A History of Foreign Students in Britain

H. Perraton

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137294951
• Thema: History
• Thema: British History

Foreign students have travelled to Britain for centuries and, from the beginning, attracted controversy. This book explores changing British policy and practice, and changing student experience, set within the context of British social and political history.

1

Introduction: Travelling Abroad to Study

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in a small southern Indian village in 1887, one of six children of whom three died in infancy. His father was a clerk in a silk shop. Ramanujan went to primary and then high school, passing most of his examinations, but with no great distinction except in mathematics where he excelled. At the age of about 16 he was given a copy of the standard English university text Carr’s A synopsis of elementary results in pure and applied mathematics. Ramanujan devoured the book and began work on a series of his own notebooks in which he extended what was in the text, explored its theorems and suggestions, and went on to discover, infer and go beyond much of what was then advanced pure mathematics. Ramanujan went on to college and entered for an arts degree, but did not complete it as he got poor marks in English, had a vegetarian’s objection to the dissection of frogs in physiology and was essentially interested only in mathematics. He got a job as a clerk which gave him an income as well as spare time for mathematics. His capacity here was so remarkable that, despite the lack of a degree, he was soon appointed to a research post at Presidency College Madras. Though he was still isolated from much mainstream mathematical thinking, this put him in touch with local mathematicians; they encouraged him to write to G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge, one of the most eminent pure mathematicians of the time. Ramanujan explained in his letter that he was a clerk, with no university training, on a salary of £20 a year, and that he had produced some interesting mathematical results which he enclosed.¹ Hardy’s reaction to one group of Ramanujan’s theorems was that they ‘defeated me completely; I had never seen anything like them before. A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class.’ He went on to explain that ‘they must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them’.² Ramanujan belonged in the Cambridge of Hardy, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, but, leaving aside the complications and cost of travel, a year there would require at least five times his annual salary.

A fellow of Trinity in the heyday of the empire was able to work the levers of power. When the India Office in London rejected the idea of funding such an unorthodox scholar, Hardy found a way of reaching the governor of Madras who duly provided a scholarship for Ramanujan to travel to Cambridge.³ He cut his hair, abandoned his turban, bought western clothes – all of which he mistakenly thought were necessary – and overcame Hindu objections to travelling over the water before sailing to England in 1913. In Cambridge he began a programme of academic cooperation with Hardy, publishing papers in pure mathematics from 1914 on. Having failed to graduate in India he did so in Cambridge in 1916 and within two years was elected to the Royal Society and to a Trinity fellowship. But his extraordinary academic promise was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis and, having returned to India, died in 1920. He had by then found time to explain that, with his Indian income and his Trinity fellowship, he had more money than he and his family needed and that the surplus should be used as a trust fund for the education of poor boys.⁴ And his work in number theory lived on. Within 20 years over 100 papers had been published on his work which continued to inspire further research. In 1974, for example, a paper on the tau conjecture which he had proposed in 1916 confirmed that his conjecture could be established.⁵

British universities have always been a magnet for scholars like Ramanujan, and unlike him, who have overcome improbable obstacles to reach them. University members, like Hardy, and government officials like Lord Pentland, the governor of Madras, have used imagination and administrative flair to support and encourage them. While scholars as able as Ramanujan are exceptionally rare, travel has always been part of student life. In the ancient world, learners from outside the city were welcome in fifth-century Athens and at Taxila in the Indus valley. They were accepted in medieval European universities, and at different times tolerated, embraced and feared in Britain. There was already a handful of foreign students in Oxford at the end of the twelfth century, and monks and friars travelled to England to study until the Reformation. Teachers travelled as well as students so that links between universities helped shape their teaching: the founders of the respected medical school in Edinburgh learnt their skills at Leiden, which in turn owed intellectual debts to Padua. Then for a century and more steamships and imperial expectations brought students from the empire and the Commonwealth to Britain. As memories of the empire faded, political changes brought increasing numbers from other European countries so that, by the twenty-first century, Britain attracted more students from Europe than from the Commonwealth.

Over the years the number of students from abroad increased so that, for much of the twentieth century, they made up one in every ten of the university total, a figure that had risen to one in five by 2000. By 2010 overseas students made up more than half of all postgraduates. This book sets out to tell the story of foreign students in Britain, concentrating on changes in policy and practice towards them, on the part of schools, colleges and universities, of government, and of society generally.

So far, but not so simple, as the definitions of ‘foreign’, ‘British’ and ‘student’ all turn out to be slippery. Students from Ireland were certainly foreign until 1540 when Henry VIII adopted the title of king of Ireland – or perhaps until the English conquest was completed in 1603 – and again certainly foreign from 1948, or from some other date between the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922 and Ireland’s proclaiming itself a republic and leaving the Commonwealth. But even then the Ireland Act, which has been in force in the United Kingdom since 1949, states that ‘Ireland shall not be regarded as a foreign country for the purpose of any law’. Indian students are now regarded as foreign but, in the first half of the twentieth century, were British subjects with a right to travel to Britain and to remain there. Public statistics reflect the changing sense of categories that matter: from the 1920s to the 1980s they distinguished between home, Commonwealth and foreign students, then separated out the European students, and in the twenty-first century dropped the Commonwealth category.

‘Overseas’ has often been used as a catch-all term but can present difficulties in relation to Scotland and Ireland. Today a distinction is sometimes drawn between international students, who have crossed a border to study, and foreign students, of a different nationality from their hosts.

Just as the sense of foreignness has changed so ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ present problems. For simplicity, ‘Britain’ is generally used in the text as shorthand for the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ (or ‘Britain and Ireland’ until the 1920s). The earlier story is about the British Isles and begins at a time when students travelling to Oxford and Cambridge from Scotland, Wales and Ireland were as foreign as their contemporaries from France. But even England is not that simple. Queen Elizabeth I’s resounding title as ‘by the grace of God Queen of England, France and Ireland’ reminds us how political realities and claims have shifted. Students from Aquitaine, under her predecessors in the fourteenth century, owed allegiance to the English king and were in that sense less foreign than those from Scotland, though they were clearly more so by the seventeenth century.

The term ‘student’ is just as tricky. Erasmus came to Britain to teach as well as to learn. Political refugees, from Protestants escaping Catholic Europe in the seventeenth century to central Europeans in the twentieth, travelled to Britain, sent their children to school and themselves went to university. Having arrived as refugees they became students. In another twist, British universities are understandably proud of alumni who went on to fame having enrolled with them, as Jomo Kenyatta did at the London School of Economics, not because they came to Britain primarily to study but because they signed up to study while in Britain for different, individual or political reasons.

Uncertain terminology need not inhibit discussion, as any good pub argument will demonstrate. The terms ‘Britain’, ‘foreign’ and ‘student’ are used with no greater weight or precision than that of their contemporary users, in order to explore and explain student mobility and what it meant. In examining attitudes and even policies there is often a case for treating someone as foreign, or a student, if that is how they were perceived, rather than concentrating on their precise legal status. The uncertainty serves to demonstrate how the typical foreign student has changed over eight centuries. Mendicant friars, encouraged or expected to travel by their orders, formed the largest group in the Middle Ages. The Reformation cut off their flow but students continued to travel from northern, Protestant Europe. By the eighteenth century they were joined by students from the empire, initially from the West Indian plantocracy, and then in small numbers from the west African middle class. In the nineteenth century larger numbers came from India and then Australia. By the twentieth, students from the informal empire – notably Egypt and Iraq – added to the numbers. Children, sent to school from the Caribbean, Africa and India joined their elders. While religion sent the first students, politics and political aspiration now took its place. Kings were made particularly welcome: Harrow had them from Afghanistan, Jordan and Iraq as well as the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Soldiers went to Sandhurst which educated future generals and military leaders. Some, particularly catechists and civil servants, were sent by their employers, some came on scholarships, but the majority were paid for by their families.

While the students have been various, policy and attitudes towards them have repeatedly been marked by controversy, ambiguity and ambivalence.⁶

Universities have traditionally welcomed foreign students, though the welcome has sometimes been muted. In the Middle Ages Oxford and Cambridge valued the ius ubique docendi which encouraged movement to and fro by giving their graduates the right to teach in any European university. The tradition continued: in the 1960s the Robbins Report on higher education confirmed that ‘The presence here in institutions of higher education of students from abroad is widely regarded as valuable, and rightly so in our judgment’.⁷ Universities’ commitment to international values has been a common and consistent feature of university policy, often ranking higher with them than with governments. In the 1930s they, rather than government, made the running in welcoming students and academics escaping from Germany.

For their part governments have usually at least tolerated students from abroad, sometimes wanted to restrain them and at times actively sought to attract them. In the early twentieth century no serious attempt was made to restrict Indian students, even when there were objections to their presence. In the 1930s the Board of Trade wanted to encourage overseas students in the national interest only to be frustrated when industry treated them with suspicion. In the 1960s and 1970s governments tried but failed to hold back overseas student numbers. By the 2000s policy had changed again with the launch of a prime minister’s initiative to recruit increased numbers of students from India and China. Over many years international agencies, from the medieval orders of monks and friars to the League of Nations and in its turn the European Union, have encouraged student travel, but without always attracting government support.

Foreign students have mattered to British universities and their presence has influenced university policy. From their beginnings, universities saw themselves as part of an international network of institutions. At different times they were seen as serving the needs of the universal church, of the empire, of the new Europe. Foreigners’ needs and interests were likely to have a particularly strong influence on institutions where they were present in large numbers, or as a large proportion of students. These included, among others, the Edinburgh medical school from the eighteenth century, the London School of Economics from its foundation and some London technical colleges favoured by west African migrants in the 1960s. But all universities were affected by the introduction of the PhD at the end of the First World War, designed to attract the kind of students who had previously done doctoral work in Germany. From the mid-1980s, universities themselves created a proliferation of master’s courses, mainly targeted at students from abroad. Scholarship and politics alike have been influenced by individual students from abroad, from Erasmus to Wittgenstein or the refugee scientists of the 1930s, some of them first welcomed, then interned, next released and prized for their contribution to military research.

Despite the welcome for talented individuals, there were always sceptical voices. Even where institutions were committed to accepting overseas students, they could not carry all their staff members with them. Early in the twentieth century schools were ambivalent in expecting to attract a cosmopolitan elite but reluctant to find places for foreigners. Oxford academics in the 1900s complained about changes brought by the first Rhodes scholars; in the 1920s their Cambridge counterparts complained about the introduction of the PhD in the interest of foreign students (see Chapter 4). Beyond this general objection to change, the critical voices have claimed that there were too many foreign students, that they did not go home, that they were not good enough, that it was not in the national interest to welcome them and that their loyalty was questionable. Casual racism affected attitudes. In the late twentieth century the cost of accepting and teaching them became an issue of political as well as institutional controversy.

The repeated charge that there were too many foreign students has sometimes been specific, sometimes general. Before and after the First World War it was repeatedly argued that there were too many Egyptian and Indian students, although at this time there was little pressure on university numbers. After the Second World War there was a sharp increase in the domestic demand for university places, fed by ex-servicemen and by increasing numbers of school leavers, and reinforced by the availability of student grants. The resulting apparent shortage of places for overseas students became a mainspring of government policy in the 1960s and 1970s, with repeated attempts to hold down overseas numbers. Those attempts led to controversial decisions in the 1960s and 1970s to charge differential fees to home and overseas students. A Labour government took the first decision in 1967 while a Conservative one in 1979 took the policy a step further by requiring them to pay fees that met the full cost of their education. Each opposition party in turn protested vigorously and ineffectively but reversed their views when in office. Universities initially joined the protests, but the protests died away as they came to enjoy the freedom to generate income by recruiting internationally. The number question then came back into politics in the 2000s as overseas students seemed to be swelling the numbers of immigrants. Regardless of the party in power, the Home Office repeatedly wanted to hold down their numbers, which became a more consistent policy under the new government of 2010.

Complaints that students did not return home after they graduated fed into the arguments that their numbers should be controlled. These complaints were, at times, reinforced from a quite different direction. As increasing numbers of students from the colonial empire, and later from the Commonwealth, travelled to Britain, there were objections that British universities were denuding Australia, New Zealand and later the developing world of their most talented citizens. This complaint was a counterpoint to repeated claims that foreign students were not as good, or as well prepared, as their home-grown contemporaries.

The argument that the presence of foreign students went against national interests took various forms. In the early twentieth century there were commercial objections to their presence, nourished by a fear that they would return home with trade secrets and set up competing enterprises. It was particularly difficult for technical students to get industrial placements for this reason (see Chapter 4). Over a much longer period questions were raised about the loyalty and political or ideological commitment of foreign students. French students were suspect in the fourteenth century, as were students with the wrong religion between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century. Many of the future leaders of the Indian National Congress studied in Britain and were, unsurprisingly, seen as being disloyal to the idea of British India. MI5 watched the activities of Forbes Burnham of Briti...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Travelling Abroad to Study
• Part I  Narrative
• Part II  Perspectives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index