Yale, Harvard, Bloomsbury

Historian David Cannadine says British higher education is less confident, creative and imaginative than its American counterpart, but he believes he has a blueprint for its recovery

It is true to say that, compared with most universities in Europe, British universities are in relatively good shape. Here in Britain, student numbers are smaller, staff-student ratios better and degree courses more rigorous than on the Continent. Our funding is more stable and more secure, and British academics are not hired or fired at the behest of the state, or expected to ply their trade in conformity with the party ideology of whoever happens to be in power.

In France, Germany and Italy, universities are less well resourced and more oversubscribed than they are here, while in the former Communist bloc, it is going to take decades to construct a viable, independent university system, emancipated from the thraldom of Marxist dogma and decades of inadequate funding.

But if we turn our perspective westward, comparisons offer little advantage to British universities. Even the richest institutions are chronically underfunded and under-endowed compared with their American counterparts. In 1996-97, the market value of the endowments of Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Harvard universities were, respectively, $3 billion, $4.4 billion, $4.9 billion, $5.7 billion and $11.1 billion, and, in the year since then, the buoyant stock market has increased endowments by anything from one half to two billion dollars.

Such prodigious accumulations of academic wealth make even the riches of Oxford and Cambridge pale into relative insignificance. And this abundance of material resources makes so much else possible in the world of US higher education - not just higher professorial salaries (important though these are), but the back up of support for teaching and research and the fostering of a buoyant, optimistic environment where these activities are supported as the purpose of university life - and beyond into the wider, national, public culture.

Moreover, it is not just that even the richest British universities are chronically underfunded and underendowed by comparison with American universities, it is also that they are no less chronically over-bureaucratised. Of course, American universities have to be administered, and they, too, have their hierarchies of committees. But they are more concerned with spending money than with second-guessing the funding councils, and there is still a widespread belief that professors should be given as much freedom as possible to get on with the things they are expert at - namely teaching and research.

Indeed, those professors who show particular distinction are rewarded with promotions that give them more time to teach and write and protect them from the distracting demands of administration. In Britain, the reverse is true - and the situation is getting worse. In part this is because the more eminent and promoted British academics become, the more administration they are expected to undertake. And in part, it is because the insistent and growing demands from the government for accountability bring with them ever more committees and meetings.

It is this debilitating combination of inadequate resources and excessive bureaucracy that underlies both the proletarianisation of British academic life and the increasingly pervasive culture of accountability and productivity. But these developments are lethal to any serious culture of creativity. For most hard-pressed academics, who lack adequate time and resources, research and writing are relegated to a low-level, residual activity, to be fitted into those few hours or days when there are no more pressing obligations.

This may still allow for the grinding out of routine pieces of research and writing, but it is not an environment in which sustained or original creative labour can be carried on - the kind of thought that will open up a new subject, or treat an old problem in a new way, or capture the imagination of the general public. Behold the result: at all levels of the historical profession, most British academics are less confident and creative and imaginative then their American counterparts.

It remains the belief of some in Britain, reinforced by the many five-star ratings liberally handed out in the "fever of enhancement" that characterised the 1996 research assessment exercise, that our best universities are successfully competing with the best universities in the world - that is, those in North America. But on the basis of my own transatlantic experience (and I spent ten years at one of the top US universities), I have to report that that view is at best nostalgic delusion, at worst mistaken fact.

As even the richest and most privileged of British universities become - by comparison with their US counterparts - relatively less rich, more bureaucratised and less creative, their capacity to compete dwindles and diminishes by the day.

Perhaps this is inevitable: for universities, like nations, rise and fall. Indeed they tend to rise and fall together, since great powers are generally rich powers, and rich nations can better afford world-class universities than can poor nations. In an earlier era, Bologna and Prague and Heidelberg and Paris were the great universities of the world; that supremacy passed to Edinburgh and Glasgow, Cambridge, Oxford and London; now it is passing to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Chicago. Perhaps we should resign ourselves to the inevitable, and recognise that in higher education, as in everything else, there is an international division of labour, and accept that in this world league, as in so many others, from cars to cricket, Britain is no longer a serious competitor at the world level.

But if we do not wish to give up, then we have to address a question that no one in high places is prepared to admit needs to be posed: does Britain want to make the effort to continue to maintain even a handful of world-class universities into the next century? And if it does, then what, in terms of massively increased endowments and funding and no less massively reduced intrusion and bureaucracy, is it prepared to do about it?

As Noel Annan writes in his forthcoming book, The Dons, the life blood of any great university is "outstanding and productive scholars, devoted and stimulating teachers, men and women of originality and imagination, open-hearted and magnanimous". There are people working in British universities who embody these qualities: but from Oxford to Luton, they are held back, hemmed in by a system that hinders and harasses, instead of encouraging and liberating them.