Rüegg.2011.history.of.the.university.in.europe.vol.4.watson.ch.15.technology

A HISTORY OF THE
UNIVERSITY IN EUROPE
general editor
walter ru¨ egg
VOLUME IV
UNIVERSITIES SINCE 1945
EDITOR
WALTER RU¨ EGG

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CHAPTER 15
TECHNOLOGY
CHRISTOPHER WATSON
the post-war context
The universities of Europe had two very different faces in 1945. Seen
from without, they represented to millions of young men and women the
embodiment of hope – repositories of knowledge, expertise and wisdom,
oases of detachment and objectivity – from which they had been cut off by
seven years of world war. Seen from within, by those who had struggled
to keep them alive during the war years, they seemed to be in a state
of grave debility, if not mortal danger. Their buildings and equipment
had all too often been destroyed or diverted to non-educational uses,
their teaching staff had been run down (particularly at the young and
perhaps most creative end of the spectrum) and they had been starved of
their principal life-blood – young people with enquiring minds who could
gratify their teachers and challenge them.
Both of these views, from without and from within, have been over-painted,
the first in too rosy, the second in too black a hue. And this is
particularly true if we consider those aspects of university life which relate
to technology. Although about half of the German universities suffered
severe bomb damage (particularly those in large cities),1 as did both the
main and technical universities of Helsinki,2 and Poland suffered partic-ularly
badly, losing over half of its pre-war laboratories and over 75 per
cent of its libraries, many of the universities of Europe in fact escaped
comparatively lightly overall from the physical destruction of the war.3
The use of their buildings and facilities for war work did not always lead
far from their pre-war purposes. Military and political leaders of Europe
1 N. Hammerstein, Statement at the International Conference on The History of European
Universities after World War II, Ghent University, September 1992.
2 M. Klinge, ibid. 3 J. Sadlak, ibid.
528

Technology
turned to the universities to provide much of the technical leadership,
especially in the early war years, and so ensured that the universities
were not completely stripped of their best and most creative teaching
staff. Their war work did not destroy, although it distorted, their pre-war
strategy for pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. They continued to
recruit teaching staff and to attract students, though not always on the
scale, and of the quality, of the pre-war years.
The young adults of 1945 were by no means starry-eyed about what the
universities had to offer. Both those whose university careers had been cut
short by the outbreak of war and those who had missed out altogether had
been exposed to a harsher education, and they were not prepared to revert
to the old-style discipline in 1945. Many of them had seen technology in
action, on a scale which dwarfed the provisions of a pre-war university
laboratory, and the traditional academic courses were no longer relevant
to their needs. But they did have needs – to re-establish a civilian (if not
academic) point of view, and to learn the skills appropriate to a world of
post-war reconstruction.
The universities were ill-equipped to meet these needs immediately.
Rewriting a curriculum takes time and requires motivated and energetic
teachers. Since these were not yet available on the necessary scale, the uni-versities
continued for a while along the course set during the war years.
Their technology teaching and research continued to focus on the war-time
priorities, outstandingly on the technologies of electronics (especially
its applications to communications and radar), aerospace (aerodynamics,
control, engines, rocketry), nuclear weapons (nuclear physics, chemistry
and engineering). This was not merely a matter of acquired habit – it
reflected the fact that seven years of priority study had made these the
exciting, leading-edge subjects, in which teachers could point to their
recent achievements, and draw on the personal experience of those that
they taught.
technology-related developments in the
universities
The developments driven by problems indigenous to the universities them-selves,
and not imposed by other institutions, were of enormous diversity
across Europe. Higher education in technology is ordered quite differently
in each of the major European nations; it is not obvious where the line
should be drawn between ‘university’ and ‘non-university’ higher educa-tion.
The list of hard cases includes the former UK colleges of advanced
technology, the French grandes ´ecoles, the German Fraunhofer Institutes
and all the institutes of the Eastern European academies of science. In this
529

Christopher Watson
Table 15.1 Percentage of students entering to read
science and technology subjects at Oxford University
1951 1961 1971 1981 1986 1991
21 32 38 37 39 39
Table 15.2 Percentage of students entering to read science
and technology subjects at Birmingham and Manchester
Universities
1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
Birmingham 38 42 46 49 50
Manchester 33 34 38 40
section, the term ‘university’ is used in a narrow sense, which excludes
such institutions.
Overall growth
Immediately after the war, science and technology enjoyed a prestige
among would-be university entrants, and within the European public
at large, which allowed admission standards in these subjects to rise
above the national average for all subjects. The universities responded by
expanding admissions in these areas. At Oxford, the percentage of stu-dents
entering to read science and technology subjects evolved as shown
in table 15.1 above.4
Similar trends held elsewhere in the UK, as shown in table 15.2.5
In British universities as a whole, science and technology accounted for
45% of all students as early as 1961.6 Still, this was regarded as too low.
The Robbins Report in 19637 recommended that to meet the needs of
the economy, the British government should actively encourage a 266%
increase in higher education as a whole over a twenty-year period, and a
392% increase in science and technology (these figures excluded medical
subjects). Within these figures, the committee recommended a particularly
strong growth in technology, to bring British higher education in this area
4 Oxford University Gazette (8 June 1992).
5 R. Low and A. Gaukroger, Ghent Conference (note 1); S. V. Barnes, ibid.
6 Lord Robbins, Higher Education, Cmnd. 2154 HMSO, para 66, 166.
7 Ibid., para 509, 165.
530

Technology
Table 15.3 The percentages
of technology degrees among
all first degrees in science and
technology in 1959
UK 36
France 48
USA 49
Sweden 54
Switzerland 59
Canada 65
Germany (FR) 68
Table 15.4 The percentages
of technology degrees among
all first degrees in science and
technology in 1980
UK 41
Switzerland 42
Germany 48
Sweden 49
France 53
USA 82
up to the level enjoyed elsewhere. It cited the comparison with Europe
shown in table 15.3; the figures are the percentages of technology degrees
among all first degrees in science and technology in 1959.8
The Robbins blueprint was implemented in broad outline. During its
twenty-year planning period, the university population did indeed rise by
252% – close to the projected 266%.9 If one sets aside doubts about the
comparability of the statistics, science and technology grew slightly faster
than proposed (341% as compared with 312%), and technology, as a
fraction of science and technology, grew faster still (445% as compared
with 331%).10 However, on the Continent and in the USA technology
grew even faster in respect to science. By 1980, the Robbins league table
read as shown in table 15.411
8 Ibid., table 46, 127. 9 See chapter 6, table 6.6.
10 A. Barblan and J. Sadlak, ‘Higher Education in OECD Countries: Patterns and Trends
in the 1980s’, CRE Standing Conference (April 1988), table 1.
11 Ibid., calculated from figures in table 1.
531

Christopher Watson
By this date, however, people questioned the link between the education
of technologists and general national economic growth accepted by the
Robbins Committee.
A significant trend has been the rise and (more recently) fall in the
relative importance of the second degree. In some measure, the rise
resulted from a form of competition with the US educational system.
There, because of the broad subject spread and relatively slow start dur-ing
secondary education, a three- or four-year first degree was required
to raise students of science and technology to a standard that European
students had already achieved on admission to university. The second
degree course, leading to the PhD, could then build on a strong under-graduate
preparation. European graduates who went to study at such
postgraduate schools as MIT or CalTech in the 1960s reported that the
experience was ‘like drinking water from a firehose’. Their enthusiasm
for the US-style second degree was infectious. Within Europe pressure
mounted in the same direction. Its strength varied from one country to
another. In France, for example, the technological elite (some 3,000 stu-dents
per year) had a two- to three-year course in an école préparatoire
before entering one of the grandes écoles for a further three-year course.
In Germany, degree courses in technology typically lasted five and a half
to six and a half years.12
A second novelty was joint degrees in two or more subjects which an
earlier generation would have regarded as unlikely partners. Engineering
and economics, physics and philosophy, science and management studies,
psychology, philosophy and physiology. The list has grown continuously
since the war, with a fine tuning in the 1960s. Teachers and students alike
wanted to ensure that scientific and technical education did not become
too narrow. The value of ‘breadth’ as an end in itself was expounded by
many leaders of public opinion throughout the 1950s and beyond. This
was perhaps a natural reaction in a generation returning to the academic
scene from the mind-broadening experience of a world war. It provoked
a negative response from a strand of academic opinion, which saw the
pursuit of breadth as a chimera which interfered with the achievement of
excellence in a chosen field. A compromise resulted in which either two-
(or three-) subject courses coexisted with the traditional single-subject
course (for example the physics and philosophy, and engineering and
economics courses introduced in Oxford in 1968), or a smattering of
‘broadening’ course material was introduced across the whole technical
curriculum.
A third trend, opposing the second, has favoured first degrees in a
much narrower speciality than earlier academics would have regarded as
12 Ibid., table 2.
532

Technology
suitable for a degree. Examples within British universities are biotechnol-ogy,
acoustic engineering, mining engineering, food technology and paper
science.13 This trend became evident in the 1950s, with the establishment
of chairs in subjects in which there was already a strong research activity
in the university, often funded by local industries, and it received a strong
boost in the late 1960s as the ‘relevance’ of academic studies came to be
debated widely by students and their teachers.
Another trend was decline in the relative importance of ‘practical’ work
in the first-degree syllabus. In the pre-war era, practical work was under-taken
using ‘state of the art’ equipment in most university courses. In the
post-war period, universities increasingly found it impossible to maintain
the quantity and standard of equipment required to sustain the concept
of ‘across the board’ practical work at this level. The equipment had
become too expensive and specialized, and changed too fast. Increasingly
the choice came down to maintaining practical work across the board,
but using out-of-date equipment, or narrowing the focus to a few selected
‘projects’, leaving the main burden of developing practical skills to post-graduate
education.
Technical infrastructure
A symptom, and also a cause, of the decline in practical work at the
undergraduate level was retrenchment in resources for the maintenance
of the technical infrastructure of science and technology departments
within the universities. Surprisingly, no major public debate took place
about the matter. The Robbins Report devotes just 2 of its 837 paragraphs
to the differential cost of educating science as against arts students.14 It
notes that the average public expenditure in 1962/3 per UK university
student (undergraduate and postgraduate) was £568 in arts, £774 in
applied science and £902 in pure science – and then drops the matter.
In partial compensation for this general decline in the technical infra-structure,
the past twenty years has seen a large relative increase in the
resources devoted to information technology. The electronic computer
was born in the military establishments of the USA and the UK during
the war (the motivation included fire control, design of atomic weapons
and breaking codes). In 1945 work began in the National Physical La-boratory
and in Manchester University (under Williams and Kilburn),15
and in 1951 this led to the development by Ferranti of the first commercial
13 B. Heap, Vocational Degree Course Offers 1987: A Student’s Guide (Richmond, 1987).
14 Robbins Report (note 6), paras 607–8, 201.
15 N. Metropolis, J. Howlett and G. C. Rota (eds.), A History of Computing in the 20th
Century (New York, 1980), 37; M. Croarken, Early Scientific Computing in Britain
(Oxford, 1990).
533

Christopher Watson
computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. In the late 1950s, the idea emerged that a
university should have a computer. Oxford purchased one of the earliest
commercial computers (for £100,000) in 1958 – the valve-based Ferranti
Mercury – and a small but faithful band of enthusiasts tended it night
and day. Its computing power was much less than that of a cheap PC
today (its disk capacity was 32K and its add time was 0.18 ms),16 but
its influence on the minds of a generation of university students was
enormous. For the mathematicians and scientists, access to a computer
led to a shift from analysis to computation as a means of solving most
practical problems. For engineers, it brought a vast range of problems
which had hitherto been tackled by exercising judgment, craftsmanship
or ‘rules of thumb’ within the scope of quantitative analysis (and hence
appropriately considered by universities rather than by apprenticeship
schemes).
For nearly two decades, the idea persisted that a university should have
a single computer, or at most a very few, probably located in ‘The Com-puter
Centre’. The machines grew rapidly in power and cost: by 1971,
Oxford was spending £67,000 per annum on its computer laboratory,
which by then had a professor and several research staff, and by 1985
annual costs had risen to £1,680,000.17 Then suddenly in the 1980s the
personal computer (PC) broke in. Individual scholars, or at least small
groups of them, could now afford to have their own computers, not one
with the number-crunching power of the supercomputer of the 1970s, but
something enormously more accessible and ‘user-friendly’. It was soon
discovered that, for the vast bulk of the problems facing an academic, the
power of the supercomputer was not really necessary, and even when it
was, a link from a PC through to the ‘mainframe’ was the appropriate
solution. Links between PCs became increasingly important during the
1980s, initially as a means to communicate programs and data, but soon
as a general means of academic communication, which combined high
speed with an appropriate respect for the academic’s need for freedom
from interruption during periods of creative thought.
PCs also provided word processing. In the 1980s, a new generation of
students emerged who used the keyboard in preference to the pen as a
means of committing their thoughts to paper. Surprisingly little research
has been published on the impact of this change on the nature and quality
of the resulting thought processes. Certainly, the ease with which a text
can be altered has led to a tendency to commit ‘half-baked’ ideas to paper.
Arguably, the comparative clumsiness of the process of shifting sentences
and paragraphs around within a word-processed text has tended to freeze
16 S. Lavington, Early British Computers (Manchester, 1980), 119.
17 As reported in the Oxford University Gazette for 26 May 1971 and 1985.
534

Technology
the initial macro-structure of the text at an early stage in the writing
process, to the detriment of logic and clarity. On the other hand, it is now
easier for several scholars to collaborate instantly over great distances in
the process of creative writing.
A second technological invention which dramatically altered academic
life in the late twentieth century was the photocopier. Prior to the intro-duction
of the Xerox (it was launched commercially in Europe in 1956,18
but did not become generally affordable by universities until the early
1970s), multiple copies of documents required for academic purposes
were either typeset and printed or made by a messy process involving
waxy paper, inks and jellies. In either case, the process was laborious,
and in consequence writers tried to get the text right the first time. The
arrival of cheap photocopiers has dramatically altered the style of aca-demic
life. It has made it possible for the enormously increased numbers
of students in the late twentieth century to read material that no univer-sity
library could otherwise have made available to all of them. It has
enabled scholars to circulate ideas before they have been frozen in the
mind or in print, so that their peers can judge, extend or improve them.
These liberating effects have to be set against the decline in the use of
the library, with its vast store of uncensored thought, and a reluctance
among scholars to take the time to put their thoughts into final form.
A third technology to revolutionize the university world was afford-able
nationwide radio and television communications to support ‘dis-tance
learning’. The idea of the ‘University of the Air’ was pioneered
in the UK by Harold Wilson in 1963, when the Labour Party was in
opposition. The necessary legislation to create the Open University was
passed in 1965, and the first students enrolled in 1971. By 1974 there were
40,000 undergraduates and by 1991, 120,000.19 Similar ideas were intro-duced
on the Continent: in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany the
FernUniversit¨ at Hagen began, attended in 1994/5 by 40,000 students;20
the Open University of the Netherlands began in 1984, and had a total
of 60,000 students by 1992.21
Student pressures
In the first two decades after the war, students in science and technology
accepted established curricula. During the late 1960s, however, student
representatives demanded a say in the curricula and management of the
18 J. Jewkes, D. Sawers and R. Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (London, 1962), 408.
19 W. A. C. Stewart, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1).
20 C. Boden, W. Becker and R. Klofat (eds.), Universit ¨aten in Deutschland, Universities in
Germany (Munich, 1994), 104.
21 H. C. de Wolf, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1). Cf. chapter 1, 19.
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Christopher Watson
universities. In relation to technology, the nub of their demands was
greater ‘relevance’ to the outside world (and in particular to their subse-quent
careers). In varying degrees, all the European universities made the
changes demanded.
In parallel with this movement, and to some extent influencing it,
was an upsurge of negative attitudes to technology. These first found
their focus in campaigns to abolish nuclear weapons, particularly the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was founded in
1958 and enjoyed strong student support in the 1960s. Many students
expressed an unwillingness to allow universities to accept funding from
military sources. During the 1970s this evolved into a more general anti-technology
movement. Among its influential sources was growing con-cern
about environmental pollution (e.g., as expressed by Friends of the
Earth) and about the limits to economic growth set by finite natural
resources (e.g., the publications of the Club of Rome). These concerns
had an immediate impact on students of secondary school age, and in
due course fed through into a decline in the number of students apply-ing
to study science and technology. In Oxford, the numbers reading
chemistry began to decline in 1981, and similarly in physics from 1989
and in engineering from 1990.22 More positively, it led to a growth in
the demand for courses in ‘green’ subjects: ecology, alternative technol-ogy,
renewable energy sources, environmental and earth sciences. The
response of university teachers to these student pressures was generally
positive, though the decline in student numbers in conventional science
and technology has been a cause of serious concern.
The general public shared the tenor of student complaints, but dis-liked
the militancy of student politics in the 1960s and the apparent
willingness of some teachers to endorse the opinions which they so force-fully
expressed. During the 1970s there was a gradual decline in the
level of popular support for the funding of university education gen-erally,
and, by the 1980s, an associated decline in the status of aca-demics
within the community. This affected the willingness of the gifted
technology graduates to stay on within the university community after
graduation.
Throughout the first two decades following the war, national govern-ments
were overwhelmingly the dominant source of funding in all but a
handful of well-endowed ancient universities, but they were uncharacter-istically
restrained in the exercise of the power which this gave them. In
the UK, this was a consequence of the ‘arm’s length’ relationship with gov-ernment
which had been established in 1919 in the form of the University
Grants Committee (UGC), which though appointed by the government
22 Oxford University Gazette, 6 June 1994.
536

Technology
was independent of ministerial and departmental control.23 In the 1960s,
government began gently to exert influence: the Treasury-appointed
Robbins Committee, while bowing graciously to the principle of aca-demic
freedom, recommended a substantial shift in the direction of more
technology. By the early 1980s, Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government
no longer felt the need to be so discreet when it imposed a substantial cut
in the UGC grant.24 Perhaps unexpectedly, the UGC distributed the cut
in a manner which directly penalized technology.25 This trend towards
direct government intervention developed rapidly, and by 1989 the UGC
had been abolished in favour of the Universities Funding Council, a body
much more concerned to see that the government obtained value for
money from the funds that it allocated to the universities.26
the marketplace for knowledge and research
in technology
Universities exist because there is a demand for what they have to offer –
access to existing knowledge and to the processes which create new
knowledge. They are not unique in offering to meet that demand: they
exist in a marketplace defined by it, and their survival depends on their
ability to adapt to the changing demands of that marketplace. The part
of that market labelled ‘technology’ has changed dramatically during the
twentieth century, and any account of the university response has to begin
with a survey of those changes. The universities have faced the rise of tech-nology
in this modern sense with a certain ambivalence – conscious that
they have contributed to its birth and development, but also aware that
it has acquired an independent existence, and has created a set of values
to which a university cannot always easily subscribe.
The information explosion
It is a familiar observation27 that information, however it is measured,
has been growing since the seventeenth century at a fairly steady expo-nential
rate. The numbers of books or journal articles published, the
number of radio and television channels, the number of telephone calls
made, all these measures tell the same story. In a sense therefore there has
been nothing special about the period since 1945. However, the resources
required to sustain this growth have, for the first time in recorded his-tory,
become a significant fraction of the national economy. Equally,
23 Robbins Report (note 6), para 728, 235. 24 See chapter 1, 15.
25 A. Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London, 1982), 52.
26 D. E. Bland, Managing Higher Education (London, 1990), 2.
27 D. J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science and Beyond (New York, 1986).
537

Christopher Watson
the human resources required to access the stock of information have
become inadequate. The universities have made heroic efforts to improve
the means of access. The process advanced in several phases. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the main repositories of information were libraries. In the
older universities at least, these were broadly adequately resourced, and
the emphasis was on expanding the shelving and sustaining the cata-loguing
of an exponentially growing number of books and journals. These
publications and their readerships became progressively more specialized.
The issue was crystallized in a lecture by C. P. Snow entitled ‘The Two
Cultures’ (1959),28 in which he lamented the disappearance of the Renais-sance
Man equally at home in the worlds of arts and science. How many
of his arts friends, he asked, could even state the Second Law of Ther-modynamics?
Considerable effort was devoted to ‘popularizing’ the ideas
of science for the benefit of the arts community and adding a ‘cultural’
element to the education of scientists and engineers.
The 1970s saw computerized information technology. Library cata-logues
were computerized, titles of journal articles and often also ‘key-words’
or abstracts were transferred into computer ‘databases’ which
could be searched for ‘relevant’ material. This approach has done much
to soothe the perennial fear of the academic of missing significant ma-terial
in his/her field; it has done nothing to stem the growth of informa-tion.
Now information is often held only in computer-accessible storage,
and the user consults it on a screen. Without some such development,
the continuing expansion of information will certainly be stopped by the
finite budgets of libraries, which already impose a severe and sometimes
arbitrary restriction on the books and journals purchased. At least within
a computerized IT environment, decisions about which information is
preserved may be made more rationally.
Big Science
Many academics returning to civilian life after the Second World War
had participated in a large team-research project, or knew of this style
of research from the experience of others. Governments were also keenly
aware of its effectiveness, and were therefore sympathetic to requests for
funds to introduce it into universities. The first examples concerned sub-jects
that derived more or less naturally from wartime military projects.
In the nuclear sphere, the scene had been set by the Manhattan Project –
the $2 billion29 project to construct the first atomic bombs. That project
and wartime radar work provided the model for all the Big Science
28 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1959).
29 R. G. Hewlett and O. E. Anderson, The New World (University Park, Pa., 1962), 724.
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Technology
projects in the next three decades. The common themes were a hier-archical
organization, with a new breed of scientist-administrator at the
top (General Leslie Groves and Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer being the two
role models), specialized divisions with specific responsibilities within
the overall project, rigidly defined objectives with timetables, budgets
and human ‘resources’, and benevolent governmental (or latterly multi-government)
sponsors, committed in advance to the whole package, and
not expecting to interfere in detail in management. The Manhattan Project
demonstrated that this approach could work well even before the basic
science and technology were established. When there was serious doubt,
several parallel approaches were initiated, with ‘decision points’ along
the route once their relative merits had been established.
In the post-war era, the first such projects in Europe were the cre-ation
of nuclear weapons by France and by the UK.30 In both countries,
these were run concurrently with projects to create nuclear reactors capa-ble
of generating electricity for civilian purposes. The success of these
projects (the UK bomb in 1952, the French bomb in 1960, the Calder
Hall power station in 1956)31 confirmed the belief in government circles
that this approach to science and technology should receive a large pro-portion
of the available resources. It also ensured that the establishments
created to provide the physical infrastructure for these projects (Harwell,
Capenhurst and Windscale in the UK, Fontenay, Saclay and Cadarache in
France) enjoyed a unique prestige, and sustained large teams of gifted sci-entists
and engineers long after the initial project objective was achieved.
Once the initial nuclear projects had reached fruition, participants
in the process and others, including some in the universities who had
been watching or assisting from the side, conceived a range of new big
projects. These included fusion weapons, controlled fusion reactors and
high energy accelerators. Initially, all these projects were pursued on a
national scale. However as the size and cost of the projects rose, the
pressures grew for a more integrated European approach. In relation to
controlled fusion, this began under the auspices of Euratom, the organi-zation
set up by the European Community in 1957 to coordinate nuclear
research. Initially this amounted to no more than the funding by the
Commission of the European Communities (CEC) of selected projects
at the national laboratories. However, in 1977 it was agreed to estab-lish
a first European Community big project – the Joint European Torus
(JET) controlled fusion project at Culham in the UK.32 With a German
30 M. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–45 (London, 1964).
31 M. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52
(London, 1974).
32 E. N. Shaw, Europe’s Experiment in Fusion: The JET Joint Undertaking (Amsterdam,
1990).
539

Christopher Watson
director, a French chief engineer, an Irish administrator, and a staff drawn
from all the community countries, it represented a model for Big Science
collaboration, and has been a world leader in controlled fusion research,
outperforming its US, Soviet and Japanese competitors.
In relation to high energy accelerators, a similar cooperation was estab-lished,
but in this case the key step was taken by the governments of eigh-teen
European nations (including several not in the European Commu-nity)
to set up CERN (the Conseil europ´een pour la recherche nucl´eaire)
in 1952. The success of the first project, the Proton Synchrotron, com-pleted
under the leadership of J. B. Adams in 1959, led to a series of
more ambitious projects, including the Intersecting Storage Rings in 1971,
the Super Proton Synchrotron in 1976, and the Large Electron Positron
Collider – an accelerator of 27 km circumference built in a tunnel under
the Jura mountains near Geneva. The next step, the construction of the
Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel, which smashes together beams
of protons with an energy of 14 TeV, has recently been agreed, and came
into operation in 2009. Here again, European collaboration has been the
key to the achievement of outstanding research – including the discovery
of a range of new particles.33
In aerospace, the big projects grew out of the military rocketry pro-grammes
in Germany in the Second World War directed by General Dorn-berger
and Wernher von Braun.34 In the years immediately following the
war, military and civilian projects proceeded in parallel, of rockets for
delivering nuclear weapons and rockets for space research. In this sphere,
Western Europe lost its pre-eminence to the US, where von Braun led a
series of large projects culminating in the Saturn rocket, which launched
the astronauts to the moon, and to the USSR, which sent up the first two
Sputniks in 1957.35 This unexpected achievement led to the establish-ment
of NASA in the USA in 1958 and to a series of European initiatives
to re-enter the field. In 1962 six European countries (Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK) formed the European Space
Vehicle Launcher Organization (ELDO) to develop major launchers, and
in 1964 the same group plus Denmark, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland
formed the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) to develop
satellites and other space-research equipment. ELDO and ESRO had a
number of successful launches, and a number of highly public failures.
They merged in 1975 into the European Space Agency (ESA), which
had a highly successful series of missions based on its Ariane rocket. It
33 M. Goldsmith and E. Shaw, Europe’s Giant Accelerator (Andover, 1977); A. Hermann,
J. Krige, U. Mersits and D. Pestre, History of CERN (Amsterdam, 1987–90).
34 Jewkes et al., Sources (note 18), 357.
35 20 Years of European Cooperation in Space, European Space Agency Report (Paris,
1984), 64.
540

Technology
has carried up a number of telecommunication satellites (including ECS1
and Intelsat) and a number of scientific missions, including Giotto’s ren-dezvous
with Halley’s comet and the Meteosat space meteorology station.
A feature of the ESA programme has been its close coordination with the
US programme, using NASA launchers when a European one was not
available, and collaborating on a 50:50 basis with NASA on the Spacelab
mission, launched on the US shuttle in 1983, with a laboratory designed
and made in Europe.
Other Big Science projects in Europe concerned astronomy (the Jodrell
Bank radio telescope in 195736 and the Cambridge radio telescope in
195837, both with strong university connections), molecular biology (the
European Molecular Biology Organization was set up in 1963), comput-ing
(the UK Alvey project of 1985 and the CEC-funded Esprit project
of 1984 deserve special mention) and meteorology (the UK, Norwegian
and German meteorological organizations have led in developing large
computer models for short-term weather prediction, and a European
organization established at Reading in 1973 focused on medium-term
weather prediction).
sources of funding and competition
National and regional government
In the 1940s and early 1950s the principal source of funding for university
research in technology remained, as it had been before the war, a grant
from the national or regional government, with little if any earmarking.
Universities asserted, and were generally granted, autonomy in the allo-cation
of government grants. During the 1960s, the grants no longer met
the demands of the expanding universities, and governments began to
create (or extend the role of) non-university organizations through which
funds could be channelled, albeit increasingly with strings attached. In
the UK, as recently as 1962 (the year in which the Robbins Commit-tee
reported) the government, acting through local government (which
largely funded student fees) and the University Grants Committee, pro-vided
88% of the external income of the British universities.38 The bal-ance
came largely in the form of research grants from the three research
councils which had by then been established – the Agricultural Research
Council (1931), the Medical Research Council (1920) and (predomi-nantly)
the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1916).39 By
1987/8 (the last year before the UGC was replaced by the UFC), 68%
36 B. Lovell, Jodrell Bank (Oxford, 1968).
37 G. P. Kuiper and B. M. Middlehurst, Telescopes (Chicago, 1969).
38 Robbins Report (note 6), Appendix 4, 103. 39 Sampson, Anatomy (note 25), 241.
541

Christopher Watson
came from the UGC and local government sources, 10%from the (by now
five) research councils, and 10% from other research sources (industry,
charities etc.).40 By this date the research councils were no longer primar-ily
concerned with funding work at universities: they had become agents
in their own right, and had created major establishments in their areas of
speciality.
A further, and in some ways especially unwelcome, source of gov-ernment
funding grew up in the 1970s – the military. In the immediate
post-war era, the separation of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) from civil-ian
research was for a while almost complete, owing to the perceived need
for secrecy, and the secure position of the various defence establishments.
Thus although military RD accounted for some 25% of all European
RD expenditure during the period 1955–70 (and an even higher pro-portion
in the UK),41 it was not a significant contributor to university
funding during this period. However, the technological demands of the
cold war grew to a point where no source of technical expertise could be
ignored, and the MoD began to place contracts with the universities to
tackle the less sensitive work. This posed moral and practical dilemmas.
The research topics were often on interesting frontiers of knowledge, the
funding generous and often without onerous restrictions, but the applica-tions
were often repugnant and the security requirements on publication
irksome. Perhaps for these reasons, and unlike the US, MoD funding has
never been a major element in European university budgets. (It was less
than 1% of Oxford’s revenue in 1992.)42 Nevertheless, NATO has been
a steady source of enabling funding for conferences to bring European
technology experts together.43
These sources of national government funding were increasingly com-plemented
during the 1970s and 1980s by funds from supra-national gov-ernment
agencies. Within Europe, interest in establishing such agencies
began to develop almost immediately after the war, with initiatives such
as the European Coal and Steel Community leading in 1957 to Euratom
and the formation of the European Community. The role of the Commis-sion
of the European Communities (CEC) in RD was initially that of
a coordinator; however, by the 1970s the funds made available to it by
the Member States had increased such that it could take significant inde-pendent
action. It did so by funding research in universities, at national
government laboratories, and at its own ‘Joint Research Centres’, such
as those at Ispra and Mol. By 1980 the scale of this funding had come to
40 D. Hague, Beyond Universities (London, 1991). 41 Eurostat 1970–80.
42 ‘Vice-Chancellor’s oration’, Oxford University Gazette (1992).
43 See chapter 3, 98–9.
542

Technology
Table 15.5 Percentage breakdown in RD
expenditure for 1983
Higher-education
establishments
State/non-profit-
making
Industrial
research
UK 21 41 38
France 25 52 23
Germany 40 36 24
rival the total RD expenditure of a small nation. Its influence has been
felt especially in the nuclear and information technology sectors.44
In parallel with government-led activity, private industry was also
increasing its RD capability. In the years immediately following the
war, many industrial RD labs were modest outfits devoted to minor
product enhancements or quality assurance. The few exceptions in the
chemical, pharmaceutical and electronics industries included AEG, ICI,
Shell, BP, Glaxo and Philips, which had labs that matched those of univer-sity
departments. During the 1970s industrial RD grew enormously in
scope and quality, and began to compete significantly with the universities
for staff and resources. Most European universities now enjoy research
sponsorship from high technology industries, which ranges from the fund-ing
of chairs and lectureships, often with no overt strings attached, to
specific contracts for the investigation of problems where the university
has skills to offer, or even the establishment of complete departments in
subjects of interest to the sponsor.
An indication of the overall balance between the various sources of
funding is the percentage breakdown in RD expenditure for 1983
shown in table 15.5.45
Quasi-university institutions
In every European country, a number of institutions undertake research
or teaching (or both) at a level comparable with that of a university, with-out
actually being one (or at least, without satisfying CRE criteria). In
France, the grandes écoles, the Université de technologie de Compiègne,
and the CNRS are examples of such institutions. Collectively they now
play a dominant role in the education of French technologists (especially
those who reach the top) and account for a larger fraction of the RD
44 For the developments between 1971 and 1995, see chapter 3, for those between 1996
and 2005, see the Epilogue.
45 Eurostat 1975–85, 12.
543

Christopher Watson
budget than the universities (CNRS alone spent 7.5% of the French non-military
RD budget in 1985).46 In Germany, the corresponding insti-tutions
include the Max Planck Institutes and the Fraunhofer Institutes.
In many Eastern European countries, the counterparts are the academy
of sciences’ institutes and the technical institutes. In the UK, the compa-rable
institutions are the Research Council laboratories and the colleges
of advanced technology. The common feature of all these bodies is that
they derive much, if not all, their funding from government sources but
do not have a narrowly prescribed technical mission. The majority enjoy
a prestige in the eyes of potential members related to the level of funding
for research which they enjoy and the career prospects of those who pass
through them.
Government establishments
In every European country, the war caused a step change in the number
and importance of government-funded research establishments with a
well-defined research mission. Although a few such centres existed before
the war (e.g., the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the National
Physical Laboratory, the Royal Aeronautical Establishment), their num-bers
and relative importance grew substantially in the post-war years, and
(excepting the Federal Republic of Germany, as we have seen) by 1983
they had come to account for a higher proportion of RD expenditure
than the higher-education sector. In the UK, the major players included
the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (formed in 1954) and the
research laboratories of the nationalized industries – the Central Electric-ity
Generating Board, the National Coal Board, the Gas Board, the British
Transport Commission, and so on, all brought into the public sector in
the late 1940s.47
successes and failures of the universities in
meeting the competition
We come to an assessment of the role of the European universities in
the development of technology since the war. Did they educate most of
the key individuals? Did they generate most of the key ideas? Did they
make the important innovations and then pass them on for development?
Did they play a major part in that process of exploitation? The rough
answer to the first of these questions is yes, and to all the remainder no.
It appears that the European universities have played, at best, a marginal
46 ‘Innovation Policy France’, OECD (1986), 77.
47 Sampson, Anatomy (note 25), 533.
544

Technology
role in what has surely been one of the defining developments of the
twentieth century.
Many academics might think this judgment unfair. But in a complex
modern world there has to be specialization, and the specialities of the uni-versities
are education and basic research. This line of defence is negated
both by the way in which the universities actually behave and by the
demands made of them by their paymasters, their students and society
at large. No university applied science or engineering department would
concede that applied (or applicable) research is outside its remit: even the
core science departments would put their research funding and their abil-ity
to attract students at risk if they pursued basic research exclusively.
And, certainly since 1980, society has expected that universities will oper-ate
in the marketplace for applicable ideas on broadly the same basis as
other organizations – private sector firms, government establishments and
the like.
The education and careers of technology graduates
With the exception of France, where the dominating position of the
grandes ´ecoles creates a special situation, almost all the key men had uni-versity
degrees, and indeed a very high proportion also had PhDs or equiv-alent.
(A rare exception was J. B. Adams, director of the Culham Fusion
Laboratory in the UK and director of CERN from 1969 to 1980, who
achieved these positions without any degree qualification.) This training
has had important consequences for the style of RD even in government
establishments and private sector laboratories – their senior management
have generally retained a nostalgic affection for the lifestyle of the aca-demic
researcher, and have sometimes sought to reproduce it (at least
in part) in a non-university setting. It also meant that these managers
knew, and could protect against, the limitations of the university style.
It is also true that most of the key individuals received their entire uni-versity
education within Europe; problems in the timings of the different
phases of higher education in Europe and elsewhere made it difficult to
pick and mix. However, many of them did postdoctoral research in the
USA or elsewhere. Thus although Europe has retained its own distinctive
technological culture, it has been strongly cross-fertilized from the USA
and (more recently) other parts of the academic world.
At levels below the top echelons, university technology graduates also
have had excellent career prospects throughout almost all the period
under review. However, the pattern of their employment has shifted
considerably. Until the late 1960s, many who had the necessary high
qualifications to stay on in the university on graduation (or even on com-pletion
of a further degree) generally did so: a university research/teaching
545

Christopher Watson
post was a prestigious and relatively well-paid job with tenure for life,
and offered considerable personal freedom to choose the mix of research
and teaching and the area of research. During this period the strongest
pressure experienced by the gifted technologically inclined graduate was
whether to work in the USA, where salaries and research resources were
better than at home. However, during the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s,
the salaries and prestige of posts in the production and service indus-tries
moved ahead of those in education, research and other government
service.
This did not prevent academic technologists from playing a useful role
in society. Indeed, as they have stepped down from their pedestals, they
have come to be valued as a source of independent, commercially unprej-udiced
expertise. They appear as chairs of committees of enquiry into
technical disasters, as the articulators of informed protest against com-mercially
motivated abuses of individuals and the environment, as the
defenders of the long-term view against short-term benefits. The con-nection
between the universities and the ‘green’ trend in politics has
strengthened and played a part in the striking decline in the popularity
of technology among the younger generation. This did not stop the rise
of technology graduates to the upper reaches of the new high-technology
commercial world. On the contrary, in the 1980s and 1990s, as in previ-ous
decades, members of the boards of the advanced companies continued
to include a good proportion of technology graduates. However, the pro-portion
of accountants grew at their expense, and ambitious graduates
began to take the point that the route to the top in the commercial world
might pass through the marketing and sales department, rather than the
research department.
Technology involves the embodiment of ideas in hardware or in an
activity or process, and it is not easy to identify unambiguously the point
at which the idea has ‘taken off’, or the stage in the development process
which really generated the ‘added value’. Take nuclear energy for exam-ple.
The idea of nuclear fission was first published by Ida Noddack in 1934
and the theoretical possibility of a nuclear chain reaction was described
by Houtermans, Szilard and Joliot-Curie at about the same time. The first
experimental evidence for nuclear fission was obtained by Houtermans,
Szilard and Joliot-Curie, and Hahn and Strassman in 1938, and for a
chain reaction by Joliot, Halban and Kowarski in 1939.48 The steps which
converted all this academic work into the basis for a new technology were
the proposal by Peierls and Frisch in 1940 of a scheme for separating ura-nium
isotopes, and the ideas of Fermi (1939) and Weizs¨acker (1939)
48 R. Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns (Harmondsworth, 1960).
546

Technology
on the construction of a ‘pile’ capable of manufacturing plutonium.49
Almost every one of these individuals worked in a university. But their
ideas might never have ‘taken off’ without the wartime imperative that
used them to found a huge industry. This sequence of events – begin-ning
with pure research in a university setting and ending in a successful
industry – continued to be the paradigm of planners.
During the 1960s, this ‘trickle-down’ theory came into question. Was it
true that the best research ideas were generated by academics who did not
feel a strong commitment to the subsequent exploitation of those ideas?
The dramatic growth in the government establishment and private-sector
laboratories during this period suggested not. From them had come a
steady flow of ideas that any university might have been proud to produce.
The university response to this challenge took several forms. At the level
of the individual, a system of consultancies grew up in which academics
could offer some of the time they did not devote to teaching to government
or industry for a fee. The motivation mixed self-interest with an idealistic
concern to make the skills of the universities available for the benefit of the
national defence or economy. Initially, universities regulated this activity
lightly. During the 1970s, however, they moved to protect their interest
in the intellectual property generated by their staffs, taking out patents
in the name of the university and using public agencies, such as the (UK)
National Research Development Corporation, to help bring their ideas
to the marketplace.
A second development in relations with industry was the formation
of links at the departmental level: industries were encouraged to fund
the establishment of posts, chairs or even whole departments, in areas of
mutual interest. Examples of this were the links of Manchester University
with ICI and Metropolitan-Vickers dating back to the 1940s.50 In a few
cases, a third, much more ambitious approach was taken at the univer-sity
level – the establishment of a science park, a commercial enterprise
adjacent to the university, with a significant university investment, either
in the form of buildings or equipment, or through the secondment of
senior staff. Early examples in the UK were the science parks established
at Cambridge and at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Nonetheless, European universities did not invent the technologies
which have had a major impact on the post-war world. They can claim
credit for some part in the invention of the jet engine, radar, rocket
propulsion, nuclear energy, wind energy, polythene, Perspex, synthetic
detergents, integrated circuits, valve-based computers, robots, particle
accelerators, space exploration and radio astronomy. But this list is rather
49 Gowing, Atomic Energy (note 30).
50 Barnes, Statement, Ghent Conference (note 1).
547

Christopher Watson
unimpressive when set against the achievements of the non-university
organizations. The role of universities in the development of innovative
ideas to the point of commercial exploitation has been still more modest.
However, for the most part the role of the universities in this phase has
been to solve minor problems to which the need for a solution was not
urgent, so that the contract duration could be aligned with the three-year
life-cycle of the ‘typical’ graduate student. These contracts are important
to the balance sheet of some universities, and usually marginal to that of
the funding organization.
In sum, in the area of top-level technological education, universities
have retained a commanding position, with significant competition only
from the grandes ´ecoles in France and the technical institutes in Eastern
Europe. In basic or ‘blue skies’ research they have maintained a strong but
by no means dominant position. And in applied research and development
the government establishments and private sector RD organizations
have become the leaders while the universities have had to withdraw to
a few ‘niche’ markets. Why did this happen, and could the outcome have
been different?
Clues to the answer to this question come from comparisons with the
USA, where the universities have been significantly more successful both
in fathering inventions and in nurturing them up to the point of exploita-tion.
Many more American than European academics leave the university
laboratory to set up a small firm which goes on to success. Their science
parks are more extensive and more significant in the technology of the
country. And they derive a much larger fraction of their funding from
industrially sponsored RD. Europe has been slower to go down this
path in part because of an anti-commercial culture within the universi-ties
themselves. In part it is due to the legislative framework, which in
many countries still inhibits universities from exploiting their intellectual
property commercially. In some measure it is owing to the organiza-tional
structures within the universities, in which individual freedom is
given primacy over collective action, which inhibits promising starts from
reaching critical mass. But in large measure, it is surely due to the success
of technology itself, which has grown to the point that no one social
institution can expect to dominate it.
select bibliography
Barblan, A., and Sadlak, J. ‘Higher Education in OECD Countries: Patterns and
Trends in the 1980s’, CRE Standing Conference, April 1988.
Bland, D. E. Managing Higher Education, London, 1990.
Carson, R. Silent Spring, Boston, 1962.
Croarken, M. Early Scientific Computing in Britain, Oxford, 1990.
548

Technology
de Solla Price, D. J. Little Science, Big Science and Beyond, New York, 1986.
Forrester, T. (ed.) The Microelectronics Revolution, Oxford, 1980.
Goldsmith, M., and Shaw, E. Europe’s Giant Accelerator, Andover, 1977.
Gowing, M. Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–45, London, 1964.
Gowing, M. Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52,
London, 1974.
Hague, D. Beyond Universities, London, 1991.
Hermann, A., Krige, J., Mersits, U., and Pestre, D. History of CERN, 2 vols.,
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Hewlett, R. G., and Anderson, O. E. The New World, University Park, Pa., 1962.
Jewkes, J., Sawers, D., and Stillerman, R. The Sources of Invention, London,
1962.
Jungk, R. Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Harmondsworth, 1960.
Krige, J. (ed.) History of CERN, Vol. III, Amsterdam, 1996.
Krige, J., and Russo, A. Europe in Space, 1960–1973, Noordwijk, 1995.
Kuiper, G. P., and Middlehurst, B. M. Telescopes, Chicago, 1969.
Lavington, S. Early British Computers, Manchester, 1980.
Lovell, B. Jodrell Bank, Oxford, 1968.
Metropolis, N., Howlett, J., and Rota, G. C. (eds.) A History of Computing in
the 20th Century, New York, 1980.
Sampson, A. The Changing Anatomy of Britain, London, 1982.
Shaw, E. N. Europe’s Experiment in Fusion: The JET Joint Undertaking,
Amsterdam, 1990.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, 1959.
Williams, T. I. (ed.) A History of Technology, Vol. VI: The Twentieth Century,
2 vols., Oxford, 1978.
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549

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