When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year degrees, however, it didn’t take long for the nation’s academics to retreat beneath the comfort blanket of wanting universities to be a monolithic state provider of education.
‘Accelerated degrees risk undermining the well-rounded education upon which our universities’ reputation is based’, complained Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Universities and College Union. ‘As well as placing a huge burden on staff, these new degrees would only be available to students who could study all year round. Our universities must remain places of learning, not academic sweatshops and the government needs to resist the pile ’em high and teach ’em cheap approach to students’ education’.
She is behaving like one of these rail union bosses trying to make out that it is unsafe to allow trains to run without guards, even though the evidence points in the other direction.
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