Farewell Blighty, howdy USA

Will the Government's plans for higher education lead to a renaissance in the sector, or will our universities continue to decline? There is one simple way to find out: watch the movements of the academic workforce. Lecturers and researchers vote with their feet, and, as the White Paper acknowledges, Britain has suffered many defeats in recent years. Although we import as many academics as we export, we lose many of our best scholars to universities in America.

This autumn, Linda Colley, Professor of History at the London School of Economics, will leave to take up a chair at Princeton University in New Jersey. It's a painful loss, and not just for the LSE. When the author of Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 left Yale to come to London in 1998, it was hoped that she would be the first of many to return home. So, what went wrong?

"Why am I going back again? For various reasons," says Professor Colley. "I'm not dissatisfied with the LSE – I think it's a super university. But I believe in moving around, and I just don't like the way the state micro-manages the universities in this country. It's pernicious."

Professor Colley is in good company. This year, two other big-name historians will take up jobs in the US as Mark Mazower, of Birkbeck, goes to Columbia and Niall Ferguson, of Oxford University, currently gracing our television screens in Channel 4's Empire, arrives at New York University.

In other fields, the brain drain has become a flood. In shortage subjects like economics and engineering, British PhD programmes sometimes appear to exist for the sole purpose of training future Stanford and Princeton professors.

Low salaries are usually cited as the push factor driving British academics overseas. American universities can offer at least double the pay of the United Kingdom, and in fields like management and economics the gap is more like three times.

But this may be too simplistic – even too hopeful – an explanation for the brain drain. It assumes and, in fact, it is often said, that British-born academics "really" want to stay in Britain, but are lured away, like Hansel and Gretel, by the sweet salaries available in the US.

Professor Colley says that money is only one reason for leaving the UK. "I think it's important not to put too much emphasis – or even the majority of emphasis – on pay," she says. "Obviously there's a big disparity in salaries, but the poor provision for British universities in the last 25 years has also led to a deterioration in libraries, classrooms, and so forth. And this is a big factor, too."

The decrepit state of British universities strikes other academics who have spent time in the US (see box). And many leavers echo Colley's statement that American working conditions are just as alluring as American salaries. "It's not just the salary," says David Blackbourn, who defected to Harvard's history department from Birkbeck College, London. Professor Blackbourn says that although academic pay is higher in the US, at least some of the extra dollars are eaten up with living expenses – not least, the enormous cost of sending children to university in America.

"No, the key issue for those of us who cross the Atlantic is the quality of academic life," says Professor Blackbourn. "It's not as bureaucratic here, and there is more servicing of academics, so we don't have to engage in so much drudgery. The libraries are much better; even the system of having books on reserve works so much more smoothly in the US."

Universities like Princeton and Harvard contain armies of postgraduate students who do everything from photocopying to teaching and marking. Their science departments boast well-equipped labs and generous research budgets. From this lofty vantage point, the contrast with Britain is clear.

"If you think of research-minded types in subjects like economics, engineering, and chemistry, there's no doubt they'd have a better time in the top US research institutions than in Oxbridge, UCL, Imperial, and so on," says Alan Ryan, the Warden of New College, Oxford currently on a year's sabbatical at Stanford University.

"They'd have much more time for their own work, easier access to funding, and a lot less paperwork. They might, if public spirited, find themselves busy as department chairs, director of graduate studies, and the like, but they'd get teaching remission for it. Nobody would make them do it at the expense of their own research."

Lower down the academic totem pole, the contrast between Britain and America is less sharp. And the least competitive British universities actually boast much better working conditions than their US counterparts, which bury lecturers under mountains of teaching.

But it's the broad differences in assumptions about what academics should and shouldn't have to do that strikes many scholars who have worked in both countries. Jane Cowan, the head of anthropology at Sussex University, arrived in Britain after finishing a PhD in America.

"When I came to work in Britain, I was most struck by the fact that academics were doing administrative jobs – from policymaking at the top end to typing and Xeroxing at the bottom – much of which would have been much better and more efficiently done by trained administrators," says Professor Cowan. "The attitude was: 'why should we pay an administrator to do this when an academic could do it'?

"This attitude is crazy. Academics are not trained to do administrative work, and their time and resources are much better spent teaching and doing research. This is partly why our production is slower than our colleagues in the US."

For those who worry about the brain drain from Britain, there is one bright spot on the horizon. British academics don't move to America unless they have a job offer in hand, and those offers may be about to dry up.

Dan Hamermesh, a labour economist at the University of Texas, explains that it's the large public universities, not the small clutch of private institutions, that really drive the academic labour market in the United States. But as the US struggle to balance its budgets, public universities are losing their ability to pay for big-name scholars. "Going forward, I just don't see a tremendous demand for British academics," he says.

British lecturers in search of a bigger salary and better working conditions would be well advised to start packing their bags.

education@independent.co.uk

'If a colleague asks me if they should work in the States, i always say yes'

For those who move to Britain, working conditions can seem especially bad. Here, one British-born professor describes the shock of arriving in a Russell Group university after more than 10 years in America.

"I suppose the first thing I noticed was how run-down everything was. Physically, the university is in a worse state than any American university I have ever been to. When I started teaching, I was most struck by the complete lack of a support system. I spend large chunks of my time doing things that used to be done for me by somebody else. I always had a share in some sort of secretarial help in the US. Here, I have no secretarial help. In the United States I would not have done the photocopying for my own classes, but here I have to do it all myself.

"In the US, if I wanted a book from the library, I could order it from my desk by computer and it would be delivered to me the next day. Here, I have to go and get the books. If they're ordered from another library, I even have to pay for them.

"Individually, these things are small, but they add up. They take time that is better spent doing research, teaching my classes, and talking to students.

"Then there is the bureaucracy. I don't know whether it's produced by the university or by the Government, but there's an extraordinary amount of it, and the system is extremely rigid.

"I sit on seven committees in my department. We didn't have seven committees in any department I worked for in America. And everything here is very formal. Every meeting is formally minuted; the minutes are formally approved and filed. Then they are sent up to the university authorities, where someone files another copy.

"The people who have been teaching for a very long time tell me that it hasn't always been like this – that the bureaucracy has been slowly increasing over the years. The ones who are relatively new know no other system, so they don't find it unduly frustrating.

"If a colleague says to me: 'I've got the chance to go to the United States – should I take it?' my answer is always: 'all other things being equal, yes.' It's more alive, and the working conditions are so much better. You work with less interference, less hassle. In my field, at least, this country feels like a backwater.

"Colleagues who have never worked in the US are either blissfully unaware of what life can be like or they take the very British attitude that you shouldn't make a fuss – that it's not quite done to complain. This is not something that Americans suffer from."