It may seem difficult to believe now that, only 30 years ago, there was limited interest in the working and funding of the nation’s universities or in the opportunities they offer to their students. By the start of the twenty-first century though, that had changed and there was a role for a specialist higher education think tank.
Reflecting here on the policy climate at the time of the creation of HEPI, I draw on the perspective that I have acquired over that time from roles in central government, a funding council, two representative bodies, a national quality agency, institutional leadership and critical writing about higher education policy.
As a Civil Servant in various Departments, including the Cabinet Office, from 1976 to 1990, I was very aware of two longstanding features of UK government policymaking.
The first was Whitehall’s strong predilection for local ‘internal’ sources of information and evidence – the famous ‘not invented here’ syndrome. The second, which reflected and contributed to the first, was the weakness of the links between civil servants working in a particular area of policy and the ‘outside’ experts based, usually in a university, sometimes in a think tank.
