Brexit will damage Oxford’s status, professor warns

Oxford university will struggle to retain its status as the best university in the world as a result of Brexit, its Irish-born vice chancellor has warned.

Oxford was recently ranked number one in The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. It is regularly in the top three in the world.

Professor Louise Richardson told the national conference on the Easter Rising in Galway that 15 per cent of its students and 17 per cent of its academic staff are from other EU countries. "We anticipate those numbers will decline," she said.

She predicted that there will be opportunities for Irish universities as British academics are now vulnerable to being poached if they are concerned about their EU research funding being cut as a result of Brexit.

“Some are frankly upset at being felt to be unwelcome in Britain,” she added.

"It is a real challenge to British universities. We are trying to make the British Government see sense about this, but they are unable to give away their negotiating position."

Some 11,000 Irish students study in Britain. EU students in the UK are guaranteed EU fees for the next year, but after that “all bets are off”, she warned.

She said free travel between Ireland and Britain long pre-dates membership of the EEC but it was not guaranteed that it would remain.

Waterford-born Professor Richardson is an expert on global terrorism.

She told the conference she was concerned about the effect on free speech of recent legislation in the UK.

“They (the British Government) want to prohibit extremist speech on campus,” she explained. “My view is that universities should welcome all legal speech. Provided a speech is legal, it should be welcomed in universities where it will be openly challenged.

“We have an obligation as educators to model to our students how to respond when you hear views that you find objectionable. We are concerned this will have a chilling effect on campus.”

She described education as an antidote to extremism because education robs students of their “certitude.”

“They should be critical of everything they hear. If a student is educated to be sceptical, they are going to be sceptical of anybody who seeks to impose an orthodoxy on them. Terrorists have a highly oversimplified view of the world.”

Mrs Richardson said Oxford was spending £18 million a year on recruiting students from poorer backgrounds and now have more state pupils in the university than at any stage in the past.

However, she said it was a “real tragedy” that pupils from deprived backgrounds are not more competitive at selective universities.

She said: “Too many have fallen off the education ladder early on. Universities like Oxford will do more, but it is a societal problem that universities can’t solve.”