At large
Well, after last week's report of the merger plans between UCL and Imperial, this week the even greater bombshell came: that the new, combined institution is seeking to introduce top-up fees within three years. Privatisation is finally happening in higher education.
Of course, most readers will doubtless have been privy to the somewhat suspect arguments of the left in wanting to stop this inevitable trend from taking place. The words access for all are bandied about with greater vigour than in a seamstress convention in Soho, while talk of equality and democracy sounds more shallow and pretentious than a bunch of sixth-formers trying to impress their hosts at a university open day. I could, of course, make comments as to whether so many people really need to go to university at all; after all, why do eventual factory workers or real estate agents need a degree?
What they are really missing, though, are the simple economics of the matter: the electorate of this country is unwilling to pay higher taxes, unless they know where it's going, and thus the university will be continuously starved of resources. Oxford is deteriorating in front of our very eyes everyday; the recent reports in the decline of the tutorial system being just one example. Privatisation is the only answer, allowing more money to be raised, and, ultimately, allowing no-one to be excluded for financial reasons, a little known fact about the American system that protestors always seem conveniently to forget. I know a good number of conservatives and other right-wingers who object to U.S.-style assessed tuition fees (top-up fees, as they are known over here) because they view it as an illegal extention of income tax! But why should manual workers and others without the money be paying, through direct taxation, for us to be poncing around Oxford for three or four years?
No, the answer is for Oxford, Cambridge and others to withdraw from the nationalized system, allowing the necessary resource management to maintain Britain's place at the apex of world education. And it must be done now, before things slide so far that our heritage of Nobel Prize winners and world leaders becomes little more than a hazy memory.
Those loveable, bowler-hatted University police have been disbanded. Yes, all four of them. Now who is going to chaperone those mini-skirted Hildabeasts on a Friday night?
31st Oct 2002