Britain can avoid the fate of a cold Haiti only if it succeeds in retaining (or rather regaining) its place in the forefront of inventiveness and technical and organizational skills. We must remember (what every business man knows) that even a small initial lag in relation to the competitors can set a snowballing process which can end in total bankruptcy. Faced with the need to make a great effort and tighten the belts, the country can remain a liberal democracy only if it has a capable and public-spirited elite imbued with the ethics of work. To supply this elite—to maintain the standards where they are high and to raise them where they are low—ought to be the main task of the universities. This means that—apart from the moral education of teaching the young to work conscientiously—everything should be subordinated to the function of advancing and disseminating knowledge. Although this is plain common sense, one can hardly find a reference to it in the pronouncements of the educationalists, sociologists, journalists and politicians who seem to view the universities as agencies whose main functions are to help the handicapped, transfer the largest possible number of sons and daughters of useful workers into parasitic bureaucracy, or to conceal unemployment. Some of the academics on the other hand regard them chiefly as dining clubs, many of the students as discotheques, while some of the administrators treat them as if their purpose was to open a field for an endless proliferation of paper shufflers.
