And Pandora's Box Opens...

A. C. Grayling

A C Grayling's celebrity university (a new Fame Academy perhaps?) hasn't got off to the best of starts. Barely two days old and there are allegations of plagiarism from here there and everywhere. Apparently the syllabus of the 'New college of the Humanities' bears a remarkable word-for-word resemblance to that of the University of London. It seems that all you would get extra at NCH would be the odd guest lecturer from Richard Dawkins or Niall Ferguson. Not that I would want to be lectured at by a militant atheist or a colonial conservative - but that is neither here nor there.

The existence of this piece of news in today's papers is entirely indicative of the Pandora's Box that the introduction of the market into university education this year by the huge increase in tuititon fees has opened. (Oh and by the way, the government now are deeply concerned with the creek they are now trying to paddle up now that the vast majority of universities have given two fingers to the £6000 figure, headed straight to the £9000 and asked the government to foot the bill for a few years).

The fact of the matter is that now all media discourse surrounding university education can do little else than play to this marketisation. To quote from the Guardian today:

"[NCH] will teach exactly the same syllabuses as the University of London, which charges half the price... [teaching the same courses] that are already on offer at Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway for £9,000 or less."

A false market exists, but again and again we see the barriers to this false market being pressurised and forced, stretched and Grayling's fascinating publicity stunt only suggests that this turgid market may just burst its banks as we get ever closer to that September 2012 zenith.

At the same time as the opportunity to 'go private' for twice the price, much speculation has arisen as to how the UCAS clearing system will react to this new system. Many suggest that universities could do worse than to play the clearing system as you might play a flea market, or an auction - offering students discounts here and there, or even, some suggest material benefits to attend their course instead of their "competitor's" (long gone is the idea that universities are 'in it together' rather than in intense competition with one another). Imagine it:

You've missed your grades. An AAC offer and you got ABC. The phone calls "You'd be very welcome to our university, we can offer you a £500 discount to take our degree, offering great value for money and what's more, how about an iPad to help you in your studies?"

The university is about to transform into a very strange beast. Education for the benefit of society will become a distant utopian memory, a Garden of Eden that one may never reach again. Why did the NUS have to bite the apple of the marketisation tree?