Recent events at Oxford (see BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Oxford reports) make it highly likely that the Old Schools will try to increase the number of external members of Council here. This, we believe, should be resisted. Cambridge is a self-governing community of scholars and should stay that way, despite bullying from HEFCE.
This is perhaps why two CCF candidates - Ross Anderson and Stephen Cowley - topped the poll in our respective classes.
Here is Ross Anderson's election statement.
Five years ago, I founded and led a campaign to oppose the previous Vice- Chancellor's policy on intellectual property. Even though we did not get everything we campaigned for, the outcome was worth the effort. Scholars in the arts and humanities now own the copyrights in popular books they write; scientists and technologists similarly own the software they write; and if you patent an invention, then you can develop it yourself rather than giving it to Cambridge Enterprise. We thus face many fewer restrictions on disseminating and developing our ideas.
However, the incentives for centralisation and regulation will remain, both locally and nationally. We need strong academic representation on the Council to counter them.
The current governance tussles at Oxford are reflected in proposals that Cambridge add more external members to Council. I believe we must remain a self-governing community of scholars. This means that members in classes b and c - the members whom we Regents elect from among our number- should remain the majority on Council.
External threats to our autonomy also bear watching. My own field, cryptography and information security, was the target of heavy-handed attempts at government regulation during the 1990s; it was this that forced me to take notice of politics. Since 9/11, security regulation has become a hazard to many more researchers. But it is possible to resist. For example, I worked with UUK, the AUT and the Royal Society to get the House of Lords to insert Section 8 into the Export Control Act 2002. This exempts scientific research from export controls on technology transfers; without it, many scientists who collaborate with colleagues overseas would have been committing a crime unless we got an export license first.
As well as resisting tactical challenges to academic freedom, at both local and national levels, there are strategic issues to consider. Since Cambridge broke the link between teaching officers and college fellowships a generation ago, we have been able to adapt more quickly to opportunities than Oxford. However, now that fewer and fewer academics hold college fellowships, there are fewer of us involved in running things. This growing democratic deficit concerns me. It has both short-term and long-term effects. In the short term, we get administrative systems that are hard for academics to use - because few academics are involved in specifying them. In the long term, the loss of academic involvement in governance is likely to affect the very nature of our community. We risk losing a critical part of what makes Cambridge special - and successful.
I worked in industry until I was 35, then returned to do a PhD. I joined the academic staff as a lecturer in 1995 and became Professor of Security Engineering in 2003. I appreciate how working here differs from working in industry, and want us to build on our strengths.
Here is Stephen Cowley's election web page.
For more on the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms, and more links, see our campaign web page on the IP issue, our old web page, and our page on the IP ballot result.