The Road to Little Dribbling (47 page)

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I’m biased, but I believe Durham may be the nicest small city on the planet. It is friendly, brainy, carefully preserved, very beautiful. Its university is the third oldest in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, and one of the best. It is the only one in the world that is also a World Heritage Site. I said some complimentary things about Durham in
Notes from a Small Island
and the university gave me an honorary degree. When I came to accept the degree, I said some more nice things and they made me chancellor. This is my kind of town.

Being a university chancellor is a position that almost nobody outside the world of British academia understands. When my hero and friend Sir Kenneth Calman, who was then vice-chancellor at Durham, invited me to take on the role in 2005, my first question to him was: “What does a chancellor do?”

“Ah,” he said in a tone of genial wisdom, “a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for.”

A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose. A university is really run by the vice-chancellor. “Your job,” Ken told me, “is to be harmless and amiable, and to preside over graduation ceremonies twice a year.” And so for six years that is what I did, and I loved it. It was, I discovered, a little like being Queen Mother and Santa Claus at the same time.

The British do a lot of things remarkably well and often seem hardly aware of it, and nowhere is that more true than in the provision of higher education. Compare the situation of British universities with that of American ones. As everyone knows, the amount of money American universities have at their disposal is staggering. Harvard University’s endowment is $32 billion—that’s more than the gross domestic products of most nations. Yale has an endowment of $20 billion, Princeton and Stanford are both at $18 billion, and so on through a very long list.

In Iowa, my own state, Grinnell, a nice, eminently respectable liberal arts college but one that not many people outside the Midwest have ever heard of, has 1,680 students and an endowment of $1.5 billion—or more than all British universities put together apart from Oxford and Cambridge. Altogether eighty-one universities in America have endowments of $1 billion or more.

That’s just endowments. It doesn’t touch on the huge sums they take in from tuition and sports programs and a good deal else. Do you know, Ohio State University earns $115 million a year from its sports programs, of which some $40 million—I am actually embarrassed to say this—comes in the form of donations. That’s right. People give $40 million a year to the Ohio State University football team just so it can attract better players—and, for all I know, better cheerleaders. Forty million dollars is about equal to the total endowment of Exeter University in the UK. Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team.

I first became interested in all this when I sat at a dinner next to a fund-raiser from the University of Virginia, who mentioned, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that they had just embarked on a five-year campaign to raise $3 billion. To achieve this, the university employed a dedicated fund-raising staff of two hundred and fifty. The head of the department was paid $500,000 a year—more than anybody at the university except the football coach. The University of Virginia, in short, had turned itself into a mighty cash-raising machine.

It met its target, a remarkable accomplishment, but here’s the thing. According to the 2014
Times Higher Education
world rankings (which are generally held to be the most exacting of their type), the University of Virginia ranks 130th among the world’s universities. Eighteen much more modestly funded British universities rank higher. On the world stage, according to the
Times Higher,
Virginia is about level with Britain’s Lancaster University, which has an endowment fund one-thousandth the size of Virginia’s. That is pretty extraordinary.

And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another way, Britain has 1 percent of the world’s population, but 11 percent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 percent of total academic citations and 16 percent of the most highly cited studies.

I very much doubt if there is any other realm of human endeavor in the country that produces more world-class benefit with less financial input than higher education. It is possibly the single most outstanding thing in Britain today.

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One of the weirdest experiences I have ever had occurred on an ancient and noble span called Elvet Bridge in Durham, which I had forgotten all about but remembered now as I strolled across the bridge on my way to the cathedral. Elvet Bridge dates from the twelfth century and because of its great age and narrowness is closed to motorized traffic. I used it a lot when I was in Durham for Congregations, as graduation weeks are known, because it stood between my hotel and the cathedral, where the graduation ceremonies took place in an atmosphere of stirring pomp and glory.

One morning, as I was hurrying to the cathedral for the day’s first ceremony, I felt an irresistible urge to look over the side of the bridge. I have no idea why; it wasn’t something I normally did. Directly beneath me, thirty or forty feet below, two young mothers with strollers were chatting on a path beside the swift and rain-swollen River Wear. One of them had a toddler. As I looked down, the toddler, unnoticed, stepped onto a boat ramp beside them. It was a bigger step down than he could quite manage and he immediately unbalanced and tumbled into the water. He sank completely, then bobbed up on his back, still slightly submerged, with an exceedingly startled look on his face. I was directly in his line of sight. We made eye contact—shared this unexpected moment. The little boy was in an eddy sheltered by the ramp, and for a moment he lay becalmed, but then he began very gently to spin, and to move toward the open river, as if being tugged by a current.

All this happened in an instant, but to me, and I daresay to the toddler, it proceeded in a kind of paralyzing slow motion, in complete silence. I was watching a little boy go to his death, and mine was about to be the last face he would ever see. How’s that for an image to spend the rest of your life with?

And then, abruptly and miraculously, real time reasserted itself and the world became noisy again. I shouted and his mother in the same instant looked over and, with a shriek, scrambled to the water’s edge and snatched him out before he was swept away. The mother and her friend fussed over the little boy, but I could see he was OK. After a few moments, the friend looked up and signaled an all-clear to me and a kind of thanks. There was nothing more I could do and I was late anyway, so I waved back and continued on my way.

I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at lunch to one of the members of the cathedral, and he nodded sagely and pointed a finger heavenward, as if to say, “It was God, of course.”

I nodded and didn’t say anything, but thought: “Then why did He push him in?”

—

Beyond Elvet Bridge, a cobbled street called the Bailey leads up to Palace Green, a giant lawned square with the cathedral rising like a mountain of shaped stone at one end and Durham Castle, now part of the university, standing sentinel at the other. I entered the cathedral through its massive oak doors and for about the two hundred and fiftieth time, I would guess, was staggered by its grandeur. It is unquestionably one of the great, humbling spaces of the world.

At the eastern end of the cathedral, in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, is a breathtakingly enormous rose window, ninety feet in circumference, a giant kaleidoscope of stained glass of an almost liquid intensity, held in place by the most delicate stone tracery. I was once told by a member of the cathedral staff that some years ago, while putting together a program of maintenance, a team of conservators comprehensively measured every facet of the window and sent the numbers off to an engineering firm to be crunched in a supercomputer. Soon afterward an urgent message came back saying: “Whatever you do, don’t build that window!”

I asked Christopher Downs, the architect, about this when I met him and he smiled tolerantly. The story, he said, was apocryphal, but the substance was true. No one would dare to build such a window now. It is, he told me, at the very limit of engineering tolerances. “Somehow, without computers or other sophisticated tools, they knew precisely how far they could push things,” he told me. “It is quite miraculous really.”

I had a look around the cathedral now, then strolled through the exquisite cathedral close—known here as the College—then along the Bailey and down to a woodland path to another landmark, Prebends’ Bridge. It is unquestionably one of the loveliest views in England, with the cathedral above and the river, tranquil and green, sliding along below. It is a prospect that has barely changed since it was memorialized in a well-known painting by J. M. W. Turner in 1817.

People come from all over to marvel at the cathedral and enjoy these views without appreciating that not one bit of what they see takes care of itself. Prebends’ Bridge is part of the cathedral estate. A couple of years ago, it had to be assessed for structural wear. The dean of the cathedral, Michael Sadgrove, told me that the scaffolding alone would cost £100,000. I asked him how much cathedral visitors donated. The average visitor leaves 40p, he told me. More than half leave nothing at all.

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I had to hasten on to Newcastle to attend a dinner and then take part in a charity walk for the Northern Institute for Cancer Research, a heroic organization that I first learned of through Jon Davidson, my old friend who force-marched me through the Lake District in 2010 as part of his coast-to-coast charity hike. The institute is run by Prof. H. Josef Vormoor, who is Sir James Spence Professor of Child Health at Newcastle University and one of the foremost child cancer specialists in Britain.

I was thinking about Josef because on the drive to Newcastle I listened to the news on the radio, and it contained an item about the prime minister, David Cameron, renewing his pledge to cut drastically the number of immigrants. Britain has become obsessed in recent years with immigrants, mostly because of an influx of people from Eastern Europe, who enjoy free movement within Europe once their countries join the European Union, as most have. Many Tories and others of a conservative temperament would like all these people to go home.

My ears always perk up at immigration stories because of course I am an immigrant myself. So, too, is Josef. He is from Germany. His wife, Britta, is from Germany, too. She is a physician in family practice. I wish she was my physician because she is smart and kind.

Now here’s the thing that just drives me crazy. If Josef and Britta went home tomorrow, the British government would log it as a gain. Britain’s immigration numbers would be reduced by two and therefore the nation would have moved a tiny bit closer toward some notional concept of perfection. The smartest person I know is Prof. Carlos Frenk of Durham University. He is one of the world’s leading cosmologists. He attracts the best possible talent to his department. Carlos is from Mexico. He comes from a fabulously wealthy family; he isn’t in Britain because it is making him wealthier. He could be at Harvard or Caltech or anywhere, but he likes Durham. If he went tomorrow, it would also be logged as a net gain to the country. Do I really have to point out how foolish that is?

I am not suggesting that Britain, or any country, shouldn’t try to control its population numbers. I am just saying that the process ought to involve a little more than a body count. Jon Davidson’s wife, Donna, comes from America. She is enormously lovely and very gifted. She helps design visitor centers all over the world for an American company, so she earns dollars for the British economy, and, not incidentally, in her spare time raises lots of money for the Northern Institute for Cancer Research. There are tons of people like us in the world—people who live in another country because of considerations of marriage or family or quiet affinity—and I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot. In this respect (and one or two others, frankly) the Conservatives are idiots.

—

That evening I attended a most enjoyable fund-raising dinner for the NICR and then the following day went to the Blagdon Hall estate, north of Newcastle, which was hosting the charity hike. Blagdon Hall is the ancestral home of the Viscounts Ridley. The present viscount is the author and kindly soul more widely known to the world as Matt Ridley. I have known Matt for years but for a very long time had no idea that he was a viscount–in-waiting. It was only when I visited him at his house for the first time and found him standing at the front door of a building about the size of my high school that I realized his background involved a certain measure of privilege.

In his younger years, Matt worked as a journalist on
The Economist
and for a time was based in America. He told me that once he went to Iowa for the political caucuses and was checking into a motel when he noticed that on the wall behind the check-in desk was a reproduction of a painting of an English country estate from the eighteenth century. The painting was awfully familiar to Matt since it was of Blagdon. The original hung in his house. He said to the young check-in clerk, “I don’t suppose you’ll believe this, but that’s my house.” She glanced at the print and then looked at him as if he had just told her that he lived in Tinker Bell’s castle at Disneyland, and completed the check-in process without reference to his comment.

Matt’s wife, Anya, who is also lovely and has a brain like a mainframe computer, is a leading neuroscientist based at Newcastle University. She’s American, too. Their son, Matthew, a student at Cambridge, was one of the members of last year’s winning team on
University Challenge,
a really hard quiz show for college students, so he is obviously tremendously smart, too, as is their daughter, Iris. The children are British, but half their brains and frankly about three-quarters of their looks are American.