¹ Professor Wiseman, for example, told the committee: “[W]e have not argued in favour of specialised committees on the grounds of what happens in the United States and France. We have argued for them on their merits and have been hard put to defend their merits against what, we think, are mistaken criticisms which rest on false assumptions that the same defects which exist either across the Channel or across the Atlantic would inevitably be introduced into our system here.”

² “The civil servants are, after all, the Minister's principal advisers and the people who brief him for debates.”

³ “I had a look at this in a fair amount of detail,” he told the committee, “when I was writing a book about Parliament and public ownership, and one of the things I found, or thought I found, was that some of the debates on the nationalised industries were enormously improved when they took place… on the basis of the Report produced by the Select Committee on one particular industry which was being debated.”

⁴ “I think there is a very useful sanction here, in so far as if a Select Committee does not report unanimously and if it divides upon party lines then its influence, to say the least, is extremely limited; and I should have thought that the experience both of the Estimates Committee and of the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries did suggest that Members of the House of Commons serving on these committees are very, very well aware of what they can usefully investigate and usefully recommend and what they should avoid as being matters of acute party controversy.”

⁵ The “colleges” in the title of the report does not refer to the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, which receive no grants from the Government.

⁶ The Vice-Chancellors’ Committee had no definite functions. It was a forum for the pooling of information and the discussion of common problems. It had already, however, taken the initiative in the setting up of the University Central Council for Admissions and had set up a building sub-committee. The Estimates Committee recommended that the committee should be developed in such a way that it could speak more definitely on behalf of the universities.

⁷ “[T]here is a happy custom,” he said, “by which, the night before their monthly meeting, I give dinner to the chairman, and since very often our own monthly meeting has been that day I can tell him some of the things that have happened and he can warn me about things which are going to happen on his agenda next day. But if we wanted to get the opinion of the universities about the supply of teachers or any of those things I should write to the Chairman… asking him to put it to his colleagues. Q. That does not cut out your direct dealings with the universities? They are of two kinds. One is the circular letter which one would write about salaries or some of the Robbins proposals, where there is something which has got to be put to each university so that the Vice-Chancellor can present the letter to his Senate and Council. The other kind is the actual personal dealings with individual Vice-Chancellors about their own individual university's affairs. In the course of any ordinary day I get half a dozen letters from individual Vice-Chancellors and have three or four telephone conversations with individual Vice-Chancellors.”

⁸ “If it were possible at the moment to say what the national need for engineers of what kinds, and for doctors of what kinds, and for school teachers of what kinds, is going to be in the year 1980 or 1985, I have no doubt that we could transmit to the universities this national pattern of national needs, and I have no doubt they would respond.” “[I]f government policy were declared in the direction of more technologists, more scientists or more of anything, we should regard it as our business to bring about the implementation of that policy just as we did in the two to one science to arts expansion five or six years ago.”