Thursday, 28 June 2007

"Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills"

What a gross new title. Universities have, for hundreds of years, been the disseminators of the precious life blood of our civilisation. Now they are places where academics spend more time sweating over grant applications than they do thinking, reflection, writing. They are places that should be called .inc/.org/.plc and the like. They are places where funding to departments is given in direct relation to how many foreign students (read "big payers") are recruited. So business schools get all the money. Classics and Philosophy get nothing.
Can't there just be a Department of Education where Universities are a part of it? -- somewhat at the other end from kindergartens.

And I have no opinion whatsoever of John Denham, another great burly white male in a suit. Everyone please note: he was a great proponent of top-up fees. MY POOR students. Education should be free for everyone, as it was for Blair's and Brown's and Denham's generation.

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