Well-meaning dons could set education back 400 years

By Tom Wakeford. A new movement to put higher education back in the hands of academics is courageous and potentially useful – but is it for the best, asks Tom Wakeford. The opening statements of the Council for the Defence of British Universities have done much to highlight the Government’s rampant drive to privatise our universities, and the abject failure of university managements to defend the integrity of good research against ill-judged ministerial schemes. But we are no longer in the world of the 1980s BBC comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice, when the arguments could be understood as a simple case of academic freedom versus corporate greed.
The 21st-century reality is that the freedom to research the subjects that interest us, free from political and commercial interference, cannot ignore the need to draw on knowledge and expertise that exists beyond the ivory towers. So the claim by CDBU's Sir Keith Thomas that academics alone are “best qualified to determine the direction that intellectual enquiry should take” shows the group is walking into a dangerous trap. Presenting academics as intellectually superior to the rest of us is both out of date and damaging. More...