Lord William Hague is certain that we are headed for a “decade of change” and is convinced that he is the person to steer the University of Oxford through it. He is keen to place Oxford at the centre of the next technological explosion, to continue growing access to the University, and has many thoughts on the financial situation of the UK higher education sector. In our conversation in the Oscar Wilde Room at his old college, Magdalen, he speaks on all of these and more.
Hague has a remarkable CV: MP for 26 years, Leader of the Opposition, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons, author, columnist, and now even podcaster. First came Oxford, and that is where his drive to become Chancellor originates. “Oxford transformed my life.”, he says, “I came here from a comprehensive school in South Yorkshire. I didn’t know a single person in the whole city and university when I came and when I left, I was ready to go on to be all the things that I became. Oxford made a huge difference to my own life and I believe in helping other people have the same transformative experience.”
The curious position of being the Chancellor allows little scope to make concrete changes to the running of the university but during this even more curious campaign all of the candidates have outlined their views on how it could be done. Hague is no different and his vision again comes back to what he sees as “a decade in which human civilization is going to change more quickly than ever before in the entirety of our history.”.
The financial crisis facing UK universities is the issue of the day in education with nearly 70 already carrying out redundancy and restructuring programmes. On that, Hague concedes that fees may have to rise but that it “certainly shouldn’t be by more than inflation and that there needs to be more help with people to be able to come to university.”
A key part of that is growing the endowment at Oxford, something which Hague believes he can help with through his links with the United States. He also praises such initiatives as the Crankstart Scholarship, saying: “Bringing the best people here irrespective of background, that has to be the objective. We are going to need to keep expanding those sorts of things [scholarships], particularly in an environment where fees are probably going up.”
At the moment, international students are vital for the survival of many UK universities because of the higher fees they are charged. Like many, Hague questions the wisdom of including student numbers in immigration figures altogether, but he is wary of the sector becoming completely dependent on learners from abroad: “It is also true”, he says, “that you can’t have universities become so dependent on students from overseas that then they are in a fragile financial position whenever that changes, because then what happens when there is a future pandemic?”.
In recent years many politicians have expressed the view that 38.5% of UK students going into full-time higher education is too high, but Hague is keen to counter that narrative, one which stems primarily from the Conservative Party that he once led. “I think that over time we probably need a higher proportion of the population to go to university because human capital is the key ingredient of this decade of change that I’m talking about. That’s why it’s only going to get more important and we are going to be competing with nations where it will be reaching up to 65 or 70%.
“In the world of highly intelligent machines that is coming, humans are going to have to make sure that they can work in a kind of co-intelligence with those machines. That is going to require more and more education.”
Freedom of speech on campus and the University’s handling of pro-Palestinian encampments have proved controversial in the last year, and here Hague aligns himself broadly with the rest of the major candidates. He sets out that “the right to protest is well established and quite right in our society, but it can’t be a right to protest that stops other people going about lawful or necessary business. … That is where you draw the line. It’s very understandable at a time of conflict around the globe that people have extremely strong feelings, emotions, reasons, and deep concerns about what’s going on in the world … but it is best debated in all the many forums that we have for debate in a place like Oxford.”
One of the notable things about Hague is that he went into politics at such a young age. He was famously thrust onto the national stage after addressing Conservative party conference aged just 16 and became Leader of the Opposition at the age of 36. Now, he is desperate to encourage highly achieving young people into politics: “Look how we’re struggling across the world with political leaders. It seems like the problems have bigger and the leaders have got smaller… We cannot possibly do without that small cadre of people who’s there to take the plunge (into politics).
On current politics, Hague made a pitch for the Conservative Party to return to the centre, advising that “We should not be a right-wing pressure group that competes with Reform,” and not “to charge off to the right and ignore all those Labour and Liberal people.”. Minutes after our interview, James Cleverly was eliminated from the Conservative Party leadership race.
As has been the case during this election campaign, Hague declined to comment on any other candidates other than to say that there “are other good ones”. He did, however, make a closing pitch as to why he should be elected:
“It is because we need to articulate to the world how critical Oxford is to the next decade in the UK, and we need to raise that bigger endowment for the future that I was talking about. For that, you need somebody who is used to explaining things to the whole country and the whole world, and who is connected to people in business and philanthropy and politics all over the world, particularly in America.”
