Most place names are topographical. Most names of innovation districts are technological. So where do you begin to look when you are charged, as my company The Draft was indeed charged, with finding a new name for an innovation district that sees itself not as a science park but as a place? The Robbins report in Higher Education and the archives of the University of Manchester, of course. Where else?
Two years ago, we began working with ID Manchester, a £1.7bn innovation district created by the University of Manchester and Bruntwood Sci Tech. There is a peculiar conformity in the language of innovation and its districts. The same words appear over and over. It’s all “synergies”, “cross pollination”, “clusters”. The more we digested the marketing materials of similar districts around the world, the more certain we became: the language of innovation districts sounds like a DVD player from 2007. It isn’t very innovative. It felt divorced from and inappropriate for the city of industry and railways and canals and mills and textiles. Manchester is a place that built the world’s most advanced computer and called it “Baby”.
The answer came from my colleague Lizzie Hibbert’s search of the archive of the University of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Technology. In there, Lizzie found hundreds of (to her) fascinating documents that told a lost story of British higher education. Many of the documents were treatises on the governing idea of the new place – how to transfer the brilliance of the academic discovery into rich commercial possibility. Then she started to read the Robbins report.
Lionel Robbins, the head of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics, was appointed by Harold Macmillan on 8 February 1961 “to review the pattern of full-time higher education in Great Britain and in the light of national needs and resources to advise Her Majesty's Government on what principles its long-term development should be based.” The twelve members of the Robbins committee held 111 meetings and received over 400 written submissions of evidence. They visited universities and colleges in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland and made longer visits to the United States and the Soviet Union. They published in October 1963.
Robbins made 178 recommendations and not all of them were implemented. The committee expected growth in student numbers to occur disproportionately in the disciplines of Science and Technology, but this didn’t really happen. Robbins did little or nothing to sort out student finance and the following decades saw an expansion in Higher Education for which there was almost no extra money. The Labour Education Secretary Tony Crosland, to the irritation of Lord Robbins, refused to accept that a distinction between universities and polytechnics was invidious, which was strange for a minister whose career was predicated on collapsing the distinction between grammar schools and secondary moderns. And the Robbins report did not, in point of fact, lead to lots more universities. The only new institution that followed was the University of Stirling.
However, Robbins remains a justly famous report, perhaps mostly for ‘the Robbins principle’ which underscored all its recommendations. This states: ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.’ The Robbins principle was regularly invoked as a reason to remove the caps on student numbers from the mid-2010s. Robbins implored the government, among other things, to establish a dedicated degree-length course for teacher training, to increase the nation’s postgraduate capacity in science, to create technological universities out of the Colleges of Advanced Technology, to provide funds sufficient for the existing universities to expand to accommodate more students, to ensure that universities were comprehensive institutions that housed both teaching and research and to encourage the development of adult education. To do, in other words, plenty of things which the government duly did and which have become fixtures in the British education system.
But among the omissions from Robbins, one of them was glaring. Fearful that Britain would be left behind in an era of technological acceleration, Robbins called for the creation of three centres of technical higher education:. The report event specified what they should be called: Special Institutions for Scientific Education and Research. Or, to use the acronym that was to become the bone of contention. Three SISTERs. The first SISTER was planned to be in Manchester, on the very site that was still going by the unlovely name of ID Manchester.
One always-available option for Manchester is to tap into the city’s history of radical politics. Marx and Engels revised the manuscript of The Communist Manifesto in the library at Chetham’s. The Pankhursts were a Manchester family. It was somehow perfect that an all-male Cabinet had rejected the SISTERS at east in part because they did not like the feminist connotation. As one of the Cabinet said at the time, sister is “a horrible word”.
It's not a horrible word, of course. It’s familiar, literally so. It describes a relationship, without which it has no meaning. It’s in common usage, both in its immediate sense and metaphorically in the sense of sister companies and sister towns. It tipped the hat to a history of radicalism and was radical itself. So now there it is. First, on the façade of the Renold building and, in time, on the map. Manchester could still benefit, as all cities could, from the SISTER of Lionel Robbins’s original design, but at least it has Sister.