Last year's events at Oxford
(see BBC,
Guardian, Telegraph reports) led the Old Schools to try to increase
the number of external members of Council here. This, we believe, must be
resisted. Cambridge is a self-governing community of scholars and should stay
that way, despite bullying from HEFCE. Oxford eventually saw off the attempt at centralisation; so must we.
We have two flysheets for the poll that will take place from February 28th on governance. The first flysheet asks Regents to vote against the proposed increase of the number of externals from two to four; the second flysheet asks Regents to decide that external members should in future be nominated by a committee largely elected by the Regent House, rather than by a committee appointed by the majority on Council.
Please print out both the first flysheet and the second flysheet, sign them, persuade as many people as you can to sign them, and fax the signatures to the Registrary by 1pm on the 14th February.
There is also a more detailed flysheet that contains the detailed reasoning, and was drafted with the help of colleagues from the Law Faculty; we encourage you to sign and return that too.
The establishment has been
arguing that we dare not stand up to HEFCE for fear of having our money cut. So
I wrote to John Denham after he was appointed Secretary of State. His response
was `Cambridge is and will remain an autonomous, self-governing organisation
and will be free to decide for itself hoppt to resolve the issues you mention
taking account of the global competition it faces.' John Denham's letter is here.
The University's
constitutional expert, Professor Anthony Edwards, has written an open letter to the
Master of Clare about the errors and improprieties of the
Vice-Chancellor's proposals and campaign.
Two CCF candidates - Ross Anderson and Stephen Cowley - topped the poll in our respective classes in the last Council election..
Here is Ross Anderson's election statement.
Five years ago, I founded and led a campaign to oppose the previous Vice- Chancellor's policy on intellectual property. Even though we did not get everything we campaigned for, the outcome was worth the effort. Scholars in the arts and humanities now own the copyrights in popular books they write; scientists and technologists similarly own the software they write; and if you patent an invention, then you can develop it yourself rather than giving it to Cambridge Enterprise. We thus face many fewer restrictions on disseminating and developing our ideas.
However, the incentives for centralisation and regulation will remain, both locally and nationally. We need strong academic representation on the Council to counter them.
The current governance tussles at Oxford are reflected in proposals that Cambridge add more external members to Council. I believe we must remain a self-governing community of scholars. This means that members in classes b and c - the members whom we Regents elect from among our number- should remain the majority on Council.
External threats to our autonomy also bear watching. My own field, cryptography and information security, was the target of heavy-handed attempts at government regulation during the 1990s; it was this that forced me to take notice of politics. Since 9/11, security regulation has become a hazard to many more researchers. But it is possible to resist. For example, I worked with UUK, the AUT and the Royal Society to get the House of Lords to insert Section 8 into the Export Control Act 2002. This exempts scientific research from export controls on technology transfers; without it, many scientists who collaborate with colleagues overseas would have been committing a crime unless we got an export license first.
As well as resisting tactical challenges to academic freedom, at both local and national levels, there are strategic issues to consider. Since Cambridge broke the link between teaching officers and college fellowships a generation ago, we have been able to adapt more quickly to opportunities than Oxford. However, now that fewer and fewer academics hold college fellowships, there are fewer of us involved in running things. This growing democratic deficit concerns me. It has both short-term and long-term effects. In the short term, we get administrative systems that are hard for academics to use - because few academics are involved in specifying them. In the long term, the loss of academic involvement in governance is likely to affect the very nature of our community. We risk losing a critical part of what makes Cambridge special - and successful.
I worked in industry until I was 35, then returned to do a PhD. I joined the academic staff as a lecturer in 1995 and became Professor of Security Engineering in 2003. I appreciate how working here differs from working in industry, and want us to build on our strengths.
Here is Stephen Cowley's election web page.
For more on the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms, and more links, see our campaign web page on the IP issue, our old web page, and our page on the IP ballot result.