Lord Browne has spoken and everybody seems to be listening, which one could say is mighty generous on the part of the public given that he is a disgraced former chief executive of BP whom insiders credit with encouraging the lax safety culture which put paid to his hapless successor when the Gulf of Mexico became an oil slick. And what is he talking about? University funding that's what. Now this is one of those subjects on which our entire political class seems incapable of talking anything other than amoral bollocks.
God bless then the Principal (or whatever it is they call him - their website doesn't readily tell you) of the London School of Economics (an institution of which I try to speak well as infrequently as possible - it's a tribal thing) who caustically described the Browne Report as 'a report by an engineer for engineers.' Ouch!He went on to point out there will be something more than faintly ludicrous about the public purse subsidising a chemistry undergraduate at Imperial but not an economist at LSE when both of them are going to end up working at Goldman Sachs.
News flash: education has its own intrinsic value. It's good for us to have an educated polity drawn from all along the social spectrum. Universities, proper universities are not glorified machine shops for turning out uber-apprentices. Philistines, bloody philistines all of you.
I spent a pleasurable hour or two yesterday watching a vile-tempered game of rugby won by AOE. I did so in the company of several of my peers including a physics graduate, an engineer, a chemist, an insurance broker and a night club bouncer who once absconded from the French Foreign Legion. All equals, none philistines, some graduates, some not. Not entirely sure where I'm going with this save to say that they were the product of a more egalitarian age where the place of education was respected but not glorified and people were so much less precious than the cult of victimhood now dictates.
One final plea. Can we please not hear another university leader describing his or her students as 'consumers.' It's not a sodding bazaar lads.
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well! i am a late convert to the overgraduate although i have been been hearing his wise words for longer than both of us would care to remember. On the funding of further education i suspect we share similar views. I most definately share his frustration with our (so called) political leaders on this subject. To listen to people who really know better claim that a system that will have graduates leaving full-time education with debts of 50k as progressive would be laughable if it were not so serious. I cannot for the life of me see how this is supposed improve anything - both politicians and those who run the academic institutions should have their heads firmly banged together.This is a cheap shot concocted by those in further education to protect themselves and politicians taking a cheap shot by hiding a pain later tax. It sure as hell will do nothing for education. Think i need a bigger soapbox!
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