heavily involved in a contemporary art project with Italian artist Paola Pivi, attempting to create sculptures out of molten metal. With the New College Opera and a very good contemporary arts museum, he says that extra-curricular life at Oxford is comparable with that at the best universities anywhere. “It’s a very pleasant place to be.”

Cambridge

A city of only 110,000 people, Cambridge is dominated by the university and its 31 constituent colleges. The city has more than its fair share of restaurants and, particularly, pubs but also boasts an active cultural life that makes good use of its two theatres, concert hall, cinemas and other venues.

What’s more, the university can offer a ready-made social life. Researchers attached to one college or another will find food and drink laid on as well as a steady stream of social activities. However, postdocs tend to feel less involved in the colleges than undergraduates do – postdoc life often revolves around the relevant research department.

One trend at the university is the number of research institutes that have sprung up, operating independently of the traditional departments. Take a job as a postdoc at one of these and you avoid the teaching commitments that are part of departmental life, although there are opportunities to try your hand at teaching if you want. There is a downside to being at an institute, though. “You’re not part of a college and so it’s easy to feel excluded,” says Damian Crowther, a neuroscientist at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR).

Cambridge’s success in becoming one of the largest biotech centres in Europe has also caused problems for researchers on low salaries. The influx of well-paid executives, accountants and lawyers, as well as scientists on commercial salaries, has pushed house prices beyond the reach of many. “House prices are high and rising. My advice is to get on the property ladder as early as you can,” says Crowther.

But for him, the relatively low pay is more than outweighed by the quality of academic life and the advantages the city offers. He goes to the opera and is involved in charity work, his colleagues are friendly and the intellectual life at the CIMR is hugely stimulating. “It’s also very flexible, the working hours are good and I’d rather be here than in some of the American universities where work dominates everything.”

London

“The coolest capital city on the planet” is how Newsweek described London in 1996. And there is still no reason to disagree with the assessment. As one of the world’s great cities, there is little in the way of culture, sport and recreation that London does not offer. Which means that compared with Oxford and Cambridge, London’s universities play a quieter role in city life.

For those interested in interdisciplinary collaboration, London boasts a diversity of research institutes that matches that of the best science cities in the world. They may not be as densely packed as in Boston, for example, but an Underground pass will get you easily from the Institute of Cancer Research to the London Centre for Nanotechnology. Then there are the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, venerable scientific associations that act as focal points for numerous disciplines.

Even so, London cannot match the research infrastructure of places such as Harvard, says Sian Harding, a cardiac pharmacologist at Imperial College School of Medicine. Researchers at Harvard enjoy centralised facilities for animal labs, genomics and imaging. “Here, you often have to organise those facilities yourself from scratch,” she says.

London is expensive, particularly for researchers on relatively low pay. Simply finding somewhere to live can be tricky. House-hunters have to weigh up the benefits of a postage-stamp flat close to campus with somewhere larger in the suburbs, where commuting can take upwards of an hour each way. Then there are the nuances between districts deemed safe and not-so-safe that outsiders can have little knowledge of. “It’s a big, complicated place. And you can suffer culture shock if you’ve come from a smaller place,” says Harding. The gritty urban atmosphere is not to everyone’s taste.

But for those who take the plunge, the lifestyle is good. The quality of the theatre, music and arts is among the finest in the world. London’s nightlife is exciting. And the capital boasts a cosmopolitan diversity that few cities can match. “It’s wonderful from a cultural point of view,” she says.

The world’s top research universities

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 University of Cambridge
4 University of California, Berkeley
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Princeton University
8 University of Oxford
9 Columbia University
10 University of Chicago

23 Imperial College London
25 University College London
47 University of Edinburgh

Source: 2004 international league table of research universities, Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

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