Robbins Asks British Univ. Expansion

Wandering from the problem of governmental interference to the peculiar requirements of the British social structure, Lord Lionel Robbins, a noted English economist, yesterday led a packed Littauer Auditorium through a complicated maze of problems and prospects for higher education in Britain.

"If we don't move forward in higher education, we in Britain are in real danger of being outclassed and outsold," he said at the annual Pollak lecture, sponsored by the Graduate School of Public Administration.

Robbins recently chaired an independent government committee to study higher education in Britain. The committee's report, which included a recommendation to double student capacity by 1980, is expected to revolutionize the British educational system.

Later Robbins observed with satisfaction that despite the controversy the report has raised, the "general principle and goal of expansion has been accepted." A useful byproduct of the report, he said, was the interest it aroused in advanced study.

Explaining that higher education in Britain had become largely "a state service" with the government footing about 35 per cent of all costs, Robbins warned against the enroachment of politics into learning. "How easily the hand of official regulation becomes deadening," he said.

However, the government's financial position in higher education is now irreversible, he declared. To safeguard against "irrelevant political intrusions," the British have established a University Grants Committee, a non-political group which allots government funds, he said. Robbins reported that his study committee had recommended continued use of such "buffer committees" in allocating new state subsidies.

Robbins added that his committee had also investigated the possibility of establishing American-style junior colleges and undergraduate liberal arts colleges in England. Rejection of both types of institutions rested on some distinctive characteristics of British education.

Junior colleges, he said, would not "marry happily with the six forms of our schools." British "public" schools are generally considered to cover more material than the American high school.

The liberal arts college, Robbins continued, "would give rise to more tensions and feelings of artificial inferiority than they would be worth." He noted that proponents of the liberal arts colleges had styled them "a little lower than the angels"-- England's more prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge.