Things Are Getting Tough Around University Life:  Email from the UK. (December 21, 2011)

TFW got an email yesterday morning from a well placed academic in one of the UK universities formed from the amalgamation of a number of colleges and polytechnics during the last two decades of the last millennium.

Things are getting tough around University life... I am not sure that the market is the best regulator of education needs for a society (too short time-attention-span). However, what government is doing with its overly administrative approach is so bureaucratic that it defies belief. The top few universities manage to keep government at some distance resisting government's micromanagement. The rest of 70-90% of universities are in situations where form has eaten away substance ages ago.

Our local population's education has been systematically neglected from primary school all the way to this University, and at the University level, the battle has been already lost. On the other side there are a few top class universities doing well at the international level. The divide between these two groups is complete. There is a clear picture of something that could be called University Research Funding Apartheid.

If the market is going to do something with the University Apartheid, then so be it. Government could not do much (or did not want to do much).