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?

The Arab Spring can teach us a lot about our own leaders

The Arab Spring is amongst us. Yemen, Syria, Bahrain (complete with it's 'not about the money' Grand Prix), Oman, Egypt, Libya and, oh yeah, Palestine.

Yesterday, hundreds were injured and a dozen or so were killed when Palestinian and Syrian protesters held a demonstration on the Israeli border in the hotly contested region, the Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers indiscriminately shot live ammunition at the protesters in a similar fashion to the gunning down of protesters we have seen all over the Middle East. A brief analysis of the responses by Western leaders offers us interesting insights into the state of Middle East politics currently.

According to the BBC News website:

“The US state department said it was 'troubled' by the 'loss of life'” “We call for all sides to exercise restraint... Provocative actions like this should be avoided.”

There are a number of issues here. The first being the fact that the US state department seems to label protest against oppression as a 'provocative action' (a bit like a lady choosing to wear a mini-skirt eh Canadian Policeman??). Protest is not provocative. Protest is not a threat. Protest is a positive element of democratic life, crucial to the collective well-being of all societies.

William Hague certainly didn't regard the protests of Syrian's citizens as provocative when on the 11th April this year he urged the Syrian government to:

“respect its people's right to free speech and peaceful protest.”

And as for exercising restraint on both sides, I wonder how NATO would react if we drew this comment alongside the military barbarism in Libya – killing children in the name of freedom, using UN sanctions to protect human life in order to attempt to overthrow a dictator the West has supported for decades. The West it seems, while calling for restraint from others, are happy to use excessive force in its own interests.

Western leaders condemn the violence of Middle East states and fail to condemn Israeli violence. Western leaders then use violence themselves to achieve their own goals and objectives.

What is more, is the convenient use of pro-protest rhetoric at the same time as the UK government works hard to clamp down on legitimate protest on its own streets. It is beyond doubt that this humanitarian discourse of the UK government helped a great deal in forming a tsunami that washed away the clear appearance of unrest and discomfort on its own streets, during the student protests of late 2010 and early 2011. The more the UK cared about protesters on Egyptian streets, the less it had to worry about the public's perceptions of the protesters in parliament square suffering at the arms of truncheons and under the feet of stampeding horses.

This clever use of foreign policy discourse unveils a number of conclusions that must not go amiss amongst the tidal wave of 24-hour news coverage:

1. The West backs Israel 100% even when it oppresses, tortures and murders civilians every day.
2. The West will use violence when it wants to, and will condemn the use of violence by others when it profits them.
3. The West supports protest when it is in their interest and brutally clamps down on protest in its own streets. The act of demanding that Syria respect the right to free speech and to peaceful protest infers that these rights are respected here – they are not.
4. Protest continues to be perceived as a threat, something which it, by definition, is not.