![]() "Does transparency also mean that we are into an age of consumerism now that we are in an age where people are going to have to commit to spending £9,000, does it also mean knowing what you are getting for your money?" he says. What the committee has got to work on now is what exactly is fair and how transparent is transparent. He's pleased that the responses to that first paper have accepted that university admissions should be fair and transparent. Nevertheless, he offers some interesting signals to the thinking that will guide the committee through its next report, which has been delayed until April but will unpack broad principles set out in its first publication last September. Also that in this interview he is not speaking for his committee. He is careful to say that, while he has talked informally to ministers, his committee is independent of them. ![]() Charles Clarke has entrusted him with chairing a distinguished committee to review and make recommendations on university admissions. He was one of the few vice-chancellors for whom Margaret Hodge, the former higher education minister, would have a kind word in private as well as public. It may be a comment on the times, but Schwartz, an engaging New Yorker who spent 20 years in Australia before coming to Brunel in 2002, has an accent that spans elements of three continents and an unstuffy can-do-ness which makes him popular with the government, too. He'll dine with the Tories and once upon a time his wheeling free-marketeering would have been classified as Thatcherite. "What you really want is a system where the money goes to the students, where we say everybody who gets into a university gets this much money, and take it where you like - and then the number of universities will be sorted by the market." In fact, Schwartz thinks the government's 50% participation target doesn't go far enough, and instead they should simply provide scholarships for everyone who can get a place. He told the Spectator crowd that these days universities had 250,000 mature students upgrading their skills, and what could possibly be wrong with that? "The image many people have is that there are two million people doing PPE." Can you imagine not wanting to build Warwick? At the time it probably made sense: 'some crappy university near Coventry, who's going to want to go to that?' Nobody thinks that now." They are both in the top 10 now in everybody's league table. I think he might have changed his mind when he became Catholic."Īnd as for Kingsley Amis's "more means worse" verdict from 1959: "What was he talking about? Warwick and York, they were the new universities then. He wouldn't let anyone have an Oxford degree who wasn't an Anglican. Even the saintly Cardinal Newman, always brought up by the old folks in the senior common room because he described this ideal university which never bloody existed, in his time or any time. "Every single time people have tried to restrict university education, they've always been shown to be wrong. "The people with an education are always trying to prevent people from getting one," complains Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Brunel University. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |