Adonis, A Donkey and A Donut

For reasons I can't even being to grasp, this summer has seen UK Higher Education under attack from all directions, and particularly from the Narcissus-like “Architect of Fees”, Labour Peer Andrew Adonis.

He's criticised fees without seemingly knowing very much about them other than headline costs, vice chancellor and senior staff pay (he does have a point - some of them receive ridiculous levels of remuneration), and most irksome of all, academics and their so-called “three-month summer holidays”

Marking? Feedback? Boards? Research? Admin? Preparing? Obviously, these things are all done on a beach over cocktails, or in some Iberian café while the kids argue over which straw donkey grandma would prefer as a present, but at least we in the sector do tend to spend at least a little time trying not to look like, well, donkeys.....

He's followed up his ridiculous accusations of our idleness and privilege for 25% of the year (or more? who knows?) with an attempt to report the Committee of University Chairs to the Metropolitan Police for alleged crimes of conspiracy and cover-up in dealing with Freedom of Information requests after it advised members on how they should respond to Adonis’s enquiries.

It wouldn't have taken much research - maybe he could have asked one of us academics to do it in between rubbing tanning lotion on one another - to find out that most English universities are regulated as exempt charities and that even a cursory look at the law will show that the charge of criminality is utterly baseless.

Joining him now in an ill-judged campaign to undermine the finest higher education system on the planet (not just my opinion - I go all over the world, and academics in foreign institutions are consistent in their praise of it, and puzzlement at what a succession of recent governments have been doing) is something called UK 2020.

This is apparently a "think-tank" run/administered/convened by the Conservative MP Owen Paterson based on “concerns expressed by numerous friends who are parents of university students” which has announced that UK HE operates a “cartel” conspiring to rig fees and ensure that students get poor value for money.

Now if only this set of ignorant buffoons had waited until all we idle academics had come back from our incredibly long holidays, then their report might have got an interested and concerned audience?

We might then have put some effort into preparing for the coming year to assuage our guilt at doing so little, for so much, to the benefit of so few...