[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Mesopotamia that was the HQ of CERC. He was not yet used, however, to the plush carpet
in the Chairman's office into which one sank inches deep. Nor could he yet comprehend the
mystic significance of carpeting to the Civil Service mind, nor the purpose of the apparently
never-ending bevy of secretaries and messengers that swarmed perpetually over the
building, making it like an anthill, a Mesopotamian anthill.
He'd toyed with the idea of bringing his own secretary, Mrs Gunter, fi from the Cavendish
Laboratory, but had desisted because on reflection he'd decided the grim Scotswoman
would be only too likely to set off unrest in the clerical workers union. Likewise he'd insisted
to Frances Margaret that it was better for him to come alone, because as a lone beetle it
would be easier for him to burrow into the CERC woodwork. Besides which, the Master of
Trinity had proved to be as good as his word - he had secured a Fellowship of the College
for Frances Margaret, so that she could now march in a big cowl at 1.00 a.m. from the
antechapel to the cloisters whenever the Master and Fellows took it into their collective mind
to parade with bell, book and candle.
Seriously though, this was the first time in Isaac Newton's working life when he'd spent even
a single day within an organisation that was not dedicated to some form of real scientific
activity. The main pattern had always been for the staff to be engaged either in the research
laboratories, or to be rushing off to give lectures and demonstrations to students, not for the
staff to be an entire secretariat engaged in the pushing of pens across paper. This was the
uncanny quality of the Mesopotamian-style building which had hit Isaac Newton immediately
on his arrival there. Everybody in it was either a messenger or typist, a telephonist or
telephonee, or a reader or writer of administrative documents. The notion that the scientific
fate of the country could be successfully planned and controlled from such a place was, in
Isaac Newton's opinion, madness. Wheat does not grow from tares, or apples from thorn
bushes.
He'd begun by examining the financial accounts of CERC, in the
form in which they had been presented to the public over the preceding ten years. Bearing in
mind the inordinate attention to detail which CERC itself demanded from the universities to
which it made research grants, the paucity of information that CERC offered in its own
accounts seemed to Isaac Newton the worst of bureaucratic impertinence. It clearly implied
that the so-called Public Accounts Committee was little better than a facade, a watchdog
without teeth, and that the real details of public expenditures on science were outside the
knowledge and control of the responsible Ministers of Government. John Jocelyn Scuby
might be considered an old washerwoman in Cambridge, but what was needed in
Whitehall, Isaac Newton decided with a wry smile, was a whole trainload of John Jocelyn
Scubys. No wonder the University survived, whereas Governments came and went with little
in the pages of history to mark their passage.
Details were not necessary, however, for one to see that the £300 million which flowed from
the public purse to CERC each year flowed out through three main channels. First, by way of
subscriptions to international organisations like CERN in Geneva, where Isaac Newton had
himself been employed; second, in research grants to universities; and third, to CERC's
own research establishments, which were sited throughout the country in locations as
diverse as Sussex, Berkshire, Lancashire and Lothian. With the first of these channels, the
Government was simply using CERC as its accounting agent, without CERC being
permitted significant control over the activities in question, for these were decided by
international agreement. Because of the Council's failure to achieve control over the first
channel, the upper echelons of CERC would have been generally happy to see the
international expenditures reduced, provided the monies could then be transferred to the
second and third channels, over which CERC had indeed succeeded in establishing almost
complete control.
The disposition of resources between grants made to universities and the recurrent budgets
of the Council's own establishments had been an open scandal for more than a decade, and
it was plain evidence of the pusillanimity to which British science had been reduced that
nothing had been done about it. When the research council system was adopted in the mid
1960s, CERC had been given a charter that plainly directed the Council to promote
research in the universities. In addition to this first duty, the Council had also been required
to take over a handful of hitherto disconnected Government-operated research
establishments, an addendum which had been tacked on almost as an afterthought, without
any suggestion that the arrangement might impede the
support which CERC was supposed to give to the universities; nothing was further from the
minds of the planners than that the flow of funds to the universities would gradually become
diverted into the coffers of these adjunct establishments. The long-standing causes of this
perversion of original intent were strong union activity within the establishments, which
successive Chairmen of CERC were unwilling or unable to face down, and the rather
obvious fact that civil servants at the HQ of CERC were birds of just the same plumage as
those employed in the establishments themselves, with like very naturally flocking to like.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]