Due Diligence, Higher Education Funding and CMI Ltd
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Due Diligence, Higher Education Funding and CMI Ltd G.R. Evans Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. E-mail: http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk
Recent Government policy has been strongly in favour of encouraging entrepreneurship and partnerships with industry. A flagship project backed by d68 m was launched by Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1999. Due diligence exercises by the DTI failed to ensure that value for money was obtained. What had been planned and announced as an educational charity became a Limited Company and the ban on using the money for commercial spin-outs was waived. There was imperfect quality control of projects and little control over costing. There appear to be funding lessons both for Government and for universities at a time when it is proposed to charge students top-up fees, for the sum given away by the Treasury here for one badly-supervised project represents the top-up fees of over 20,000 students. Higher Education Policy (2004) 17, 89–99. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300043 Keywords: industry–university relations; technology transfer; funding; University of Cambridge; public policy; UK
Introduction ‘The Vice-Chancellor wishes to inform members of the University that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, has today announced substantial Government funding for collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).’1 The announcement that d68 m was to be given to Cambridge and MIT for this flagship project, without competition, caused bitter resentment in the world of higher education in the autumn of 1999. That sum could have got most of the country’s universities out of deficit and it could perhaps have made a sizeable difference to the need for the introduction of student tuition fees. It is now known that the money did not achieve the projected results. The story of the failure now needs telling. There are important lessons as the White Paper of 2003 becomes a Bill and then an Act of Parliament. It was admitted that this was the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s initiative.2 ‘The
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political agenda is closer in the CMI initiative than is normally the case with university funding because of the initiative’s origins.’3 The scheme was the outcome of ‘a series of discussions with MIT and the Treasury (HMT), involving the Vice-Chancellor, other senior officers, and senior academic staff in the subject areas directly concerned.’4 The initiative had apparently come from MIT. It had ‘approached the University about the possibility of coming to a mutually satisfactory agreement on a programme of activities which each university would be willing to undertake if the Chancellor of the Exchequer were willing to provide the appropriate funding.’5 The apportionment of the d68 m was massively in MIT’s favour (d50 m to be spent at MIT and d34 m within the University of Cambridge).6 But there was also a polit
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