Why I am leaving Oxford

I am a lucky man. As an Oxford don, I teach in one of the world's great universities. My subject is Classics, my department is the largest in its field in the world, and probably the best. My pupils are bright, keen to learn and argue, and sometimes brilliant. In Oxford, I work in beautiful surroundings. So why am I off to an American university for a year and perhaps for keeps? Part of the answer may be the natural desire for change. But I have been surprised to find how many of my colleagues are thinking about crossing the Atlantic, or are prevented only by compelling domestic reasons, like their partner's job or their children's schools.

Dons feel restive regardless of their politics. There should be more flexibility in the universities, greater attention to whether staff feel valued, and a lighter load of petty administration. The frustrations we feel stem from a culture obsessed with testing and monitoring, and it is creeping further down the age-scale by the year. The teenagers we teach need the chance to expand their imaginations and learn to take intellectual risks. I worry that the exam grind of GCSEs, ASs and A-levels is in danger of crushing that sort of initiative. If these extra examinations gave students more breadth and maturity, I too might concede that it was all for the best. But they don't.

Students are coming up to the best universities with less technical preparation than they had 30 years ago. In Classics, we have had to adapt our teaching because many applicants come with less knowledge than they once did. My colleagues in science, maths and modern languages are even more concerned that they spend much of the first year catching up with what should have been taught at school.

The fount of the problem is a coherent Government policy, or the lack of it. If we knew what we were trying to do with our universities, we might succeed. Sadly, I don't think we do. The paradox is that the US has got itself a higher- education policy without trying, while Britain claims to have one, but hasn't - a state of affairs that persists even though we keep spawning higher education ministers.

The sheer size of the American system means that institutions called universities can perform a vast range of functions, ranging from Panhandle State University, Oklahoma, which does a fine job giving kids from the farm what we would call a sixthform education, to Harvard and Berkeley. But when Tony Blair gave a lecture on his education policy at Oxford, he could see only two functions for universities: job training and money-making research. These are indeed important, but they are not the whole point of higher education. Despite his famous mantra, education itself - the enlarging, deepeningand toughening of the mind - didn't figure at all.

The truth is that no recent government, Conservative or Labour, has bothered to get itself a higher education policy. This government has one aspiration, namely to have 50 per cent of school leavers going on to university in a decade's time. That is a target in the same sense as the Soviet Union had grain harvest targets. But this is no policy at all unless you have some idea what you mean by university and what you want the students to do when they get there.

Government thinking is back to front. The right process would be to decide what we should be offering young people after they leave school, and then work out how to deliver it. If you think what is wrong with this country is that not enough people know Ancient Greek, then find ways of encouraging universities to expand their Ancient Greek departments. If you think we need more technical training or lifelong learning, then set up the institutions to provide it. Whether you call them universities or not doesn't matter.

What government needs to understand - and university administrations, for that matter - is how much the present system relies on goodwill.

Implicitly, there is a tradeoff: academics accept lower salaries than other comparable professionals in return for other advantages. That includes esteem - and it is why the absurd Laura Spence affair was more important than it may have seemed. Dons work desperately hard at admissions, and then get traduced by Gordon Brown as incompetent or semi- criminal. Why he wanted Miss Spence to be taught by a shower like that is still a mystery to me. The message dons got from this episode was that they mattered so little that a senior minister could carelessly libel them for short-term political gain, without troubling to find out the facts. If you treat people like that, they will wonder why they bother.

What has hurt university morale most, though, has been the oppressive mass of inspection and regulation. First, there has been the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). In fairness, government has a genuine problem here: it cannot support research in 80 universities all at the same level, and some method of ranking departments is essential. But the method chosen has been cumbersome and inefficient. America does the job just as well and at no public expense simply by polling the opinions of other academics.

More malign still have been the Teaching Quality Assessments which require departments to pretend to inspectors that they teach unimaginatively and mechanically in order to score top marks. The colossal amounts of time and money wasted on a process which, if taken seriously, would positively harm the quality of teaching has been a scandal. It is now in line for review - but it's telling that so many people's lives have to be made a misery in the universities before changes are made for the better. Perhaps we don't shout enough - or maybe the Government is adept at turning a deaf ear.

A fortnight from now I shall be settling my feet under my desk at Boston University. Maybe the grass won't be greener in every respect on the other side of the ocean, but one thing I can be sure of: there won't be a quango breathing down my neck, checking that all my lectures have handouts and no bright question from a student will deflect me from my course plan. If you keep cutting the goose open to see how it is doing, it won't lay those golden eggs. America's best universities have flourished through being trusted and left alone. Gordon Brown says he wants us to learn from what they do; by all means: but he might start with himself.

Richard Jenkyns is Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford